Hunab Ku- Maya GodDeity"The One God"

The Name in the Dictionary

In the late sixteenth century, Franciscan friars in the Yucatán compiled the Diccionario de Motul, a Yucatec Maya-Spanish dictionary meant to help missionaries speak to the people they intended to convert. Under Hunab Ku they wrote: "the only living and true god, also the greatest of the gods of the people of Yucatan. He had no form because they said that he could not be represented as he was incorporeal." The name breaks into three parts: hun, one; -ab, sole or unique; ku, god. The One God.

Diego de Landa, the bishop of Yucatán who produced the fullest colonial account of Maya culture in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, also recorded a supreme creator standing above the active gods of the pantheon. No Maya voice speaks directly in these texts. Every description of Hunab Ku passed through missionary hands.

Before the World Took Shape

The Books of Chilam Balam preserve fragments of creation theology in Yucatec Maya. Written in the Latin alphabet after the conquest, they carry material that reaches further back. The Chumayel manuscript describes a power that existed before the world had form: it measured the earth, measured the sky, and set the four cardinal directions in their places. The earth had no corners yet. The sky had not been raised. Then the measuring began, and the frame of the world was laid for the other gods to fill.

Father of the Gods

According to Landa's Relación, Hunab Ku engendered Itzamna, the great lord of the heavens who appears throughout Classic period inscriptions and the surviving codices. Itzamna took on the active work of creation, fashioning the world and everything in it. Hunab Ku remained above and behind, the source from which even Itzamna drew existence. He made nothing directly. He made the one who made everything.

A God Without a Face

No temples, sculptures, or painted images dedicated to Hunab Ku survive. Chaac's long-nosed masks repeat across hundreds of building facades in the Puuc hills. Itzamna presides over codex pages and painted ceramics. Hunab Ku left nothing to dig up.

The Motul dictionary offers an explanation: he had no form because he could not be represented. A god defined by what cannot be seen leaves no trace for archaeologists to find.

In 1562, Landa ordered thousands of Maya manuscripts burned at Maní. Whatever the Maya themselves had written about their gods went into that fire. What survived were the accounts Landa and his fellow friars chose to record.