Jaguar God of the Underworld- Maya GodDeity"Night Sun"

The Night Sun

When the sun descends below the western horizon, it transforms into a jaguar and prowls through Xibalba until dawn. Maya artists gave this nocturnal sun a distinctive face: twisted "cruller" shapes around the eye sockets, feline whiskers, spotted markings, and the k'in sun glyph on his body. He appears on painted ceramics crouching in darkness, eyes bright, a predator at home in the realm of the dead.

At Palenque, he is the third deity of the Triad (GIII), carved into the Tablet of the Sun alongside GI and K'awiil. The Tablet shows him as a war shield held by two figures over a throne, the night sun claimed as a weapon. His temple faces west, toward the point where the sun enters the earth.

Jaguar Kings

Maya kings wore the Jaguar God into battle. Painted murals at Bonampak show warriors dressed in full jaguar pelts, their faces framed by snarling feline jaws, leading captives by the hair. At Chichén Itzá, inside the earlier pyramid buried within El Castillo, a red-painted jaguar throne sits in a narrow chamber: a reclining stone cat with jade spots and flint teeth, built for a king to sit upon. Whoever took that seat placed himself above the night sun.

K'inich Janaab Pakal of Palenque was buried in a sarcophagus carved with his descent into the earth, following the sun's path downward. The lid shows him falling into the open jaws of the underworld, and the Jaguar God waits below. Pakal's tomb sat beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions, oriented so that at winter solstice the setting sun falls directly down the temple stairs and into the burial chamber.

The Underworld Passage

Funerary ceramics depict the dead making the same journey the sun makes each night. The vessel known as K1152 shows a canoe bearing gods and the deceased into the underworld, paddled toward the west. The Jaguar God travels this route every night, descending at dusk and clawing his way back to the eastern horizon by morning. His return is the proof that the passage can be survived. When the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh descend to Xibalba and rise as sun and moon, they follow the same route the jaguar walks in darkness.