Votan- Maya HeroHero"Founder of Nachan"

The Founder from the Sea

According to traditions recorded by Bishop Francisco Nuñez de la Vega in 1702, Votan was the first man sent by the gods to populate and organize the lands of the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya in highland Chiapas. He came from across the sea, from a place called Valum Votan, and made several return voyages during his lifetime. His destination was the founding of Nachan, the House of Serpents, a city that Ramón de Ordóñez y Aguilar later identified with ruins in the Chiapas lowlands. Votan established the lineages that structured Tzeltal society, the ancestral divisions from which political authority descended.

The Dark House

Colonial accounts describe Votan as the guardian of a subterranean chamber, a "dark house" where sacred objects were kept. What those objects were, no one now living can say with certainty. Nuñez de la Vega reported that he personally ordered the destruction of materials associated with Votan's cult, including what he described as indigenous manuscripts and relics. Whatever primary evidence once existed for the Votan tradition went into the bishop's fire.

Ordóñez y Aguilar, writing in the eighteenth century, claimed to have seen or had access to an ancient "Book of Votan" that narrated the hero's journeys and deeds. If the book existed, it has never surfaced since. The tradition survives only in the colonial accounts of men who were either destroying it or romanticizing it, and the pre-Columbian core lies somewhere beneath their words, unrecoverable.