THE BATMAN

   To some people Batman is believed to be a fictional character. YES. That could be true but not to some extent. Let's take a dive into the ocean of history about the Original Batman

    Some 2,500 years ago, and even before DC Comics introduced us to Batman , the ancient Maya worshiped Camazotz, an ancient god that had the body of a person and the head of a bat, one of the most dominating dieties in the pre-Hispanic pantheon. Curiously, that description may sound awfully similar to a character most of us are familiar with, seeing him in movies, series, and comic strips.

Camazotz (meaning ‘death bat’ in the Kʼiche’ Mayan language of Guatemala) originated deep in Mesoamerican mythology as a dangerous cave-dwelling bat creature. Beginning around 100 BCE, the cult of Camazotz worshiped an anthropomorphic monster with the body of a human, head of a bat. Camazotz is also one of the four animal demons responsible for wiping out mankind during the age of the first sun.

Amongst the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, the bat was associated with night, death, and sacrifice, and was later adopted into the pantheon of the Maya Quiche tribe.Legends of the bat god were later recorded in Maya literature.

Long before Dracula, there was Camazotz, spirit of death in the form of a bat. Camazotz is the servant of the Lord of Death, leading the nightly arrival of twilight, the time when bats emerge from their caves. He lived in bloody grottoes and other dark places that people tried to avoid for fear of disturbing him. It has been found that the Nahua horseshoe-shaped temples of the Aztecs were dedicated to the worship of the bat god. Their altars were made of pure gold and oriented towards the East.

It was believed that the bat god had power to cure any disease, but also power to cut the divine cord of life that unites the body to the soul. Nahua priests invoked the bat god when asking for health. The tzinacan (bat) was sketched upon steles, codices, hearths, basins and Mayan vessels holding the livery of the God of the air. He is shown with a nasal appendage and triangular teeth that protrude downwardly from the commissures of his lips.

His mouth is characteristic because of its canine and inferior, incisive teeth covered by his tongue, that always appears protruded in the Zapotec urns. He has big, well-formed ears, and protruding from them in the shape of leaves appears the tragus made of jade. He has short fingers on his paws that point towards the heights, in order to utilize the suckers on the palm of his hands (the suckers that serve the bat when it hangs itself from smooth surfaces), and his nasal appendage is in the form of a mounted chair or leaf.

Because his nose is described as being like a flint knife, there is some speculation that Camazotz is a leaf-nosed bat, as for example, the false vampire (Vampyrum spectrum), the largest bat in the Western hemisphere. This has led to conjecture about the source of the myth. Some believe the ancient peoples based him on the common vampire bat or on Desmodus draculae, a much larger species, both leaf-nosed as well. Both of these species inhabited the area of Oaxaca, Mexico in 100 A.D. when a bat deity was first mentioned in a cult of the Zapotec tribe.

In the beginning, bats in pre-Columbian cultures were not associated with evil. They were believed to be powerful creatures, spirits and even gods. In most of Pre-Columbian codices such as for example, Codex Borgia, bats (having human form or personality) are depicted as involved in human sacrifice. For example, in the Tajin pre-Columbian stone sculptures of Veracruz, vampire bats are depicted as gods and are also mentioned in epic myths and in the book of creation, Popol Vuh.

The Zapotecs believed bats represented night, death, and sacrifice. This was likely due to the fact that the bats would inhabit the caves around the sacred cenotes, which the Mesoamericans believed were portals to the underworld. It would be a very chilling sight at dusk when the bats would swarm out of these ‘portals’ and begin drinking the blood of the other animals. The god is also commonly depicted holding a sacrificial knife in one hand and a human heart or sacrificial victim in the other.

Camazotz was eventually adopted into the mythology of the K’iche’ (or Quiché) Maya in Guatemala, though they merged him with their god of fire, Zotzilaha Chamalcan.The Popol Vuh, the book of the council ‘or’ book of the community’, is a compilation of mythical, legendary and historical narratives of the K’iche; the Mayan people inhabiting modern-day Guatemala.

Camazotz first appears in the Popul Vuh as a bat man/ angelic figure that descends from Heaven in order to decapitate the wooden humans of the second creation of the gods Tepeu and Kukulkan, for being imperfect and having no feelings. In creation myths, Zotzilaha was the name of the House of Bats in the underworld where the hero twins were forced to spend the night by the lords of Xibalba. This chilling place, was a frightening cave that was located in what is now Alta Verapaz, near Cobán in the Republic of Guatemala.

The legend is that the hero twins slept inside their blowguns as protection from the bats (referred to as Camazotz). However, when the bats went silent, Xbalanqué asked Hunahpú to check if dawn had come and Hunahpú did so by poking his head out of the tube. But, in fact, it was not yet dawn and one of the bats took the opportunity to swoop down and rip away Hunahpú’s head, leaving him decapitated. Xbalanqué was left inside the tube, questioning what his brother was seeing and why he had gone so still without receiving any answers. The bat then took the head of Hunahpú to the ball court of the Xibalba lords to be gruesomely displayed and used as a ball while the lords rejoiced in their assumed victory. Later in the Popol Vuh, a messenger from the underworld in the form of a humanoid bat (believed to be Camazotz) appears to broker a deal between humanity and Lord Tohil, the patron god of the K’iche’.

In this deal, mankind promised their armpits and their waists in exchange for fire which is how the ritual of cutting open a person’s breast in sacrifice came to be. Some myths claim that, during the day, Camazotz would turn into a stone statue and therefore could only move at night, but this has not been confirmed.

Bat-like demons and monsters are common in South America and Central America. Another example of such a story is the Chonchon in Peru and Chile, which is thought to be created when a sorcerer, known as a kaku, performs a magical rite causing his severed head to sprout giant ears and talons at death. The giant ears become wings.

This ubiquity of giant bat monster legends leads many archaeologists to propose that the monsters have a basis in encounters with a real animal - such as the vampire bat. The vampire bat is favored because of its historical association with bloodletting and sacrifice.It is, however, possible that the legends could be derived from a giant bat that was present during the Pleistocene or early Holocene– one which may still exist today.

Bats are considered to be menacing creatures in many cultures. Nocturnal and associated with the night, bats are often associated with death. Many common species also have a relatively bizarre appearance, which makes them all the more off-putting for humans.