Chin, together with Cu, Cavil (glossed as 'idol,' likely referring to K'awiil), and Maran, is mentioned as the name of the male deity said to have demonstrated sexual intercourse with other male deities and humans. In describing the customs of the Mayas inhabiting the Verapaz province (including the

Alta Verapaz Alta Verapaz () is a department in the north central part of Guatemala. The capital and chief city of the department is Cobán. Verapaz is bordered to the north by El Petén, to the east by Izabal, to the south by Zacapa, El Progreso, and Baja ...

and

Baja Verapaz Baja Verapaz () is a department in Guatemala. The capital is Salamá. Baja Verapaz contains the Mario Dary Biotope Preserve, preserving the native flora and fauna of the region, especially the endangered national bird of Guatemala, the Resple ...

) of 16th-century Guatemala, Bishop

Bartolomé de las Casas Bartolomé de las Casas, Dominican Order, OP ( ; ; 11 November 1484 – 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish Empire, Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman ...

mentions sexual relationships, regulated by customary law, between unmarried young men and boys, as well as similar relations prevailing among adolescents receiving instruction in the temples. Chin, is said to have demonstrated sexual intercourse with another 'demon', and thereby to have introduced such relationships. De las Casas writes "From that time on some fathers gave their sons a little boy to be used as a woman; and if someone else took the boy, they demanded pay as is done when someone violates another's wife." Institutionalized pederastic prostitution, including transvestism, is recorded in 17th-century Spanish reports of the Itzá Mayas living in the Petén. Among the Classic Period scenes found in a cave of

Naj Tunich Naj Tunich ( Mopan Maya: // "stone house, cave") is a series of pre-Columbian era natural caves outside the village of La Compuerta, roughly 35 km east of Poptún in Guatemala. The site was a Maya ritual pilgrimage site during the Classic per ...

is a depiction of a naked, sexually excited male embracing a nude Maya nobleman,Houston et al. 2006: 211 and fig. 6.8b; cf. Stone 1995: 196, fig. 8-18 possibly by way of initiation.

References

Citations

Sources

* Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, ''The Memory of Bones. Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2006. * Jones, Grant D., ''The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom''. Stanford U.P. 1998. * Las Casas, Bartolomé (Edmundo O'Gorman ed.), ''Apologética Historia Sumaria'', Vol. 2. Mexico: UNAM 1967. * Miles, S. W., ''The Sixteenth-Century Pokom Maya''. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society 1957. * Stone, Andrea J., ''Images of the Underworld''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1995. {{Maya LGBT themes in mythology Maya gods