Chin (Mayan god)

In describing the customs of the Mayas inhabiting the Verapaz province (including the Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz) of 16th-century Guatemala, Bishop Bartolomé de las CasasLas Casas 1967: 515, 522 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, together with Cu, Cavil ('idol'), and Maran, is mentioned as the name of the male deity said to have demonstrated homosexual intercourse with another 'demon', and thereby to have introduced such relationships: "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."Miles 1957: 763 Institutionalized pederastic prostitution, including transvestism, is recorded in 17th-century Spanish reports of the Itzá Mayas living in the Petén.Jones 1998: 334-335, 499 Among the Classic Period scenes found in a cave of Naj Tunich is a depiction of a naked, sexually excited male creature 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.
==Notes==
==References==
*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.
Category:Maya mythology and religion
Category:Deities
Category:Homosexuality