Camazotz the Death Bat

Camazotz’s name means either “Snatch Bat”, “Death Bat”, or “Sudden Bloodletter” depending on how you want to translate it, and even though those three things all conjure up wildly different mental images of what the hell was going on here one thing is certain – you don’t want to fuck with the Snatch Bat. 

A ferocious video-gameboss-style Master Demon that lived in the Mayan Underworld of Xibalba, Camazotz the Death Bat was usually depicted with a Vampire Bat face and two arms, one which was carrying a sacrificial victim and the other holding a shank like he knows how to use it.  He turned into a statue during the day or went back to a huge Underworld cave known as the House of Bats where the walls dripped with blood and the guano flowed freely, but at night this dude came out, dive bombed his enemies, and sucked them entirely of blood Chupacabra-style. 

Camazotz is of course based on the idea of Vampire Bats, an incredibly cool and disgusting species of bloodsucking nightmare that only exists in the jungles of Central and South America and preys on everything from goats and pigs to humans and cattle.  Vampire bats are ugly as fuck, with weird-shaped faces and pig snouts, and their primary food is the life blood of other living organisms.

Here’s what a Vampire Bat looks like:

Vampire bats are pretty awesome because they’re ugly as fuck, and also because they’re evolutionarily adapted specifically to drain the gore of other creatures while they’re sleeping.  Their echolocation is way less powerful than that of regular, stupider breeds of bat, and instead their brain is wired to hear the breathing noises made by large sleeping animals while flying at high speeds through the Central American jungle.  They can see infrared radiation like the Predator and detect heat signatures of large mammals, fly almost completely silently, and their saliva has an anticoagulant some jerk scientist oh-so-cleverly named Draculin that makes it so that bite wounds don’t clot and just keep on bleeding and bleeding until the bat is done sucking the life out of you.

Oh, this is also cool.  Vampire bats are also the only species of bat capable of moving without flying.  They run on all fours, and it’s goddamned terrifying.  Here’s a video:

Vampire bats can run across the ground at a decent speed, and can climb walls the same way.  Their primary mode of attack is to glide through the forest at the height of about 3 feet off the ground, surveying for prey like horses or pigs.  Once they’ve found something, they silently land nearby, creepily run over to it like that video above, then sink their fangs in.  The bat will drink half its body weight in blood in one sitting, process the blood through its system incredibly fast, excrete out the plasma it doesn’t need, then fly off and leave you laying in a filthy pool of blood and bat piss.

Luckily, vampire bats aren’t very big, and, aside from the occasional rabies infection, they don’t kill humans or anything.  They have about a 14-18 inch wingspan, which isn’t too bad.  Scientists have found fossilized remains of a prehistoric species of Vampire bat known as the Giant Vampire Bat, but it was only like 30% bigger so that’s what like two feet across or something?  Still not exactly the second coming of Mothra.

None of that seems too horrific and gruesome, and even though some humans have tried to burn out vampire bat populations by taking blowtorches into caves, it’s really not worth it.

Now, if the bats were man-sized… and they were like real vampire bats and lived in colonies ranging from 100 to 2,000 bats…  well, you can see why the Mayan peoples were terrified of caves.

Camazotz shows up again later on in Mayan mythology, playing a minor yet awesome role in the religious text Popol Vuh.  The story goes like this:  One day this guy and his brother were really awesome at the Mayan Ball Game, but they were dunking so hard it pissed off the gods of Xibalba so the Demons challenged the brothers to a Space Jam style deathmatch.  The Demons posterized the brothers, schooling them so hard they both died.

Well one day some lady was walking around in the Underworld and she saw the skull of one of the brothers.  The skull came to life like Monkey Island and hocked a loogie on the lady, which made her pregnant with twin boys somehow.  When the boys were born their half-brothers left them on an anthill to die, but they survived, learned a bunch of magic spells, turned their half-brothers into howler monkeys, and then went after the gods to avenge their fallen father by finally winning the epic streetball showdown against the Mayan Hoops Gods.

Things were going OK for the brothers, who passed test after test until they came to the House of Bats, where fucking insane vampire bats were flying around all over the place and the bros had to hide out by jumping into a big tube.  Well one of the brothers got impatient and popped his head out, and the second he stuck it out there fucking CAMAZOTZ THE DUNK MACHINE swooped in, popped the kid’s head off, and double-pump reverse between-the-legs fucking 720 MONSTER JAMMED it while all the other gods stood up and yelled and were all like “Ohhhh my!!!  The nail in the coffin!!!!”

The surviving brother ended up making a fake head for his bro out of a hollowed-out squash, but when the Big Epic Showdown Hoops Game went down the next day the Gods awesomely insisted on using the decapitated head as the ball.  Which kicks fucking ass and you know it.  The kids of course eventually win, get the head back, defeat the demons, and then morph themselves into the Sun and Moon.

Anyways, that’s how our solar system works.

Links:

http://www.mythical-creatures-and-beasts.com/camazotz.html

http://www.blueroadrunner.com/camazotz.htm

http://demonhunterscompendium.blogspot.com/2012/12/camazotz-death-bat.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Hero_Twins

Sources

Bingham, Anne and Jeremy Roberts.  South and Meso-American Mythology A to Z.  Infobase, 2010.

International Wildlife Encyclopedia.  Marshall Cavendish, 2002.

Melton, J. Gordon.  The Vampire Book.  Visible Ink, 2010.

Popol Vuh.  Trans. Delia Goetz and Sylvanius Griswold Morley.  Courier Dover, 2003.

Sykes, Egerton and Alan Kendall.  Who’s Who in Non-Classical Mythology.  Psychology Press, 2002.