It was a common belief among many tribes in America, that their earliest ancestors emerged from a world which underlies this one on which we live, and in ancient Cakchiquel legend, the same or a similar notion seems to have prevailed. The name of the hero-god _Xbalanque_ is explained by the Abbé Brasseur as a compound of the diminutive prefix _x_, _balam_, a tiger, and the plural termination _que_.[158] Like so many of his derivations, this is quite incorrect. There is no plural termination _que_, either in the Quiche or in any related dialect; and the signification “tiger” (jaguar, _Felix unca_ Lin. in Mexican _ocelotl_), which he assigns to the word _balam_, is only one of several which belong to it. The name is compounded of the prefix, either feminine or diminutive, _x_; _balam_, or, as given by Guzman, _balan_;[159] and _queh_, deer. This is the composition given by Ximenez, who translates it literally as “a diminutive form of tiger and deer.”[160] The name _balam_, was also that of a class of warriors: of a congregation of priests or diviners; and of one of the inferior orders of deities. In composition it was applied to a spotted butterfly, as it is in our tongue to the “tiger-lily;” to the king-bee; to certain rapacious birds of prey, etc. None of the significations concerns us here; but we do see our way when we learn that both _balam_ and _queh_ are names of days in the Quiche-Cakchiquel calendar. The former stood for the twelfth, the latter for the seventh in their week of twenty days.[161] Each of the days was sacred to a particular divinity, but owing to the inadequate material preserved for the study of the ancient calendars of Guatemala, we are much in the dark as to the relationship of these divinities. Suffice it to say that the hero-god whose name is thus compounded of two signs in the calendar, who is born of a virgin, who performs many surprising feats of prowess on the earth, who descends into the world of darkness and sets free the sun, moon and stars to perform their daily and nightly journeys through the heavens, presents in these and other traits such numerous resemblances to the Divinity of Light, reappearing in so many American myths, the Day-maker of the northern hunting tribes, that I do not hesitate to identify the narrative of Xbalanque and his deeds as one of the presentations of this widespread, this well-nigh universal myth—guarding my words by the distinct statement, however, that the identity may be solely a psychological, not a historical one. THE HERO-GOD OF THE ALGONKINS AS A CHEAT AND LIAR.[162]