The head proper is distinguished by an inordinately long upper jaw, and exhibits otherwise certain characteristics usually associated with the serpent in Maya art. The mouth is invariably shown wide open, with the head of a god, usually the sun-god (though sometimes God B), emerging. The reverse head, often shown upside-down, is portrayed with a fleshless jaw and other symbols of death, but is also associated with the sun in so far as it bears upon the forehead the kin-glyph, over which are certain ornaments, notably a flame-like “plume,” which are attributes of the sun. Now the head proper, with the elongated upper jaw, bears a distinct resemblance to the Mexican cipactli animal, from which the earth was created, and in a very confused creation-myth given in one of the books of Chilan Balam we find a monster, Itzamkab-ain, who at the creation is impregnated by a god of fecundity, Ah-uuk-chek-nale. Further the earth in Mexican symbolic art is invariably represented by a monster with gaping jaws, which is often shown as swallowing Tonatiuh or Tlaloc. I think that it is perfectly just to conclude that the so-called “double-headed dragon” of Maya art is the earth-monster. As we have seen, the god who is usually shown in his jaws is the sun-god, and the occasional substitution of God B is paralleled in the Mexican manuscripts which sometimes show Tlaloc in the jaws of the earth-monster. The head with the attributes of death and the sun combined, which appears at the other end of the animal (sometimes, as I have said, upside-down), is, on this explanation, the sun in the underworld, i.e. the sun after its setting. The presence of the sun-attributes is necessitated by the fact that without them the death-face would be indistinguishable from that of the death-god, whereas the head of the other god requires no special identification marks. There are a good many additional points which support this view, but I will mention two only. The magnificent carved lintel from Tikal, now at Basle, shows a figure with all the attributes of the death-god beneath a particularly elaborate example of the double-headed monster. The position of the monster here is unusual, since it is usually shown as a support rather than as a canopy, but I think that in this case it emphasizes the fact that the home of the death-god is below the earth. The other point is the following: in the relief at Palenque, known as the cross, the conventional tree (for such it is in reality), springs from the head with the combined death- and sun-symbols (Fig. 51). In this case the part is taken for the whole, the head represents the earth-monster, and the whole scene is an exact parallel to the Borgia codex, in which the trees of the world-directions are shown rooted in the body of the monstrous earth-goddess (Fig. 10; p. 79). The Vaticanus B codex is an even closer parallel, since the trees representing the quarters are there depicted as springing from a