slayer, among the Tzotziles of Chiapas; and Kumix among the Ch'orti' Mayas. The heroes' actions can belong to a relatively recent past, and be semi-historical, or have occurred in the deep past, and be primeval; but in principle, the heroes can be addressed in prayer, and receive some form of worship. Sometimes, they have merged with specific military saints. Deities The ancient Maya concept of 'deity', or 'divinity' (k'u in Yucatec, ch'u in Ch'ol, and qabuvil in ancient Quiché) is insufficiently understood, but can by no means be reduced to a mere personification of natural phenomena. The life-cycle of the maize, for instance, lies at the heart of Maya belief, but the role of the principal Maya maize god transcends the sphere of agriculture to embrace basic aspects of civilized life in general (such as writing). Deities have all sorts of social functions, related to such human activities as agriculture, midwifery, trade, and warfare. Moreover, they can be the patrons of large kin-based, ethnic or localized segments of society, as shown by the four deities presiding over the four wards of the town of Itzamkanac; the Popol Vuh Triad of lineage gods (Tohil, Hacavitz, Avilix); and probably also by the Palenque Triad (G[God] I, II, and III) and its Classic Period analogues elsewhere. Such patron deities - who may be either place-specific, or instances of a general deity - tend to have an intimate relationship with the associated community and its representative (in Classic inscriptions usually the king), by whom they are bathed, dressed, and fed. From the multitude of deity names occurring in early-colonial sources (and especially in the medical 'Rituals of the Bacabs'), about twenty have been linked to deity figures from the three Postclassic hieroglyphic books and their correspondences in the corpus of Classic ceramic representations; these have been assigned letter names (Schellhas-Zimmermann-Taube classification). The codices demonstrate that deities were permanently being arranged and rearranged according to cultic criteria which usually are not immediately accessible to us. Moreover, Maya deities typically operate within various fields, changing attributes accordingly. With the provisos formulated above, the main deities depicted in the codices can be roughly divided into the following groups (the names given are 16th-century Yucatec): The principal creator god (Itzamna); sky gods, particularly the sun god (Kinich Ahau), the Maya moon goddess, and the patrons of the Venus cycle; gods of the weather and the crops, particularly the