Mayan Pendants

The Obsidian Pendent

The four Mayan Pendants are magical talismans, each of which is made of a precious stone: sapphire, obsidian, jade, and turquoise.

History

The Mayan Sorcerer in 990 AD went to extreme lengths to ensure the Mayan Pyramid and the its people would be defended, day and night. [1] The human created four magical pendants, mystically connected and powered by the golden Mayan Sun Amulet, which was forged with the corresponding four precious stones embedded into its face. These pendants caused the gargoyles that wore them to remain awake in the daytime, without entering stone sleep.

The Mayan Clan kept the Mayan Sun Amulet safe for a thousand years, passing the pendants on from one group of four gargoyles in a rookery generation to the next. [2] Then, in 1993, disaster struck. A band of looters came upon the pyramid where the clan lived during the daytime, slaughtered the entire clan in its stone sleep (except for Zafiro, Obsidiana, Jade, and Turquesa, who were away patrolling the rain forest), and stole the amulet. While the surviving members of the Mayan Clan were clueless as to the Sun Amulet's whereabouts, they knew it must have been intact – otherwise, their pendants would have failed them. ("The Green")

In 1996, when Jade and Turquesa journeyed to Avalon to transfer a variety of Guatemalan plant samples to the mystical island, they had to leave their pendants on the skiff. ("Questions") [3]

Characteristics

The four gargoyles who wear these pendants are given names (Zafiro/Zafira, Obsidiano/Obsidiana, Jade/Jada and Turqueso/Turquesa) and remain flesh as long as they wear them. Unlike a typical gargoyle, they do not absorb solar radiation during the day, though the pendants do seem to compensate for this. The pendants also allow them to continue aging at the usual gargoyle rate, giving the pendant wearers longer lifespans. [4] The pendants work on gargoyle beasts and will even wake a sleeping gargoyle midday if one is placed on them. Traditionally, two of the pendant wearers are male and two are female, though that isn't an enforced rule. Usually the leader of the clan is one of the pendant wearers, but that isn't a hard and fast rule either. [5]

Production Background

While Greg Weisman stated in the early days of Ask Greg that the Mayan Sun Amulet and its pendants were made by human sorcery, during the website's 2007-2008 "This Day in Gargoyles' Universe History" feature, the entry for May 26 suggested that the two gargoyles were, in fact, awake on Avalon during the day. [6][7][8] This canon-in-training confusion was eventually clarified in the canonical issue, "Questions" in 2024. [9]