Popol Vuh

1550
POPOL VUH: THE MAYAN BOOK OF THE DAWN OF LIFE

translated by Dennis Tedlock with commentary based on the ancient

knowledge of the modern Quiche Maya

(C) Copyright 1985, Dennis Tedlock

PREFACE


You cannot erase time.

-ANDRES XILOJ
-
THE TRANSLATOR of the Popol Vuh, as if possessed by the story the
Popol Vuh tells, must wander in darkness and search long for the clear
light. The task is not a matter of deciphering Maya hieroglyphs, since
the only surviving version of the Popol Vuh is a transcription into
alphabetic writing, but the manuscript nevertheless abounds with
ambiguities and obscurities. My work took me not only into dark
corners of libraries but into the forests and tall cornfields and
smoky houses of highland Guatemala, where the people who speak and
walk and work in the pages of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche Maya, have
hundreds of thousands of descendants. Among them are diviners called
"daykeepers," who know how to interpret illnesses, omens, dreams,
messages given by sensations internal to their own bodies, and the
multiple rhythms of time. It is their business to bring what is dark
into "white clarity," just as the gods of the Popol Vuh first
brought the world itself to light.
The Quiche people speak a Mayan language, say prayers to Mayan
mountains and Mayan ancestors, and keep time according to the Mayan
calendar. They are also interested citizens of the larger contemporary
world, but they find themselves surrounded and attacked by those who
have yet to realize they have something to teach the rest of us. For
them it is not that the time of Mayan civilization has passed, to be
followed by the time of European civilization, but that the two have
begun to run alongside one another. A complete return to conditions
that existed before Europeans first arrived is unthinkable, and so
is a complete abandonment of indigenous traditions in favor of
European ones. What most worries daykeepers about people from
Europe, and specifically about missionaries, is that they confuse
the Earth, whose divinity is equal to that of the celestial God,
with the devil. As daykeepers put it, "He who makes an enemy of the
Earth makes an enemy of his own body."
In the western part of what was once the Quiche kingdom is a town
called Chuua 4,ak or "Before the Building." It is listed in the
Popol Vuh as one of the citadels that were added to the kingdom during
the reign of two great lords named Quicab and Cauizimah. When they
sent "guardians of the land" to occupy newly conquered towns, Before
the Building was assigned to nobles whose descendants still possess
documents that date from the period of the Popol Vuh manuscript. Among
contemporary Guatemalan towns it is without rival in the degree to
which its ceremonial life is timed according to the Mayan calendar and
mapped according to the relative elevations and directional
positions of outdoor shrines. Once each 260 days, on the day named
Eight Monkey, daykeepers converge from all over the Guatemalan
highlands for the largest of all present-day Mesoamerican ceremonies
that follow the ancient calendar. That Before the Building was already
a religious center before the fall of the Quiche kingdom is
indicated by the Nahua name that Pedro de Alvarado's Mexican-Indian
allies gave it: Momostenango, meaning "Citadel of Shrines." It was
in this town that I began my search for someone who might be able to
light my way through some of the darker passages of the Popol Vuh.
At the same time I began making sound recordings of contemporary
narratives, speeches, and prayers, looking for passages that might
resemble the Popol Vuh.

For fieldworkers in a Citadel of Shrines, visiting sacred places,
listening to prayers and chants, and learning how to reckon time
according to the continuing rhythms of the Mayan calendar can be a
dangerous business. Barbara Tedlock and I almost came to the point
of giving up our various research projects and leaving town when a
daykeeper named Andres Xiloj divined that we had not only annoyed
people at shrines but had entered the presence of these shrines
without even realizing that we must be ritually clean in order to do
so. But it was this same daykeeper, a man who is also the head of
his patrilineage, who took on the task of answering all our
inquiries about the shrines, the people who went there, the
calendar, and the process by which he had divined the nature of our
offense. One day, when we had come to the point of asking for a
detailed description of the training and initiation of daykeepers,
he dropped what seemed to be a broad hint that the best way to find
out the answer to such questions would be to undertake an actual
apprenticeship. After debating the meaning of his remarks all night,
we asked him the next day whether he had meant that he would in fact
be willing to take us on as apprentices, and he said, "Of course."
There followed four and a half months of formal training, timed
according to the Mayan calendar, that left us much more
knowledgeable than we had ever intended to be.
Diviners are, by profession, interpreters of difficult texts. They
can even start from a nonverbal sign, such as an ominous invasion of a
house by a wild animal, and arrive at a "reading," as we would say, or
ubixic, "its saying" or "its announcement," as is said in Quiche. When
they start from a verbal sign such as the name of a day on the Mayan
calendar, they may treat it as if it were a sign from a writing system
rather than a word in itself, arriving at "its saying" by finding a
different word with similar sounds. It should therefore come as no
surprise that a diviner might be willing to take on the task of
reading the Popol Vuh, whose text presents its own intriguing
difficulties of interpretation.
When Andres Xiloj was given a chance to look at the text of the
Popol Vuh, he produced a pair of spectacles and began reading aloud,
word by word. His previous knowledge of alphabetic reading and writing
was limited to Spanish, but he was able to grasp the orthography of
the Popol Vuh text with very little help. When he was puzzled by
archaic words, I offered definitions drawn from Quiche dictionaries
compiled during the colonial period; in time, of course, he readily
recognized the more frequent archaic forms. He was never content
with merely settling on a Quiche reading of a particular passage and
then offering a simple Spanish translation; instead, he was given to
frequent interpretive asides, some of which took the form of entire
stories. In the present volume the effects of the three-way dialogue
among Andres Xiloj, the Popol Vuh text, and myself are most obvious in
the Glossary and the Notes and Comments, but they are also present
in the Introduction and throughout the translation of the Popol Vuh
itself.
My work in Guatemala took me not only to the town called Before
the Building (Momostenango), but to the ruins of Rotten Cane
(Utatlan), to the mountain called Patohil, to the pile of broken
stones at Petatayub, and to towns such as Santa Cruz Quiche, Spilt
Water (Zacualpa), Above the Nettles (Chichicastenango), Above the
Hot Springs (Totonicapan), Willow Tree (Santa Maria Chiquimula), and
Under Ten Deer (Quezaltenango). To the patron saints and earthly
spirits of all these places I pay my respects, especially to
Santiago and his scribe, San Felipe, at Momostenango; to San Juan
and to the divine Uhaal and Roz Utz stones at Agua Tibia; and above
all to Uhaal Zabal, 4huti Zabal, and Nima Zabal.
Library pilgrimages have taken me to nearby Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to the Tozzer Library at Harvard; to the National
Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C.; to the Latin American libraries at Tulane in New Orleans and the
University of Texas in Austin; to the special-collections library at
Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; to the Museo Nacional de
Antropologia in Mexico City; to the Archivo General de Centroamerica
in Guatemala City; and to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I
saw, felt, smelled, and heard the rustle of the manuscript of the
Popol Vuh.

Such is the magnitude of the present project that it stretched
over nine years; except for one of these years and part of another, it
necessarily took a backseat to the countless complexities of
university life. Most of the Guatemalan fieldwork was carried out
during the summer of 1975 and throughout 1976. Much of my effort to
transform masses of research and multiple trial runs at translation
into a book was made during evenings and weekends at home, and it
was also carried on during all-too-brief retreats to such places as
Tepoztlan, south of Mexico City; Panajachel, on the shore of Lake
Atitlan in Guatemala; and in the woodlands and rocks near Cerrillos,
New Mexico, south of Santa Fe. But even when one is confined to
Massachusetts, there are ways in which the world of the Popol Vuh
makes itself felt. During the months in which I completed the
manuscript for the book you now hold in your hands, I could see
Venus as the morning star if I looked out the window of my study early
enough.
Thinking back over my work on the Popol Vuh brings a great many
people to mind; I apologize in advance to those who should have been
remembered here but were not. Having learned my lessons about
ancestors from my Quiche master, I will begin with persons who are now
deceased. Robert Wauchope, when I first began my graduate work at
Tulane in 1961, soon became convinced that I should eventually go to
Guatemala to do archaeological fieldwork; he lived long enough to know
that fourteen years later I finally did get to Guatemala, but as an
ethnologist, linguist, and translator rather than an archaeologist. My
first lessons in how to read and interpret manuscript sources from
Spanish America were given to me by France V. Scholes in the
Coronado Library at the University of New Mexico, during the summer of
1964. He and Wauchope enjoyed full careers, but the career of Thelma
Sullivan, the finest of all scholars working with texts in the Nahuatl
language, was cut short; she stood out among Americanists in general
as one of those rare individuals who realize and demonstrate that
precision in translation is not to be confused with mechanical
literalness. Also cut short was the career of Fernando Horcasitas, who
gave a splendid lecture on Nahuatl theater one fine warm evening in
Cuernavaca when Barbara Tedlock and I were waiting for the
Guatemalan border to reopen after the great earthquake of 1976.
And then there is Abelino Zapeta y Zapeta, who in 1979 became the
first Quiche to serve as mayor of Santa Cruz Quiche in centuries. He
offered gracious words of greeting to an international conference on
the Popol Vuh that took place in his town. For the time being it
must also be said that he was the last Quiche to serve as mayor. A
year after the conference, while he was riding home from work on his
bicycle, he was assassinated by gunmen who were seen driving away in
an army jeep. The day may come when the Popol Vuh will be entirely
at home in Santa Cruz Quiche, the town where it was written, but
that day may not be soon.
Turning to those who are still living, and beginning with graduate
school, I first think of Munro S. Edmonson. I have come to disagree
with him about a great many matters affecting the Popol Vuh, as he
well knows, but I have not forgotten his seminar on the Maya at
Tulane, which I took more than twenty years ago. When he offered a
list of possible research topics to the students in that seminar, I
was the one who chose to do a class presentation and term paper on the
Popol Vuh. But my first fieldwork in anthropology took me closer to my
home in New Mexico: I went to the Zuni, who live on the northern
frontier of Mesoamerica. When it came, at long last, to doing field
research among the people whose ancestors wrote the Popol Vuh, it
was Robert M. Carmack, of the State University of New York at
Albany, who introduced Barbara Tedlock and myself to the western
highlands of Guatemala. He did this with a generosity that is rare
among ethnographers- and with a wisdom, still rarer, that led him to
abandon us to our fate once he had gotten us into the field.
Among the people of Guatemala, I give special thanks to Andres Xiloj
Peruch, who not only traveled with me through the Quiche text of the
Popol Vuh but taught me how to read dreams, omens, and the rhythms
of the Mayan calendar. Thanks also go to his daughter Maria, who has
boundless patience and kindness; to Santiago Guix, who showed the
way down many a path; to Gustavo Lang, who offers a steady hand in any
emergency; to Lucas Pacheco Benitez, who combines a warm heart with an
intimate knowledge of the spiritual properties of stones; to Celso
Akabal, who offers genial toasts at his home near the shrine called
the Great Place of Declaration; to Vicente de Leon Abac, who knows how
the ancient customs originated; to Esteban Ajxub, who eloquently prays
and sings for others; and to Flavio Rojas Lima, who knows how to
make foreigners feel welcome at the Seminario de Integracion Social
Guatemalteca.

In matters of Native American linguistics and poetics, I am
especially thankful for more than fifteen years of unceasing
dialogue with Dell Hymes. Others who come to mind here are Allan
Burns, the first to reveal that conversation is the root of all
Mayan discourse; Lyle Campbell, who went beyond his normal duties in
providing myself and others with an introductory course in Quiche at
the State University of New York at Albany in the fall of 1975 and who
taught me the value of Cakchiquel sources; Ives Goddard, who convinced
me that even the most intractable manuscript materials on Native
American languages may conceal moments of great accuracy; T. J.
Knab, who helped me with Nahuatl loanwords in the Popol Vuh and with
Nahuatl metaphors; and James L. Mondloch, who answered some of my
questions about Quiche syntax.
In matters of ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology I think
of Duncan Earle, who revealed that the "mushroom head" of the Popol
Vuh is in fact an herb; Gary Gossen, who knows that in trying to
comprehend the contemporary highland Maya we are dealing with
nothing less than a civilization; Doris Heyden, the first to reveal
the full meaning of the secret cave at Teotihuacan; Alain Ichon, who
excavated the site called Thorny Place in the Popol Vuh; David H.
Kelley, who personally convinced me in far-off Calgary that classic
Maya vase paintings do indeed illustrate scenes from the Popol Vuh; J.
Jorge Klor de Alva, who knows that the "spiritual conquest" of
Mesoamerica has in fact never taken place; Linda Schele, who brought
the hieroglyphic texts of Palenque closer than ever to the Popol Vuh
at the eighth Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in Austin; and
Nathaniel Tarn, who in earlier times played the role of anthropologist
among neighbors of the Quiche and later returned as a poet.
Anthony Aveni, John B. Carlson, and Floyd G. Lounsbury have heard
out my ideas concerning the calendrical and astronomical
interpretation of the Popol Vuh. Michael D. Coe, who well knows what a
calabash tree is, not only provided welcome praise for the translation
but generously permitted the use of the vase drawings reproduced here.
Peter T. Furst and Jill Leslie Furst are steady friends who can be
counted upon to do unexpected things, like raising toads, cooking
sharks, and praising the fertility of skeletons. But above all I am
grateful to my wife-colleague Barbara Tedlock, scholar and artist, who
has meanwhile been telling her own story about places and times in
Guatemala.
At various times over the years I have discussed portions of this
work with four past and present colleagues in the University
Professors Program at Boston University, all of whom have views on the
subject of translation: William Arrowsmith, Rodolfo Cardona, D. S.
Carne-Ross, and Herbert Mason. Others who have lent patient ears
include the poets Robert Kelly, George Quasha, Jerome Rothenberg,
and Charles Stein, along with the book-rancher Gus Blaisdell and the
apple-farmer Jeff Titon. Thanks also go to Richard Lewis, of the
Touchstone Center in New York, who provided me with the opportunity to
do a public performance of parts of the translation at the American
Museum of Natural History.
My fieldwork in Guatemala in 1976 was done with the aid of a
Fellowship for Independent Study and Research from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Released time for the continuation of
the translation of the Popol Vuh was provided, during the academic
years 1979-80 and 1980-81, by a grant from the Translations Program at
the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is ably and
thoughtfully administered by Susan Mango. During 1980-81 I received
additional aid in the form of a sabbatical leave from Boston
University.

From the beginning of our work on the Popol Vuh, Andres Xiloj felt
certain that if one only knew how to read it perfectly, borrowing
the knowledge of the day lords, the moist breezes, and the distant
lightning, it should reveal everything under the sky and on the earth,
all the way out to the four corners. As a help to my own reading and
pondering of the book, he suggested an addition to the prayer that
daykeepers recite when they go to public shrines. It goes like this:
-
Make my guilt vanish,
Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth;
do me a favor,

give me strength, give me courage
in my heart, in my head,
since you are my mountain and my plain;
may there be no falsehood and no stain,
and may this reading of the Popol Vuh

come out clear as dawn,
and may the sifting of ancient times
be complete in my heart, in my head;
and make my guilt vanish,
my grandmothers, grandfathers,

and however many souls of the dead there may be,
you who speak with the Heart of Sky and Earth,
may all of you together give strength
to the reading I have undertaken.

INTRODUCTION

-
THE FIRST FOUR HUMANS, the first four earthly beings who were
truly articulate when they moved their feet and hands, their faces and
mouths, and who could speak the very language of the gods, could
also see everything under the sky and on the earth. All they had to do
was look around from the spot where they were, all the way to the
limits of space and the limits of time. But then the gods, who had not
intended to make and model beings with the potential of becoming their
own equals, limited human sight to what was obvious and nearby.
Nevertheless, the lords who once ruled a kingdom from a place called
Quiche, in the highlands of Guatemala, once had in their possession
the means for overcoming this nearsightedness, an ilbal, a "seeing
instrument" or a "place to see"; with this they could know distant
or future events. The instrument was not a telescope, not a crystal
for gazing, but a book.
The lords of Quiche consulted their book when they sat in council,
and their name for it was Popol Vuh or "Council Book." Because this
book contained an account of how the forefathers of their own lordly
lineages had exiled themselves from a faraway city called Tulan,
they sometimes described it as "the writings about Tulan." Because a
later generation of lords had obtained the book by going on a
pilgrimage that took them across water on a causeway, they titled it
"The Light That Came from Across the Sea." And because the book told
of events that happened before the first sunrise and of a time when
the forefathers hid themselves and the stones that contained the
spirit familiars of their gods in forests, they also titled it "Our
Place in the Shadows." And finally, because it told of the first
rising of the morning star and the sun and moon, and of the rise and
radiant splendor of the Quiche lords, they titled it "The Dawn of
Life."
Those who wrote the version of the Popol Vuh that comes down to us
do not give us their personal names but rather call themselves "we" in
its opening pages and "we who are the Quiche people" later on. In
contemporary usage "the Quiche people" are an ethnic group in
Guatemala, consisting of all those who speak the particular Mayan
language that itself has come to be called Quiche; they presently
number over half a million and occupy most of the former territory
of the kingdom whose development is described in the Popol Vuh. To the
west and northwest of them are other Mayan peoples, speaking other
Mayan languages, who extend across the Mexican border into the
highlands of Chiapas and down into the Gulf coastal plain of
Tabasco. To the east and northeast still other Mayans extend just
across the borders of El Salvador and Honduras, down into the lowlands
of Belize, and across the peninsula of Yucatan. These are the peoples,
with a total population of about four million today, whose ancestors
developed what has become known to the outside world as Maya
civilization.

The roots of Maya civilization may lie in the prior civilization
of the Olmecs, which reached its peak on the Gulf coastal plain
about three thousand years ago. Maya hieroglyphic writing and
calendrical reckoning probably have antecedents that go back at
least that far, but they did not find expression in the lasting form
of inscriptions on stone monuments until the first century B.C., in
a deep river valley that cuts through the highlands of Chiapas. From
there, the erection of inscribed monuments spread south to the Pacific
and eastward along the Guatemalan coastal plain, then reached back
into the highlands at the site of Kaminaljuyu, on the western edge
of what is now Guatemala City. During the so-called classic period,
beginning about A.D. 300, the center of literate civilization in the
Mayan region shifted northward into the lowland rain forest that
separates the mountain pine forest of Chiapas and Guatemala from the
low and thorny scrub forest of northern Yucatan. Swamps were drained
and trees were cleared to make way for intensive cultivation.
Hieroglyphic texts in great quantity were sculpted in stone and
stucco, painted on pottery and plaster, and inked on long strips of
paper that were folded like screens to make books. This is the
period that accounts for the glories of such sites as Palenque, Tikal,
and Copan, leaving a legacy that has made Maya civilization famous
in the fields of art and architecture. The Mayan languages spoken at
most of these sites probably corresponded to the ones now known as
Cholan, which are still spoken by the Mayan peoples who live at the
extreme eastern and western ends of the old classical heartland.
Near the end of the classic period, the communities that had
carved out a place for themselves in the rain forest were caught in
a deepening vortex of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and
malnutrition. The organizational and technological capacities of
Maya society were strained past the breaking point, and by A.D. 900
much of the region had been abandoned. That left Maya civilization
divided between two areas that had been peripheral during classic
times, one in northern Yucatan and the other in the Guatemalan
highlands. The subsequent history of both these areas was shaped by
invaders from the western end of the old classical heartland, from
Tabasco and neighboring portions of the Gulf coastal plain, who set up
militaristic states among the peoples they conquered. The culture they
carried with them has come to be called Toltec; it is thought to
have originated among speakers of Nahua languages, who are presently
concentrated in central Mexico (where they include the descendants
of the Aztecs) and who once extended eastward to Tabasco. In the Mayan
area, Toltec culture was notable for giving mythic prominence to the
god-king named Plumed Serpent, technical prominence to the use of
spear-throwers in warfare, and sacrificial prominence to the human
heart. Those who carried this culture to highland Guatemala brought
many Nahua words with them, but they themselves were probably
Gulf-coast Maya of Cholan descent. Among them were the founders of the
kingdom whose people have come to be known as the Quiche Maya.*
Mayan monuments and buildings no longer featured inscriptions
after the end of the classic period, but scribes went right on
making books for another six centuries, sometimes combining Mayan
texts with Toltecan pictures. Then, in the sixteenth century,
Europeans arrived in Mesoamerica. They forcibly imposed a monopoly
on all major forms of visible expression, whether in drama,
architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. Hundreds of
hieroglyphic books were tossed into bonfires by ardent missionaries;
between this disaster and the slower perils of decay, only four
books made it through to the present day. Three of them, all thought
to come from the lowlands, found their way to Europe in early colonial
times and eventually turned up in libraries in Madrid, Paris, and
Dresden; a fragment from a fourth book was recovered more recently
from looters who had found it in a dry cave in Chiapas. But the
survival of Mayan literature was not dependent on the survival of
its outward forms. Just as Mayan peoples learned to use the
symbolism of Christian saints as a mask for ancient gods, so they
learned to use the Roman alphabet as a mask for ancient texts.*(2)
-
??popo26.cif??

SCRIBES WENT RIGHT ON MAKING BOOKS: This is a page from the Maya
hieroglyphic book known as the Dresden Codex, which dates to the
thirteenth century. The left-hand column describes the movements of
Venus during one of five different types of cycles reckoned for that
planet. The right-hand column describes the auguries for the cycle and
gives both pictures and names for the attendant deities. The top
picture, in which the figure at right is seated on two glyphs that
name constellations, may have to do with the position of Venus
relative to the fixed stars during the cycle. In the middle picture is
the god who currently accounts for Venus itself, holding a
dart-thrower in his left hand and darts in his right; in the bottom
picture is his victim, with a dart piercing his shield. The Venus gods
of the Popol Vuh are more conservatively Mayan than those of the
Dresden Codex; they are armed with old-fashioned blowguns rather
than Toltecan dart-throwers.)
-
There was no little justice in the fact that it was the missionaries
themselves, the burners of the ancient books, who worked out the
problems of adapting the alphabet to the sounds of Mayan languages,
and while they were at it they charted grammars and compiled
dictionaries. Their official purpose in doing this linguistic work was
to facilitate the writing and publishing of Christian prayers,
sermons, and catechisms in the native languages. But very little
time passed before some of their native pupils found political and
religious applications for alphabetic writing that were quite
independent of those of Rome. These independent writers have left a
literary legacy that is both more extensive than the surviving
hieroglyphic corpus and more open to understanding. Their most notable
works, created as alphabetic substitutes for hieroglyphic books, are
the Chilam Balam or "Jaguar Priest" books of Yucatan and the Popol Vuh
of Guatemala.
The authors of the alphabetic Popol Vuh were members of the three
lordly lineages that had once ruled the Quiche kingdom: the Cauecs,
the Greathouses, and the Lord Quiches. They worked in the middle of
the sixteenth century, shortly before the end of one of the
fifty-two-year cycles measured out by their own calendar. The scene of
their writing was the town of Quiche, northwest of what is now
Guatemala City. The east side of this town, on flat land, was new in
their day, with buildings in files on a grid of streets and the bell
towers of a church at the center. The west side, already in ruins, was
on fortified promontories above deep canyons, with pyramids and
palaces clustered around multiple plazas and courtyards. The buildings
of the east side displayed broad expanses of blank stone and
plaster, but the ruined walls of the west side bore tantalizing traces
of multicolored murals. What concerned the authors of the new
version of the Popol Vuh was to preserve the story that lay behind the
ruins.
During the early colonial period the town of Quiche was eclipsed, in
both size and prosperity, by the neighboring town of Chuui La or
"Above the Nettles," better known today as Chichicastenango.*(3) The
residents of the latter town included members of the Cauec and Lord
Quiche lineages, and at some point a copy of the alphabetic Popol
Vuh found its way there. Between 1701 and 1703, a friar named
Francisco Ximenez happened to get a look at this manuscript while he
was serving as the parish priest for Chichicastenango. He made the
only surviving copy of the Quiche text of the Popol Vuh and added a
Spanish translation. His work remained in the possession of the
Dominican order until after Guatemalan independence, but when
liberal reforms forced the closing of all monasteries in 1830, it
was acquired by the library of the University of San Carlos in
Guatemala City. Carl Scherzer, an Austrian physician, happened to
see it there in 1854, and Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a
French priest, had the same good fortune a few months later.*(4) In
1857 Scherzer published Ximenez' Spanish translation under the
patronage of the Hapsburgs in Vienna,*(5) members of the same royal
lineage that had ruled Spain at the time of the conquest of the Quiche
kingdom, and in 1861 Brasseur published the Quiche text and a French
translation in Paris. The manuscript itself, which Brasseur spirited
out of Guatemala, eventually found its way back across the Atlantic
from Paris, coming to rest in the Newberry Library in 1911. The town
graced by this library, with its magnificent collection of Native
American texts, is not in Mesoamerica, but it does have an Indian
name: Chicago, meaning "Place of Wild Onions."

The manuscript Ximenez copied in the place called "Above the
Nettles" may have included a few illustrations and even an
occasional hieroglyph, but his version contains nothing but solid
columns of alphabetic prose. Mayan authors in general made only
sparing use of graphic elements in their alphabetic works, but
nearly every page of the ancient books combined writing (including
signs meant to be read phonetically) and pictures. In the Mayan
languages, as well as in Nahua, the terms for writing and painting
were and are the same, the same artisans practiced both skills, and
the patron deities of both skills were twin monkey gods born on the
day bearing a name translatable (whether from Mayan or Nahua) as One
Monkey. In the books made under the patronage of these twin gods there
is a dialectical relationship between the writing and the pictures:
the writing not only records words but sometimes has elements that
picture or point to their meaning without the necessity of a detour
through words. As for the pictures, they not only depict what they
mean but have elements that can be read as words. When we say that
Mesoamerican writing is strongly ideographic relative to our own, this
observation should be balanced with the realization that
Mesoamerican painting is more conceptual than our own.
At times the writers of the alphabetic Popol Vuh seem to be
describing pictures, especially when they begin new episodes in
narratives. In passages like the following, the use of sentences
beginning with phrases like "this is" and the use of verbs in the
Quiche equivalent of the present tense cause the reader to linger, for
a moment, over a lasting image:
-
This is the great tree of Seven Macaw, a nance, and this is the food
of Seven Macaw. In order to eat the fruit of the nance he goes up
the tree every day. Since Hunahpu and Xbalanque have seen where he
feeds, they are now hiding beneath the tree of Seven Macaw, they are
keeping quiet here, the two boys are in the leaves of the tree.
-

It must be cautioned, of course, that "word pictures" painted by
storytellers, in Quiche or in any other language, need not have
physical counterparts in the world outside the mind's eye. But the
present example has an abruptness that suggests a sudden still picture
from a story already well under way rather than a moving picture
unfolded in the course of the events of that story. The narrators do
not describe how the boys arrived "in the leaves of the tree"; the
opening scene is already complete, waiting for the blowgun shot that
comes in the next sentence, where the main verb is in the Quiche
equivalent of the past tense and the still picture gives way to a
moving one.
More than any other Mayan book, whether hieroglyphic or
alphabetic, the Popol Vuh tells us something about the conceptual
place of books in the pre-Columbian world. The writers of the
alphabetic version explain why the hieroglyphic version was among
the most precious possessions of Quiche rulers:
-
They knew whether war would occur; everything they saw was clear
to them. Whether there would be death, or whether there would be
famine, or whether quarrels would occur, they knew it for certain,
since there was a place to see it, there was a book. "Council Book"
was their name for it.
-

When "everything they saw was clear to them" the Quiche lords were
recovering the vision of the first four humans, who at first "saw
everything under the sky perfectly." That would mean that the Popol
Vuh made it possible, once again, to sight "the four sides, the four
corners in the sky, on the earth," the corners and sides that mark not
only the earth but are the reference points for the movements of
celestial lights.*(6)
If the ancient Popol Vuh was like the surviving hieroglyphic
books, it contained systematic accounts of cycles in astronomical
and earthly events that served as a complex navigation system for
those who wished to see and move beyond the present. In the case of
a section dealing with the planet Venus, for example, there would have
been tables of rising and setting dates, pictures of the attendant
gods, and brief texts outlining what these gods did when they
established the pattern for the movements of Venus. When the ancient
reader of the Popol Vuh took the role of a diviner and astronomer,
seeking the proper date for a ceremony or a momentous political act,
we may guess that he looked up a specific passage, pondered its
meaning, and rendered an opinion. But the authors of the alphabetic
Popol Vuh tell us that there were also occasions on which the reader
offered "a long performance and account" whose subject was the
emergence of the whole cahuleu or "sky-earth," which is the Quiche way
of saying "world." If a divinatory reading or pondering was a way of
recovering the depth of vision enjoyed by the first four humans, a
"long performance," in which the reader may well have covered every
major subject in the entire book, was a way of recovering the full
cosmic sweep of that vision.
If the authors of the alphabetic Popol Vuh had transposed the
ancient Popol Vuh directly, on a glyph-by-glyph basis, they might have
produced a text that would have made little sense to anyone but a
fully trained diviner and performer. What they did instead was to
quote what a reader of the ancient book would say when he gave a "long
performance," telling the full story that lay behind the charts,
pictures, and plot outlines of the ancient book. Lest we miss the fact
that they are quoting, they periodically insert such phrases as
"This is the account, here it is," or "as it is said." At one point
they themselves take the role of a performer, speaking directly to
us as if we were members of a live audience rather than mere
readers. As they introduce the first episode of a long cycle of
stories about the gods who prepared the sky-earth for human life, they
propose that we all drink a toast to the hero.*(7)
At the beginning of their book, the authors delicately describe
the difficult circumstances under which they work. When they tell us
that they are writing "amid the preaching of God, in Christendom now,"
we can catch a plaintive tone only by noticing that they make this
statement immediately after asserting that their own gods "accounted
for everything- and did it, too- as enlightened beings, in enlightened
words." What the authors propose to write down is what Quiches call
the Oher Tzih, the "Ancient Word"*(8) or "Prior Word," which has
precedence over "the preaching of God." They have chosen to do so
because "there is no longer" a Popol Vuh, which makes it sound as
though they intend to re-create the original book solely on the
basis of their memory of what they have seen in its pages or heard
in the "long performance." But when we remember their complaint
about being "in Christendom," there remains the possibility that
they still have the original book but are protecting it from
possible destruction by missionaries. Indeed, their next words make us
wonder whether the book might still exist, but they no sooner raise
our hopes on this front than they remove the book's reader from our
grasp: "There is the original book and ancient writing, but he who
reads and ponders it hides his face." Here we must remember that the
authors of the alphabetic Popol Vuh have chosen to remain anonymous;
in other words, they are hiding their own faces. If they are
protecting anyone with their enigmatic statements about an
inaccessible book or a hidden reader, it could well be themselves.*(9)
The authors begin their narrative in a world that has nothing but an
empty sky above and a calm sea below. The action gets under way when
the gods who reside in the primordial sea, named Maker, Modeler,
Bearer, Begetter, Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea, and Sovereign
Plumed Serpent, are joined by gods who come down from the primordial
sky, named Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, Newborn Thunderbolt, Raw
Thunderbolt, and Hurricane. These two parties engage in a dialogue,
and in the course of it they conceive the emergence of the earth
from the sea and the growth of plants and people on its surface.
They wish to set in motion a process they call the "sowing" and
"dawning," by which they mean several different things at once.
There is the sowing of seeds in the earth, whose sprouting will be
their dawning, and there is the sowing of the sun, moon, and stars,
whose difficult passage beneath the earth will be followed by their
own dawning. Then there is the matter of human beings, whose sowing in
the womb will be followed by their emergence into the light at
birth, and whose sowing in the earth at death will be followed by
dawning when their souls become sparks of light in the darkness.

For the gods, the idea of human beings is as old as that of the
earth itself, but they fail in their first three attempts (all in Part
One) to transform this idea into a living reality. What they want is
beings who will walk, work, and talk in an articulate and measured
way, visiting shrines, giving offerings, and calling upon their makers
by name, all according to the rhythms of a calendar. What they get
instead, on the first try, is beings who have no arms to work with and
can only squawk, chatter, and howl, and whose descendants are the
animals of today. On the second try they make a being of mud, but this
one is unable to walk or turn its head or even keep its shape; being
solitary, it cannot reproduce itself, and in the end it dissolves into
nothing.
Before making a third try the gods decide, in the course of a
further dialogue, to seek the counsel of an elderly husband and wife
named Xpiyacoc and Xmucane. Xpiyacoc is a divine matchmaker and
therefore prior to all marriage, and Xmucane is a divine midwife and
therefore prior to all birth. Like contemporary Quiche matchmakers and
midwives, both of them are ah3ih or "daykeepers," diviners who know
how to interpret the auguries given by thirteen day numbers and twenty
day names that combine to form a calendrical cycle lasting 260
days.*(10) They are older than all the other gods, who address them as
grandparents, and the cycle they divine by is older than the longer
cycles that govern Venus and the sun, which have not yet been
established at this point in the story. The question the younger
gods put to them here is whether human beings should be made out of
wood. Following divinatory methods that are still in use among
Quiche daykeepers, they give their approval. The wooden beings turn
out to look and talk and multiply themselves something like humans,
but they fail to time their actions in an orderly way and forget to
call upon the gods in prayer. Hurricane brings a catastrophe down on
their heads, not only flooding them with a gigantic rainstorm but
sending monstrous animals to attack them. Even their own dogs,
turkeys, and household utensils rise against them, taking vengeance
for past mistreatment. Their only descendants are the monkeys who
inhabit the forests today.
At this point the gods who have been working on the problem of
making human beings will need only one more try before they solve
it, but the authors of the Popol Vuh postpone the telling of this
episode, turning their attention to stories about heroic gods whose
adventures make the sky-earth a safer place for human habitation.
The gods in question are the twin sons of Xpiyacoc and Xmucane,
named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, and the twin sons of One Hunahpu,
named Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Both sets of twins are players of the
Mesoamerican ball game, in which the rubber ball (an indigenous
American invention) is hit with a yoke that rides on the hips rather
than with the hands. In addition to being ballplayers, One and Seven
Hunahpu occupy themselves by gambling with dice, whereas Hunahpu and
Xbalanque go out hunting with blowguns.*(11)
The adventures of the sons and grandsons of Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are
presented in two different cycles, with the episodes divided between
the cycles more on the basis of where they take place in space than
when they take place in time. The first cycle deals entirely with
adventures on the face of the earth, while the second, though it has
two separate above-ground passages, deals mainly with adventures in
the Mayan underworld, named Xibalba. If the events of these two cycles
were combined in a single chronological sequence, the above-ground
episodes would probably alternate with those below, with the heroes
descending into the underworld, emerging on the earth again, and so
forth. These sowing and dawning movements of the heroes, along with
those of their supporting cast, prefigure the present-day movements of
the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque are the protagonists of the first of the two
hero cycles (corresponding to Part Two in the present translation),
and their enemies are a father and his two sons, all of them
pretenders to lordly power over the affairs of the earth. Hurricane,
or Heart of Sky, is offended by this threesome, and it is he who sends
Hunahpu and Xbalanque against them. The first to get his due is the
father, named Seven Macaw, who claims to be both the sun and moon.
In chronological terms this episode overlaps with the story of the
wooden people (at the end of Part One), since Seven Macaw serves as
their source of celestial light and has his downfall at the same
time they do. The twins shoot him while he is at his meal, high up
in a fruit tree, breaking his jaw and bringing him down to earth.
Later they pose as curers and give him the reverse of a face-lift,
pulling out all his teeth and removing the metal disks from around his
eyes; this puts an end to his career as a lordly being. His earthly
descendants are scarlet macaws, with broken and toothless jaws and
mottled white patches beneath their eyes. He himself remains as the
seven stars of the Big Dipper, and his wife, named Chimalmat,
corresponds to the Little Dipper. The rising of Seven Macaw (in
mid-October) now marks the coming of the dry season, and his fall to
earth and his disappearance (beginning in mid-July) signal the
beginning of the hurricane season. It was his first fall, brought on
by the blowgun shot of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, that opened the way
for the great flood that brought down the wooden people. Just as Seven
Macaw only pretended to be the sun and moon, so the wooden people only
pretended to be human.*(12)

Hunahpu and Xbalanque next take on Zipacna, the elder of Seven
Macaw's two sons, a crocodilian monster who claims to be the maker
of mountains. But first comes an episode in which Zipacna has an
encounter with the gods of alcoholic drinks, the Four Hundred Boys.
Alarmed by Zipacna's great strength, these boys trick him into digging
a deep hole and try to crush him by dropping a great log down behind
him. He survives, but he waits in the hole until they are in the
middle of a drunken victory celebration and then brings their own
house down on top of them. At the celestial level they become the
stars called Motz, the Quiche name for the Pleiades, and their
downfall corresponds to early-evening settings of these stars. At
the earthly level, among contemporary Quiches, the Pleiades
symbolize a handful of seeds, and their disappearance in the west
marks the proper time for the sowing of crops.
Zipacna meets his own downfall when Hunahpu and Xbalanque set out to
avenge the Four Hundred Boys. At a time when Zipacna has gone
without food for several days, they set a trap for him by making a
device that appears to be a living, moving crab. Having placed this
artificial crab in a tight space beneath an overhang at the bottom
of a great mountain, they show him the way there. Zipacna goes after
the crab with great passion, and his struggles to wrestle himself into
the right position to consummate his hunger become a symbolic parody
of sexual intercourse. When the great moment comes the whole
mountain falls on his chest (which is to say he ends up on the
bottom), and when he heaves a sigh he turns to stone.*(13)
Finally there comes the demise of the younger son of Seven Macaw,
named Earthquake, who bills himself as a destroyer of mountains. In
his case the lure devised by Hunahpu and Xbalanque is the irresistibly
delicious aroma given off by the roasting of birds. They cast a
spell on the bird they give him to eat: just as it was cooked inside a
coating of earth, so he will end up covered by earth. They leave him
buried in the east, opposite his elder brother, whose killing of the
Four Hundred Boys associates him with the west (where the Pleiades may
be seen to fall beneath the earth). Seven Macaw, as the Big Dipper, is
of course in the north. He is near the pivot of the movement of the
night sky, whereas his two sons make the earth move- though they
cannot raise or level whole mountains in a single day as they once
did.*(14)
Having accounted for three of the above-ground episodes in the lives
of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Popol Vuh next moves back in time to
tell the story of their father, One Hunahpu, and his twin brother,
Seven Hunahpu (at the beginning of Part Three). This is the point at
which the authors treat us as if we were in their very presence,
introducing One Hunahpu with these words: "Let's drink to him, and
let's just drink to the telling and accounting of the begetting of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque." The story begins long before One Hunahpu meets
the woman who will bear Hunahpu and Xbalanque; in the opening episode,
he marries a woman named Xbaquiyalo and they have twin sons named
One Monkey and One Artisan. One Hunahpu and his brother sometimes play
ball with these two boys, and a messenger from Hurricane, a
falcon,*(15) sometimes comes to watch them. The boys become
practitioners of all sorts of arts and crafts, including flute
playing, singing, writing, carving, jewelry making, and
metalworking. At some point Xbaquiyalo dies, but we are not told
how; that leaves Xmucane, the mother of One and Seven Hunahpu, as
the only woman in the household.
The ball court of One and Seven Hunahpu lies on the eastern edge
of the earth's surface at a place called Great Abyss at
Carchah.*(16) Their ballplaying offends the lords of Xibalba, who
dislike hearing noises above their subterranean domain. The head lords
are named One Death and Seven Death, and under them are other lords
who specialize in causing such maladies as lesions, jaundice,
emaciation, edema, stabbing pains, and sudden death from vomiting
blood. One and Seven Death decide to challenge One and Seven Hunahpu
to come play ball in the court of Xibalba, which lies at the western
edge of the underworld. They therefore send their messengers, who
are monstrous owls, to the Great Abyss. One and Seven Hunahpu leave
One Monkey and One Artisan behind to keep Xmucane entertained and
follow the owls over the eastern edge of the world. The way is full of
traps, but they do well until they come to the Crossroads, where
each of four roads has a different color corresponding to a
different direction. They choose the Black Road, which means, at the
terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld will take
them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that they
were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they descended
below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the Road of
Xibalba.

Entering the council place of the lords of Xibalba is a tricky
business, beginning with the fact that the first two figures seated
there are mere manikins, put there as a joke. The next gag that awaits
visitors is a variation on the hot seat, but after that comes a deadly
serious test. One and Seven Hunahpu must face a night in Dark House,
which is totally black inside. They are given a torch and two
cigars, but they are warned to keep these burning all night without
consuming them. They fail this test, so their hosts sacrifice them the
next day instead of playing ball with them. Both of them are buried at
the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice, except that the severed head of
One Hunahpu is placed in the fork of a tree that stands by the road
there. Now, for the first time, the tree bears fruit, and it becomes
difficult to tell the head from the fruit. This is the origin of the
calabash tree, whose fruit is the size and shape of a human head.
Blood Woman, the maiden daughter of a Xibalban lord named Blood
Gatherer, goes to marvel at the calabash tree. The head of One
Hunahpu, which is a skull by now, spits in her hand and makes her
pregnant with Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The skull explains to her that
henceforth, a father's face will survive in his son, even after his
own face has rotted away and left nothing but bone. After six
months, when Blood Woman's father notices that she is pregnant, he
demands to know who is responsible. She answers that "there is no
man whose face I've known," which is literally true. He orders the owl
messengers of Xibalba to cut her heart out and bring it back in a
bowl; armed with the White Dagger, the instrument of sacrifice, they
take her away.*(17) But she persuades them to spare her, devising a
substitute for her heart in the form of a congealed nodule of sap from
a croton tree. The lords heat the nodule over a fire and are entranced
by the aroma; meanwhile the owls show Blood Woman to the surface of
the earth. As a result of this episode it is destined that the lords
of Xibalba will receive offerings of incense made from croton sap
rather than human blood and hearts. At the astronomical level Blood
Woman corresponds to the moon, which appears in the west at
nightfall when it begins to wax, just as she appeared before the skull
of One Hunahpu at the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice when she became
pregnant.
Once she is out of the underworld, Blood Woman goes to Xmucane and
claims to be her daughter-in-law, but Xmucane resists the idea that
her own son, One Hunahpu, could be responsible for Blood Woman's
pregnancy. She puts Blood Woman to a test, sending her to get a netful
of corn from the garden that One Monkey and One Artisan have been
cultivating. Blood Woman finds only a single clump of corn plants
there, but she produces a whole netful of ears by pulling out the silk
from just one ear. When Xmucane sees the load of corn she goes to
the garden herself, wondering whether Blood Woman has stripped it.
On the ground at the foot of the clump of plants she notices the
imprint of the carrying net, which she reads as a sign that Blood
Woman is indeed pregnant with her own grandchildren.
To understand how Xmucane is able to interpret the sign of the net
we must remember that she knows how to read the auguries of the
Mayan calendar, and that one of the twenty day names that go into
the making of that calendar is "Net." Retold from a calendrical
point of view, the story so far is that Venus rose as the morning star
on a day named Hunahpu, corresponding to the ballplaying of
Xmucane's sons, One and Seven Hunahpu, in the east; then, after
being out of sight in Xibalba, Venus reappeared as the evening star on
a day named Death, corresponding to the defeat of her sons by One
and Seven Death and the placement of One Hunahpu's head in a tree in
the west. The event that is due to come next in the story is the
rebirth of Venus as the morning star, which should fall, as she
already knows, on a day named Net. When she sees the imprint of the
net in the field, she takes it as a sign that this event is coming
near, and that the faces of the sons born to Blood Woman will be
reincarnations of the face of One Hunahpu.*(18)
When Hunahpu and Xbalanque are born they are treated cruelly by
their jealous half-brothers, One Monkey and One Artisan, and even by
their grandmother. They never utter a complaint, but keep themselves
happy by going out every day to hunt birds with their blowguns.
Eventually they get the better of their brothers by sending them up
a tree to get birds that failed to fall down when they were shot. They
cause the tree to grow tall enough to maroon their brothers, whom they
transform into monkeys. When Xmucane objects they give her four
chances to see the faces of One Monkey and One Artisan again,
calling them home with music. They warn her not to laugh, but the
monkeys are so ridiculous she cannot contain herself; finally they
swing up and away through the treetops for good. One Monkey and One
Artisan, both of whose names refer to a single day on the divinatory
calendar, correspond to the planet Mars, which thereafter begins its
period of visibility on a day bearing these names, and their temporary
return to the house of Xmucane corresponds to the retrograde motion of
Mars. They are also the gods of arts and crafts, and they probably
made their first journey through the sky during the era of the
wooden people, who were the first earthly beings to make and use
artifacts and who themselves ended up as monkeys.

With their half-brothers out of the way, Hunahpu and Xbalanque
decide to clear a garden plot of their own, but when they return to
the chosen spot each morning they find that the forest has reclaimed
it. By hiding themselves at the edge of the plot one night, they
discover that the animals of the forest are restoring the cleared
plants by means of a chant. They try to grab each of these animals
in turn, but they miss the puma and jaguar completely, break the tails
off the rabbit and deer, and finally get their hands on the rat. In
exchange for his future share of stored crops, the rat reveals to them
that their father and uncle, One and Seven Hunahpu, left a set of ball
game equipment tied up under the rafters of their house, and he agrees
to help them get it down. At home the next day, Hunahpu and
Xbalanque get Xmucane out of the house by claiming her chili stew
has made them thirsty; she goes after water but is delayed when her
water jar springs a leak. Then, when Blood Woman goes off to see why
Xmucane has failed to return, the rat cuts the ball game equipment
loose and the twins take possession of it.
When Hunahpu and Xbalanque begin playing ball at the Great Abyss
they disturb the lords of Xibalba, just like their father and uncle
before them. Once again the lords send a summons, but this time the
messengers go to Xmucane, telling her that the twins must present
themselves in seven days. She sends a louse to relay the message to
her grandsons, but the louse is swallowed by a toad, the toad by a
snake, and the snake by a falcon.*(19) The falcon arrives over the
ball court and the twins shoot him in the eye. They cure his eye
with gum from their ball, which is why the laughing falcon now has a
black patch around the eye. The falcon vomits the snake, who vomits
the toad, who still has the louse in his mouth, and the louse
recites the message, quoting what Xmucane told him when she quoted
what the owls told her when they quoted what the lords of Xibalba told
them to say.
Having been summoned to the underworld, Hunahpu and Xbalanque go
to take leave of their grandmother, and in the process they
demonstrate a harvest ritual that Quiches follow to this day. They
"plant" ears of corn in the center of her house, in the attic; these
ears are neither to be eaten nor used as seed corn but are to be
kept as a sign that corn remains alive throughout the year, even
between the drying out of the plants at harvest time and the sprouting
of new ones after planting. They tell their grandmother that when a
crop dries out it will be a sign of their death, but that the
sprouting of a new crop will be a sign that they live again.*(20)
The twins play a game with language when they instruct their
grandmother; only now, instead of a quotation swallowed up inside
other quotations we get a word hidden within other words. The secret
word is "Ah," one of the twenty day names; the twins point to it by
playing on its sounds rather than simply mentioning it. When they tell
their grandmother that they are planting corn ears (ah) in the house
(ha), they are making a pun on Ah in the one case and reversing its
sound in the other. The play between Ah and ha is familiar to
contemporary Quiche daykeepers, who use it when they explain to
clients that the day Ah is portentous in matters affecting households.
If the twins planted their corn ears in the house on the day Ah,
then their expected arrival in Xibalba, seven days later, would fall
on the day named Hunahpu. This fits the Mayan Venus calendar
perfectly: whenever Venus rises as the morning star on a day named
Net, corresponding to the appearance of Hunahpu and Xbalanque on the
earth, its next descent into the underworld will always fall on a
day named Hunahpu.
Following in the footsteps of their father and uncle, Hunahpu and
Xbalanque descend the road to Xibalba, but when they come to the
Crossroads they do things differently. They send a spy ahead of
them, a mosquito, to learn the names of the lords. He bites each one
of them in turn; the first two lords reveal themselves as mere
manikins by their lack of response, but the others, in the process
of complaining about being bitten, address each other by name, all the
way down the line. When the twins themselves arrive before the
lords, they ignore the manikins (unlike their father and uncle) and
address each of the twelve real lords correctly. Not only that, but
they refuse to fall for the hot seat, and when they are given a
torch and two cigars to keep lit all night, they trick the lords by
passing off a macaw's tail as the glow of the torch and putting
fireflies at the tips of their cigars.*(21)

The next day Hunahpu and Xbalanque play ball with the Xibalbans,
something their father and uncle did not survive long enough to do.
The Xibalbans insist on putting their own ball into play first, though
the twins protest that this ball, which is covered with crushed
bone, is nothing but a skull. When Hunahpu hits it back to the
Xibalbans with the yoke that rides on his hips, it falls to the
court and reveals the weapon that was hidden inside it. This is
nothing less than the White Dagger, the same instrument of sacrifice
that the owls were supposed to use on Blood Woman; it twists its way
all over the court, but it fails to kill the twins.
The Xibalbans consent to use the rubber ball belonging to the
twins in a further game; this time four bowls of flowers are bet on
the outcome. After playing well for awhile the twins allow
themselves to lose, and they are given until the next day to come up
with the flowers. This time they must spend the night in Razor
House, which is full of voracious stone blades that are constantly
looking for something to cut. In exchange for a promise that they will
one day have the flesh of animals as their food, the blades stop
moving. This leaves the boys free to attend to the matter of the
flowers; they send leaf-cutting ants to steal them from the very
gardens of the lords of Xibalba. The birds who guard this garden,
poorwills and whippoorwills, are so oblivious that they fail to notice
that their own tails and wings are being trimmed along with the
flowers. The lords, who are aghast when they receive bowls filled with
their own flowers, split the birds' mouths open, giving them the
wide gape that birds of the night-jar family have today.
Next, the hero twins survive stays in Cold House, which is full of
drafts and falling hail; Jaguar House, which is full of hungry,
brawling jaguars; and a house with fire inside. After these horrors
comes Bat House, full of moving, shrieking bats, where they spend
the night squeezed up inside their blowgun.*(22) When the house
grows quiet and Hunahpu peeks out from the muzzle, one of the bats
swoops down and takes his head off. The head ends up rolling on the
ball court of Xibalba, but Xbalanque replaces it with a carved squash.
While he is busy with this head transplant the eastern sky reddens
with the dawn, and a possum, addressed in the story as "old man,"
makes four dark streaks along the horizon. Not only the red dawn but
the possum and his streaks are signs that the time of the sun (which
has never before been seen) is coming nearer. In the future a new
solar year will be brought in by the old man each 365 days; the four
streaks signify that only four of the twenty day names- Deer, Tooth,
Thought, and Wind- will ever correspond to the first day of a solar
year. Contemporary Quiche daykeepers continue to reckon the solar
dimension of the Mayan calendar; in 1986, for example, they will
expect the old man to arrive on February 28, which will be the day
Thirteen Deer.*(23)
Once Hunahpu has been fitted out with a squash for a head, he and
Xbalanque are ready to play ball with the Xibalbans again. When the
lords send off Hunahpu's original head as the ball, Xbalanque knocks
it out of the court and into a stand of oak trees. A rabbit decoys the
lords, who mistake his hopping for the bouncing of the ball, while
Xbalanque retrieves the head, puts it back on Hunahpu's shoulders, and
then pretends to find the squash among the oaks. Now the squash is put
into play, but it wears out and eventually splatters its seeds on
the court, revealing to the lords of Xibalba that they have been
played for fools. The game played with the squash, like the games
played with the bone-covered ball and with Hunahpu's severed head,
corresponds to an appearance of Venus in the west, the direction of
evening and death. If these events were combined in chronological
order with those that take place entirely above ground, they would
probably alternate with the episodes in which the twins defeat One
Monkey and One Artisan, Seven Macaw, Zipacna, and Earthquake, with
each of these latter episodes corresponding to an appearance of
Venus in the east, the direction of morning and life.*(24)
At this point we are ready for the last of the episodes that
prefigure the cycles of Venus and prepare the way for the first rising
of the sun. Knowing that the lords of Xibalba plan to burn them,
Hunahpu and Xbalanque instruct two seers named Xulu and Pacam as to
what they should say when the lords seek advice as to how to dispose
of their remains. This done, the twins cheerfully accept an invitation
to come see the great stone pit where the Xibalbans are cooking the
ingredients for an alcoholic beverage. The lords challenge them to a
contest in which the object is to leap clear across the pit, but the
boys cut the deadly game short and jump right in. Thinking they have
triumphed, the Xibalbans follow the advice of Xulu and Pacam, grinding
the bones of the boys and spilling the powder into a river.

After five days Hunahpu and Xbalanque reappear as catfish;*(25)
the day after that they take human form again, only now they are
disguised as vagabond dancers and actors. They gain great fame as
illusionists, their most popular acts being the ones in which they set
fire to a house without burning it and perform a sacrifice without
killing the victim. The lords of Xibalba get news of all this and
invite them to show their skills at court; they accept with
pretended reluctance. The climax of their performance comes when
Xbalanque sacrifices Hunahpu, rolling his head out the door,
removing his heart, and then bringing him back to life. One and
Seven Death go wild at the sight of this and demand that they
themselves be sacrificed. The twins oblige- and, as might already be
imagined, these final sacrifices are real ones. Hunahpu and
Xbalanque now reveal their true identities before all the
inhabitants of the underworld. They declare that henceforth, the
offerings received by Xibalbans will be limited to incense made of
croton sap and to animals, and that Xibalbans will limit their attacks
on future human beings to those who have weaknesses or guilt.
At this point the narrative takes us back to the twins' grandmother,
telling us what she has been doing all this time. She cries when the
season comes for corn plants to dry out, signifying the death of her
grandsons, and rejoices when they sprout again, signifying rebirth.
She burns incense in front of ears from the new crop and thus
completes the establishment of the custom whereby humans keep
consecrated ears in the house, at the center of the stored harvest.
Then the scene shifts back to Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are about
to establish another custom.
Having made their speech to the defeated Xibalbans, the twins go
to the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice with the intention of reviving
Seven Hunahpu, whose head and body still lie buried there. The full
restoration of his face depends on his own ability to pronounce the
names of all the parts it once had, but he gets no further than the
mouth, nose, and eyes, which remain as notable features of skulls.
They leave him there, but they promise that human beings will keep his
day (the one named Hunahpu), coming to pray where his remains are.
To this day, Hunahpu days are set aside for the veneration of the
dead, and graveyards are called by the same word (hom) as the ball
courts of the Popol Vuh.
At the astronomical level the visit of Hunahpu and Xbalanque to
their uncle's grave signals the return of a whole new round of Venus
cycles, starting with a morning star that first appears on a day named
Hunahpu. As for the twins themselves, they rise as the sun and moon.
Contemporary Quiches regard the full moon as a nocturnal equivalent of
the sun, pointing out that it has a full disk, is bright enough to
travel by, and goes clear across the sky in the same time it takes the
sun to do the same thing. Most likely the twin who became the moon
is to be understood specifically as the full moon, whereas Blood
Woman, the mother of the twins, would account for the other phases
of the moon.*(26)
With the ascent of Hunahpu and Xbalanque the Popol Vuh returns to
the problem the gods confronted at the beginning: the making of beings
who will walk, work, talk, and pray in an articulate manner. The
account of their fourth and final attempt at a solution is a
flashback, since it takes us to a time when the sun had not yet
appeared. As we have already seen, the gods failed when they tried
using mud and then wood as the materials for the human body, but now
they get news of a mountain filled with yellow corn and white corn,
discovered by the fox, coyote, parrot, and crow (at the beginning of
Part Four). Xmucane grinds the corn from this mountain very finely,
and the flour, mixed with the water she rinses her hands with,
provides the substance for human flesh, just as the ground bone thrown
in the river by the Xibalbans becomes the substance for the rebirth of
her grandsons. The first people to be modeled from the corn dough
are four men named Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah, and True
Jaguar. They are the first four heads of Quiche patrilineages; as in
the case of the men who occupy such positions today, they are called
"mother-fathers,"*(27) since in ritual matters they serve as
symbolic androgynous parents to everyone in their respective lineages.

This time the beings shaped by the gods are everything they hoped
for and more: not only do the first four men pray to their makers, but
they have perfect vision and therefore perfect knowledge. The gods are
alarmed that beings who were merely manufactured by them should have
divine powers, so they decide, after their usual dialogue, to put a
fog on human eyes. Next they make four wives for the four men, and
from these couples come the leading Quiche lineages. Celebrated
Seahouse becomes the wife of Jaguar Quitze, who founds the Cauec
lineage; Prawn House becomes the wife of Jaguar Night, who founds
the Greathouse lineage; and Hummingbird House becomes the wife of
Mahucutah, who founds the Lord Quiche lineage. True Jaguar is also
given a wife, Macaw House, but they have no male children. Other
lineages and peoples also come into being, and they all begin to
multiply.
All these early events in human history take place in darkness,
somewhere in the "east," and all the different peoples wander about
and grow weary as they go on watching and waiting for the rising of
the morning star and the sun. Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night,
Mahucutah, and True Jaguar decide to change their situation by
acquiring patron deities they can burn offerings in front of, and it
is with this purpose in mind that they go to a great eastern city
bearing the names Tulan Zuyua, Seven Caves, Seven Canyons. These are
grand names that call up broad reaches of the Mesoamerican past. Tulan
(or Tollan)*(28) means "Place of Reeds" or more broadly "metropolis"
in Nahua, and it was prefixed to the names of many different towns
during Toltecan times. The particular Tulan called Zuyua was
probably near the Gulf coast in Tabasco or Campeche, "eastern" because
it was east of the principal Tulan of the Toltecs, near Mexico City at
the site now known as Tula. But in giving Tulan Zuyua the further name
Seven Caves, the Popol Vuh preserves the memory of a metropolis much
older and far grander than any Toltec town. This ultimate Tulan was at
the site now known as Teotihuacan, northeast of Mexico City. It was
the greatest city in Mesoamerican history, dating from the same period
as the classic Maya. Only recently it has been discovered that beneath
the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan lies a natural cave whose main
shaft and side chambers add up to seven.*(29)
Countless lineages and tribes converge on the Tulan Zuyua of the
Popol Vuh, and each of them, starting with the Quiches, is given a
god. The Cauecs receive the god named Tohil, the Greathouses receive
Auilix, and the Lord Quiches receive Hacauitz. Ultimately the
patronage of the first-ranking god, Tohil, extended to all three of
these lineages, and to two other Quiche lineages of lesser rank, the
Tams and Ilocs. The worship of Tohil has recently been traced back
to the classic period; in the inscriptions at Palenque, he bears the
name Tahil, a Cholan word meaning "Obsidian Mirror," and he is shown
with a smoking mirror in his forehead.
The Popol Vuh tells us that although "all the tribes were sown and
came to light in unity," their languages differentiated while they
were at Tulan. The cause of this was that some peoples were given
patron deities whose names differed from that of the god of the
Quiches. The language of the Rabinals became only slightly
different, since they were given a god named One Toh rather than
Tohil, but others, who received gods with completely distinctive
names, ended up speaking distinctive languages, including the
Cakchiquels, the Bird House people, and the Yaqui people. Today,
indeed, the Rabinals, who live to the northeast of the Quiche
proper, speak a dialect of Quiche, whereas the Cakchiquels (still
known by this name) and the Bird House people (better known as the
Tzutuhils) speak related but separate languages. What the Popol Vuh
calls the Yaqui people are the speakers of Nahua languages, in Mexico.
Those languages belong to a family that not only stands apart from
Quiche, Cakchiquel, and Tzutuhil, but from Mayan languages in general.
Tohil is the source of the first fires kept by human beings,
making it possible for them to keep warm in the cold of the predawn
world. When a great hailstorm puts all these fires out, Tohil restores
fire to the Quiches by pivoting inside his sandal, which is to say
that he originates the technology whereby fire is started by
rotating a drill in the socket of a wooden platform. The other tribes,
shivering with cold, come to the Quiches to beg for fire, but Tohil
refuses to let them have it unless they promise to embrace him
someday, allowing themselves to be suckled. They agree, not
realizing that when the time comes for the Quiche lords to subjugate
them, being "suckled" by Tohil will mean having their hearts cut out
in sacrifice. Only the Cakchiquels, who get their fire by sneaking
past everyone else in the smoke, escape this fate.

At the suggestion of Tohil the Quiches leave Tulan. They sacrifice
their own blood to him, passing cords through their ears and elbows,
and they sing a song called "The Blame Is Ours," lamenting the fact
that they will not be in Tulan when the time comes for the first dawn.
Packing their gods on their backs and watching continuously for the
appearance of the morning star, they begin a long migration. At a
place called Rock Rows, Furrowed Sands they cross a "sea"*(30) on a
causeway; this would be somewhere in Tabasco or Campeche, perhaps at
Potonchan or Tixchel, both lowland Maya sites where causeways pass
through flooded areas. They also pass the Great Abyss, the location of
the eastern ball court used by the sons and grandsons of Xmucane, a
long way east and a little south of any likely location for Rock Rows,
Furrowed Sands. Next they enter the highlands, turning west and
continuing at a slight southward angle until they reach a mountain
called Place of Advice, not very far short of the site where they will
one day reach their greatest glory. With them at Place of Advice,
having accompanied them ever since they left Tulan, are the
Rabinals, Cakchiquels, and Bird House people.
Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah, and True Jaguar, together
with their wives, observe a great fast at Place of Advice. Tohil,
Auilix, and Hacauitz speak to them, asking to be given hiding places
so that they will not be captured by enemies of the Quiches. After a
search through the forest, each of these gods is hidden at the place
that bears his name today. They are not yet placed in temples atop
pyramids, but merely in arbors decorated with bromelias and hanging
mosses. At the place of Hacauitz, on a mountaintop, the Cauecs,
Greathouses, and Lord Quiches weep while they wait for the dawn; the
Tams and Ilocs wait on nearby mountains, while peoples other than
the Quiches wait at more distant places. When, at last, they all see
the daybringer, the morning star, they give thanks by burning the
incense they have kept for this occasion, ever since they left Tulan.
At this point we reach the moment in the account of human affairs
that corresponds to the final event in the account of the lives of the
gods: the Sun himself rises. On just this one occasion he appears as
an entire person, so hot that he dries out the face of the earth.
His heat turns Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz to stone, along with such
pumas, jaguars, and snakes as had existed until now. A diminutive
god called White Sparkstriker*(31) escapes petrifaction by going
into the shade of the trees, becoming the keeper of the stone animals.
He remains to this day as a gamekeeper, with stone fetishes
(volcanic concretions and meteorites) that resemble animals,
together with flesh-and-blood game animals, in his care. He may be
encountered in forests and caves, or on dark nights and in dreams;
he appears in contemporary masked dramas dressed entirely in red,
the color of the dawn.
At first the Quiches rejoice when they see the first sunrise, but
then they remember their "brothers," the tribes who were with them
at Tulan, and they sing the song called "The Blame Is Ours" once
again. In the words of this song they wonder where their brothers
might be at this very moment. In effect, the coming of the first
sunrise reunites the tribes, despite the fact that they remain
widely separated in space; as the Popol Vuh has it, "there were
countless peoples, but there was just one dawn for all tribes." The
orderly movements of the lights of the sky, signs of the deeds of
the gods, enable human beings to coordinate their actions even when
they cannot see one another. In point of fact Mesoamerican peoples
in general shared a common calendar, consisting of the 260-day
cycle, whose auguries were first read by Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, and the
cycles of Mars, Venus, and the sun and moon, as measured off by the
movements of their sons and grandsons and by Blood Woman.*(32)
Having seen the first sunrise from the mountain of Hacauitz, the
Quiches eventually build a citadel there. But at first, even while the
people of other tribes are becoming thickly settled and are seen
traveling the roads in great numbers, the Quiches remain rustic and
rural, gathering the larvae of yellow jackets, wasps, and bees for
food and staying largely out of sight. When they go before the
petrified forms of Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz, they burn bits of
pitchy bark and wildflowers as substitutes for refined incense and
offer blood drawn from their own bodies. The three gods are still able
to speak to them, but only by appearing in spirit form. Tohil tells
them to augment their offerings with the blood of deer and birds taken
in the hunt, but they grow dissatisfied with this arrangement and
begin to cast eyes on the people they see walking by in the roads.
From hiding places on mountain peaks, they begin imitating the cries
of the coyote, fox, puma, and jaguar.

Finally Tohil tells the Quiches to go ahead and take human beings
for sacrifice, reminding them that when they were at Tulan the other
tribes promised to allow him to "suckle" them. They begin to seize
people they find out walking alone or in pairs, taking them away to
cut them open before Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz and then rolling
their heads out onto the roads. At first the lords who rule the
victimized tribes think these deaths are the work of wild animals, but
then they suspect the worshipers of Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz and
attempt to track them down. Again and again they are foiled by rain,
mist, and mud, but they do discover that the three gods, whose
spirit familiars take the form of adolescent boys, have a favorite
bathing place. They send two beautiful maidens, Xtah and Xpuch, to
wash clothes there, instructing them to tempt the boys and then
yield to any advances. They warn the maidens to return with proof of
the success of their mission, which must take the form of presents
from the boys.*(33)
Contrary to plan, the three Quiche gods fail to lust after Xtah
and Xpuch, but they do agree to provide them with presents. They
give them three cloaks with figures on the inside, one painted with
a jaguar by Jaguar Quitze, another painted with an eagle by Jaguar
Night, and the third painted with swarms of yellow jackets and wasps
by Mahucutah. When the maidens return the enemy lords are so pleased
with the cloaks that they cannot resist trying them on. All is well
until the wasps painted on the inside of the third cloak turn into
real ones. Xtah and Xpuch are spurned; despite their failure to
tempt Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz they become the first prostitutes,
or what Quiches call "barkers of shins." As for the enemy lords,
they resolve to make war and launch a massive attack on the Quiche
citadel at Hacauitz.
The enemy warriors come at night in order to get as far as
possible without resistance, but they fall into a deep sleep on the
road. The Quiches not only strip them of all the metal ornaments on
their weapons and clothes, but pluck out their eyebrows and beards
as well. Even so the enemy warriors press on the next day,
determined to recover their losses, but the Quiches are well prepared.
What the enemy lookouts see all around the citadel of Hacauitz is a
wooden palisade; visible on the parapet are rows of warriors, decked
out with the very metal objects that were stolen during the night.
What the lookouts do not see is that these warriors are mere wooden
puppets, and that behind the palisade, on each of its four sides, is a
large gourd filled with yellow jackets and wasps, put there at the
suggestion of Tohil. As for the Quiches on the inside, what they
see, once the attack begins, is more than twenty-four thousand
warriors converging on them, bristling with weapons and shouting
continuously. But Tohil has made them so confident that they treat the
attack as a great spectacle, bringing their women and children up on
the parapet to see it. When they release the yellow jackets and
wasps their enemies drop their weapons and attempt to flee, so badly
stung they hardly even notice the blows they receive from conventional
Quiche weapons. The survivors become permanent payers of tribute to
the Quiche lords.
After their great victory, Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah,
and True Jaguar begin preparing, with complete contentment, for what
they know to be their approaching death. First they sing "The Blame Is
Ours," and then they explain to their wives and successors that "the
time of our Lord Deer" has come around again. This is a reference to
the day named Deer, one of the four days on which a new solar year can
begin, and specifically to the first day of a longer period, lasting
fifty-two years, which falls on One Deer.*(34) Such a major temporal
transition is an occasion for rites of renewal; the Quiche forefathers
declare that their time as lords among the living has been completed
and that they intend to return to the place where they came from,
far in the east. Jaguar Quitze leaves a sacred object called the
"Bundle of Flames," a sort of cloth-wrapped ark with mysterious
contents, as a "sign of his being." He and the others "die" by
simply departing; they are never seen again, but their descendants
burn incense before the Bundle of Flames in remembrance of them,
just as Xmucane burned incense before the ears of corn in
remembrance of Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
The Quiche lords of the second generation, following the
instructions of their departed fathers, go on a pilgrimage to the east
(at the beginning of Part Five). Unlike their fathers, they do this
with the intention of returning in the flesh. Cocaib, the firstborn
son of Jaguar Quitze, goes on behalf of the Cauec lineage; Coacutec,
the second son of Jaguar Night, represents the Greathouses; and
Coahau, the only son of Mahucutah, represents the Lord Quiches. They
go all the way back down into the lowlands, to the other side of the
same "sea" their fathers once crossed on the way up to the
highlands. If they were retracing their fathers' route in detail, they
must have descended into the lowlands by way of the Great Abyss.
They do not go to Tulan Zuyua, which may have been in ruins by this
time, but they do come before the ruler of a great kingdom. His name
is Nacxit, one of the epithets Nahua speakers give to the god-king
Plumed Serpent. He gives them the emblems that go with the two highest
titles of Mayan nobility, Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of the
Reception House Mat. Both these titles, the one belonging to a head of
state and the other to an overseer of tribute collection, go to the
Cauecs. From other sources we know that the Greathouse and Lord Quiche
lineages also receive emblems at this time, with the title of Lord
Minister (ranking third) going to one and that of Crier to the
People (ranking fourth) to the other.*(35)

Cocaib, Coacutec, and Coahau return "from across the sea" with the
regalia given them by Nacxit, including canopies, thrones, musical
instruments, cosmetics, jewelry, the feet and feathers of various
animals and birds, and "the writings about Tulan." Since one of the
titles of the Popol Vuh is "The Light That Came from Across the
Sea," we may guess that it was the Popol Vuh they brought back, and
that the hieroglyphic version of the book contained not only
writings about the gods whose movements prefigured those of
celestial lights, but about such human affairs as those of Tulan.
The sovereign lordship of the returned pilgrims is recognized not only
by the Quiches themselves, but by the Rabinals, Cakchiquels, and
Bird House people as well. Only now do the Quiche lords begin to
have what the Popol Vuh calls "fiery splendor." It seems likely that
their pilgrimage was conceived as a reenactment of the adventures of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque in Xibalba, who had only the planet Ve