Ixpiyacoc, the Grandfather Who Divines

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ixpiyacoc appears in the Popol Vuh almost always in company with Ixmucane, and Dennis Tedlock's translation preserves the pair's shared titles, grandfather and grandmother, midwife and matchmaker, day keeper and diviner. Where the text distinguishes them at all it is by grammatical gender rather than by separate deeds, both cast the maize kernels and red beans of divination, both counsel the greater creator beings, Heart of Sky and the Plumed Serpent, on how to proceed, and both take part in shaping the wood people whose failure to remember their makers leads to their destruction. Allen Christenson's commentary identifies this casting of lots as the earliest description of a divinatory practice in the K'iche' textual tradition, performed here by the divine grandparents themselves before it is ever performed by a human day keeper. Ixpiyacoc's fatherhood of Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu situates him as the source of the whole line that runs through the story, from the first pair of brothers who lose the ballgame in Xibalba to the second pair, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who win it. The text never separates Ixpiyacoc's will from Ixmucane's; every decision attributed to the pair is theirs together, which is itself part of what commentators read as the narrative's own statement about paired, complementary creative power.