The Popol Vuh opens not with a king but with a conversation. Tepeu and Gucumatz confer in the darkness, and creation proceeds by consultation between powers rather than by the decree of one. That is the Maya arrangement in miniature: a plurality of gods who deliberate, with no sovereign presiding over them in the way Zeus or the Jade Emperor presides.
Creation is attempted repeatedly and fails twice. Beings are made of mud and dissolve, then of wood and are destroyed for their emptiness, and only the third attempt, with maize, produces people who can speak and remember and give thanks. This is a pantheon that revises its work, and the recurrence is structural rather than incidental: Maya time is cyclical, counted in interlocking calendars, and periods end and begin rather than simply accumulating.
Membership is regional. Each Classic city held its own patron deities alongside the widely shared ones, and the deity lists in the codices do not map neatly onto the gods named in monumental inscriptions from any single site.
The king is the point of contact. Classic Maya rulers styled themselves holy lords, performed bloodletting to open communication, and were commemorated after death in funerary temples where they received offerings. The line between an ancestral ruler and a god is deliberately indistinct, and reading the inscriptions requires holding both possibilities open at once.