Hun Hunahpu

Hun Hunahpu, One Hunahpu, is a central figure of the Popol Vuh, the sacred narrative of the Kiche Maya, and the father of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Scholars widely identify him with the Classic Maya maize god, one of the most important of all Maya deities, so that his story is at root the story of maize, its death in the earth and its rebirth as the sprouting plant.

In the narrative, Hun Hunahpu and his brother Vukub Hunahpu are keen ballplayers whose noise disturbs the lords of the underworld, Xibalba, who summon the pair down to the underworld ballcourt. There the brothers are defeated by the trials the lords set for them, and they are sacrificed and buried. On painted Classic Maya ceramics, Hun Hunahpu's resurrection is shown through a recurring, instantly recognisable image: a youthful figure with the elongated, cob-shaped head and foliated headdress characteristic of what scholars call the Tonsured Maize God, emerging from a crack in the earth, often rendered as the cracked shell of a turtle. That image, maize sprouting from the broken carapace of the earth-turtle, gives visual form to the Popol Vuh's underlying logic: the buried grain and the buried god rise together, so that Hun Hunahpu's myth is at root an explanation, cast as a hero's death and revival, of how the maize crop is renewed each planting season.

The dead Hun Hunahpu is not wholly gone. The lords of Xibalba cut off his head and set it in the fork of a calabash tree, which had never borne fruit before and now suddenly hangs full; and they forbid anyone to approach it. But a young woman of the underworld, Xquic (Blood Moon), drawn by curiosity, comes to the tree, and the skull of Hun Hunahpu spits into her open hand, and by this she conceives the Hero Twins. Fleeing the anger of her father, one of the lords, she escapes to the world above, where she bears Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who grow up to become the greatest of heroes.

In time the twins descend to Xibalba in their turn, avenge their father by outwitting and defeating its lords, and, in the fullest understanding of the myth, bring about the resurrection of their father the maize god, who rises again from the underworld, an image echoed in Classic Maya art that shows the maize god reborn, sprouting from the cracked earth or the turtle-shell of the world. Hun Hunahpu thus embodies the great Maya theme of death and regeneration through the cycle of the maize: the god who dies in the underworld and, through his sons, lives again, as the maize is buried as seed and rises as the plant that feeds the people. The Maya remain a living people, and maize retains its deep cultural and spiritual importance in Maya communities today.