Maya

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.

The Maya are the only Mesoamerican people whose own writing can be read at length, and that changed the field completely within living memory.

Four screenfold books survived the colonial burnings, of which the Dresden Codex is the most complete: astronomical tables, almanacs and ritual sequences, not narrative. The Popol Vuh is a different kind of survival, a K'iche' account written down in the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century and copied in the eighteenth, and it is the fullest creation narrative from anywhere in the Americas. It is also post-conquest, written by people who had encountered Christianity, and arguments about how much that shaped it are ongoing.

The transforming development is the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, achieved over the second half of the twentieth century after a long period in which the writing was believed to record only calendar and astronomy. It is now read as language, and the monumental inscriptions turn out to be substantially historical: named rulers, dated accessions, wars, and the ritual acts by which kings dealt with gods. Statements about Maya religion made before that work are frequently obsolete.

The Books of Chilam Balam add a colonial-period Yucatec layer, prophetic and historical and heavily mixed.

None of this is a dead subject. The 260-day count is still kept by day-keepers in the Guatemalan highlands, and the tradition has living custodians whose practice is theirs rather than the atlas's to describe.