Xbalanque

Xbalanque is the second of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, the brother of Hunahpu, and one of the two young heroes at the centre of the Kiche Maya sacred narrative. His name carries the jaguar, the element balam meaning jaguar, tying him to the night, to the underworld, and to the sun in its passage beneath the earth from sunset to sunrise; he is often understood as the darker, nocturnal complement to his brother, and in one common interpretation the twins become the sun and the moon (or the day-sun and the night-sun) at the end of their story. In the Popol Vuh the two are almost inseparable and act nearly always as a pair, matching their wits against the lords of Xibalba, the underworld.

Summoned below to answer for the noise of their ballplaying, as their father and uncle had been before them, the twins survive the deadly houses of trial, of darkness, cold, jaguars, fire and bats, through cleverness rather than strength, and by a series of tricks and self-transformations they outwit and destroy the lords of death: in the climactic deception the twins allow themselves to be killed and ground up and thrown into a river, only to return in disguise as wandering performers who dazzle the lords with a marvellous trick of killing and resurrecting, until the lords beg to undergo it themselves and are killed without being brought back. Having defeated death, the twins raise up their father, the maize god, and ascend into the sky. Xbalanque, the jaguar-twin of the night, embodies the Maya conviction that death itself can be overcome by wit and courage, and that life rises again out of the underworld as surely as the sun climbs each dawn from beneath the earth.

Before their descent into Xibalba, Hunahpu and Xbalanque had already dealt with a domestic rivalry at home: their older half-brothers, One Batz and One Chuen, gifted musicians, singers and craftsmen in their own right, treated the twins with jealousy and contempt, mistreating them and mocking their hunting. When Hunahpu and Xbalanque finally retaliate, they trick the older brothers into climbing a tall tree to retrieve birds the twins have supposedly shot down, then cause the tree to grow impossibly tall so the brothers cannot climb back down, and the two, in their frustration and shame at being stranded, are transformed into monkeys, their fine clothing becoming fur and their faces stretching into a simian shape. When their grandmother laughs uncontrollably at the sight of her transformed grandsons, the twins deliberately let the two escape into the forest for good rather than restoring them, since her laughter proves she finds real amusement in the misfortune of the sons she had always favored.

Some scholars connect this episode to the Maya reverence for skilled artistry, since One Batz and One Chuen's names are associated with craftsmanship and the arts, and their transformation into howler and spider monkeys, animals genuinely known in the region for a certain restless, chattering energy, was sometimes read as an origin story explaining the existence of these two monkey species while also settling accounts within the twins' own family before their far greater trial against the lords of Xibalba begins.