Popol Vuh

The work divides into four parts. The first opens on a world of sky and still water and the gods who deliberate over it, and turns at once to a problem: the gods want beings who will speak, count the days and keep them in mind, and they fail three times. Animals are made first and cannot speak. A creature of mud is made and dissolves. A people of carved wood is made and multiplies, but has no memory and no reverence, and is destroyed by flood and by a revolt of its own possessions, the grinding stones, the pots and the dogs turn on it. The survivors of that third humanity become monkeys.

The second and third parts belong to the twins. Seven Macaw, a vain bird who claims to be the sun and the moon in a world that has neither yet, is brought down by Hunahpu and Xbalanque, along with his two sons who claim the earth and the mountains. The twins then take up the story of their father and uncle, summoned to the underworld, Xibalba, for the noise of their ballplaying and killed there. The twins are summoned in turn, survive the houses of trial, cold, jaguars, fire, bats, blades, outplay the lords at the ballgame, allow themselves to be killed and return, and finish Xibalba by trickery.

Only then, in the fourth part, does the successful creation happen, out of maize ground and mixed by the grandmother goddess. The first four men see too far and too well, and their sight is dimmed. The remainder of the fourth part leaves myth for history: the migration of the Kiche lineages, the acquisition of their gods and their titles, and the genealogy of the ruling houses down to the sixteenth century, ending with the names of men alive when it was written.

No pre-conquest Kiche book survives. What survives is alphabetic: at some point around the middle of the sixteenth century, within a generation or two of the Spanish conquest of the highlands, Kiche authors who left their names off the work wrote their tradition down in the Kiche language using the Latin alphabet the missionaries had brought. That manuscript is lost.

Between roughly 1701 and 1703 a Dominican, Francisco Ximenez, parish priest at Chichicastenango, obtained it or was shown it, and copied it out in parallel columns, Kiche on the left and his own Spanish translation on the right. His copy passed to the university library in Guatemala City, was carried to Europe in the nineteenth century, and eventually reached the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it sits in the Ayer collection. Every edition and translation in existence descends from those two columns in Ximenez's hand.

That transmission raises an obvious question and scholars have pressed it. The prologue speaks of an older book now hidden and of writing under Christian law; some turns of phrase read as biblical; a sequence of failed creations followed by a flood invites comparison with Genesis. Some readings treat the surviving text as substantially shaped by its colonial setting, and a small minority have gone further and doubted its independence altogether. The dominant position is narrower: the framing and a handful of phrases are demonstrably colonial, the narrative content is not, and the Kiche authors adapted presentation rather than importing story. Dennis Tedlock's English translation of 1985, made in consultation with a working Kiche daykeeper, and Allen Christenson's literal and literary versions published in the 2000s are the standard modern texts.

Sources Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Lifetranslated by Dennis Tedlock with Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the MayaAllen J. Christenson

The strongest reason to treat the Popol Vuh as an old story rather than a colonial composition is that it can be watched being told before the Spanish arrived, in a medium no missionary touched. Classic Maya painted vases of the seventh to ninth centuries carry scene after scene that match it: a pair of young men shooting a great bird out of a fruit tree with blowguns; a bird deity with a ruined beak; twins confronting skeletal underworld lords; a figure emerging from a cracked turtle shell; ballplayers in underworld settings. Michael Coe set these correspondences out in the 1970s, and they have held up under four decades of further decipherment.

The evidence runs older still. The murals at San Bartolo in the Guatemalan lowlands, dated to around 100 BCE and so some sixteen centuries before Ximenez copied anything, show the maize god's death and rebirth and include a figure whom Karl Taube, William Saturno and David Stuart identify as one of the twins. Whatever those painters called the story, they were painting something structurally continuous with what the Kiche later wrote down.

Two qualifications belong with that. The correspondence is of scenes and figures rather than of a fixed text: names differ between Classic inscriptions and Kiche, the two twins do not always behave as the book has them behave, and the underworld lords do not line up one to one. And the Popol Vuh is a highland Kiche version, set down by particular lineages with a direct political interest in its closing genealogies. It is the best window available onto Maya mythology, not a Maya scripture, and there was no single Maya scripture for it to be.