Popol Vuh (Mayan)
Religious Document 253
pages
---------------------------------------------------------
1550
POPOL VUH:
THE MAYAN BOOK OF THE DAWN OF
LIFE
| Other Mayan texts: Yucatan Before and After the Conquest by Diego de Landa, tr. William Gates [1937] The best primary source on the Maya, ironically by the monk who burned most of their books. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel by Ralph L. Roys [1930]
The Book of the People: Popol Vuh
Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (excerpts) The Popul Vuh excerpt from The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kichés of Central America, by Lewis Spence; London [1908] 79,023 bytes The Myths of Mexico and Peru by Lewis Spence |
PREFACE
You cannot erase time.
-ANDRES XILOJ
INTRODUCTION
THE FIRST FOUR HUMANS,
the first four earthly beings who were
truly articulate when they moved their feet and hands, their
faces and
mouths, and who could speak the very language of the gods,
could
also see everything under the sky and on the earth. All they had
to do
was look around from the spot where they were, all the way to
the
limits of space and the limits of time. But then the gods, who
had not
intended to make and model beings with the potential of becoming
their
own equals, limited human sight to what was obvious and
nearby.
Nevertheless, the lords who once ruled a kingdom from a place
called
Quiche, in the highlands of Guatemala, once had in their
possession
the means for overcoming this nearsightedness, an ilbal, a
"seeing
instrument" or a "place to see"; with this they
could know distant
or future events. The instrument was not a telescope, not a
crystal
for gazing, but a book.
The lords of Quiche
consulted their book when they sat in council,
and their name for it was Popol Vuh or "Council Book."
Because this
book contained an account of how the forefathers of their own
lordly
lineages had exiled themselves from a faraway city called
Tulan,
they sometimes described it as "the writings about
Tulan." Because a
later generation of lords had obtained the book by going on
a
pilgrimage that took them across water on a causeway, they
titled it
"The Light That Came from Across the Sea." And because
the book told
of events that happened before the first sunrise and of a time
when
the forefathers hid themselves and the stones that contained
the
spirit familiars of their gods in forests, they also titled it
"Our
Place in the Shadows." And finally, because it told of the
first
rising of the morning star and the sun and moon, and of the rise
and
radiant splendor of the Quiche lords, they titled it "The
Dawn of
Life."
Those who wrote the
version of the Popol Vuh that comes down to us
do not give us their personal names but rather call themselves
"we" in
its opening pages and "we who are the Quiche people" later
on. In
contemporary usage "the Quiche people" are an ethnic
group in
Guatemala, consisting of all those who speak the particular
Mayan
language that itself has come to be called Quiche; they
presently
number over half a million and occupy most of the former
territory
of the kingdom whose development is described in the Popol Vuh.
To the
west and northwest of them are other Mayan peoples, speaking
other
Mayan languages, who extend across the Mexican border into
the
highlands of Chiapas and down into the Gulf coastal plain
of
Tabasco. To the east and northeast still other Mayans extend
just
across the borders of El Salvador and Honduras, down into the
lowlands
of Belize, and across the peninsula of Yucatan. These are the
peoples,
with a total population of about four million today, whose
ancestors
developed what has become known to the outside world as
Maya
civilization.
The roots of Maya
civilization may lie in the prior civilization
of the Olmecs, which reached its peak on the Gulf coastal
plain
about three thousand years ago. Maya hieroglyphic writing
and
calendrical reckoning probably have antecedents that go back
at
least that far, but they did not find expression in the lasting
form
of inscriptions on stone monuments until the first century B.C.,
in
a deep river valley that cuts through the highlands of Chiapas.
From
there, the erection of inscribed monuments spread south to the
Pacific
and eastward along the Guatemalan coastal plain, then reached
back
into the highlands at the site of Kaminaljuyu, on the western
edge
of what is now Guatemala City. During the so-called classic
period,
beginning about A.D. 300, the center of literate civilization in
the
Mayan region shifted northward into the lowland rain forest
that
separates the mountain pine forest of Chiapas and Guatemala from
the
low and thorny scrub forest of northern Yucatan. Swamps were
drained
and trees were cleared to make way for intensive
cultivation.
Hieroglyphic texts in great quantity were sculpted in stone
and
stucco, painted on pottery and plaster, and inked on long strips
of
paper that were folded like screens to make books. This is
the
period that accounts for the glories of such sites as Palenque,
Tikal,
and Copan, leaving a legacy that has made Maya civilization
famous
in the fields of art and architecture. The Mayan languages
spoken at
most of these sites probably corresponded to the ones now known
as
Cholan, which are still spoken by the Mayan peoples who live at
the
extreme eastern and western ends of the old classical
heartland.
Near the end of the
classic period, the communities that had
carved out a place for themselves in the rain forest were caught
in
a deepening vortex of overpopulation, environmental degradation,
and
malnutrition. The organizational and technological capacities
of
Maya society were strained past the breaking point, and by A.D.
900
much of the region had been abandoned. That left Maya
civilization
divided between two areas that had been peripheral during
classic
times, one in northern Yucatan and the other in the
Guatemalan
highlands. The subsequent history of both these areas was shaped
by
invaders from the western end of the old classical heartland,
from
Tabasco and neighboring portions of the Gulf coastal plain, who
set up
militaristic states among the peoples they conquered. The
culture they
carried with them has come to be called Toltec; it is thought
to
have originated among speakers of Nahua languages, who are
presently
concentrated in central Mexico (where they include the
descendants
of the Aztecs) and who once extended eastward to Tabasco. In the
Mayan
area, Toltec culture was notable for giving mythic prominence to
the
god-king named Plumed Serpent, technical prominence to the use
of
spear-throwers in warfare, and sacrificial prominence to the
human
heart. Those who carried this culture to highland Guatemala
brought
many Nahua words with them, but they themselves were
probably
Gulf-coast Maya of Cholan descent. Among them were the founders
of the
kingdom whose people have come to be known as the Quiche
Maya.*
Mayan monuments and
buildings no longer featured inscriptions
after the end of the classic period, but scribes went right
on
making books for another six centuries, sometimes combining
Mayan
texts with Toltecan pictures. Then, in the sixteenth
century,
Europeans arrived in Mesoamerica. They forcibly imposed a
monopoly
on all major forms of visible expression, whether in drama,
architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. Hundreds of
hieroglyphic books were tossed into bonfires by ardent
missionaries;
between this disaster and the slower perils of decay, only
four
books made it through to the present day. Three of them, all
thought
to come from the lowlands, found their way to Europe in early colonial
times and eventually turned up in libraries in Madrid, Paris,
and
Dresden; a fragment from a fourth book was recovered more
recently
from looters who had found it in a dry cave in Chiapas. But
the
survival of Mayan literature was not dependent on the survival
of
its outward forms. Just as Mayan peoples learned to use the
symbolism of Christian saints as a mask for ancient gods, so
they
learned to use the Roman alphabet as a mask for ancient
texts.*(2)
-
(See illustration:
Drawing by Carlos A. Villacorta.
SCRIBES WENT RIGHT ON
MAKING BOOKS: This is a page from the Maya
hieroglyphic book known as the Dresden Codex, which dates to
the
thirteenth century. The left-hand column describes the movements
of
Venus during one of five different types of cycles reckoned for
that
planet. The right-hand column describes the auguries for the
cycle and
gives both pictures and names for the attendant deities. The
top
picture, in which the figure at right is seated on two glyphs
that
name constellations, may have to do with the position of
Venus
relative to the fixed stars during the cycle. In the middle
picture is
the god who currently accounts for Venus itself, holding a
dart-thrower in his left hand and darts in his right; in the
bottom
picture is his victim, with a dart piercing his shield. The
Venus gods
of the Popol Vuh are more conservatively Mayan than those of
the
Dresden Codex; they are armed with old-fashioned blowguns
rather
than Toltecan dart-throwers.)
-
There was no little
justice in the fact that it was the missionaries
themselves, the burners of the ancient books, who worked out
the
problems of adapting the alphabet to the sounds of Mayan
languages,
and while they were at it they charted grammars and
compiled
dictionaries. Their official purpose in doing this linguistic
work was
to facilitate the writing and publishing of Christian
prayers,
sermons, and catechisms in the native languages. But very
little
time passed before some of their native pupils found political
and
religious applications for alphabetic writing that were
quite
independent of those of Rome. These independent writers have
left a
literary legacy that is both more extensive than the
surviving
hieroglyphic corpus and more open to understanding. Their most
notable
works, created as alphabetic substitutes for hieroglyphic books,
are
the Chilam Balam or "Jaguar Priest" books of Yucatan
and the Popol Vuh
of Guatemala.
The authors of the
alphabetic Popol Vuh were members of the three
lordly lineages that had once ruled the Quiche kingdom: the
Cauecs,
the Greathouses, and the Lord Quiches. They worked in the middle
of
the sixteenth century, shortly before the end of one of the
fifty-two-year cycles measured out by their own calendar. The
scene of
their writing was the town of Quiche, northwest of what is
now
Guatemala City. The east side of this town, on flat land, was
new in
their day, with buildings in files on a grid of streets and the
bell
towers of a church at the center. The west side, already in
ruins, was
on fortified promontories above deep canyons, with pyramids
and
palaces clustered around multiple plazas and courtyards. The
buildings
of the east side displayed broad expanses of blank stone
and
plaster, but the ruined walls of the west side bore tantalizing
traces
of multicolored murals. What concerned the authors of the
new
version of the Popol Vuh was to preserve the story that lay
behind the
ruins.
During the early
colonial period the town of Quiche was eclipsed, in
both size and prosperity, by the neighboring town of Chuui La
or
"Above the Nettles," better known today as
Chichicastenango.*(3) The
residents of the latter town included members of the Cauec and
Lord
Quiche lineages, and at some point a copy of the alphabetic
Popol
Vuh found its way there. Between 1701 and 1703, a friar
named
Francisco Ximenez happened to get a look at this manuscript
while he
was serving as the parish priest for Chichicastenango. He made
the
only surviving copy of the Quiche text of the Popol Vuh and
added a
Spanish translation. His work remained in the possession of
the
Dominican order until after Guatemalan independence, but
when
liberal reforms forced the closing of all monasteries in 1830,
it
was acquired by the library of the University of San Carlos
in
Guatemala City. Carl Scherzer, an Austrian physician, happened
to
see it there in 1854, and Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg,
a
French priest, had the same good fortune a few months later.*(4)
In
1857 Scherzer published Ximenez' Spanish translation under
the
patronage of the Hapsburgs in Vienna,*(5) members of the same
royal
lineage that had ruled Spain at the time of the conquest of the
Quiche
kingdom, and in 1861 Brasseur published the Quiche text and a
French
translation in Paris. The manuscript itself, which Brasseur
spirited
out of Guatemala, eventually found its way back across the
Atlantic
from Paris, coming to rest in the Newberry Library in 1911. The
town
graced by this library, with its magnificent collection of
Native
American texts, is not in Mesoamerica, but it does have an
Indian
name: Chicago, meaning "Place of Wild Onions."
The manuscript Ximenez
copied in the place called "Above the
Nettles" may have included a few illustrations and even
an
occasional hieroglyph, but his version contains nothing but
solid
columns of alphabetic prose. Mayan authors in general made
only
sparing use of graphic elements in their alphabetic works,
but
nearly every page of the ancient books combined writing
(including
signs meant to be read phonetically) and pictures. In the
Mayan
languages, as well as in Nahua, the terms for writing and
painting
were and are the same, the same artisans practiced both skills,
and
the patron deities of both skills were twin monkey gods born on
the
day bearing a name translatable (whether from Mayan or Nahua) as
One
Monkey. In the books made under the patronage of these twin gods
there
is a dialectical relationship between the writing and the
pictures:
the writing not only records words but sometimes has elements
that
picture or point to their meaning without the necessity of a
detour
through words. As for the pictures, they not only depict what
they
mean but have elements that can be read as words. When we say
that
Mesoamerican writing is strongly ideographic relative to our
own, this
observation should be balanced with the realization that
Mesoamerican painting is more conceptual than our own.
At times the writers of
the alphabetic Popol Vuh seem to be
describing pictures, especially when they begin new episodes
in
narratives. In passages like the following, the use of
sentences
beginning with phrases like "this is" and the use of
verbs in the
Quiche equivalent of the present tense cause the reader to
linger, for
a moment, over a lasting image:
-
This is the great tree
of Seven Macaw, a nance, and this is the food
of Seven Macaw. In order to eat the fruit of the nance he goes
up
the tree every day. Since Hunahpu and Xbalanque have seen where
he
feeds, they are now hiding beneath the tree of Seven Macaw, they
are
keeping quiet here, the two boys are in the leaves of the
tree.
-
It must be cautioned,
of course, that "word pictures" painted by
storytellers, in Quiche or in any other language, need not
have
physical counterparts in the world outside the mind's eye. But
the
present example has an abruptness that suggests a sudden still
picture
from a story already well under way rather than a moving
picture
unfolded in the course of the events of that story. The
narrators do
not describe how the boys arrived "in the leaves of the
tree"; the
opening scene is already complete, waiting for the blowgun shot
that
comes in the next sentence, where the main verb is in the
Quiche
equivalent of the past tense and the still picture gives way to
a
moving one.
More than any other
Mayan book, whether hieroglyphic or
alphabetic, the Popol Vuh tells us something about the
conceptual
place of books in the pre-Columbian world. The writers of
the
alphabetic version explain why the hieroglyphic version was
among
the most precious possessions of Quiche rulers:
-
They knew whether war
would occur; everything they saw was clear
to them. Whether there would be death, or whether there would
be
famine, or whether quarrels would occur, they knew it for
certain,
since there was a place to see it, there was a book.
"Council Book"
was their name for it.
-
When "everything
they saw was clear to them" the Quiche lords were
recovering the vision of the first four humans, who at first
"saw
everything under the sky perfectly." That would mean that
the Popol
Vuh made it possible, once again, to sight "the four sides,
the four
corners in the sky, on the earth," the corners and sides
that mark not
only the earth but are the reference points for the movements
of
celestial lights.*(6)
If the ancient Popol
Vuh was like the surviving hieroglyphic
books, it contained systematic accounts of cycles in
astronomical
and earthly events that served as a complex navigation system
for
those who wished to see and move beyond the present. In the case
of
a section dealing with the planet Venus, for example, there
would have
been tables of rising and setting dates, pictures of the
attendant
gods, and brief texts outlining what these gods did when
they
established the pattern for the movements of Venus. When the
ancient
reader of the Popol Vuh took the role of a diviner and
astronomer,
seeking the proper date for a ceremony or a momentous political
act,
we may guess that he looked up a specific passage, pondered
its
meaning, and rendered an opinion. But the authors of the
alphabetic
Popol Vuh tell us that there were also occasions on which the
reader
offered "a long performance and account" whose subject
was the
emergence of the whole cahuleu or "sky-earth," which
is the Quiche way
of saying "world." If a divinatory reading or
pondering was a way of
recovering the depth of vision enjoyed by the first four humans,
a
"long performance," in which the reader may well have
covered every
major subject in the entire book, was a way of recovering the
full
cosmic sweep of that vision.
If the authors of the
alphabetic Popol Vuh had transposed the
ancient Popol Vuh directly, on a glyph-by-glyph basis, they
might have
produced a text that would have made little sense to anyone but
a
fully trained diviner and performer. What they did instead was
to
quote what a reader of the ancient book would say when he gave a
"long
performance," telling the full story that lay behind the
charts,
pictures, and plot outlines of the ancient book. Lest we miss
the fact
that they are quoting, they periodically insert such phrases
as
"This is the account, here it is," or "as it is
said." At one point
they themselves take the role of a performer, speaking directly
to
us as if we were members of a live audience rather than
mere
readers. As they introduce the first episode of a long cycle
of
stories about the gods who prepared the sky-earth for human
life, they
propose that we all drink a toast to the hero.*(7)
At the beginning of
their book, the authors delicately describe
the difficult circumstances under which they work. When they
tell us
that they are writing "amid the preaching of God, in
Christendom now,"
we can catch a plaintive tone only by noticing that they make
this
statement immediately after asserting that their own gods
"accounted
for everything- and did it, too- as enlightened beings, in
enlightened
words." What the authors propose to write down is what
Quiches call
the Oher Tzih, the "Ancient Word"*(8) or "Prior
Word," which has
precedence over "the preaching of God." They have
chosen to do so
because "there is no longer" a Popol Vuh, which makes
it sound as
though they intend to re-create the original book solely on
the
basis of their memory of what they have seen in its pages or
heard
in the "long performance." But when we remember their
complaint
about being "in Christendom," there remains the possibility
that
they still have the original book but are protecting it
from
possible destruction by missionaries. Indeed, their next words
make us
wonder whether the book might still exist, but they no sooner
raise
our hopes on this front than they remove the book's reader from
our
grasp: "There is the original book and ancient writing, but
he who
reads and ponders it hides his face." Here we must remember
that the
authors of the alphabetic Popol Vuh have chosen to remain
anonymous;
in other words, they are hiding their own faces. If they
are
protecting anyone with their enigmatic statements about an
inaccessible book or a hidden reader, it could well be
themselves.*(9)
The authors begin their
narrative in a world that has nothing but an
empty sky above and a calm sea below. The action gets under way
when
the gods who reside in the primordial sea, named Maker,
Modeler,
Bearer, Begetter, Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea, and
Sovereign
Plumed Serpent, are joined by gods who come down from the
primordial
sky, named Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, Newborn Thunderbolt,
Raw
Thunderbolt, and Hurricane. These two parties engage in a
dialogue,
and in the course of it they conceive the emergence of the
earth
from the sea and the growth of plants and people on its
surface.
They wish to set in motion a process they call the
"sowing" and
"dawning," by which they mean several different things
at once.
There is the sowing of seeds in the earth, whose sprouting will
be
their dawning, and there is the sowing of the sun, moon, and
stars,
whose difficult passage beneath the earth will be followed by
their
own dawning. Then there is the matter of human beings, whose
sowing in
the womb will be followed by their emergence into the light
at
birth, and whose sowing in the earth at death will be followed
by
dawning when their souls become sparks of light in the
darkness.
For the gods, the idea
of human beings is as old as that of the
earth itself, but they fail in their first three attempts (all
in Part
One) to transform this idea into a living reality. What they
want is
beings who will walk, work, and talk in an articulate and
measured
way, visiting shrines, giving offerings, and calling upon their
makers
by name, all according to the rhythms of a calendar. What they
get
instead, on the first try, is beings who have no arms to work
with and
can only squawk, chatter, and howl, and whose descendants are
the
animals of today. On the second try they make a being of mud,
but this
one is unable to walk or turn its head or even keep its shape;
being
solitary, it cannot reproduce itself, and in the end it
dissolves into
nothing.
Before making a third
try the gods decide, in the course of a
further dialogue, to seek the counsel of an elderly husband and
wife
named Xpiyacoc and Xmucane. Xpiyacoc is a divine matchmaker
and
therefore prior to all marriage, and Xmucane is a divine midwife
and
therefore prior to all birth. Like contemporary Quiche
matchmakers and
midwives, both of them are ah3ih or "daykeepers,"
diviners who know
how to interpret the auguries given by thirteen day numbers and
twenty
day names that combine to form a calendrical cycle lasting
260
days.*(10) They are older than all the other gods, who address
them as
grandparents, and the cycle they divine by is older than the
longer
cycles that govern Venus and the sun, which have not yet
been
established at this point in the story. The question the
younger
gods put to them here is whether human beings should be made out
of
wood. Following divinatory methods that are still in use
among
Quiche daykeepers, they give their approval. The wooden beings
turn
out to look and talk and multiply themselves something like
humans,
but they fail to time their actions in an orderly way and forget
to
call upon the gods in prayer. Hurricane brings a catastrophe
down on
their heads, not only flooding them with a gigantic rainstorm
but
sending monstrous animals to attack them. Even their own
dogs,
turkeys, and household utensils rise against them, taking
vengeance
for past mistreatment. Their only descendants are the monkeys
who
inhabit the forests today.
At this point the gods
who have been working on the problem of
making human beings will need only one more try before they
solve
it, but the authors of the Popol Vuh postpone the telling of
this
episode, turning their attention to stories about heroic gods
whose
adventures make the sky-earth a safer place for human
habitation.
The gods in question are the twin sons of Xpiyacoc and
Xmucane,
named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, and the twin sons of One
Hunahpu,
named Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Both sets of twins are players of
the
Mesoamerican ball game, in which the rubber ball (an
indigenous
American invention) is hit with a yoke that rides on the hips rather
than with the hands. In addition to being ballplayers, One and
Seven
Hunahpu occupy themselves by gambling with dice, whereas Hunahpu
and
Xbalanque go out hunting with blowguns.*(11)
The adventures of the
sons and grandsons of Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are
presented in two different cycles, with the episodes divided
between
the cycles more on the basis of where they take place in space
than
when they take place in time. The first cycle deals entirely
with
adventures on the face of the earth, while the second, though it
has
two separate above-ground passages, deals mainly with adventures
in
the Mayan underworld, named Xibalba. If the events of these two
cycles
were combined in a single chronological sequence, the
above-ground
episodes would probably alternate with those below, with the
heroes
descending into the underworld, emerging on the earth again, and
so
forth. These sowing and dawning movements of the heroes, along
with
those of their supporting cast, prefigure the present-day
movements of
the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque
are the protagonists of the first of the two
hero cycles (corresponding to Part Two in the present
translation),
and their enemies are a father and his two sons, all of
them
pretenders to lordly power over the affairs of the earth. Hurricane,
or Heart of Sky, is offended by this threesome, and it is he who
sends
Hunahpu and Xbalanque against them. The first to get his due is
the
father, named Seven Macaw, who claims to be both the sun and
moon.
In chronological terms this episode overlaps with the story of
the
wooden people (at the end of Part One), since Seven Macaw serves
as
their source of celestial light and has his downfall at the
same
time they do. The twins shoot him while he is at his meal, high
up
in a fruit tree, breaking his jaw and bringing him down to
earth.
Later they pose as curers and give him the reverse of a
face-lift,
pulling out all his teeth and removing the metal disks from
around his
eyes; this puts an end to his career as a lordly being. His
earthly
descendants are scarlet macaws, with broken and toothless jaws
and
mottled white patches beneath their eyes. He himself remains as
the
seven stars of the Big Dipper, and his wife, named
Chimalmat,
corresponds to the Little Dipper. The rising of Seven Macaw
(in
mid-October) now marks the coming of the dry season, and his
fall to
earth and his disappearance (beginning in mid-July) signal
the
beginning of the hurricane season. It was his first fall,
brought on
by the blowgun shot of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, that opened the
way
for the great flood that brought down the wooden people. Just as
Seven
Macaw only pretended to be the sun and moon, so the wooden
people only
pretended to be human.*(12)
Hunahpu and Xbalanque
next take on Zipacna, the elder of Seven
Macaw's two sons, a crocodilian monster who claims to be the
maker
of mountains. But first comes an episode in which Zipacna has
an
encounter with the gods of alcoholic drinks, the Four Hundred
Boys.
Alarmed by Zipacna's great strength, these boys trick him into
digging
a deep hole and try to crush him by dropping a great log down
behind
him. He survives, but he waits in the hole until they are in
the
middle of a drunken victory celebration and then brings their
own
house down on top of them. At the celestial level they become
the
stars called Motz, the Quiche name for the Pleiades, and
their
downfall corresponds to early-evening settings of these stars.
At
the earthly level, among contemporary Quiches, the Pleiades
symbolize a handful of seeds, and their disappearance in the
west
marks the proper time for the sowing of crops.
Zipacna meets his own downfall
when Hunahpu and Xbalanque set out to
avenge the Four Hundred Boys. At a time when Zipacna has
gone
without food for several days, they set a trap for him by making
a
device that appears to be a living, moving crab. Having placed
this
artificial crab in a tight space beneath an overhang at the
bottom
of a great mountain, they show him the way there. Zipacna goes
after
the crab with great passion, and his struggles to wrestle
himself into
the right position to consummate his hunger become a symbolic
parody
of sexual intercourse. When the great moment comes the
whole
mountain falls on his chest (which is to say he ends up on
the
bottom), and when he heaves a sigh he turns to stone.*(13)
Finally there comes the
demise of the younger son of Seven Macaw,
named Earthquake, who bills himself as a destroyer of mountains.
In
his case the lure devised by Hunahpu and Xbalanque is the
irresistibly
delicious aroma given off by the roasting of birds. They cast
a
spell on the bird they give him to eat: just as it was cooked
inside a
coating of earth, so he will end up covered by earth. They leave
him
buried in the east, opposite his elder brother, whose killing of
the
Four Hundred Boys associates him with the west (where the
Pleiades may
be seen to fall beneath the earth). Seven Macaw, as the Big
Dipper, is
of course in the north. He is near the pivot of the movement of
the
night sky, whereas his two sons make the earth move- though
they
cannot raise or level whole mountains in a single day as they
once
did.*(14)
Having accounted for
three of the above-ground episodes in the lives
of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Popol Vuh next moves back in time
to
tell the story of their father, One Hunahpu, and his twin
brother,
Seven Hunahpu (at the beginning of Part Three). This is the
point at
which the authors treat us as if we were in their very
presence,
introducing One Hunahpu with these words: "Let's drink to
him, and
let's just drink to the telling and accounting of the begetting
of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque." The story begins long before One
Hunahpu meets
the woman who will bear Hunahpu and Xbalanque; in the opening
episode,
he marries a woman named Xbaquiyalo and they have twin sons
named
One Monkey and One Artisan. One Hunahpu and his brother
sometimes play
ball with these two boys, and a messenger from Hurricane, a
falcon,*(15) sometimes comes to watch them. The boys become
practitioners of all sorts of arts and crafts, including
flute
playing, singing, writing, carving, jewelry making, and
metalworking. At some point Xbaquiyalo dies, but we are not
told
how; that leaves Xmucane, the mother of One and Seven Hunahpu,
as
the only woman in the household.
The ball court of One
and Seven Hunahpu lies on the eastern edge
of the earth's surface at a place called Great Abyss at
Carchah.*(16) Their ballplaying offends the lords of Xibalba,
who
dislike hearing noises above their subterranean domain. The head
lords
are named One Death and Seven Death, and under them are other
lords
who specialize in causing such maladies as lesions,
jaundice,
emaciation, edema, stabbing pains, and sudden death from
vomiting
blood. One and Seven Death decide to challenge One and Seven
Hunahpu
to come play ball in the court of Xibalba, which lies at the
western
edge of the underworld. They therefore send their messengers,
who
are monstrous owls, to the Great Abyss. One and Seven Hunahpu
leave
One Monkey and One Artisan behind to keep Xmucane entertained
and
follow the owls over the eastern edge of the world. The way is
full of
traps, but they do well until they come to the Crossroads,
where
each of four roads has a different color corresponding to a
different direction. They choose the Black Road, which means, at
the
terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld
will take
them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that
they
were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they
descended
below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the
Road of
Xibalba.
Entering the council
place of the lords of Xibalba is a tricky
business, beginning with the fact that the first two figures
seated
there are mere manikins, put there as a joke. The next gag that
awaits
visitors is a variation on the hot seat, but after that comes a
deadly
serious test. One and Seven Hunahpu must face a night in Dark
House,
which is totally black inside. They are given a torch and
two
cigars, but they are warned to keep these burning all night
without
consuming them. They fail this test, so their hosts sacrifice
them the
next day instead of playing ball with them. Both of them are
buried at
the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice, except that the severed head
of
One Hunahpu is placed in the fork of a tree that stands by the
road
there. Now, for the first time, the tree bears fruit, and it
becomes
difficult to tell the head from the fruit. This is the origin of
the
calabash tree, whose fruit is the size and shape of a human head.
Blood Woman, the maiden
daughter of a Xibalban lord named Blood
Gatherer, goes to marvel at the calabash tree. The head of
One
Hunahpu, which is a skull by now, spits in her hand and makes
her
pregnant with Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The skull explains to her
that
henceforth, a father's face will survive in his son, even after
his
own face has rotted away and left nothing but bone. After
six
months, when Blood Woman's father notices that she is pregnant,
he
demands to know who is responsible. She answers that "there
is no
man whose face I've known," which is literally true. He
orders the owl
messengers of Xibalba to cut her heart out and bring it back in
a
bowl; armed with the White Dagger, the instrument of sacrifice,
they
take her away.*(17) But she persuades them to spare her,
devising a
substitute for her heart in the form of a congealed nodule of
sap from
a croton tree. The lords heat the nodule over a fire and are
entranced
by the aroma; meanwhile the owls show Blood Woman to the surface
of
the earth. As a result of this episode it is destined that the
lords
of Xibalba will receive offerings of incense made from croton
sap
rather than human blood and hearts. At the astronomical level
Blood
Woman corresponds to the moon, which appears in the west at
nightfall when it begins to wax, just as she appeared before the
skull
of One Hunahpu at the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice when she
became
pregnant.
Once she is out of the
underworld, Blood Woman goes to Xmucane and
claims to be her daughter-in-law, but Xmucane resists the idea
that
her own son, One Hunahpu, could be responsible for Blood
Woman's
pregnancy. She puts Blood Woman to a test, sending her to get a
netful
of corn from the garden that One Monkey and One Artisan have
been
cultivating. Blood Woman finds only a single clump of corn
plants
there, but she produces a whole netful of ears by pulling out
the silk
from just one ear. When Xmucane sees the load of corn she goes
to
the garden herself, wondering whether Blood Woman has stripped
it.
On the ground at the foot of the clump of plants she notices
the
imprint of the carrying net, which she reads as a sign that
Blood
Woman is indeed pregnant with her own grandchildren.
To understand how
Xmucane is able to interpret the sign of the net
we must remember that she knows how to read the auguries of
the
Mayan calendar, and that one of the twenty day names that go
into
the making of that calendar is "Net." Retold from a
calendrical
point of view, the story so far is that Venus rose as the
morning star
on a day named Hunahpu, corresponding to the ballplaying of
Xmucane's sons, One and Seven Hunahpu, in the east; then,
after
being out of sight in Xibalba, Venus reappeared as the evening
star on
a day named Death, corresponding to the defeat of her sons by
One
and Seven Death and the placement of One Hunahpu's head in a
tree in
the west. The event that is due to come next in the story is
the
rebirth of Venus as the morning star, which should fall, as
she
already knows, on a day named Net. When she sees the imprint of
the
net in the field, she takes it as a sign that this event is
coming
near, and that the faces of the sons born to Blood Woman will
be
reincarnations of the face of One Hunahpu.*(18)
When Hunahpu and
Xbalanque are born they are treated cruelly by
their jealous half-brothers, One Monkey and One Artisan, and
even by
their grandmother. They never utter a complaint, but keep
themselves
happy by going out every day to hunt birds with their
blowguns.
Eventually they get the better of their brothers by sending them
up
a tree to get birds that failed to fall down when they were
shot. They
cause the tree to grow tall enough to maroon their brothers,
whom they
transform into monkeys. When Xmucane objects they give her
four
chances to see the faces of One Monkey and One Artisan
again,
calling them home with music. They warn her not to laugh, but
the
monkeys are so ridiculous she cannot contain herself; finally
they
swing up and away through the treetops for good. One Monkey and
One
Artisan, both of whose names refer to a single day on the
divinatory
calendar, correspond to the planet Mars, which thereafter begins
its
period of visibility on a day bearing these names, and their
temporary
return to the house of Xmucane corresponds to the retrograde
motion of
Mars. They are also the gods of arts and crafts, and they
probably
made their first journey through the sky during the era of
the
wooden people, who were the first earthly beings to make and
use
artifacts and who themselves ended up as monkeys.
With their
half-brothers out of the way, Hunahpu and Xbalanque
decide to clear a garden plot of their own, but when they return
to
the chosen spot each morning they find that the forest has
reclaimed
it. By hiding themselves at the edge of the plot one night,
they
discover that the animals of the forest are restoring the
cleared
plants by means of a chant. They try to grab each of these
animals
in turn, but they miss the puma and jaguar completely, break the
tails
off the rabbit and deer, and finally get their hands on the rat.
In
exchange for his future share of stored crops, the rat reveals
to them
that their father and uncle, One and Seven Hunahpu, left a set
of ball
game equipment tied up under the rafters of their house, and he
agrees
to help them get it down. At home the next day, Hunahpu and
Xbalanque get Xmucane out of the house by claiming her chili
stew
has made them thirsty; she goes after water but is delayed when
her
water jar springs a leak. Then, when Blood Woman goes off to see
why
Xmucane has failed to return, the rat cuts the ball game
equipment
loose and the twins take possession of it.
When Hunahpu and
Xbalanque begin playing ball at the Great Abyss
they disturb the lords of Xibalba, just like their father and
uncle
before them. Once again the lords send a summons, but this time
the
messengers go to Xmucane, telling her that the twins must
present
themselves in seven days. She sends a louse to relay the message
to
her grandsons, but the louse is swallowed by a toad, the toad by
a
snake, and the snake by a falcon.*(19) The falcon arrives over
the
ball court and the twins shoot him in the eye. They cure his
eye
with gum from their ball, which is why the laughing falcon now
has a
black patch around the eye. The falcon vomits the snake, who
vomits
the toad, who still has the louse in his mouth, and the
louse
recites the message, quoting what Xmucane told him when she
quoted
what the owls told her when they quoted what the lords of
Xibalba told
them to say.
Having been summoned to
the underworld, Hunahpu and Xbalanque go
to take leave of their grandmother, and in the process they
demonstrate a harvest ritual that Quiches follow to this day.
They
"plant" ears of corn in the center of her house, in
the attic; these
ears are neither to be eaten nor used as seed corn but are to
be
kept as a sign that corn remains alive throughout the year,
even
between the drying out of the plants at harvest time and the
sprouting
of new ones after planting. They tell their grandmother that
when a
crop dries out it will be a sign of their death, but that
the
sprouting of a new crop will be a sign that they live
again.*(20)
The twins play a game
with language when they instruct their
grandmother; only now, instead of a quotation swallowed up inside
other quotations we get a word hidden within other words. The
secret
word is "Ah," one of the twenty day names; the twins
point to it by
playing on its sounds rather than simply mentioning it. When
they tell
their grandmother that they are planting corn ears (ah) in the
house
(ha), they are making a pun on Ah in the one case and reversing
its
sound in the other. The play between Ah and ha is familiar
to
contemporary Quiche daykeepers, who use it when they explain
to
clients that the day Ah is portentous in matters affecting
households.
If the twins planted their corn ears in the house on the day
Ah,
then their expected arrival in Xibalba, seven days later, would
fall
on the day named Hunahpu. This fits the Mayan Venus
calendar
perfectly: whenever Venus rises as the morning star on a day
named
Net, corresponding to the appearance of Hunahpu and Xbalanque on
the
earth, its next descent into the underworld will always fall on
a
day named Hunahpu.
Following in the
footsteps of their father and uncle, Hunahpu and
Xbalanque descend the road to Xibalba, but when they come to
the
Crossroads they do things differently. They send a spy ahead
of
them, a mosquito, to learn the names of the lords. He bites each
one
of them in turn; the first two lords reveal themselves as mere
manikins by their lack of response, but the others, in the
process
of complaining about being bitten, address each other by name,
all the
way down the line. When the twins themselves arrive before
the
lords, they ignore the manikins (unlike their father and uncle)
and
address each of the twelve real lords correctly. Not only that,
but
they refuse to fall for the hot seat, and when they are given
a
torch and two cigars to keep lit all night, they trick the lords
by
passing off a macaw's tail as the glow of the torch and
putting
fireflies at the tips of their cigars.*(21)
The next day Hunahpu
and Xbalanque play ball with the Xibalbans,
something their father and uncle did not survive long enough to
do.
The Xibalbans insist on putting their own ball into play first,
though
the twins protest that this ball, which is covered with
crushed
bone, is nothing but a skull. When Hunahpu hits it back to
the
Xibalbans with the yoke that rides on his hips, it falls to
the
court and reveals the weapon that was hidden inside it. This
is
nothing less than the White Dagger, the same instrument of
sacrifice
that the owls were supposed to use on Blood Woman; it twists its
way
all over the court, but it fails to kill the twins.
The Xibalbans consent
to use the rubber ball belonging to the
twins in a further game; this time four bowls of flowers are bet
on
the outcome. After playing well for awhile the twins allow
themselves to lose, and they are given until the next day to
come up
with the flowers. This time they must spend the night in
Razor
House, which is full of voracious stone blades that are
constantly
looking for something to cut. In exchange for a promise that
they will
one day have the flesh of animals as their food, the blades
stop
moving. This leaves the boys free to attend to the matter of
the
flowers; they send leaf-cutting ants to steal them from the
very
gardens of the lords of Xibalba. The birds who guard this
garden,
poorwills and whippoorwills, are so oblivious that they fail to
notice
that their own tails and wings are being trimmed along with
the
flowers. The lords, who are aghast when they receive bowls
filled with
their own flowers, split the birds' mouths open, giving them
the
wide gape that birds of the night-jar family have today.
Next, the hero twins
survive stays in Cold House, which is full of
drafts and falling hail; Jaguar House, which is full of
hungry,
brawling jaguars; and a house with fire inside. After these
horrors
comes Bat House, full of moving, shrieking bats, where they
spend
the night squeezed up inside their blowgun.*(22) When the
house
grows quiet and Hunahpu peeks out from the muzzle, one of the
bats
swoops down and takes his head off. The head ends up rolling on
the
ball court of Xibalba, but Xbalanque replaces it with a carved
squash.
While he is busy with this head transplant the eastern sky
reddens
with the dawn, and a possum, addressed in the story as "old
man,"
makes four dark streaks along the horizon. Not only the red dawn
but
the possum and his streaks are signs that the time of the sun
(which
has never before been seen) is coming nearer. In the future a
new
solar year will be brought in by the old man each 365 days; the
four
streaks signify that only four of the twenty day names- Deer,
Tooth,
Thought, and Wind- will ever correspond to the first day of a
solar
year. Contemporary Quiche daykeepers continue to reckon the
solar
dimension of the Mayan calendar; in 1986, for example, they
will
expect the old man to arrive on February 28, which will be the
day
Thirteen Deer.*(23)
Once Hunahpu has been
fitted out with a squash for a head, he and
Xbalanque are ready to play ball with the Xibalbans again. When
the
lords send off Hunahpu's original head as the ball, Xbalanque
knocks
it out of the court and into a stand of oak trees. A rabbit
decoys the
lords, who mistake his hopping for the bouncing of the ball,
while
Xbalanque retrieves the head, puts it back on Hunahpu's
shoulders, and
then pretends to find the squash among the oaks. Now the squash
is put
into play, but it wears out and eventually splatters its seeds
on
the court, revealing to the lords of Xibalba that they have
been
played for fools. The game played with the squash, like the
games
played with the bone-covered ball and with Hunahpu's severed
head,
corresponds to an appearance of Venus in the west, the direction
of
evening and death. If these events were combined in
chronological
order with those that take place entirely above ground, they
would
probably alternate with the episodes in which the twins defeat
One
Monkey and One Artisan, Seven Macaw, Zipacna, and Earthquake,
with
each of these latter episodes corresponding to an appearance
of
Venus in the east, the direction of morning and life.*(24)
At this point we are
ready for the last of the episodes that
prefigure the cycles of Venus and prepare the way for the first
rising
of the sun. Knowing that the lords of Xibalba plan to burn
them,
Hunahpu and Xbalanque instruct two seers named Xulu and Pacam as
to
what they should say when the lords seek advice as to how to
dispose
of their remains. This done, the twins cheerfully accept an
invitation
to come see the great stone pit where the Xibalbans are cooking
the
ingredients for an alcoholic beverage. The lords challenge them
to a
contest in which the object is to leap clear across the pit, but
the
boys cut the deadly game short and jump right in. Thinking they
have
triumphed, the Xibalbans follow the advice of Xulu and Pacam,
grinding
the bones of the boys and spilling the powder into a river.
After five days Hunahpu
and Xbalanque reappear as catfish;*(25)
the day after that they take human form again, only now they
are
disguised as vagabond dancers and actors. They gain great fame
as
illusionists, their most popular acts being the ones in which
they set
fire to a house without burning it and perform a sacrifice
without
killing the victim. The lords of Xibalba get news of all this
and
invite them to show their skills at court; they accept with
pretended reluctance. The climax of their performance comes
when
Xbalanque sacrifices Hunahpu, rolling his head out the
door,
removing his heart, and then bringing him back to life. One
and
Seven Death go wild at the sight of this and demand that
they
themselves be sacrificed. The twins oblige- and, as might
already be
imagined, these final sacrifices are real ones. Hunahpu and
Xbalanque now reveal their true identities before all the
inhabitants of the underworld. They declare that henceforth,
the
offerings received by Xibalbans will be limited to incense made
of
croton sap and to animals, and that Xibalbans will limit their
attacks
on future human beings to those who have weaknesses or
guilt.
At this point the
narrative takes us back to the twins' grandmother,
telling us what she has been doing all this time. She cries when
the
season comes for corn plants to dry out, signifying the death of
her
grandsons, and rejoices when they sprout again, signifying
rebirth.
She burns incense in front of ears from the new crop and
thus
completes the establishment of the custom whereby humans
keep
consecrated ears in the house, at the center of the stored
harvest.
Then the scene shifts back to Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are
about
to establish another custom.
Having made their
speech to the defeated Xibalbans, the twins go
to the Place of Ball Game Sacrifice with the intention of
reviving
Seven Hunahpu, whose head and body still lie buried there. The
full
restoration of his face depends on his own ability to pronounce
the
names of all the parts it once had, but he gets no further than
the
mouth, nose, and eyes, which remain as notable features of
skulls.
They leave him there, but they promise that human beings will
keep his
day (the one named Hunahpu), coming to pray where his remains
are.
To this day, Hunahpu days are set aside for the veneration of
the
dead, and graveyards are called by the same word (hom) as the
ball
courts of the Popol Vuh.
At the astronomical
level the visit of Hunahpu and Xbalanque to
their uncle's grave signals the return of a whole new round of
Venus
cycles, starting with a morning star that first appears on a day
named
Hunahpu. As for the twins themselves, they rise as the sun and
moon.
Contemporary Quiches regard the full moon as a nocturnal
equivalent of
the sun, pointing out that it has a full disk, is bright enough
to
travel by, and goes clear across the sky in the same time it
takes the
sun to do the same thing. Most likely the twin who became the
moon
is to be understood specifically as the full moon, whereas
Blood
Woman, the mother of the twins, would account for the other
phases
of the moon.*(26)
With the ascent of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque the Popol Vuh returns to
the problem the gods confronted at the beginning: the making of
beings
who will walk, work, talk, and pray in an articulate manner.
The
account of their fourth and final attempt at a solution is
a
flashback, since it takes us to a time when the sun had not
yet
appeared. As we have already seen, the gods failed when they
tried
using mud and then wood as the materials for the human body, but
now
they get news of a mountain filled with yellow corn and white
corn,
discovered by the fox, coyote, parrot, and crow (at the beginning
of
Part Four). Xmucane grinds the corn from this mountain very
finely,
and the flour, mixed with the water she rinses her hands
with,
provides the substance for human flesh, just as the ground bone
thrown
in the river by the Xibalbans becomes the substance for the
rebirth of
her grandsons. The first people to be modeled from the corn
dough
are four men named Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah, and
True
Jaguar. They are the first four heads of Quiche patrilineages;
as in
the case of the men who occupy such positions today, they are
called
"mother-fathers,"*(27) since in ritual matters they
serve as
symbolic androgynous parents to everyone in their respective
lineages.
This time the beings
shaped by the gods are everything they hoped
for and more: not only do the first four men pray to their
makers, but
they have perfect vision and therefore perfect knowledge. The
gods are
alarmed that beings who were merely manufactured by them should
have
divine powers, so they decide, after their usual dialogue, to
put a
fog on human eyes. Next they make four wives for the four men,
and
from these couples come the leading Quiche lineages.
Celebrated
Seahouse becomes the wife of Jaguar Quitze, who founds the
Cauec
lineage; Prawn House becomes the wife of Jaguar Night, who
founds
the Greathouse lineage; and Hummingbird House becomes the wife
of
Mahucutah, who founds the Lord Quiche lineage. True Jaguar is
also
given a wife, Macaw House, but they have no male children.
Other
lineages and peoples also come into being, and they all begin
to
multiply.
All these early events
in human history take place in darkness,
somewhere in the "east," and all the different peoples
wander about
and grow weary as they go on watching and waiting for the rising
of
the morning star and the sun. Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night,
Mahucutah, and True Jaguar decide to change their situation
by
acquiring patron deities they can burn offerings in front of,
and it
is with this purpose in mind that they go to a great eastern
city
bearing the names Tulan Zuyua, Seven Caves, Seven Canyons. These
are
grand names that call up broad reaches of the Mesoamerican past.
Tulan
(or Tollan)*(28) means "Place of Reeds" or more
broadly "metropolis"
in Nahua, and it was prefixed to the names of many different
towns
during Toltecan times. The particular Tulan called Zuyua
was
probably near the Gulf coast in Tabasco or Campeche,
"eastern" because
it was east of the principal Tulan of the Toltecs, near Mexico
City at
the site now known as Tula. But in giving Tulan Zuyua the
further name
Seven Caves, the Popol Vuh preserves the memory of a metropolis
much
older and far grander than any Toltec town. This ultimate Tulan
was at
the site now known as Teotihuacan, northeast of Mexico City. It
was
the greatest city in Mesoamerican history, dating from the same
period
as the classic Maya. Only recently it has been discovered that
beneath
the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan lies a natural cave whose
main
shaft and side chambers add up to seven.*(29)
Countless lineages and
tribes converge on the Tulan Zuyua of the
Popol Vuh, and each of them, starting with the Quiches, is given
a
god. The Cauecs receive the god named Tohil, the Greathouses
receive
Auilix, and the Lord Quiches receive Hacauitz. Ultimately
the
patronage of the first-ranking god, Tohil, extended to all three
of
these lineages, and to two other Quiche lineages of lesser rank,
the
Tams and Ilocs. The worship of Tohil has recently been traced
back
to the classic period; in the inscriptions at Palenque, he bears
the
name Tahil, a Cholan word meaning "Obsidian Mirror,"
and he is shown
with a smoking mirror in his forehead.
The Popol Vuh tells us
that although "all the tribes were sown and
came to light in unity," their languages differentiated
while they
were at Tulan. The cause of this was that some peoples were
given
patron deities whose names differed from that of the god of
the
Quiches. The language of the Rabinals became only slightly
different, since they were given a god named One Toh rather
than
Tohil, but others, who received gods with completely
distinctive
names, ended up speaking distinctive languages, including
the
Cakchiquels, the Bird House people, and the Yaqui people.
Today,
indeed, the Rabinals, who live to the northeast of the
Quiche
proper, speak a dialect of Quiche, whereas the Cakchiquels
(still
known by this name) and the Bird House people (better known as
the
Tzutuhils) speak related but separate languages. What the Popol
Vuh
calls the Yaqui people are the speakers of Nahua languages, in
Mexico.
Those languages belong to a family that not only stands apart
from
Quiche, Cakchiquel, and Tzutuhil, but from Mayan languages in
general.
Tohil is the source of
the first fires kept by human beings,
making it possible for them to keep warm in the cold of the
predawn
world. When a great hailstorm puts all these fires out, Tohil
restores
fire to the Quiches by pivoting inside his sandal, which is to
say
that he originates the technology whereby fire is started
by
rotating a drill in the socket of a wooden platform. The other
tribes,
shivering with cold, come to the Quiches to beg for fire, but
Tohil
refuses to let them have it unless they promise to embrace
him
someday, allowing themselves to be suckled. They agree, not
realizing that when the time comes for the Quiche lords to
subjugate
them, being "suckled" by Tohil will mean having their
hearts cut out
in sacrifice. Only the Cakchiquels, who get their fire by
sneaking
past everyone else in the smoke, escape this fate.
At the suggestion of
Tohil the Quiches leave Tulan. They sacrifice
their own blood to him, passing cords through their ears and
elbows,
and they sing a song called "The Blame Is Ours,"
lamenting the fact
that they will not be in Tulan when the time comes for the first
dawn.
Packing their gods on their backs and watching continuously for
the
appearance of the morning star, they begin a long migration. At
a
place called Rock Rows, Furrowed Sands they cross a
"sea"*(30) on a
causeway; this would be somewhere in Tabasco or Campeche, perhaps
at
Potonchan or Tixchel, both lowland Maya sites where causeways
pass
through flooded areas. They also pass the Great Abyss, the
location of
the eastern ball court used by the sons and grandsons of
Xmucane, a
long way east and a little south of any likely location for Rock
Rows,
Furrowed Sands. Next they enter the highlands, turning west
and
continuing at a slight southward angle until they reach a
mountain
called Place of Advice, not very far short of the site where
they will
one day reach their greatest glory. With them at Place of
Advice,
having accompanied them ever since they left Tulan, are the
Rabinals, Cakchiquels, and Bird House people.
Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar
Night, Mahucutah, and True Jaguar, together
with their wives, observe a great fast at Place of Advice.
Tohil,
Auilix, and Hacauitz speak to them, asking to be given hiding
places
so that they will not be captured by enemies of the Quiches.
After a
search through the forest, each of these gods is hidden at the
place
that bears his name today. They are not yet placed in temples
atop
pyramids, but merely in arbors decorated with bromelias and
hanging
mosses. At the place of Hacauitz, on a mountaintop, the
Cauecs,
Greathouses, and Lord Quiches weep while they wait for the dawn;
the
Tams and Ilocs wait on nearby mountains, while peoples other
than
the Quiches wait at more distant places. When, at last, they all
see
the daybringer, the morning star, they give thanks by burning
the
incense they have kept for this occasion, ever since they left
Tulan.
At this point we reach
the moment in the account of human affairs
that corresponds to the final event in the account of the lives
of the
gods: the Sun himself rises. On just this one occasion he
appears as
an entire person, so hot that he dries out the face of the
earth.
His heat turns Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz to stone, along with
such
pumas, jaguars, and snakes as had existed until now. A
diminutive
god called White Sparkstriker*(31) escapes petrifaction by
going
into the shade of the trees, becoming the keeper of the stone
animals.
He remains to this day as a gamekeeper, with stone fetishes
(volcanic concretions and meteorites) that resemble
animals,
together with flesh-and-blood game animals, in his care. He may
be
encountered in forests and caves, or on dark nights and in
dreams;
he appears in contemporary masked dramas dressed entirely in
red,
the color of the dawn.
At first the Quiches
rejoice when they see the first sunrise, but
then they remember their "brothers," the tribes who
were with them
at Tulan, and they sing the song called "The Blame Is Ours"
once
again. In the words of this song they wonder where their
brothers
might be at this very moment. In effect, the coming of the
first
sunrise reunites the tribes, despite the fact that they
remain
widely separated in space; as the Popol Vuh has it, "there
were
countless peoples, but there was just one dawn for all
tribes." The
orderly movements of the lights of the sky, signs of the deeds
of
the gods, enable human beings to coordinate their actions even
when
they cannot see one another. In point of fact Mesoamerican
peoples
in general shared a common calendar, consisting of the
260-day
cycle, whose auguries were first read by Xpiyacoc and Xmucane,
and the
cycles of Mars, Venus, and the sun and moon, as measured off by
the
movements of their sons and grandsons and by Blood
Woman.*(32)
Having seen the first
sunrise from the mountain of Hacauitz, the
Quiches eventually build a citadel there. But at first, even
while the
people of other tribes are becoming thickly settled and are
seen
traveling the roads in great numbers, the Quiches remain rustic
and
rural, gathering the larvae of yellow jackets, wasps, and bees
for
food and staying largely out of sight. When they go before
the
petrified forms of Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz, they burn bits
of
pitchy bark and wildflowers as substitutes for refined incense
and
offer blood drawn from their own bodies. The three gods are
still able
to speak to them, but only by appearing in spirit form. Tohil
tells
them to augment their offerings with the blood of deer and birds
taken
in the hunt, but they grow dissatisfied with this arrangement
and
begin to cast eyes on the people they see walking by in the
roads.
From hiding places on mountain peaks, they begin imitating the
cries
of the coyote, fox, puma, and jaguar.
Finally Tohil tells the
Quiches to go ahead and take human beings
for sacrifice, reminding them that when they were at Tulan the
other
tribes promised to allow him to "suckle" them. They
begin to seize
people they find out walking alone or in pairs, taking them away
to
cut them open before Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz and then
rolling
their heads out onto the roads. At first the lords who rule
the
victimized tribes think these deaths are the work of wild
animals, but
then they suspect the worshipers of Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz
and
attempt to track them down. Again and again they are foiled by
rain,
mist, and mud, but they do discover that the three gods,
whose
spirit familiars take the form of adolescent boys, have a
favorite
bathing place. They send two beautiful maidens, Xtah and Xpuch,
to
wash clothes there, instructing them to tempt the boys and
then
yield to any advances. They warn the maidens to return with
proof of
the success of their mission, which must take the form of
presents
from the boys.*(33)
Contrary to plan, the
three Quiche gods fail to lust after Xtah
and Xpuch, but they do agree to provide them with presents.
They
give them three cloaks with figures on the inside, one painted
with
a jaguar by Jaguar Quitze, another painted with an eagle by
Jaguar
Night, and the third painted with swarms of yellow jackets and
wasps
by Mahucutah. When the maidens return the enemy lords are so
pleased
with the cloaks that they cannot resist trying them on. All is
well
until the wasps painted on the inside of the third cloak turn
into
real ones. Xtah and Xpuch are spurned; despite their failure
to
tempt Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz they become the first
prostitutes,
or what Quiches call "barkers of shins." As for the
enemy lords,
they resolve to make war and launch a massive attack on the
Quiche
citadel at Hacauitz.
The enemy warriors come
at night in order to get as far as
possible without resistance, but they fall into a deep sleep on
the
road. The Quiches not only strip them of all the metal ornaments
on
their weapons and clothes, but pluck out their eyebrows and
beards
as well. Even so the enemy warriors press on the next day,
determined to recover their losses, but the Quiches are well
prepared.
What the enemy lookouts see all around the citadel of Hacauitz
is a
wooden palisade; visible on the parapet are rows of warriors,
decked
out with the very metal objects that were stolen during the
night.
What the lookouts do not see is that these warriors are mere
wooden
puppets, and that behind the palisade, on each of its four
sides, is a
large gourd filled with yellow jackets and wasps, put there at
the
suggestion of Tohil. As for the Quiches on the inside, what
they
see, once the attack begins, is more than twenty-four
thousand
warriors converging on them, bristling with weapons and
shouting
continuously. But Tohil has made them so confident that they
treat the
attack as a great spectacle, bringing their women and children
up on
the parapet to see it. When they release the yellow jackets
and
wasps their enemies drop their weapons and attempt to flee, so
badly
stung they hardly even notice the blows they receive from
conventional
Quiche weapons. The survivors become permanent payers of tribute
to
the Quiche lords.
After their great
victory, Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah,
and True Jaguar begin preparing, with complete contentment, for
what
they know to be their approaching death. First they sing
"The Blame Is
Ours," and then they explain to their wives and successors
that "the
time of our Lord Deer" has come around again. This is a
reference to
the day named Deer, one of the four days on which a new solar
year can
begin, and specifically to the first day of a longer period,
lasting
fifty-two years, which falls on One Deer.*(34) Such a major
temporal
transition is an occasion for rites of renewal; the Quiche
forefathers
declare that their time as lords among the living has been
completed
and that they intend to return to the place where they came
from,
far in the east. Jaguar Quitze leaves a sacred object called
the
"Bundle of Flames," a sort of cloth-wrapped ark with
mysterious
contents, as a "sign of his being." He and the others
"die" by
simply departing; they are never seen again, but their descendants
burn incense before the Bundle of Flames in remembrance of
them,
just as Xmucane burned incense before the ears of corn in
remembrance of Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
The Quiche lords of the
second generation, following the
instructions of their departed fathers, go on a pilgrimage to
the east
(at the beginning of Part Five). Unlike their fathers, they do
this
with the intention of returning in the flesh. Cocaib, the
firstborn
son of Jaguar Quitze, goes on behalf of the Cauec lineage;
Coacutec,
the second son of Jaguar Night, represents the Greathouses;
and
Coahau, the only son of Mahucutah, represents the Lord Quiches.
They
go all the way back down into the lowlands, to the other side of
the
same "sea" their fathers once crossed on the way up to
the
highlands. If they were retracing their fathers' route in
detail, they
must have descended into the lowlands by way of the Great
Abyss.
They do not go to Tulan Zuyua, which may have been in ruins by
this
time, but they do come before the ruler of a great kingdom. His
name
is Nacxit, one of the epithets Nahua speakers give to the
god-king
Plumed Serpent. He gives them the emblems that go with the two
highest
titles of Mayan nobility, Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of
the
Reception House Mat. Both these titles, the one belonging to a
head of
state and the other to an overseer of tribute collection, go to
the
Cauecs. From other sources we know that the Greathouse and Lord
Quiche
lineages also receive emblems at this time, with the title of
Lord
Minister (ranking third) going to one and that of Crier to
the
People (ranking fourth) to the other.*(35)
Cocaib, Coacutec, and
Coahau return "from across the sea" with the
regalia given them by Nacxit, including canopies, thrones,
musical
instruments, cosmetics, jewelry, the feet and feathers of
various
animals and birds, and "the writings about Tulan."
Since one of the
titles of the Popol Vuh is "The Light That Came from Across
the
Sea," we may guess that it was the Popol Vuh they brought
back, and
that the hieroglyphic version of the book contained not
only
writings about the gods whose movements prefigured those of
celestial lights, but about such human affairs as those of
Tulan.
The sovereign lordship of the returned pilgrims is recognized
not only
by the Quiches themselves, but by the Rabinals, Cakchiquels,
and
Bird House people as well. Only now do the Quiche lords begin
to
have what the Popol Vuh calls "fiery splendor." It
seems likely that
their pilgrimage was conceived as a reenactment of the
adventures of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque in Xibalba, who had only the planet Venus
to
their credit when they first descended in the east at the Great
Abyss,
but who eventually returned with the greater splendor of the sun
and
full moon.
Later, after the death
of the widows of Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night,
and Mahucutah, the Quiches leave Hacauitz and settle at a
succession
of other sites. The Popol Vuh mentions only one of these by
name,
Thorny Place, settled at some point after the deaths of
Cocaib,
Coacutec, and Coahau. The ruins of Thorny Place, which are
divided
into four parts just as the Popol Vuh indicates they should be,
are
some distance east and a little north of Hacauitz, in the
direction of
the Great Abyss. This location may have been chosen because it
was a
step backward on the Quiche migration route, placing the
ruling
lords closer to their forefathers than they were before. But
when
the Quiches move again, two generations later, they go west and
a
little south again, ending up even farther in that direction
than
Hacauitz. This time, with Cotuha as Keeper of the Mat and
Iztayul as
Keeper of the Reception House Mat, they found the citadel of
Bearded
Place, directly across a canyon to the south from the site of
what
will one day be their greatest citadel.*(36)
At Bearded Place there
is great harmony among the Cauecs,
Greathouses, and Lord Quiches; these three lineages, each with
its own
palace, are tied together through intermarriage. At Thorny Place
women
were married off in exchange for modest favors and gifts, but
now,
at Bearded Place, wedding arrangements are accompanied by
elaborate
feasting and drinking. The only disturbance during this period
comes
when the Ilocs not only try to get Iztayul involved in a plot
to
assassinate Cotuha, but come to the point of making a
military
attack on Bearded Place. They are defeated, and some of their
own
number are sacrificed before the gods of their intended victims.
The
Cauec, Greathouse, and Lord Quiche lineages now rise to greater
and
greater power, defeating some tribes in direct attacks and
terrorizing
still others by having them witness the sacrifice of prisoners
of war.
In the next generation
the Keeper of the Mat bears the divine name
Plumed Serpent, while the Keeper of the Reception House Mat is
Cotuha,
named after the previous Keeper of the Mat. They build a new
and
larger citadel across the canyon from Bearded Place, at
Rotten
Cane.*(37) The three leading lineages, faced with increased
numbers
and torn by quarrels over inflation in bride prices, break
apart
into smaller groups. The Cauecs divide into nine segments,
the
Greathouses into nine, and the Lord Quiches into four, with each
of
these segments headed by a titled lord and occupying its own
palace.
In addition, the inhabitants of Rotten Cane include the Zaquics,
a
lineage not previously mentioned in the Popol Vuh, divided into
two
segments but occupying only a single palace, making
twenty-three
palaces in all. Along with all these palaces, Rotten Cane
is
provided with three pyramids that bear the temples of Tohil,
Auilix,
and Hacauitz, ranged around a central plaza; elsewhere is a
fourth
pyramid for Corntassel, the god of the Zaquics.
The Popol Vuh
identifies Plumed Serpent, who holds the titles of
both Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of the Reception House Mat
during at
least part of his reign at Rotten Cane, as "a true lord of
genius." He
has the power to manifest his personal spirit familiars, putting
on
performances in which he transforms himself into a snake, an
eagle,
a jaguar, or a puddle of blood, climbing to the sky or
descending to
Xibalba. As the Popol Vuh explains it, his displays are
"just his
way of revealing himself," but they have the effect of
terrorizing the
lords of other tribes. The next Quiche lords to manifest
genius,
coming two generations later, are Quicab, who serves as Keeper
of
the Mat, and Cauizimah, who serves as Keeper of the Reception
House
Mat. Under their rule the dominion of the Quiches reaches its
greatest
extent. Where Plumed Serpent gained power through spectacular
displays
of shamanic skill, Quicab now gains it by military force.
Not
content with merely overpowering the citadels of
surrounding
peoples, he sends out loyal vassals, called "guardians of
the land" or
"lookout lineages," to serve as forces of occupation.
The stationing
of these guardians is conceived as analogous to the construction
of
a palisade; they turn the entire Quiche kingdom into one
great
fortress.
During this period the
settlement at the center of the Quiche
kingdom embraced a cluster of four citadels, with Rotten Cane at
the
focal point. Together with the ordinary houses that occupied the
lower
ground around them, these four sites made up a larger town that
took
the name Quiche. It was perhaps the most densely built-up area
that
had existed in highland Guatemala since early in the classic
period,
and it took on the stature of the place where Cocaib, Coacutec,
and
Coahau had gone to receive the titles and emblems of truly
glorious
lordship. Five generations after their pilgrimage a new
conferring
of titles took place, only now it was not Quiches but the heads
of the
leading "lookout" lineages who were ennobled, and it
happened not
under the authority of Nacxit, lord of a domain in the
mythic
"east," but under Quicab, who ruled from
Quiche.*(38)
The town of Quiche not
only took on the status of the place
visited by the pilgrims who saw Nacxit, but of the Tulan visited
by
their forefathers as well. When the founders of the ruling
Quiche
lineages and their closest allies left Tulan Zuyua before the
first
sunrise, they had come away with tribal gods whose names were
"meant
to be in agreement," and they were "in unity"
when they passed the
Great Abyss and convened at Place of Advice. Now, in this
latter
day, "the word came from just one place" again, and
the allies
convened in a town and "came away in unity" again, but
this time
they came away "having heard, there at Quiche, what all of
them should
do." It was probably during this period that the Quiche
lords went
so far as to have a branching tunnel constructed directly beneath
Rotten Cane, a tunnel that brought the Seven Caves of Tulan
Zuyua,
or of the ultimate Tulan that was Teotihuacan, to the time and
place
of their own greatest glory.
It is in the course of
explaining the greatness of lords like Plumed
Serpent and Quicab that the writers of the alphabetic Popol Vuh
tell
us how its hieroglyphic predecessor was put to use, serving as a
way
of seeing into distant places and times. Greatness also came to
the
lords through their participation in religious retreats. For
long
periods they would stay in the temples, praying, burning
incense,
bleeding themselves, sleeping apart from their wives, and abstaining
not only from meat but from corn products, eating nothing but
the
fruits of various trees. The shortest fast lasted 180 days,
corresponding to half the 360-day cycle (separate from the solar
year)
that was used in keeping chronologies of historical events,
and
another lasted 260 days, or one complete run of the cycle whose
days
were counted by Xpiyacoc and Xmucane when they divined for the
gods.
The longest fast, 340 days, corresponded to a segment of the
Mayan
Venus calendar, beginning with the departure of Venus as the
morning
star and continuing through its stay in the underworld and
its
period of reappearance as the evening star, leaving just eight
days to
go before its rebirth as the morning star. This fast
probably
commemorated the heroic adventures of Hunahpu and Xbalanque
in
Xibalba, the long darkness endured by the first generation of
lords as
they watched for the appearance of the morning star, and the
lowland
pilgrimage undertaken by Cocaib, Coacutec, and Coahau.
The Quiche lords sought
identification with the very gods, not
only in their pilgrimages, shamanic feats, limitless vision,
and
long fasts, but in the requirements they set for their
subjects.
Just as the gods needed human beings to nurture them with
offerings,
so human lords required subjects to bring them tribute. As the
Popol
Vuh points out, the "nurture" required by the Quiche
lords consisted
not only of the food and drink that were prepared for them, but
of
turquoise, jade, and the iridescent blue-green feathers of the
quetzal
bird. Apparently such precious objects as these were considered
the
ultimate fruits of the earth and sky, which were themselves
described as the "blue-green plate" and
"blue-green bowl."
Near the end, the Popol
Vuh lists all the noble titles held by the
various segments of the Cauec, Greathouse, and Lord Quiche
lineages
(in rank order), and it gives the names of those who held
the
highest titles (in the order of their succession). In the case
of
the two leading segments of the Cauec lineage, those whose
heads
held the titles of Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of the Reception
House
Mat, the text lists four generations after Quicab and Cauizimah,
who
were in the seventh generation, without comment. Then, in
the
twelfth generation, the names Three Deer and Nine Dog are
followed
by two sentences whose combination of gravity and brevity gives
the
reader a chill. The first is, "And they were ruling when
Tonatiuh
arrived," Tonatiuh or "Sun" being the name given
by the Aztecs to
Pedro de Alvarado, the man whose forces destroyed Rotten Cane in
1524.
And the second sentence about Three Deer and Nine Dog is simply,
"They
were hanged by the Castilian people."*(39)
In the thirteenth
generation of Cauecs the Popol Vuh lists Tecum and
Tepepul, who were "tributary to the Castilian people."
Then, at the
end of the list of Cauec generations, come the first lords who
adopted
Spanish names, Juan de Rojas and Juan Cortes, the living holders
of
the titles of Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of the Reception
House
Mat when the alphabetic Popol Vuh was written. Today Quiches
ideally
list either nine or thirteen generations when they invoke
their
ancestors in prayer; from this we can see that the thirteen
generations of lords named as preceding Juan de Rojas and
Juan
Cortes need not be taken as constituting an exhaustive genealogy
but
may simply be a list of the names these two men used in their
own
prayers.
By giving us the names
of Quiche lords who were alive while they
were writing, the authors of the alphabetic Popol Vuh also give
us the
means for dating their work. They could not have finished it any
later
than 1558, since by that year the name of Juan de Rojas is
missing
from documents he would have signed had he still been among
the
living. And since they mention Pedro de Robles of the
Greathouse
lineage as the current Lord Minister, they could not have
finished any
earlier than 1554, at which time his predecessor was still
in
office. This places the writing of the Popol Vuh during the
very
same decade as the writing of the majority of the native
titulos
that exist for colonial Guatemala, documents that were composed
by
indigenous authors for the express purpose of reasserting the
rights
formerly enjoyed by specific lordly lineages living in
specific
places. The version of the Popol Vuh that comes down to us does
not
include a copy of the original title page or of whatever
explicitly
legal statements might have been appended to the original
alphabetic
manuscript, but it makes the lineage and place names plain
enough, and
it contains two different lists of towns that had once been
tributary to Quiche.*(40)
It may be that the
indigenous lords of highland Guatemala chose
the 1550s to make their claims because they thought they saw
an
opening in Spanish policy, but they may also have been preparing
for
the major temporal transition that Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar
Night,
Mahucutah, and True Jaguar had once called "the time of our
Lord
Deer." A new fifty-two-year cycle, with the first day of
its first
year falling on One Deer, was due to begin on June 2, 1558 (on
the
Julian calendar). Juan Cortes, whose duties as Keeper of the
Reception
House Mat would have included tribute collection had he
served
before the coming of Alvarado, worked constantly to restore
tribute
rights to the lordly lineages of the town of Quiche. In 1557 he
went
all the way to Spain to press his case, and it may well be that
he
took a copy of the alphabetic Popol Vuh with him. He continued
to make
claims when he returned to Guatemala in 1558, prompting a
missionary
to warn Philip II that "this land is new and not confirmed
in the
faith," and that Cortes, "son of idolatrous parents,
would need to
do very little to restore their ceremonies and attract their
former
subjects to himself."*(41) Quiche rights to collect tribute
never were
restored, but over the next thirty years Juan Cortes did take
a
considerable role in appointing and installing the leaders
of
various towns that had once been under Quiche rule.*(42)
By the time the authors
of the Popol Vuh have finished giving the
rank order of noble titles and the names of the individuals who
held
the highest titles, they are only a few sentences away from
finishing their work. At this point they single out one of
the
lesser titles for further discussion, a move that seems
anticlimactic until we realize that they are giving us a clue to
their
own identity. Without naming any individuals, they point out
that each
of the three leading lineages included one lord bearing the
title of
Great Toastmaster,*(43) also translatable as Great Convener
of
Banquets. Here we may recall that when the authors introduced
the
story of One Hunahpu, they themselves proposed a toast to
the
reader. If we look for a convener of banquets and maker of
toasts
among the contemporary Quiche, we find the professional
matchmaker,
who serves as an eloquent master of ceremonies at the feasts
where
marriage arrangements are completed. If our mysterious authors
were
themselves the three Great Toastmasters, and if their
duties
included the convening of wedding banquets, that would help
explain
why they took a special interest in marriage customs when
they
recounted the life and times of successive Quiche citadels.
Indeed,
they specifically noted the point at which feasting and drinking
first
became a part of the negotiations for a bride.
The authors give us one
final clue to their identity when they
tell us that the three Great Toastmasters are "Mothers of
the Word"
and "Fathers of the Word." The combination of
"Mother" and "Father"
suggests the contemporary daykeepers called mother-fathers,
who
serve as the ritual heads of patrilineages; it is from their
ranks
that matchmakers are drawn. The focus on "the Word,"
coming as it does
near the very end of a work whose opening line promised to give
us the
"Ancient Word," suggests that the Word parented by the
Great
Toastmasters and the Word written down in the alphabetic Popol
Vuh are
one and the same. If so, we know the name of at least one of
the
writers: when Juan de Rojas and Juan Cortes signed a document
known as
the "Title of the Lords of Totonicapan" in 1554, a man
named Cristobal
Velasco*(44) signed himself as Great Toastmaster of the
Cauecs.
At the end of their
work the authors repeat the enigma they
presented near the beginning, allowing us to wonder whether
the
hieroglyphic Popol Vuh might still exist somewhere, only now
they
say it has been "lost" instead of telling us that the
reader is hiding
his face. They close on a note of reassurance, asking us, in
effect,
to accept what they have written without demanding a closer look
at
their sources, since "everything has been completed here
concerning
Quiche," meaning the place named Quiche. Then, lest we
forget their
difficult circumstances, they add the phrase, "which is now
named
Santa Cruz," or "Holy Cross." Here again they
take us back to the
beginning, where they told us, "We shall write about this
now amid the
preaching of God, in Christendom now."
Today, even when Quiche
daykeepers go to a remote mountaintop
shrine, sending up great clouds of incense for multitudes of
deities
and ancestors, they sometimes begin and end by running through
an "Our
Father" and a "Hail Mary" and crossing
themselves. It is as if the
alien eye and ear of the conqueror were present even under
conditions of solitude and required the recitation of two
spells,
one to ward them off for awhile and the other to readmit
their
existence. Between these protective spells daykeepers are left
to
enter, in peace, a world whose obligations they know to be
older
than those of Christianity, obligations to the mountains and
plains
where they continue to live and to all those who have ever lived
there
before them. So it is with the authors of the Popol Vuh, who
mention
Christendom on the first page, Holy Cross on the last page, and
open
up the whole sky-earth, vast and deep, within.
Perhaps the most
remarkable thing about the Popol Vuh, considered in
its entirety, is the vast temporal sweep of its narrative. It
begins
in darkness, with a world inhabited only by gods, and continues
all
the way past the dawn into the time of the humans who wrote it.
The
surviving Maya hieroglyphic books abound with gods, but they
seem to
stop short of dealing directly with the acts of mortals. The
Dresden
book does have one page that shifts the action to the human
sphere,
but the following pages were torn off at some time in the past.
If
we wish to find hieroglyphic texts that have the same
proportion
between divine and human affairs as the alphabetic Popol Vuh,
we
must leave the time and place in which it was written and go
a
thousand years back and hundreds of miles away to the classic
Maya
site of Palenque, in the Gulf-coast lowlands.*(45)
At Palenque, in the sanctuary of each temple
in what is now known as
the Cross Group, is a stone tablet bearing a hieroglyphic
narrative.
In each case the text is divided into two panels, one of
which
begins with the deeds of gods who include the classic
equivalents of
Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and the other of which ends with the
deeds of
human lords whose own scribes were the authors of the
inscriptions. In
the middle of this narrative, where the reader passes from one
panel
to the other, are characters who are neither fully divine nor
quite
human. So also with the Popol Vuh: about halfway through, the
reader
comes to a transition between what might be called
"myth" and
"history" (at the end of Part Three). The characters
in the
narrative are still divine at this point, but they are described
as
performing rituals for the veneration of ripened corn and
deceased
relatives, rituals that are meant to be followed by future
humans
rather than by ancient gods. After this episode, in which the
gods act
like people, comes another in which people act like gods (at
the
beginning of Part Four). The people in question are the first
four
humans, the ones who saw and understood everything in the
sky-earth.
Once their perfect vision has been taken away the narrative
begins
to sound more like history as it moves along, though human
characters continue to aspire to deeds of divine
proportions.*(46)
We tend to think of
myth and history as being in conflict with one
another, but the authors of the inscriptions at Palenque and
the
alphabetic text of the Popol Vuh treated the mythic and
historical
parts of their narratives as belonging to a single, balanced
whole. By
their sense of proportion, the Egyptian Book of the Dead would
need
a second half devoted to human deeds in the land of the living,
and
the Hebrew Testament would need a first half devoted to events
that
took place before the fall of Adam and Eve. In the case of
ancient
Chinese literature the Book of Changes, which is like the Popol
Vuh in
being subject to divinatory interpretation, would have to
be
combined with the Book of History in a single volume.
To this day the Quiche
Maya think of dualities in general as
complementary rather than opposed, interpenetrating rather
than
mutually exclusive. Instead of being in logical opposition to
one
another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a
mutual
attraction. If we had an English word that fully expressed the
Mayan
sense of narrative time, it would have to embrace the duality of
the
divine and the human in the same way the Quiche term cahuleu
or
"sky-earth" preserves the duality of what we call the
"world." In fact
we already have a word that comes close to doing the job:
mythistory, taken into English from Greek by way of Latin. For
the
ancient Greeks, who set about driving a wedge between the divine
and
the human, this term became a negative one, designating
narratives
that should have been properly historical but contained
mythic
impurities. For Mayans, the presence of a divine dimension
in
narratives of human affairs is not an imperfection but a
necessity,
and it is balanced by a necessary human dimension in narratives
of
divine affairs. At one end of the Popol Vuh the gods are
preoccupied
with the difficult task of making humans, and at the other
humans
are preoccupied with the equally difficult task of finding
the
traces of divine movements in their own deeds.
The difference between
a fully mythistorical sense of narrative time
and the European quest for pure history is not reducible to a
simple
contrast between cyclical and linear time. Mayans are always
alert
to the reassertion of the patterns of the past in present
events,
but they do not expect the past to repeat itself exactly. Each
time
the gods of the Popol Vuh attempt to make human beings they get
a
different result, and except for the solitary person made of
mud, each
attempt has a lasting result rather than completely
disappearing
into the folds of cyclical time. Later, when members of the
second
generation of Quiche lords go on a pilgrimage that takes them
into the
lowlands, their journey is not described as a literal repetition
of
the journey of Hunahpu and Xbalanque to Xibalba, nor even as
a
retracing of the journey of the human founders of the ruling
Quiche
lineages, but is allowed its own character as a unique event, an
event
that nevertheless carries echoes of the past. The effect of
these
events, like others, is cumulative, and it is a specifically
human
capacity to take each of them into account separately while at
the
same time recognizing that they double back on one another.*(47)
In theory, if we who
presently claim to be human were to forget
our efforts to find the traces of divine movements in our own
actions,
our fate should be something like that of the wooden people in
the
Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted
itself
by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up
against them
and drove them from their homes. Today they are swinging through
the
trees.
On the holy day Eight
Monkey
in the year Eleven
Thought,
June 22, 1984,
Menotomy,
Massachusetts
PRONOUNCING_QUICHE_WORDS
-
PRONOUNCING QUICHE WORDS
-
VOWELS
a Like a in English
"father," or Spanish a.
e Like ai in English
"wait," or Spanish e.
i Like ee in English
"seed," or Spanish i.
o Like o in English
"bone," or Spanish o.
u Like oo in English
"hoot," or Spanish u.
aa, ee, ii, The doubling of a vowel normally indicates
that it
oo, uu is followed by a glottal stop, which
is like tt in
the
Scottish pronunciation of "bottle"; when uu
begins a
word or follows another vowel it is
pronounced like English "woo."
-
CONSONANTS
b Like English b, but pronounced
together with a
glottal
stop.
c, qu Pronounced without the puff of air
that follows c in
English
"cat."
ch Like English ch.
h Pronounced deeper in the throat
than English h, like
Spanish
j or German ch.
k Pronounced with the tongue
farther back in the mouth
than for
c or qu, like the Hebrew letter qoph.
l Pronounced with the tongue moved
forward from the
position
of English l so as to touch the teeth, as
in the
ll of Welsh "Lloyd."
m Like English m.
n Like English n.
p Pronounced without the puff of
air that follows p in
English
"pit."
r Pronounced with a flap if
between two vowels, like
Spanish
r, otherwise trilled like Spanish rr.
t Pronounced without the puff of
air that follows t in
English
"ten."
tt Like t, but pronounced together
with a glottal stop.
tz Like ts in English
"mats."
x Like English sh.
y Like English y.
z Like English s.
3 Like k, but pronounced together
with a glottal
stop.
4 Like c or qu, but pronounced
together with a glottal
stop.
4h Like ch, but pronounced together
with a glottal
stop.
4, Like tz, but pronounced together
with a glottal
stop.
-
Stress is always on the
final syllable of a word.
PART_ONE
PART ONE
-
THIS IS THE
BEGINNING*(48) OF THE ANCIENT WORD, here in this place
called Quiche.*(49) Here we shall inscribe, we shall implant
the
Ancient Word, the potential and source for everything done in
the
citadel of Quiche, in the nation of Quiche people.
And here*(50) we shall
take up the demonstration, revelation, and
account of how things were put in shadow and brought to
light*(51)
-
by the Maker,
Modeler, named Bearer, Begetter,
Hunahpu Possum,
Hunahpu Coyote,
Great White
Peccary, Tapir,
Sovereign Plumed
Serpent,
Heart of the
Lake, Heart of the Sea,
Maker of the
Blue-Green Plate,
Maker of the
Blue-Green Bowl,
-
as they are called, also named, also described as
-
the midwife,
matchmaker*(52)
named Xpiyacoc,
Xmucane,
defender,
protector,*(53)
twice a
midwife, twice a matchmaker,
-
as is said in the words of Quiche. They accounted for
everything-
and did it, too- as enlightened beings, in enlightened
words.*(54)
We shall write about this now amid the preaching of God, in
Christendom now.*(55) We shall bring it out because there is no
longer
a place to see it,*(56) a Council Book,
-
a place to see
"The Light That Came from
Across the
Sea,"
the account of
"Our Place in the Shadows,"
a place to see
"The Dawn of Life,"
-
as it is called. There is the original book and ancient writing,
but
he who reads and ponders it hides his face.*(57) It takes a
long
performance*(58) and account to complete the emergence of all
the
sky-earth:
-
the fourfold
siding, fourfold cornering,
measuring,
fourfold staking,
halving the
cord, stretching the cord
in the sky,
on the earth,