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,&qu