Philosophy

Popol Vuh (Maya Creation Cosmology)

Sacred K'iche' Maya book of creation and the Hero Twins, the foundational text of Maya cosmology and mythic worldview.

Before the first sunrise there was the sea and the sky and nothing standing between them. No earth, no mountain, no animal moving, no human voice — only water lying calm under empty heaven, and in the water, hidden under green and azure feathers, the makers. The Popol Vuh opens on that stillness and never loses it; the whole vast book of the K’iche’ Maya keeps returning to the moment when speech first crossed the silence and the makers said earth, and the earth rose dripping out of the sea. It is the longest and most complete cosmogony to survive from the Americas before the conquest, the one place where a Mesoamerican people’s account of how the world was made, how it failed and was remade, and how its own kings descended from the first beings of maize, can be read whole and in their own language. Everything else of the kind was burned, lost, or never written down. This one came through because, at the exact moment it might have vanished, it changed its skin.

The book that survived by changing its body

The Maya kept books. They wrote in a true script — logographic and syllabic, painted on bark-paper folded screenfold and bound in jaguar hide — and the rulers and priests of the lowland cities used these codices for the count of days, the reckoning of the heavens, and the deeds of gods and dynasts. Of the hundreds that existed at contact, three survive intact and a fragment of a fourth. The rest were consumed. On the twelfth of July 1562, in the Yucatec town of Maní, the Franciscan Diego de Landa gathered the books and the carved images of the local Maya and burned them in a single auto-da-fé — by his own account twenty-seven manuscripts and some five thousand carved images — convinced that they held nothing but lies of the devil. He later wrote, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the fullest early account of Maya writing and ritual that we possess.

The Popol Vuh is not one of the burned codices, and it is not a codex at all. It belongs to the K’iche’, the people of the western Guatemalan highlands, far south of Landa’s Yucatán, and it survived precisely because it abandoned the old form. Sometime between 1554 and 1558, in the years just after the Spanish conquest of the highlands, men of three K’iche’ noble lineages set their inherited account down in alphabetic letters — the K’iche’ language written with the phonetic values of the sixteenth-century Spanish alphabet, in the colonial town of Santa Cruz del Quiché. The work itself says it was copied from an older book that could no longer be seen openly, an ilbal, an instrument of sight, in which the ancestors had read the past and the turning of the sky. That older book was almost certainly a pre-conquest pictorial-hieroglyphic codex; it does not survive, and the alphabetic transcription is the only thing that carries its memory forward. The title is the colophon’s own: Popol Vuh, the Council Book — popol, the woven mat of the council house where lords sat in session; vuh (Wuj), the book or paper. The book of the mat, the book of the seat of rule.

For nearly a century and a half the manuscript stayed within the K’iche’ community, recopied and consulted. Then, at the very turn of the eighteenth century, around 1701 to 1703, a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez, parish priest at Chichicastenango — the town the K’iche’ call Chuilá — was lent or shown the K’iche’ text. He copied it out and set beside it, column for column, his own Spanish translation, so that the two languages run together down the page. It is Ximénez’s bilingual copy, not the lost mid-sixteenth-century original, that comes down to us. It passed in the nineteenth century through the hands of the Abbé Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who published the first scholarly edition, and after his death through the collector Alphonse Pinart to Edward E. Ayer, whose enormous Americana library went to the Newberry Library in Chicago between 1897 and 1911. There it remains, cataloged as Ayer MS 1515 — the single surviving manuscript of the Popol Vuh, a small bound thing on which the entire reconstructed cosmology of the highland Maya finally rests. The Newberry’s own research guide holds it among Ximénez’s papers and limits the time a reader may spend with the original light upon it.

The makers and the word

The account proper begins in the dark water. There are makers in it — Tepeu, the Sovereign, and Gucumatz, whom the K’iche’ name Q’uq’umatz, the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the quetzal-feathered being who moves in the sea. With them, or over them, is Heart of Sky, called Huracan, the one-legged lightning of the storm, who is at once a single power and a trinity of thunderbolts. They take counsel together; the cosmology is built on counsel, on beings who think and speak in company rather than command alone. Their speech is creative. When they agree and say the word, the waters draw back and the mountains rise, the valleys open, the cypress and pine stand up, and the rivers run in their courses. Then they fill the made world with its first inhabitants — the deer and the birds, the jaguar and the serpent — and assign each its dwelling.

But the makers want more than a populated world. They want to be known. They want creatures who will name them, keep their days, and feed them with prayer and offering. So they tell the animals to speak, to call out the names of their shapers and sustainers — and the animals only squawk and howl and roar, each in its own noise, unable to say the names. For that failure the animals are sentenced: their flesh will be eaten, they will serve and be hunted. The world has voices in it but no praise, and a cosmos that cannot praise its makers is, in the logic of this book, unfinished. The drama of the whole creation is the search for a being who can hold the makers in memory and answer them with words.

Mud, then wood: the creations that failed

The first attempt is made of earth. The makers shape a person of wet mud, and it will not hold. It is soft and lopsided; it crumbles and dissolves; it cannot turn its head; it speaks, but without sense, and has no mind to remember who made it. They let it melt away.

The second attempt is more ambitious and more terrible. They take counsel with the old diviners, the grandmother and grandfather of the dawn, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, who cast lots with corn kernels and coral seeds to read what should be done — the first act of divination in the world, performed before there are yet any people to divine for. On their counsel the makers carve people out of wood: a man shaped from the wood of the coral tree, a woman from the pith of reeds. These wooden people succeed where the mud failed. They walk and talk, they multiply and fill the earth, they have sons and daughters. But they are hollow. They have no hearts and no minds; they do not remember Heart of Sky; they walk on all fours without purpose and let their faces dry out, and their speech is empty of gratitude. So the makers unmake them in a single catastrophe. A black rain falls; a flood comes; and the whole made world rises against the wooden people. The animals they have eaten, the dogs they have beaten, the grinding stones that wore down their corn, the water jars and cooking pots — every used and abused thing of the household speaks at last and takes its revenge, crushing and biting and grinding the wooden people in turn. Those few who escape into the forest become the monkeys, and that is why the monkey, with its almost-human face and hands, looks like a draft of a person that was set aside.

This is one of the book’s deepest notes, and it has no apology in it: a being that consumes the world without remembering its makers is owed nothing by the world, and the tools of an ungrateful life are not neutral. They wait, and when the order of things turns, they answer.

The Hero Twins and the descent into Xibalba

Between the failed creations and the successful one the Popol Vuh sets its great central narrative, the matter that fills more of the book than anything else and that the Maya had been telling for at least a thousand years before the manuscript was written: the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

It opens with their elders. One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, brothers, are great ballplayers whose noise on the court disturbs the lords of the underworld. That underworld is Xibalba, the place of fright, a damp and corrupted kingdom beneath the earth ruled by twelve lords whose names are the diseases and indignities of the body — One Death and Seven Death first among them, and beneath them Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon and the lords of stabbing and of bloody vomit. The lords summon the brothers down, defeat them at a rigged game, and sacrifice them. The head of One Hunahpu is hung in a calabash tree as a warning, and the tree, which had never borne fruit, suddenly fills with gourds the shape of skulls. A daughter of one of the lords, the maiden Xquic, comes to look; the skull spits into her open hand; she conceives. Driven out of Xibalba, she climbs to the surface and bears the twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The twins grow up tricksters and hunters, armed with blowguns. Their first great deed addresses an older arrogance: Vucub-Caquix, Seven Macaw, a gorgeous bird who in the false dawn before the true sun has set himself up as both the sun and the moon, glittering with metal teeth and jeweled eyes, demanding worship he has not earned. The twins shoot him from his fruit tree with the blowgun and, by a long ruse involving his broken jaw and his stolen finery, strip him of his teeth and his eyes and his pretension until he dies — and with him his two sons, Zipacná and Cabracán, the maker and the shaker of mountains. The world is cleared of false suns and overweening earth-movers before the true sun is allowed to rise.

Then the twins go down the road to Xibalba to finish their fathers’ business. The descent is the heart of the heart of the book. They survive the messengers and the river of blood and the crossing where the roads divide; they outwit the seated mannequins the lords set up to mock them; and they pass, one by one, the houses of ordeal — the Dark House, the House of Cold, the House of Jaguars, the House of Fire, and the House of Bats, where a death-bat takes off Hunahpu’s head and the lords hang it over the ballcourt to use as the ball. The twins recover by a trick, substituting a carved squash for the head and restoring Hunahpu, and they beat the lords at their own game. At last they stage their own deaths, turning sacrifice itself into the instrument of victory. They allow themselves to be ground up and thrown in the river, then return five days later disguised as wandering performers who can kill a thing and bring it back to life. They burn houses and revive them, sacrifice a dog and revive it, kill a man and revive him; and the delighted lords, One Death and Seven Death, demand to be sacrificed themselves so as to taste the resurrection. The twins kill them — and do not bring them back. With the two greatest lords of death dead and unrevived, the power of Xibalba is broken; the remaining lords are demoted to scavengers of the dirty and the guilty, never again to claim the noble dead by right. The twins recover and honor their father, and the two of them rise out of the underworld into the sky to become the sun and the moon, the lights by which the next world will be measured.

The people of maize

Only now, with death thrown down and the lights in the sky, are the true humans made. The makers take counsel a last time. The animals — the fox, the coyote, the parrot, the crow — bring word of a mountain stuffed with food, and there in the place called Paxil and Cayalá the makers find white maize and yellow maize. The grandmother Xmucane grinds the corn nine times, mixes the meal into a dough, and from that dough are formed the flesh and the blood and the strength of the first people. Four men are made: Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Acab, Mahucutah, and Iqui-Balam — Jaguar Quitzé, Jaguar Night, the Traveler, and Dark Jaguar.

They are, at first, too perfect. Their sight is unclouded; they see to the four corners of the earth and through the mountains and to the curve of the sky; their knowledge is the makers’ own knowledge, and they give thanks and praise without being prompted, which is everything the makers had sought through three failed worlds. And precisely because they are everything the makers sought, they are too much. A creature that sees as far as its makers and knows as much is not a creature but a rival. So Heart of Sky breathes a mist across their eyes, as breath clouds a mirror, and their vision is drawn back to the near and the human. They keep gratitude and lose omniscience. The makers then give them wives while they sleep — Cahá-Paluna, Chomihá, Tzununihá, Caquixahá — and from these four couples descend the K’iche’ people.

The book does not end with the making of humankind. It goes on into the long darkness before the first dawn, the receiving of fire from the god Tohil, the migration of the lineages, the building of the citadel, and at last the true sunrise, when the gods who had walked among the people turn to stone in the morning light. And it closes with names: the genealogy of the ruling houses of the K’iche’, the Cavec and the Nihaib and the Ahau-Quiché, traced lord by lord from the four maize men down to the families who held power when the Spanish came. This is the deliberate architecture of the whole. The Popol Vuh is at once a cosmogony, a sacred history, and a charter: the same word that drew the earth out of the sea runs unbroken to the kings of Santa Cruz del Quiché, so that to read the genealogy is to be told that the lords of the council mat sit where they sit by an authority as old as the first sunrise. Cosmology and dynasty are not two subjects in this book. They are one claim.

What the manuscript stands on: the older record in stone and clay

The alphabetic Popol Vuh dates from the 1550s, but the story it carries is far older than its paper. This is not inference from the text alone. Across the Classic lowland cities — at Tikal and Calakmul, on the painted vessels and modeled stucco of Palenque, on the dynastic monuments of Copán and Quiriguá — Maya artists of the seventh through ninth centuries painted and carved scenes that the K’iche’ book lets us finally read: a hero raising a blowgun at a great bird in a fruit tree; paddler gods ferrying a figure across black water; above all the Maize God rising young and reborn from a cracked turtle shell or the split earth, attended by two youths who pour water and lift him into life. These images stand seven hundred years and several languages away from the K’iche’ manuscript, and the Classic versions diverge from it in detail; no single straight line of transmission can be drawn. But the core is unmistakably continuous — the dying and resurrected maize-father, the twin sons, the journey through and triumph over the underworld. The Popol Vuh is the surviving verbal expression of a mythic complex that the whole of Maya civilization had been depicting for the better part of a millennium. The book reads the pots, and the pots confirm the book.

That continuity also fixes what the Popol Vuh is and is not. It is specifically a K’iche’ document — the council book of one highland Maya people, written in their language, ending in their royal genealogy. It is not a pan-Maya scripture and not, in any useful sense, the Maya Bible it is sometimes loosely called. There was no single canon for the dozens of Maya kingdoms and languages, and the other Maya peoples — the lowland cities from El Mirador and Tikal onward, the Yucatec north of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, the living forest communities such as the Lacandon — carried their own versions and their own gods. What the Popol Vuh offers is the fullest single window onto a worldview those peoples broadly shared, set down by one of them. To read it alongside the wider record of the Maya civilization and the Long Count calendar is to see that window open onto a far larger room.

The text in modern hands

The Ximénez manuscript sat unread by the wider world until the nineteenth century. Carl Scherzer published Ximénez’s Spanish in 1857; the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who had carried the manuscript to Europe, published the K’iche’ with a facing French translation in Paris in 1861, the edition that first made the Popol Vuh a fact of world literature. The decisive modern recovery, however, came from Guatemala itself. The historian Adrián Recinos (1886–1962) returned to the Newberry manuscript and produced Popol Vuh: Las antiguas historias del Quiché (Mexico City, 1947), the Spanish translation that became standard across the Spanish-speaking world and the basis for the widely read English version of Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Morley in 1950.

A second decisive turn came when scholars stopped treating the book as a dead text. Dennis Tedlock (1939–2016) made his English translation, Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1985; revised 1996), in sustained dialogue with a living K’iche’ daykeeper, Andrés Xiloj, who read the sixteenth-century words aloud and interpreted them out of a ritual tradition still practiced in the highlands — so that the translation is at once a philological reconstruction and a transcript of the book being received by the people whose book it is. Allen J. Christenson’s translation directly from the K’iche’ (2003, with a literal line-by-line edition following) carried the philological project further and is freely available in full. The K’iche’ are some two million people today, a living nation with a continuing oral and calendrical tradition; the Popol Vuh is read in their schools and claimed as the founding book of their literature, and the day-keeping the book describes did not die with the conquest. It now circulates through teaching editions and classroom resources far beyond the highlands, carried into the wider literature of Latin American esotericism and into the comparative study of myth.

Set against the silence that the burnings of 1562 imposed on so much of Maya literature, the Popol Vuh is the one long voice that came through. From the makers under the feathered water to the lords of the council mat, it holds a complete world in a single arc — the only pre-conquest American cosmogony preserved entire and in its own tongue, and the spine to which every later reconstruction of the Maya mythic imagination is fastened. Where the codices were ash, the council book was speech written down, and speech, the book itself insists from its first sentence, is the thing the makers wanted and could not be destroyed for wanting.