The K'iche'

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The mountains of the Guatemalan altiplano are cold country. Pine and cypress climb the ridges above two thousand meters, mist sits in the ravines through the dawn, and the volcanoes of the western chain stand white-tipped over the valleys. This is not the lowland forest of the great stone cities, the hot green world of Tikal and Palenque and Calakmul. It is a higher, harder land, and the people who built their kingdom here in the centuries before the Spanish came belonged to it — a Maya nation of the cool pine slopes who counted their wealth in maize fields cut from the mountainsides and in the warriors of their fortified towns. They are the K’iche’, and they kept, when almost everything else of Maya religion had been burned, the one great book that came through whole.

The lords of the cold mountains

The K’iche’ are a highland Maya people, speakers of a language in the K’ichean branch of the Mayan family, settled across the western departments of what is now Guatemala — Quiché above all, and Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá, and the slopes that fall toward the Pacific. Their own histories, written down after the conquest, trace the nation’s beginning to a migration: lineages who came, the tradition holds, from the east, from a place of reeds called Tulan Zuyva, carrying their gods with them, and who climbed at last into the highlands to take the land. The Popol Vuh names the four founding fathers of the people — Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Acab, Mahucutah, and Iqui-Balam, the men made of maize — and follows their descendants out of the long darkness before the first sunrise, up into the mountains, to the building of their citadels and the establishment of their right to rule.

The historical kingdom takes shape in the record from the thirteenth century onward. The early seats of K’iche’ power lay at fortified hill-sites — Jakawitz, then Pismachi’ — defensive positions on plateaus ringed by deep barrancas, where a people who fought their neighbors for the highland valleys could hold a height against attack. The decisive expansion came in the fifteenth century. Under the king the K’iche’ remember as Q’uq’umatz — the name means Feathered Serpent, the highland form of the being the lowland Maya knew as the plumed serpent and central Mexico as Quetzalcoatl — and still more under his warlike successor K’iq’ab, who ruled across the middle of the century, the K’iche’ drove their power outward across the mountains. At its height the kingdom reached west toward the Chiapas frontier, east to the Motagua, and down toward the Pacific piedmont, holding tributary towns and subject peoples across a great stretch of the highlands, the largest of the Maya states the Spanish would find in the south.

Around 1400, Q’uq’umatz founded a new capital a short way north of Pismachi’, on a plateau cut off on every side by ravines: Q’umarkaj, “the place of old reeds.” Its conquerors’ Nahua allies would call it by the translation Utatlán, and that is the name under which it entered the Spanish record. The city was no scatter of huts. More than seventy structures stood around a central plaza floored in plaster: temple-pyramids, long council-house platforms, palaces for the ruling houses, and a ballcourt some forty meters long set between the great lineages’ compounds — the architecture of statecraft built into the ground plan, the council mat made stone. On the western side of the plaza rose the temple of Tohil, the patron god of the dominant house, the fire-giver of the migration tradition; near it stood shrines to Awilix and to Jakawitz, the lineage and mountain gods, and a round temple in the plaza’s center for Q’uq’umatz, the feathered serpent of the royal line.

For the K’iche’ the order of the city was the order of the world. Power rested in a confederacy of four principal lineages — the Kaweq above all, with the Nijaib, the Saqik, and the Ajaw K’iche’ — and these houses together raised up the chief lords, the ajpop and ajpop k’amja, the speaker and the supreme judge, each office an inheritance descending from the maize fathers down the named generations. The Kaweq, who furnished the priests of Q’uq’umatz, held their primacy by sacred right as much as by force. To sit on the mat at Q’umarkaj was to occupy a seat whose authority ran back, lord by named lord, to the first beings who saw to the four corners of the earth before the gods clouded their sight. Cosmology and dynasty were one claim, and the citadel was where the claim was made visible.

Panorama of the Grand Plaza at Q’umarkaj, the ruined K’iche’ capital outside Santa Cruz del Quiché. Photo by Петров Эдуард (Petrov Eduard), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

The one book that came through

Of all that the K’iche’ carried, the thing for which they are best known beyond the highlands is a book — the Popol Vuh, which the colophon of the surviving text names the Council Book: popol, the woven mat of the council house where the lords sat in session; wuj, the paper or the book. The book of the mat, the book of the seat of rule. It is the longest and most complete account of creation to survive from the Americas before the conquest, and it survived, against every odds, because it changed its body at the one moment it might have vanished.

The Maya had written real books for more than a thousand years, painted in a true script on folded bark-paper and bound in jaguar hide. Almost all of them were destroyed. In the lowland Yucatán, far to the north, the Franciscan Diego de Landa gathered the books and images of the Maya at Maní in 1562 and burned them in a single auto-da-fé; only a handful of codices anywhere survived the colonial fires. The Popol Vuh is not one of those codices, and it is not a codex at all. Sometime in the 1550s, in the years just after Q’umarkaj fell, men of the K’iche’ noble lineages set their inherited account down in the K’iche’ language written with the letters of the Spanish alphabet, in the colonial town of Santa Cruz del Quiché that had risen beside the ruined citadel. The work 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 — almost certainly a pre-conquest painted codex, now lost. The alphabetic transcription is the only thing that carries its memory.

For a century and a half the manuscript stayed within the K’iche’ community. Then, around 1701 to 1703, a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez, parish priest at Chichicastenango — the town the K’iche’ call Chuilá — was shown the K’iche’ text, and copied it out, setting his own Spanish translation in a column beside it so the two languages run together down the page. It is Ximénez’s bilingual copy, not the lost sixteenth-century original, that comes down to us. The single surviving manuscript passed in the nineteenth century to Europe and at last to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it rests today. By this thin thread — a friar’s copy of a copy of a lost painted book — the whole reconstructed cosmology of the highland Maya is held. The K’iche’ text is now read in full scholarly translation, available freely, and stands at the center of every modern account of the wider Maya civilization and its lost books.

What the book carries is, first, the account of creation. In the beginning there is only the sea under empty sky, and in the water, hidden under green feathers, the makers — Tepeu the Sovereign and Q’uq’umatz the Plumed Serpent, with Heart of Sky, the storm-power called Huracan, over them. They take counsel and speak, and at the word the mountains rise and the earth comes dripping out of the sea. But the makers want more than a populated world; they want beings who will name them and keep their days. The animals cannot — they only howl and squawk — and so the makers try to fashion such beings, and fail, twice. They shape people of wet mud, and the mud will not hold; it crumbles and dissolves and cannot remember its makers. They carve people of wood, and these walk and speak and multiply, but they are hollow, without hearts or minds or gratitude, and the makers unmake them in a flood, while the very tools and animals of their thankless households rise and take revenge. Only at the third attempt, in the place called Paxil where white and yellow maize were found, is the right substance discovered. The grandmother Xmucane grinds the corn, and from the dough are formed the flesh and the blood of the first true people — humankind made of maize, which is for the Maya the literal stuff of the body, the grain that is ground and eaten and that walks. This is not metaphor inside the frame of the tradition. The first people are maize because people are maize.

The temple of Tohil at Q’umarkaj, drawn by Frederick Catherwood and published in John L. Stephens, “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan” (1841). Public domain.

The Hero Twins and the road to Xibalba

Between the failed creations and the maize people, the Popol Vuh sets its great central tale, the matter that fills more of the book than anything else: the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The Maya had been telling and painting it for centuries before the K’iche’ set it in letters; on the vases and stuccos of the Classic lowland cities the same scenes appear — a hero raising a blowgun at a great bird, the young maize-god rising from a cracked shell attended by two youths — so that the book lets the older images at last be read. The K’iche’ version is the fullest verbal account of a story the whole of Maya civilization carried.

It begins with the twins’ fathers, ballplayers whose noise on the court disturbs the lords of the underworld below. That underworld is Xibalba, the place of fright, a damp and corrupted kingdom beneath the earth ruled by lords whose names are the diseases and indignities of the body — One Death and Seven Death the greatest among them. The lords summon the fathers down, defeat them at a rigged game, and sacrifice them, hanging the head of one in a barren calabash tree, which at once fills with fruit shaped like skulls. A daughter of one of the lords comes to look; the skull spits into her hand; she conceives, and bearing the twins, climbs to the surface of the earth.

The twins grow up tricksters and hunters with their blowguns, and their first great deed sets the order of the sky straight: they bring down Seven Macaw, a glittering bird who in the false dawn before the true sun had set himself up as both sun and moon, demanding a worship he had not earned. Then they go down the long road to Xibalba to finish their fathers’ business. The descent is the heart of the book. They survive the river of blood and the crossing where the roads divide; they outwit the seated dummies 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, the House of Bats, where a death-bat takes Hunahpu’s head. They beat the lords at the ballgame, and at last they turn death itself into their weapon: disguised as wandering performers who can kill a thing and bring it back to life, they let themselves be killed and return, and they entice the two great lords of death to demand the same — and kill them, and do not bring them back. With the lords of Xibalba broken, the twins rise out of the underworld into the sky to become the sun and the moon, the lights by which the next world, the world of the maize people, would be measured. The jaguar-sun’s nightly passage through the underworld and his rising again at dawn is, for the Maya, this victory renewed each day.

The book does not end there. It carries the K’iche’ lineages out of the darkness, through the receiving of fire from Tohil, the long migration, and the building of the citadel, to the first true sunrise — when the gods who had walked among the people turned to stone in the morning light — and it closes with the genealogy of the ruling houses, traced lord by named lord from the four maize men down to the families who held Q’umarkaj when the Spanish came. The same word that drew the earth out of the sea runs unbroken to the lords of the council mat. The Popol Vuh is at once a creation, a sacred history, and a charter of rule.

The fall of the citadel

In the winter of 1523 to 1524 a captain of Hernán Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, came south into the highlands from conquered Mexico with a small force of Spaniards and a far larger army of Nahua and other allies. The K’iche’ met him on the Pacific piedmont and again on the plain below Quetzaltenango. The K’iche’ had never seen horses; the cavalry charge broke them. The tradition remembers that their war-leader fell in this fighting — the captain the K’iche’ name Tecun Uman, who, the stories tell, went into battle in the green feathers of the quetzal, his spirit-companion the quetzal bird itself, and was killed by Alvarado on the plains near Quetzaltenango on the twelfth of February, 1524. The documentary record is thinner than the legend: Alvarado’s own letter to Cortés says only that in the fighting one of the four chiefs of the city of Utatlán was killed, the captain general of all that country — and whether the named hero of tradition stands behind that line is debated among historians. What is not in doubt is the defeat. Tecun Uman was declared the national hero of Guatemala in 1960, and the day of his death is marked each year.

The end of the kingdom came at the citadel itself. The K’iche’ lords invited Alvarado into Q’umarkaj; he, fearing an ambush in the ravine-girt town, encamped outside, summoned the rulers Oxib-Keh and Beleheb-Tzy on a pretext, seized them, had them burned, and then put the city to the torch. The plastered plaza, the temple of Tohil, the council houses, the round shrine of the feathered serpent — the seat from which the maize fathers’ descendants had ruled the highlands — were left in ruin. Over the following century the cut stone was carried off to build the colonial town of Santa Cruz del Quiché beside it, and Q’umarkaj fell to the rubble cores and grass-covered mounds that stand there now.

A living people

The kingdom fell; the people did not vanish. Through the colonial centuries the K’iche’ endured as one of the largest of the Maya nations, holding their language, their lineage towns, and the count of the sacred days. The very writing-down of the Popol Vuh in the 1550s, and its recopying for a century and a half, was an act of a community that meant to keep itself. The daykeepers who read the calendar in the Classic and colonial highlands have their successors still; the day-keeping the great book describes did not die with the conquest. Today the K’iche’ number well over a million people — by some counts more than a million and a half — the largest single Maya group in Guatemala and the speakers of the most widely spoken Mayan language. The Popol Vuh is read in their schools and claimed as the founding book of their literature.

That endurance was tested with particular cruelty within living memory. During the long Guatemalan civil war, in the early 1980s, the army’s counterinsurgency campaign fell hardest on the highland Maya, the K’iche’ among them. A “scorched earth” operation razed hundreds of villages; a United Nations-sponsored truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification, found after the war that acts of genocide had been committed against Maya communities, and documented that the great majority of the war’s victims were Maya. The toll across the conflict ran into the scores of thousands killed and disappeared. This is the recent factual record, soberly stated: a campaign against a people, falling on the descendants of the maize fathers in the same cold mountains.

Out of that decade came the voice for which the K’iche’ are widely known today. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, born in 1959 to a poor K’iche’ family in the department of Quiché, lost members of her family to the violence and carried the testimony of her people into the world. In 1992 — the year that marked five centuries since the European arrival in the Americas — she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples,” the first indigenous person and, at the time, the youngest person to receive it. The choice of that year was deliberate. At the quincentenary of the conquest, the prize went to a daughter of one of the peoples the conquest had set out to break, and had not.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the K’iche’ Maya human-rights activist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Photo by Freddyballo, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

To stand in the grand plaza at Q’umarkaj now is to stand among low grassed mounds where the temple of Tohil once rose, with the pine ridges around and Santa Cruz del Quiché, built of the citadel’s own stone, a short way off. The site is no dead ruin. K’iche’ daykeepers still come to its plaza and its caves to burn copal and keep the count, the same ground their lords held when the horsemen came. The book that should have burned with the rest was set in letters in the town below; the people who should have ended with their kingdom number their millions and read it; and the gods who turned to stone at the first sunrise are addressed yet, in the cold mountains, in the language of the men made of maize.

→ Related: Popol Vuh · The Yucatec Maya · The Itza · Maya Civilization · Maya Long Count Calendar · Tikal · Palenque · Chichen Itza · Lacandon Maya · Copan · Quirigua · Calakmul · El Mirador · Uxmal · Divination · Sacrifice Ritual · Deity · Soul · Reincarnation