What Is the Popol Vuh and Why Does It Matter?

The Popol Vuh is the single most important literary source for ancient Maya religion and mythology. Written in the K’iche’ (Quiché) language of highland Guatemala, it tells the story of creation, the defeat of the underworld gods, and the origin of the K’iche’ people. Because the great majority of Maya books were destroyed by the Spanish and their allies, the Popol Vuh is also the only continuous narrative of pre-Hispanic Maya religion that has survived to the present. Its importance for understanding the religion, mythology, and cosmology of the ancient Maya can hardly be overstated.

The text itself

The Popol Vuh — translated variously as the “Book of the Council,” the “Book of the People,” or the “Book of the Community” — is a K’iche’ document that combines creation mythology, heroic legend, and dynastic history. The text was almost certainly composed in the highland Guatemalan town of Chichicastenango, in the years around or just after the Spanish conquest. The single surviving manuscript is a copy made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in the early eighteenth century. Ximénez was parish priest of Chichicastenango and a student of the K’iche’ language; he transcribed the K’iche’ text, added a Spanish translation, and included the whole in his Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala.

The manuscript then passed through several hands, was found in the archives of the Universidad de San Carlos by the abbé Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and was published in Paris in 1861. Since then it has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, and many other languages. The standard English translation, by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley (1950), was followed by important new editions by Munro Edmonson (1965, 1971) and Dennis Tedlock (1985, 1996).

A summary of the narrative

The Popol Vuh is divided into four parts. The first tells the story of the creation of the world. In the beginning, only the sea and the sky existed. The first gods — the Plumed Serpent Gukumatz, the Heart of Sky (Huracan), and the divine grandparents Xpiyacoc and Xmucane — met and brought forth the earth, the plants, the animals, and finally, the first humans. The first humans, made of mud, dissolved. The second, made of wood, were destroyed by a flood and turned into monkeys. Only the third, made from maize dough, survived. From these first true humans — Balam Quitzé, Balam Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqui Balam — descended the K’iche’ noble lineages.

The second part of the book is the story of the first Hero Twins — Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu — and their defeat at the ballcourt of the lords of Xibalba. Hun Hunahpu, the senior twin, is decapitated, and his head is hung in a calabash tree. A daughter of one of the lords, the virgin Xkik’, approaches the tree and conceives twins from the spittle of the head.

The third part tells of these twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the second Hero Twins. They grow up as trickster-youths, defeat the arrogant bird-god Vucub Caquix, and accept the challenge of the ballgame in Xibalba. They survive the tests of the House of Gloom, the House of Knives, the House of Cold, the House of Jaguars, the House of Fire, and the House of Bats, only to be killed and resurrected. They then reappear as wandering magicians and perform a feat in which they cut a man in half and bring him back to life. When the lords of Xibalba invite them to perform the trick on a lord, the twins do not bring him back. The lords are defeated, and the twins rise into the sky as the sun and the moon.

The fourth and final part returns to the third creation. The first four men are made, their vision is limited, and they found the K’iche’ lineage. The book concludes with a list of the K’iche’ lineages and the founding of their capital, Q’umarkaj.

Why the Popol Vuh matters for understanding Maya religion

The Popol Vuh matters for at least four reasons.

First, it preserves the pre-Columbian myth cycle in narrative form. The Classic-period inscriptions of Tikal, Palenque, and Yaxchilan record the names of gods and the dates of rituals, but they do not give the kind of extended narrative that the Popol Vuh provides. The Popol Vuh is therefore the only way we have to understand the meaning of the imagery of the Hero Twins, the Vision Serpent, and the lords of Xibalba as a connected story.

Second, the Popol Vuh’s themes appear directly in Classic Maya iconography. The Hero Twins appear on the Bonampak murals and the Yaxchilan lintels. The ballgame is depicted on hundreds of Classic-period vessels. The Popol Vuh’s myth of creation is paralleled by the famous San Bartolo murals at Tikal, dated to 100 BCE or earlier, and by the carvings of Palenque. The fact that the K’iche’ text and the Classic-period images match in so many details demonstrates the antiquity of the story.

Third, the Popol Vuh provides a window onto the late Postclassic and early colonial K’iche’ state. The fourth part of the book is a dynastic history of the K’iche’ lineages and the founding of Q’umarkaj, and it preserves the names of pre-Columbian rulers, the locations of towns, and the structure of the K’iche’ league. The Popol Vuh is therefore both a religious text and a historical document.

Fourth, the Popol Vuh is still a living text in the highland Maya world. The prayers of the daykeepers, the rituals of the cofradías, and the ceremonies of the New Year draw on themes and phrases from the Popol Vuh. The 260-day Tzolk’in calendar used by modern Maya daykeepers is the same calendar that structures the Popol Vuh’s mythology.

The Popol Vuh and Francisco Ximénez

Francisco Ximénez (1666–1729) is the unsung hero of the Popol Vuh’s preservation. A Dominican friar who worked in the parishes of highland Guatemala, Ximénez was one of the first Europeans to master the K’iche’ language. He recognized the antiquity and value of the K’iche’ text that was circulating in Chichicastenango, transcribed it carefully, and added a Spanish translation. He then included the text in his unpublished history of the Dominican province, where it remained hidden in the university library for more than a century.

Ximénez’s transcription is not perfect — the K’iche’ text contains some errors of interpretation, and the Spanish translation is sometimes a paraphrase rather than a strict rendering. Nevertheless, his work preserved a text that would otherwise almost certainly have been lost, and he is the principal reason that the Popol Vuh is known at all.

Comparative context

The Popol Vuh is one of several Mesoamerican creation texts, and it shares themes with the Aztec Codex Quetzalecatzin, the Mixtec Codex Vindobonensis, and the central Mexican story of the five suns. The descent of the Hero Twins to Xibalba parallels the central Mexican journey of Quetzalcoatl to Mictlan. The creation of humans from maize is paralleled in many Mesoamerican traditions. The Popol Vuh is, in other words, both a Maya text and a Mesoamerican text.

The structure of the cosmology — thirteen heavens, nine underworlds, the directional color scheme, the central place of maize — is shared with the rest of the Maya world and is documented in the Dresden Codex and the inscriptions.

The afterlife of the text

The Popol Vuh continues to inspire artists, scholars, and religious practitioners. Rigoberta Menchú’s 1992 Nobel Prize lecture cited the Popol Vuh as a foundational text of Maya civilization. The Guatemalan theater group Teatro Maya and the Mexican director Humberto Musacchio have produced theatrical versions of the text. The Popol Vuh is taught in highland Maya schools as a foundational cultural document, and the daykeepers of Chichicastenango and Santiago Atitlán still use the K’iche’ text in their rituals.

A more detailed study of the Hero Twins and the Xibalba myth cycle appears in the related pages. The longer treatment of the text as a whole can be found in The Popol Vuh: Maya Creation Myth.

Sources

Freidel, D., Schele, L. & Parker, J. (1993). Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. William Morrow. — link
Miller, M. E. & Taube, K. A. (2001). An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. Thames & Hudson. — link
Taube, K. A. (2010). Maya Deities and the Place of Vision: A Workbook on Maya Iconography. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press. — link
Tedlock, D., trans. (1996). Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings (rev. ed.). Touchstone. — link
Edmonson, M. S., trans. (1971). The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala. Tulane University, Middle American Research Institute Pub. 35. — link
Bassie-Sweet, K. (2002). Corn From the Heavens: The Sacred Geography of the Ancient Maya. University of Texas Press. — link
Aveni, A. F. (2001). Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press. — link