Xibalba: The Maya Underworld

Xibalba — pronounced roughly “shee-BAL-ba” and translated as the “Place of Fright” or “Place of Fear” — was the underworld of the ancient Maya. It lay beneath the surface of the earth, a dark and dangerous counterpart to the bright world of the living. According to the Popol Vuh and the inscriptions of the Classic period, Xibalba was a stratified realm of nine descending levels, ruled by a council of demonic lords, and crossed by rivers of blood and pus. It was not a final destination in the Christian sense; it was the place where the dead were tried, where the maize god was imprisoned, and from which ancestors could be conjured back to the world of the living.

The place of Xibalba in the cosmos

The Maya cosmos was vertically organized into thirteen heavens above, the middle world of humans, and nine underworlds below. This structure is documented in the Dresden Codex and in the architecture of sites such as Chichen Itza, where the Castillo pyramid’s nine terraces represent the nine levels of Xibalba and its four staircases represent the four cardinal entrances. Each level of the underworld was associated with a specific nocturnal deity, the so-called “Lords of the Night,” and the lowest level was the throne room of the supreme lords, sometimes called the Great Xibalba.

Xibalba was not a place of eternal punishment in the way Christian theology describes hell. It was a place of testing, and the trials that the dead underwent there were the moral and physical equivalents of the trials the sun undergoes every night. The dead, like the sun, might emerge transformed. The Popol Vuh describes how, after four years, the dead reach a place where they “are received with great ceremony and given their face.” Yet the lords of Xibalba were also the bringers of disease, drought, hunger, and sudden death, and fear of them pervaded everyday life.

The lords of Xibalba

The underworld was ruled by a council of twelve lords, often described in the Popol Vuh as a series of paired “judges.” The most prominent were:

• Hun Came (“One Death”) and Vucub Came (“Seven Death”) — the supreme lords.
• Xiquiripat and Patan — the bringers of swelling and pus.
• Cuchumaquiqui and Chamiabak — the bringers of bloody diarrhea and vomiting.
• Ahalpuh and Ahalgana — the bringers of pus in the legs and jaundice.
• Chimi and Xmucuri — the bringers of cold, sorrow, and headaches.

Together they were called the “Lords of Xibalba” and were known for their skill in deception. They used the ballgame to lure humans into the underworld, where they could be killed. The lords were not always evil: they were the executors of the cosmic order, and the death they dealt was a necessary part of the cycle. Yet the Popol Vuh repeatedly describes their arrogance, their jealousy of the fame of humans who played the ballgame, and their cruelty in torturing their victims.

The geography of Xibalba

Xibalba was reached through a series of natural portals — caves, cenotes, deep ravines, and ballcourts. The journey involved crossing several rivers:

• The river of blood.
• The river of pus.
• The river of blackness.
• The river of yellow water.
• The river of red water.
• The river of jade.

Each river tested the dead, and anyone who failed to show courage was hurled into them. The geography of Xibalba is closely paralleled in the geography of the modern Maya underworld, as recorded in colonial and modern ethnography: deep caves, swift rivers, and the cold mists of the highland forests.

The deepest level of Xibalba was the “throne room” of the lords, where the Hero Twins performed their final act of magic. The Popol Vuh describes the throne of Hun Came and Vucub Came as being set on a platform, with two of the testing houses arranged around it. The architecture of the underworld was understood to be a darker mirror of the architecture of the surface world, and Maya kings sometimes tried to replicate it in the layout of their courts.

The houses of testing

The dead were subjected to a series of trials in the “houses” or testing chambers of Xibalba, each designed to test a particular virtue or skill:

The Popol Vuh describes how the Hero Twins survived these tests through magic, trickery, and resilience. Their father and uncle, the first Hero Twins, failed them and were killed.

The Xibalba ballgame

The ballgame was the defining contest of the underworld. The lords of Xibalba invited the great ballplayers of the upper world to play in their court, where the rules were rigged and the deaths of the losers were preordained. The first Hero Twins, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, accepted the invitation and were defeated; Hun Hunahpu was decapitated and his head hung in a calabash tree.

The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, accepted a similar invitation, but they used magic to survive the tests and to trick the lords. After their death and resurrection, they defeated the lords by appearing as itinerant magicians who could cut a man in half and bring him back to life — and then, when invited to demonstrate on a lord of Xibalba, they did not bring him back. The surviving lords, recognizing that they had been outwitted, conceded defeat.

The Xibalba ballgame is the structural model for the Mesoamerican ballgame generally. The Classic Maya ballcourt, with its sunken playing alley, vertical stone rings, and underground passages, was a symbolic re-creation of the Xibalba court.

The maize god and Xibalba

A central role of Xibalba in Maya cosmology is that it was the place where the maize god — the divine patron of human food — was held. The Popol Vuh tells how, after the death of the first Hero Twins, the maize god was hidden in the underworld, and humans on earth had no maize to eat. A series of mythic animals — the fox, the coyote, the parrot, and the crow — were sent down to Xibalba to bring the maize god back. The Hero Twins, the Popol Vuh continues, finally brought the maize god back from Xibalba and resurrected him. With maize, the third creation of humans was possible.

This myth explains why maize was understood as a substance of the underworld, brought up to the surface through the effort of the gods. The maize god, who is also the pre-eminent ancestor of the Maya royal lineage, is closely related to Hun Hunahpu, the father of the Hero Twins.

Sacred portals to Xibalba

The Maya recognized numerous portals to Xibalba in the natural landscape. Caves, cenotes, and chasms were the most obvious. The Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, a natural sinkhole about 60 meters across and 35 meters deep, was one of the most famous. Edward H. Thompson dredged it in the early twentieth century and recovered gold, jade, copper bells, ceramic vessels, obsidian, animal bones, and the remains of sacrificial victims — including, in his controversial interpretations, both children and adults.

Other important cave and cenote portals include the Cave of Bolonchen in Yucatan, the Balankanche cave near Chichen Itza, the Aktun Tunichil Muknal in Belize, and the many cave sites in the Peten lowlands. The most sacred of all was probably the entrance to the ballcourt itself, where the rings represented the mouths of the underworld and the players reenacted the cosmic struggle.

Xibalba in Classic Maya iconography

Xibalba is represented in Classic Maya art through the imagery of the Jaguar God of the Underworld, the night aspect of the sun, and the “starry deer crocodile,” a long-bodied creature with celestial markings. The glyph for the underworld is a half-circle with internal markings representing the dark, enclosed space below the earth; it appears in the inscriptions of the Late Classic period and in the Dresden Codex eclipse tables, which refer to the descent of the moon and the sun into Xibalba during eclipses.

The sarcophagus lid of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal at Palenque, one of the most famous works of Maya art, depicts Pakal falling into the open maw of the underworld at the moment of his death. He is suspended above the skeletal jaws of the underworld, with the celestial bird above him and the skeletal fish below — a clear visual statement of the journey of a dead king into Xibalba.

Xibalba in the modern Maya world

The underworld is not a vanished concept. Modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala and Yucatan retain elaborate beliefs about the spirits of the underworld and the places where they dwell. The “lost souls” of folk Catholicism often have pre-Hispanic antecedents in the lords of Xibalba, and the rituals of All Saints’ Day and Day of the Dead in many Maya villages include offerings to the lords of the underworld, sometimes in the form of small altars set in caves or at the mouths of cenotes. The contemporary Maya priesthood includes specialists who communicate with the dead, and the burning of copal at the household altar is in part an invitation to the ancestors to return from the underworld.

Caves, cenotes, and the modern cult of Xibalba

The modern cult of Xibalba is most fully developed in the highland Maya communities of Guatemala, where cave pilgrimage is an annual ritual obligation. The Maya town of Santiago Atitlán, the K’iche’ town of Chichicastenango, and the Q’eqchi’ communities of the Polochic valley all maintain sacred caves that are understood to be entrances to the underworld. The caves contain altars, burned copal, and the remains of candles and other offerings; they are visited by cofradía officials and by daykeepers on the appropriate days of the 260-day almanac.

The annual cycle of cave pilgrimage is closely tied to the agricultural calendar. The caves are visited before planting, after harvest, and at the time of the New Year. The daykeeper’s prayer at the cave is a prayer for rain, for fertility, and for the renewal of the cosmic order. The water in the cave — sometimes a sacred cenote, sometimes a slow-moving underground stream — is the “water of Xibalba,” the source of the fertility of the milpa. The cross-shaped ceiba tree at the mouth of the cave is the axis mundi, the central point of the cosmic order.

The colonial and modern traditions of the underworld have been extensively studied. The work of the Mexican anthropologist Alfredo López Austin (Los mitos del tlacuache, 1990; Cuerpo humano e ideología, 1980) has been particularly important in connecting the pre-Hispanic and modern traditions. The work of the Guatemalan scholar Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj has documented the persistence of the cult of Xibalba in the highland communities of Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango. The work of the American anthropologist June Nash has documented the cult of the underworld in the highland Maya communities of Chiapas.

Related pages

• Maya Religion, Mythology, and Cosmology
• The Popol Vuh: Maya Creation Myth
• Who Are the Hero Twins in Maya Mythology?
• What Is Xibalba, the Place of Fear?
• Principal Maya Gods and Deities
• Maya Rituals: Bloodletting and Sacrifice
• Maya Writing, Language, and Books

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