THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Popol Vuh means "Book of the Council." It was set down in K'iche' using the Latin alphabet by K'iche' nobles in the Guatemalan highlands in the mid-16th century; the sole surviving copy, a two-column transcript made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez around 1701-1703 in Chichicastenango, is now held at the Newberry Library in Chicago. No fuller indigenous creation account survives anywhere in the Americas.
In the beginning there were only two things: the motionless sea and the empty sky. Gucumatz, the Plumed Serpent, lay in the water wrapped in quetzal feathers, conferring in the dark with Heart of Sky, Huracan, who is three in one - Thunderbolt, Newborn Lightning, Sudden Lightning. They spoke the word "Earth," and mountains rose out of the water like mist, cypress and pine spreading over them. The gods first made the animals and asked them to pronounce their makers' names; the beasts could only screech and bellow, and so were condemned to be one another's food. A first race molded from mud crumbled in water and talked without sense; its makers broke it apart themselves.
The gods then asked the old diviners Xpiyacoc and Xmucane to cast their red seeds and maize kernels, and on their word carved a race of wood. The wooden people looked human, spoke, and filled the earth, but they had no blood and no hearts and never remembered their makers. A rain of burning resin fell on them, beasts tore them, and their own possessions rose in revenge - the grinding stones crushed their faces, crying that they had been ground upon daily, while the dogs and turkeys settled their own scores. The survivors who fled into the trees became the monkeys of the forest.
At last the fox, the coyote, the parakeet, and the crow brought word of Paxil, a mountain filled with white and yellow maize. Xmucane ground the corn nine times and mixed it with water, and from that dough the gods formed four true men: Balam Quitzé, Balam Acab, Mahucutah, and Iqui Balam. Their sight was perfect and reached to the edges of the world; fearing rivals, the gods breathed on their eyes as breath clouds a mirror, and human vision has been short ever since. Four wives were given to them, and humankind multiplied in the darkness, waiting for the first sunrise.
