Maya Mythology

All of this comes from one book. The Popol Vuh was written in K'iche' in the Latin alphabet by K'iche' nobles in the Guatemalan highlands around the 1550s. It says it is copied from an older Popol Vuh, but that hieroglyphic original has never been seen by anyone, and the text states outright that it is being written down now under the law of God, within Christendom. The K'iche' manuscript is lost; every modern translation goes back to the two-column transcript made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in Chichicastenango around 1701-1703 (Newberry Library, Ayer MS 1515). How much the creation-by-speech and the flood that wipes out a whole race owe to Genesis is still argued over, and the men who wrote the book had certainly read it.

This is also not 'the Maya creation myth'. Maya means some thirty languages across three thousand years, and this is one late text from one of them. Classic-period inscriptions frame things differently: Quiriguá Stela C records the setting of three hearthstones at the Three-Stone-Place on 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u (about 3114 BCE under the GMT correlation), which opens the current era. The Popol Vuh has no Long Count and no founding of an era by stone-setting; the three hearthstones that do appear in it are the ones that leap out of the fire at the wooden people. The Yucatec Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel has the sky falling, the world flooded, and the four Bacabs propping up the corners, which is another story again.

The seams inside the book are left showing here. The Hero Twins rise into the sky as sun and moon before the maize people exist, yet the maize people and the tribes then sit in darkness waiting for the first sunrise; and Seven Macaw calls himself the sun at a time when there is nobody to see him. The stages follow the order the book itself gives, without smoothing. Spellings follow the Ximénez-Recinos tradition (Gucumatz, Xmucane, Balam Quitzé); modern K'iche' orthography writes Q'uq'umatz, Xmukane, B'alam Ki'tze'.