Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh belongs to the Kʼicheʼ people of Guatemala, one of the Maya peoples, who also live in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana Roo and in parts of Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. It is a foundational sacred narrative from long before the Spanish conquest, and its name translates as “Book of the Community” or “Book of Counsel”: literally the book that pertains to the mat, since a woven mat served as a royal throne in ancient Kʼicheʼ society and symbolized the unity of the community.

Its stories are far older than its text. Many versions of the legend of the Hero Twins circulated among the Maya peoples. Archaeologists, first of all Michael D. Coe, have found characters and episodes of the Popol Vuh on Maya ceramics and other objects, among them the Hero Twins, the Howler Monkey Gods and the shooting of Vucub-Caquix, and Richard D. Hansen found a stucco frieze at El Mirador with two floating figures that might be the Twins. Maya deities in the Post-Classic codices differ, however, from their earlier forms.

The text matters all the more because so few early accounts of Mesoamerican mythology survive: as part of the Spanish conquest, missionaries and colonists destroyed many documents.

The Popol Vuh covers creation, ancestry, history and cosmology. A preamble introduces Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, the purpose of the writing and the measuring of the earth. Book One tells of the creation of living beings: animals first, then humans, first of earth and mud, who crumbled, then of wood, who did not function well and were washed away in a flood and killed by animals; those who survived became monkeys. Vucub-Caquix then rises, and in Book Two the Hero Twins kill him and his sons, Zipacna and Cabracan, “restoring order and balance to the world.”

Book Three tells of the Twins' father and uncle, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, who are invited to Xibalba, the underworld, to play a ballgame with its lords, and who fail its trials and are put to death. Hun Hunahpu's head, placed in a calabash tree, spits in the hand of Xquiq and makes her pregnant; she leaves the underworld for her mother-in-law, Xmucane, and her sons, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, return to Xibalba, defeat its lords and become the sun and the moon. In Book Four humans are at last made from maize, given morality to keep them loyal and then wives; the book goes on to the movement of the Kʼicheʼ and introduces Gucumatz.

The making of mankind from white and yellow corn shows the crop's importance in Maya culture, and to the Classic Maya Hun Hunahpu may have represented the maize god.

The Popol Vuh was preserved through oral tradition until it was recorded in writing, approximately 1550. It is generally believed that Ximénez worked from a phonetic manuscript borrowed from a parishioner, a rendering of an oral recitation given in or around Santa Cruz del Quiché soon after Pedro de Alvarado's conquest of 1524; yet, as Néstor Quiroa points out, no such manuscript has ever been found. Comparing the closing genealogy with dated colonial records, Adrián Recinos and Dennis Tedlock suggest a date between 1554 and 1558. One theory, first proposed by Rudolf Schuller, names Diego Reynoso, a signatory of the Título de Totonicapán, as its writer; Don Cristóbal Velasco has also been proposed.

The preamble shows the colonial setting: “This we shall write now under the Law of God and Christianity”, it says, because the Popol Vuh “cannot be seen any more”. From this Munro Edmonson theorized a pre-conquest glyphic codex, of which no evidence has been found. A minority doubts that any text existed before Ximénez: John Woodruff notes that Ximénez never disclosed his source and suggests that he or another missionary made the first written text from an oral recitation.

Ximénez, a Dominican, came to Santo Tomás Chichicastenango in 1701 and translated the work between 1700 and 1715, writing the Kʼicheʼ phonetically with Latin and Parra characters beside a Spanish column.

Ximénez himself put the Spanish text into book one, chapters 2 to 21, of his Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la orden de predicadores, in or around 1714. The work reached Europe in the 1850s: Carl Scherzer, travelling with Moritz Wagner, found Ximénez's writings in the university library of Guatemala City in 1854, called one item “of the greatest interest” and, with the help of the historian Juan Gavarrete, copied and published the Spanish content of the manuscript's second half. Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg brought out another edition, and the division into a preamble and four books used by popular editions today is the one he imposed in 1861.

Since then the Popol Vuh has been translated into many languages. Adrián Recinos's Spanish edition remains a major reference, as does Delia Goetz's English translation of it; other English versions are by Victor Montejo, Munro Edmonson (1985) and Dennis Tedlock (1985, 1996), whose version builds on the commentary of a modern Kʼicheʼ daykeeper, Andrés Xiloj. Sam Colop (1999) and Allen J. Christenson (2004) published modern transcriptions and translations of the Kʼicheʼ text, Augustín Estrada Monroy a facsimile in the 1970s, and in 2018 The New York Times named Michael Bazzett's verse translation among the ten best books of poetry of the year.

Ximénez's manuscripts stayed with the Dominican Order after his death until General Francisco Morazán expelled the clergy from Guatemala in 1829–30, when the Order's documents passed largely to the Universidad de San Carlos. There, in 1855, Brasseur de Bourbourg came across the manuscript; whereas Scherzer had copied it, Brasseur apparently stole the university's volume and took it to France.

After Brasseur's death in 1874 his collection passed to Alphonse Pinart, through whom it was sold to Edward E. Ayer. In 1897 Ayer decided to give his 17,000 pieces to the Newberry Library in Chicago, a gift not completed until 1911, and Ximénez's transcription and translation was among them. It then sank into obscurity until Adrián Recinos rediscovered it there in 1941, though Munro Edmonson and Carlos López credit Walter Lehmann with a first rediscovery in 1928. Experts including Allen Christenson, Néstor Quiroa, Rosa Helena Chinchilla Mazariegos, John Woodruff and Carlos López consider the Newberry volume to be Ximénez's one and only original, and it is the only source for scholarly study of the text.

Ohio State University now offers a facsimile and transcription online, a project its stewards describe as repatriating the Popol Vuh.

The Popol Vuh remains an important part of the beliefs of many Kʼicheʼ. Catholicism is generally seen as the dominant religion, but some believe that many practise a blend of Christian and indigenous beliefs. Some of its stories are still told by modern Maya as folk legends, and versions recorded by anthropologists in the 20th century may preserve parts of the ancient tales in greater detail than the Ximénez manuscript. On August 22, 2012, the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture declared it intangible cultural heritage of Guatemala.

Since its rediscovery by Europeans in the 19th century it has drawn many artists. Diego Rivera painted watercolours to illustrate it in 1931; Edgard Varèse set words from it in Ecuatorial (1934); Alberto Ginastera began a symphonic work, Popol Vuh, in 1975 but did not finish it before his death in 1983. Madeleine L'Engle named the planet Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time (1962) after its bat-god, and Louis L'Amour based the myths of The Haunted Mesa (1987) largely on it. Werner Herzog used it as narration in Fata Morgana (1971), and the Munich band Popol Vuh, formed by Florian Fricke in 1969, took its name from it. Patricia Amlin made an hour-long animated film of the Hero Twins' tale.