Xquic and the Calabash Tree

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Xquic's story opens the second half of the Popol Vuh's hero narrative. Hun Hunahpu and his brother Vucub Hunahpu have already been summoned to Xibalba and killed there, and Hun Hunahpu's severed head has been hung in a barren calabash tree as a warning. When Xquic, daughter of the underworld lord Cuchumaquic, comes to see the tree out of curiosity, the skull speaks to her and spits into her outstretched hand, telling her she will bear sons by this alone. She conceives without contact, and when her pregnancy is discovered her father orders the messenger owls of Xibalba to kill her and bring back her heart in a bowl. Xquic persuades the owls to spare her, offering them the red sap of the croton tree in place of her heart, which hardens into a substitute they carry back to the lords. Freed, she climbs to the surface world and finds Ixmucane, the grandmother of the child she carries, who at first doubts her story. Xquic proves it through a harvest sign, gathering a single stalk of maize into a full net through Ixmucane's own garden guardian spirit, and is accepted into the house. There she gives birth to Hunahpu and Xbalanque, setting up the second confrontation with Xibalba that ends in the underworld lords' defeat. Allen Christenson's translation and commentary trace how closely this scene mirrors Maya beliefs about conception, blood and maize as intertwined sources of human life.