Huracan

Huracan, also called Heart of Sky, is a Maya creator god of wind, storm and fire named in the Popol Vuh of the Kiche Maya. He is a threefold deity, a single power manifest in three lightning-aspects whose names are given as Thunderbolt Huracan, Newborn Thunderbolt and Sudden (or Raw) Thunderbolt, three flashes of the one god, an early instance of a deity conceived as three-in-one. He dwells in the sky and works through the storm and the lightning-stroke. His name is the source, through Spanish and the Caribbean, of the English word hurricane, carried into European languages from the great storms of the region.

In the Popol Vuh's creation narrative, Huracan works together with Gucumatz, the Kiche form of the Feathered Serpent, deliberating in the darkness before the world existed and bringing forth land, mountains and, eventually, human beings, largely through the spoken word, an act of creation by speech that gives the Kiche account its own version of a widespread ancient theme. The Popol Vuh itself survives only through a single manuscript, a Kiche-language text transcribed alongside a Spanish translation around 1701 by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez from an earlier document, now lost, that had itself been written down in the Latin alphabet by literate Kiche nobles sometime after the Spanish conquest, so that Huracan's fullest surviving myth rests on a chain of transmission running through colonial-era Guatemala rather than on any surviving pre-conquest original text.

In the creation account of the Popol Vuh, Huracan, the Heart of Sky, together with the Feathered Serpent Gucumatz (the Sovereign Plumed Serpent), brings the world into being. At the beginning there is only the still sky and the calm sea, and the gods, in the darkness and the water, take counsel together and simply speak: at their word the earth rises from the sea, the mountains and valleys are formed, and the forests and their creatures come into being.

The creation of humankind, however, takes several attempts. The first beings, made of mud, dissolve; a second race, carved of wood, can move and multiply but have no minds, no memory of their makers and no proper worship, and so Huracan sends a great flood and a rain of resin, and monsters and even their own tools and animals turn against them, to destroy them, and the surviving remnant, tradition says, became the monkeys. Only later are true human beings successfully made, from maize. Huracan is thus both the storm that destroys and the creative power whose word calls the world into existence, the Heart of Sky whose lightning is at once the terror of the tempest and the flash of the creating mind.