The Hero Twins

The Popol Vuh gives the twins a father and an uncle who played ball too loudly above the underworld and were summoned down by its lords, One Death and Seven Death, who defeated and killed them. The father's severed head was hung in a calabash tree; it spat into the hand of Xquic, a daughter of one of the lords, who conceived and fled upward, and Hunahpu and Xbalanque were born. Before their own summons the brothers bring down Vucub Caquix, a great bird who had set himself up as sun and moon while neither yet existed, shot from his fruit tree by Hunahpu and stripped of his teeth and his eyes.

Summoned in their turn, the twins go down knowingly. They pass the river of blood and the crossroads, name the lords correctly instead of greeting wooden manikins, and survive a series of houses: the dark house, the razor house, the cold house, the jaguar house, the fire house and the bat house. In the last, Hunahpu is decapitated by Camazotz and his head hung over the ballcourt, and his brother contrives a substitute head so that play can continue until the real one is recovered.

They cannot be beaten and cannot be allowed to leave, so they arrange their own deaths, are burned and ground and thrown into the river, and come back first as catfish and then as travelling performers who dance, burn a house and restore it, sacrifice a man and revive him. The lords ask to be killed and revived themselves. The twins kill them and stop there. That is the end of the power of Xibalba over the living, and the ground is then clear for the making of people out of maize. The brothers then rise into the sky as its lights, Hunahpu as the sun and Xbalanque as the moon in most readings of the ending.

The Popol Vuh survives because a Dominican priest, Francisco Ximenez, copied an alphabetic Kiche text at Chichicastenango in the early eighteenth century and set a Spanish translation beside it. That manuscript is now Ayer MS 1515 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Kiche original he copied is lost, and the text he copied was itself written down between about 1554 and 1558 from something older, so the book stands at two removes from anything ever performed aloud.

Classic Maya art shows that the tradition is much older than any of that. Codex style vases of the seventh and eighth centuries carry paired young lords whose name glyphs are read as Hunahpu and Xbalanque, shown shooting a great bird out of a tree, attending the resurrection of the Maize God from a cracked turtle shell, and in scenes of decapitation and of the ballgame. The correspondences are close enough for the identification to be accepted, while the differences are real: the Classic material gives the Maize God a far larger part than the Popol Vuh does, and the fit between the two is a working reconstruction rather than a match.

That gap is the interesting part. A colonial period book in the Latin alphabet turns out to preserve, imperfectly, a narrative that painters knew eight hundred years earlier. The pottery is now read partly through the book, and the book is corrected by the pottery, which is an unusually direct case of two kinds of evidence holding each other up.