The Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya "Council Book," tells of the gods' repeated attempts to create beings able to speak their names and keep their calendar. Wild animals could not speak. Beings shaped from mud dissolved and crumbled. Beings carved from wood looked human but had no blood, no memory and no gratitude toward their makers, and were destroyed in a flood and by the very animals and household objects that turned against them, the survivors becoming monkeys. Only the fourth attempt, humanity formed from white and yellow maize dough, succeeded, giving the K'iche' their own account of successive, flawed creations answering the same question this atlas tracks across every tradition that tells of ages that failed before the present one held.
Facts
Origins
Held ByThe K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands. The narrative survives through the Popol Vuh, a colonial-era manuscript in the K'iche' language, rather than through any earlier hieroglyphic text that has been recovered. 1 Historical OriginThe surviving Popol Vuh was set down in the K'iche' language using the Latin alphabet by K'iche' nobles in the mid sixteenth century, drawing on earlier oral and pictorial tradition that predates the Spanish conquest of the Guatemalan highlands. The K'iche' original is lost; the earliest text to survive is a Spanish Dominican friar's early eighteenth century transcription and translation. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Position Profile
Key TextPopol Vuh, part one, which precedes the book's account of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque and its later dynastic history of the K'iche' lords. 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeThis K'iche' highland narrative is textually and culturally distinct from the much older Long Count creation date recorded on Classic period lowland Maya monuments, conventionally correlated to 11 or 13 August 3114 BCE. Scholars caution against treating the Popol Vuh's mythic creation sequence and the Classic Long Count's calendrical starting point as a single unified Maya cosmology; they come from different regions, different eras and different kinds of sources. 2 Structure
StructureFour attempts at creation, in order: animals, who could not speak and so were condemned to be eaten; people of mud, who dissolved and could not stand; people of wood, mannikins who lacked blood, sweat, memory and gratitude, destroyed by a flood and by the revolt of their own animals and belongings, their survivors becoming monkeys; and finally people formed from white and yellow maize dough, the ancestors of the K'iche' themselves. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteHighland Maya conceptions of time recorded by ethnographers and historians of religion, including in Munro Edmonson's study, describe cosmic history as cyclical rather than a single line from a fixed beginning, consistent with the Popol Vuh's own account of an already repeated pattern of creation and destruction before the present age of maize people. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Corresponds To
Both are Mesoamerican accounts of a world already created and destroyed more than once before the present age, the K'iche' Maya and the Nahua Mexica traditions' own answers to the pattern of cyclical world-ages comparative religion traces widely.
Related To
Both are Americas doctrines of successive world ages ended by catastrophe and followed by a remade world: the Popol Vuh names failed prior creations that precede the present one, pachakuti names the recurring reversal that ends each Andean era in turn.
Sources
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