The work divides into four parts. The first opens on a world of sky and still water and the gods who deliberate over it, and turns at once to a problem: the gods want beings who will speak, count the days and keep them in mind, and they fail three times. Animals are made first and cannot speak. A creature of mud is made and dissolves. A people of carved wood is made and multiplies, but has no memory and no reverence, and is destroyed by flood and by a revolt of its own possessions, the grinding stones, the pots and the dogs turn on it. The survivors of that third humanity become monkeys.
The second and third parts belong to the twins. Seven Macaw, a vain bird who claims to be the sun and the moon in a world that has neither yet, is brought down by Hunahpu and Xbalanque, along with his two sons who claim the earth and the mountains. The twins then take up the story of their father and uncle, summoned to the underworld, Xibalba, for the noise of their ballplaying and killed there. The twins are summoned in turn, survive the houses of trial, cold, jaguars, fire, bats, blades, outplay the lords at the ballgame, allow themselves to be killed and return, and finish Xibalba by trickery.
Only then, in the fourth part, does the successful creation happen, out of maize ground and mixed by the grandmother goddess. The first four men see too far and too well, and their sight is dimmed. The remainder of the fourth part leaves myth for history: the migration of the Kiche lineages, the acquisition of their gods and their titles, and the genealogy of the ruling houses down to the sixteenth century, ending with the names of men alive when it was written.