K'iche' Maya

The Popol Vuh is the fullest surviving account of creation from anywhere in the Maya world, and it is K'iche'. It was set down in the K'iche' language using Latin letters in the middle of the sixteenth century, copied at the beginning of the eighteenth by the Dominican Francisco Ximenez at Chichicastenango, and survives only in his manuscript, now held at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Its narrative runs in two movements. The gods make the world and attempt humanity more than once, from mud and then from wood, and both failures are described as failures of speech and memory, because the made beings cannot name their makers. Between the attempts stands the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are summoned to Xibalba, the underworld, are tested in its houses of cold, of knives and of bats, and defeat its lords by allowing themselves to be killed and then returning. Maize is what humanity is finally made from, which places the staple crop and the substance of the human body in one category.

The last section is genealogy and history, tracing the K'iche' lineages and their rule in the highlands. Dennis Tedlock's translation works from that structure and from his own study with contemporary K'iche' daykeepers, arguing that the text is not a dead document but a book read alongside a calendar still being counted.

The K'iche' were the dominant highland power before the Spanish arrived, ruling from Q'umarkaj, called Utatlan by the Nahuatl speaking allies of the invaders. Robert Carmack's study reconstructs that kingdom from archaeology, from colonial land titles and from the Popol Vuh's own dynastic sections, and describes a state built by lineages claiming an eastern origin. Pedro de Alvarado burned the town in 1524, and the conquest of the highlands followed.

What survived the conquest most intact was the calendar. The 260 day count, the cholq'ij, has been kept continuously in the western highlands, and the ajq'ijab, the daykeepers, are the specialists who count it, name the days, read questions with tz'ite seeds, and conduct ceremonies at hilltop and cave altars. The office is held by both men and women and is entered through a calling that is diagnosed rather than chosen.

Catholicism arrived with the conquest and was made local through the cofradias, the lay brotherhoods that hold the saints and finance their fiestas. The result is less a compromise than two calendars running in parallel in the same towns. The Guatemalan armed conflict of the later twentieth century fell most heavily on these communities, and the work of the daykeepers has been part of the recovery from it since.