Hunahpu

Hunahpu is one of the Hero Twins, with his brother Xbalanque, whose exploits form the central narrative of the Popol Vuh, the great K'iche' Maya book of creation preserved in a colonial-era manuscript. In the story the twins, skilled ballplayers, are summoned to the underworld Xibalba by its lords, who resent the noise of their game, and there they undergo a series of deadly trials in houses of gloom, cold, jaguars, fire and bats; by wit and self-sacrifice they defeat and outwit the death-lords, avenging their father Hun Hunahpu, and are finally raised into the sky, in the common interpretation as the sun and the moon (or Venus).

The Hero Twins are far older than the sixteenth-century Popol Vuh text: figures matching them, and scenes of the ballgame and of the twins with their blowguns, appear on Classic-period Maya painted ceramics centuries earlier, showing that the myth was a long-standing part of Maya tradition and not merely a colonial composition. Hunahpu is thus both a character of a preserved indigenous book and a deep-rooted figure of ancient Maya religion.

Hunahpu's own story in the Popol Vuh cannot be fully understood without the generation before him: his father, Hun Hunahpu, and his uncle, Vucub Hunahpu, were themselves ballplayers summoned to Xibalba by the underworld lords, tricked and defeated there, and killed, with Hun Hunahpu's severed head hung up in the branches of a calabash tree, where it miraculously transformed into a gourd-like fruit indistinguishable from the tree's others.

When a young woman of the underworld named Xquic, daughter of one of the Xibalba lords, comes to the tree out of curiosity and reaches for the fruit, the head spits into her outstretched hand, and through this act alone, without ordinary conception, she becomes pregnant with Hunahpu and his twin brother Xbalanque. Driven out of the underworld once her pregnancy becomes known, Xquic travels to the surface world and is eventually taken in by her dead husband's mother, and the twins are born and raised on earth, initially treated poorly by their grandmother and older half-brothers before their prodigious skills, especially at the ballgame that had doomed their father, begin to reveal their true nature. The whole cycle, the father's death, the miraculous conception from a severed head, and the sons' eventual triumph over the same underworld lords who killed their father, gives Hunahpu's own trials in Xibalba the weight of a generational reckoning as well as a personal test, since in defeating the lords of death he and his brother are avenging a father neither of them ever knew, completing a debt opened a full generation earlier.