The Hero Twins in Xibalba

The Popol Vuh tells how the ballplayer twins Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, playing too noisily above the underworld realm of Xibalba, are summoned below by its lords, tricked through a sequence of deadly trial houses, and killed; Hun Hunahpu's severed head is hung in a calabash tree, where it spits into the hand of a passing underworld maiden, Xquic, and impregnates her. Fleeing to the surface world pregnant, Xquic gives birth to a second generation of twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who grow up skilled ballplayers themselves and eventually, after recovering their dead father's ballgame equipment, are summoned to Xibalba in turn by its lords, annoyed at the game's renewed noise.

Unlike their father and uncle, the younger twins survive the same sequence of trial houses, the Dark House, the Razor House, the Cold House, the Jaguar House, the Fire House, and the Bat House, through cleverness and careful preparation rather than being caught unaware, though Hunahpu briefly loses his head to a bat in the last of these before Xbalanque restores it.

The ballgame itself is not incidental to the conflict: the Mesoamerican ballgame carried deep cosmological significance across the region, frequently associated with the movement of celestial bodies and with contests between the forces of life and the underworld, so that the twins' repeated confrontations with Xibalba over noisy games read as a recurring cosmic contest rather than a simple dispute between neighbors.

Having survived the trial houses, the twins are subjected to a final series of tests and traps, including a rigged ballgame, from which they escape by cunning each time. In their decisive move against the death lords, the twins allow themselves to be burned to death voluntarily, have their bones ground and scattered in a river, and are then reborn from the water, first as catfish-like beings and then as wandering performers whose act includes sacrificing and reviving each other and other animals. Invited to perform this trick before the delighted lords of Xibalba themselves, the twins sacrifice one lord and then, when the others beg to experience the same trick, refuse to revive them, finally defeating the death gods by the same means the gods had used to kill their father.

Having avenged Hun Hunahpu, though without fully restoring him to life, the twins ascend into the sky, becoming the sun and the moon in most tellings, or the sun and the planet Venus in some readings favored by researchers working from the correlated Dresden Codex Venus tables. Dennis Tedlock's translation, working directly with a K'iche' interpretive tradition rather than treating the sixteenth-century manuscript as a self-sufficient text, is the standard modern English edition used to reconstruct the sequence summarized here.