Xibalba

Xibalba, the "place of fear", is the underworld of the Maya, and it is known in unusual narrative detail thanks to the survival of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya, which recounts the great myth of the Hero Twins and their descent into it. In that account Xibalba is ruled by twelve sinister Lords, gods of death, disease, decay, and misfortune with names like One Death, Seven Death, Blood Gatherer, and Pus Master, who summon mortals down through a treacherous road (past rivers of blood and scorpions) and subject them to deadly ordeals in a series of test-houses: the Dark House, the Razor House, the Cold House, the Jaguar House, the Bat House full of shrieking death-bats, and more.

The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, descend to avenge their father, and through cunning, resilience, and self-sacrifice they survive the houses, outwit and finally defeat the Lords of Death, and rise to become the sun and the moon, a mythic victory that breaks the absolute power of death over humanity. Xibalba thus embodies the Maya vision of the underworld as a realm of dread and trial, but the Popol Vuh frames it within a story of triumph: death is real and terrible, yet it can be faced, outwitted, and overcome, and from the descent into it comes the ordering of the heavens.

Everything narrative that is known about Xibalba comes through one document. A Dominican friar, Francisco Ximenez, working in highland Guatemala at the beginning of the eighteenth century, copied out a K'iche' text in the Latin alphabet and set his Spanish translation beside it. That manuscript, after a long journey through private hands, is now in the Newberry Library in Chicago. No earlier written copy survives.

The text is therefore late, mediated by a missionary, and produced by K'iche' authors already writing under colonial rule, and every one of those facts affects how it should be read. What makes it more than a colonial curiosity is that the images in it are much older. Painted vases and carved monuments of the Classic period, some more than eight centuries before Ximenez, show the Hero Twins, the ballgame, the underworld lords and episodes recognisable from the narrative.

That correspondence is one of the better-attested cases of continuity in Mesoamerican studies. It means the story was in circulation long before the manuscript, that the manuscript preserves something real, and that the ball court, which is a physical structure at hundreds of sites, was not only a game. Xibalba is a place reached by playing, and the field is in the middle of the town.