Biblexika

Popol Vuh

mythologykiche-maya~1554-1558 CE (based on older oral tradition)

Translation: Lewis Spence (1908) (public-domain)

Overview

The Popol Vuh ('Book of the Community' or 'Council Book') is the K'iche' Maya epic of creation and heroic origins, the most important surviving text of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican literature. Written down in the K'iche' language using the Latin alphabet between roughly 1554 and 1558 CE, shortly after the Spanish conquest, by anonymous K'iche' scribes who preserved an ancient oral and hieroglyphic tradition, it is often called the 'Mayan Bible' for its foundational religious and cultural importance. The original manuscript was discovered and translated by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in the early 18th century; the original has since been lost.

The Popol Vuh narrates the creation of the world in multiple attempts, the defeat of the underworld lords by the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the successful creation of humanity from maize, the migration and origin of the K'iche' people, and their royal genealogy down to the time of the Spanish conquest. It synthesizes cosmogony, myth, heroic adventure, and historical chronicle in a manner characteristic of Mesoamerican textual culture.

The text is characterized by a distinctive rhetorical style of paired and parallel phrases ('in darkness, in night-time, by Night Jaguar, by Night Wind') that reflects both the oral performance tradition and the structural worldview of Maya thought, in which reality is understood through couplets and complementary oppositions. This poetic parallelism is one of the features that most immediately connects the Popol Vuh to Hebrew biblical poetry, which also relies heavily on the parallelism of ideas and phrases.

Bible connections
  • Genesis 1-3
  • Genesis 6-9
  • John 1:1-3
  • John 6:35-51
  • John 12:24
  • 1 Peter 3:18-20
  • Revelation 21:13
Key terms
Xib'alb'a– The Maya underworld — the realm of death and disease whose lords the Hero Twins defeat
K'iche'– The highland Maya people of Guatemala whose tradition the Popol Vuh preserves
Huracán– 'One-Leg' or 'Heart of Sky' — one of the creator deities, whose name became the word 'hurricane'
ajq'ij– A K'iche' Maya daykeeper or ritual specialist who maintains the sacred calendar tradition
ballgame– The Mesoamerican sacred ballgame that the Hero Twins play — connected to the movement of celestial bodies
maize theology– The theological framework in which human life is made from and sustained by corn, the sacred grain
Did you know?

The word 'hurricane' derives from Huracán, one of the K'iche' Maya creator gods in the Popol Vuh whose name means 'one-leg.' The creator deity associated with wind and storm gave his name to the most destructive storms of the Caribbean through the encounter between Maya civilization and European explorers.