Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya, a people of the Guatemalan highlands. It tells how the world was made, how the Hero Twins outwitted the lords of the underworld, and how the first true humans were finally shaped out of maize dough. It also traces the K'iche' royal families down to the writers' own day, which is part of why it was written at all.

The moment of writing was a dangerous one. In 1524 the Spanish captain Pedro de Alvarado conquered the K'iche' kingdom, and in the decades that followed missionaries destroyed Maya painted books because they saw them as idolatry. Around 1550, somewhere near Santa Cruz del Quiché, a small group of K'iche' nobles did something clever. They took the Latin alphabet the friars had taught them and used it to write their own language, setting down the old story in secret so it would survive the loss of the painted originals. The text itself refers to an earlier book that the writers say they no longer have, which is why scholars think they were working from an older screenfold manuscript and from memory.

That first alphabetic manuscript has never been found. Around 1701, a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez, serving in the town of Chichicastenango, was shown it by his parishioners. He copied the K'iche' text and added a Spanish translation in parallel columns. His copy is the only reason we can read the book today. It sat largely unread for over a century, then reached Europe in the 1850s, and the French scholar Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg published a translation in 1861 that made the book famous.

Since then it has become the most widely read text of ancient America. Archaeologists noticed that scenes painted on Maya pottery from a thousand years earlier show the same twins, which means the story is far older than the manuscript. It shaped the work of Guatemalan writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias, and for K'iche' communities today it remains a living account of who they are. Ximénez's copy now rests in the Newberry Library in Chicago.