Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (63 page)

The Holy Bible of Judaism and Christianity is a book of Creation, a list of divinely ordained rules and rituals and a foundation history of the Hebrew people, which includes a list of ancient Israel’s many legendary and real kings. Perhaps most important, the Bible is believed to be the word of God.

The Mayan Popol Vuh is a book of Creation, a list of divinely ordered rules and rituals and a foundation history of the Mayan people, which gives the Mayan kings a heavenly mandate and links them to a list of legendary rulers. Perhaps most important, the Popol Vuh was believed to be the word of the gods.

So, the Bible and the Popol Vuh have some things in common. Both books were the sacred texts at the core of their culture’s religious traditions. Both were written down by scribes only after centuries of oral transmission. Both contain poetic accounts of Creation and grim stories of death and destruction. Yet, most people have never heard of the Popol Vuh. There aren’t Popol Vuh study courses offered in most local colleges. Or pamphlets with scriptural excerpts from the Popol Vuh. Or concordances published for easy referencing of the Popol Vuh. To a significant degree, the book is a well-kept secret.

Once again, we have the Spanish conquerors to thank. After their arrival in the Americas in the 1500s, the Spanish—as many conquerors do—prohibited the use of the Mayan and other native languages and began to enforce the use of Spanish and Latin as the common vernacular. Of course, Catholicism became the official—and, presumably, only—religion wherever the Spanish went. And wholesale “culturecide” began to take place. In an introduction to his English translation of the Popol Vuh, scholar Dennis Tedlock describes the Spanish approach to destroying a culture: “Backed by means of persuasion that included gunpowder, instruments of torture, and the threat of eternal damnation, the invaders established a monopoly on virtually all major forms of visible public expression, whether in drama, architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. In the highlands, when they realized that textile designs carried complex messages, they even attempted to ban the wearing of Mayan style clothing.” (Oh, those terrible Spanish. But just remember, in America you can be thrown out of a shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt with a message the authorities don’t like. And the French banned the head scarves worn by Muslim girls in public schools. Clothing is, and always has been, a form of spiritual, cultural, and political expression.)

During the mid-sixteenth century, working secretly and anonymously, Mayan priests and clerks who had been taught Latin translated copies of the old hieroglyphic Mayan books into Latin. They also began to blend Catholicism in with their own religious beliefs, merging the two much the way the African practitioners of Santeria and voodoo did in the Caribbean. Around 1700, a Latinized version of ancient Mayan texts was discovered by a Franciscan priest in a Guatemalan town. Instead of destroying the book—which is what happened to most ancient Mayan and Aztec hieroglyphic writings—the priest translated it into Spanish and added the names of some of the Spanish governors of Guatemala to the lists of Mayan kings. Maybe the priest thought this addendum would keep him out of ecclesiastical hot waters if his heresy was ever discovered.
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This, then, is how the Popol Vuh survived. Coming down from Mayan scribes who valued the “ancient word” over the “preaching of God” forced on them by the Spanish, the Popol Vuh is a rare and important source, although one that is clearly filtered through the Spanish colonial era.

Divided into five parts and a little over one hundred pages long in English, the Popol Vuh begins with a Creation account in a world that has only an empty sky above and a sea below. Central to this Creation narrative are two groups of gods, one from the sea and one from the sky, who decide to create the earth, plants, and people. The role of the people, interestingly, is to praise the gods and provide them with offerings. The first people the gods make have no arms and can only chatter and howl—so they become the first animals. A second try produces a being made of mud, which cannot walk or reproduce and which dissolves into nothing. After consulting a wise old divine couple, the gods make a third attempt and create people out of wood. But the results are only slightly improved. The wooden people can speak and reproduce, but they prove to be very poor at praying and providing the requisite offerings.
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The god Huracan—a name appropriated by the Spanish and transformed into the word “hurricane”—decides to do away with the wooden people with a flood, and he sends a gigantic rainstorm along with terrible monsters to attack them. The people are destroyed, but some manage to survive in the jungles and become the ancestors of the monkeys.

After this round of botched human creation, the Popol Vuh shifts to a long, complex, and admittedly bizarre narrative account of the Maya’s two sets of semidivine national heroes, the twins One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, and another set of twins, named Hunahpu and Ixbalanque—the slayers of demons who defeat the gods of the underworld. The extraordinary adventures of these two sets of twins have all the makings of a modern hit video game. A heroic quest into a multilevel underworld filled with demons with names like Scab Stripper, blowguns, monsters, deadly bats, and frequent decapitations all occupy the center of the elaborate Mayan tales described in the Popol Vuh. (
Which gods like a good ball game?
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Who were the Mayas who produced the Popol Vuh?

Peeking inside the Popol Vuh raises the question—how did the civilization that produced this extraordinary book evolve?

The simple answer is “farming.” Civilization in Mesoamerica—the area now known as southern Mexico and much of Central America—began when people shifted from hunting-gathering to farming. Creating small villages in clearings in the rain forest, the first farmers of Mesoamerica raised tomatoes, peanuts, avocados, tobacco, beans, squashes—many plants and foods unknown in Europe until Columbus carried them back. But these farmers’ most important crop was maize, which evolved from a tamed wild grass. Commonly known as corn, maize would become the staple of the Mesoamerican diet, feed its herds and support large populations.
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By about 1700 BCE, improved farming techniques were producing maize in surplus quantities—an economic necessity for developing a more advanced civilization.

The first major Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs, had settled along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in what is now Veracruz and Tabasco, around 1500 BCE. Clearly poised to achieve great things, the Olmecs created, within a few hundred years, a fairly sophisticated society with temples, pyramids, a single ruler, and a powerful religion-based culture that spread throughout Mesoamerica. One of their distinguishing accomplishments were the great carved heads of supernatural beings and animal deities produced out of large basalt stones that weighed up to 36,000 pounds (16,300 kilograms). These massive stone blocks had to be transported more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) through difficult terrain, without benefit of the wheel or large draft animals, and were most likely rafted on rivers. Discovered at Olmec sites at La Venta in Tabasco and San Juan Lorenzo in Veracruz, five of these colossal heads can now be seen at an outdoor park in La Venta, and others are displayed in museums, including the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City and the Veracruz Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa.

The Olmec religion, sculpture, and other arts would significantly influence all the later Mesoamerican groups, including the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Mayas. Eventually producing cities with towering pyramids and broad plazas centered mostly in Guatemala and southern Mexico, Mayan civilization, new research shows, began to reach a level of complexity as early as 150 BCE—much earlier than previously thought—and reached the peak of its development about 200 CE, then continued to flourish in a “classic period” for hundreds of years, declining around 900 CE.

Although not an empire in the usual sense, the Mayas formed a loose collection of about ninety city-states, with several different languages. But theirs was one of the first cultures in the Americas to develop an advanced form of writing, a hieroglyphic picture-language that was used to record the sacred texts. The Mayas also made great strides in astronomy and mathematics, developed an accurate yearly calendar, and produced remarkable architecture, painting, pottery, and sculpture. By about 900 CE, for reasons unclear, most of the Mayas abandoned the cities of the Guatemalan lowlands. Invasion and changing climates may have been the cause, but some of the Mayas moved south and others north, to the Yucatán Peninsula. There, between 900 and 1200 CE, the city of Chichén Itzá grew into the largest and most powerful Mayan city.

Like all Mayan cities, Chichén Itzá was a religious center with a temple where a priestly class resided and served the needs of surrounding rural populations. Each day, priests performed the daily sacrifices and rituals. Farmers from nearby villages would come to the city to attend regular festivals that included dancing, competitions like the ball game (see below), dramas, prayers, and sacrifice. Sometimes these sacrifices involved ordinary foods. But human sacrifices were also demanded to appease the gods.

Governed by a council of nobles, Chichén Itzá dominated Yucatán with a combination of military strength and control over important trade routes until it declined around 1200. For the next two hundred years, the Yucatán was divided by civil wars, and the Mayas later merged with the Toltecs, a warrior group that moved in from northern Mexico. In the early 1500s, the Spanish invaded the Mayan territories, and by 1550 had overcome almost all the Mayas, enslaving those who survived on the large-scale plantations they began to build.

Which gods like a good ball game?

Finally, a myth that every red-blooded sports fan can love! It involves a ball game. Today, people often speak of the mythic accomplishments of certain athletes—like Babe Ruth’s prodigious home runs promised to a sick boy. But great athletes were actually a part of the Mayan mythology. Along with other Mesoamericans, the Mayas passionately played a sport that takes center court—literally—in the Popol Vuh.

The Mayan sport, simply called “the ball game,” was more than just a game. Combining ritual elements with Super Bowl–level excitement, the sport was played on a ball court with two walls. The largest such court found in the ancient Mayan world is at Chichén Itzá and measures 140 by 35 meters (approximately 153 by 38 yards, or longer and narrower than a typical international soccer field or American football field). The courts featured two steeply sloping parallel stone walls inset with round disks or rings set high on the walls at right angles. Two teams competed in a contest to pass a rubber ball through such a ring. Other versions of the game included markers that could also be hit to score points. The game was probably invented by the Olmecs, who were the first to cultivate the rubber tree and whose name came from Aztec and meant “the people who use rubber.”

Sounds easy—like basketball. But the tricky part was that the ball couldn’t touch the ground, and had to be hit off the walls, using only the elbows, knees, or hips. A single score—or the ball touching the ground—usually ended the match. So, winning must have been difficult—but losing was even harder. “Sudden death” in this ball game could be literal, since the leader of the losing team sometimes became a sacrificial victim. It didn’t happen at every ball game but often enough, as human sacrifice was essential in the Mesoamerican religions. And modern professional coaches think they are under a lot of pressure!

The central importance of the ball game is underscored in a story in part 3 of the Popol Vuh, in which two different sets of heroes are very good “ball players,” who play an “under-World Series” with the gods of death.

The first set of twins, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu (their names are actually dates from the elaborate Mayan calendar), are playing ball one day, but the noise of their game annoys the lords of Xibalba (hell), One Death and Seven Death, who invite the brothers to the underworld for a game. Among the other lords of the Mayan underworld are the charmingly named Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Demon of Pus, and Demon of Jaundice. When the twins arrive and play the game, the lords of hell flat out cheat, kill the brothers, and decapitate them—losing heads is a recurring theme in the Popol Vuh.

One twin’s head is placed in a tree as a warning not to mess around with the lords of hell. But Blood Moon, the daughter of Blood Gatherer, is fascinated by the head and is even more surprised when it speaks to her. The head tells the girl to put out her hand, and then spits on it. This makes Blood Moon pregnant. Her father is so angry that he calls for her sacrifice. But she conspires with the messengers sent to sacrifice her to use a false heart, just as in the story of Sleeping Beauty, when the hunter who is supposed to kill her offers an animal heart as proof instead. Blood Moon seeks out her mother-in-law on earth, where she gives birth to the hero twins, Hunahpu and Ixbalanque.

It is clear from the start that these twins are magical, because they grow up fast, are unusually expert hunters, and can perform all sorts of miracles, like killing monsters. One day they discover their father’s ball-playing equipment and decide to play. Like their father and uncle before them, they disturb the gods of Xibalba and are summoned to the under-world and given a series of challenges by the lords of hell. Unlike their ancestors, however, these twins are able to outwit the lords of hell. Supreme tricksters, they meet every challenge put to them. At last, they are placed in a Bat House. A bat swoops down and beheads Hunahpu, and his head is used as the ball in the next ball game. But Ixbalanque switches his brother’s head with a squash, and Hunahpu is restored to life. When the lords of death realize they have been tricked yet again, they decide to burn the twins.