Mesoamerican Traditions
Book · the 1550s
The Popol Vuh
Saved in a Friar's Hand
It survives only through the mission sent to replace it: one friar's copy, the original long gone.
SignificanceThe gods make humans three times and fail — mud dissolves, wood has no memory, and only maize holds a mind that can speak and remember its makers. Human beings are read as the material that turned out to be capable of gratitude.
The FindingThe oldest surviving Popol Vuh is a Dominican friar's copy made between 1701 and 1704; what became of the K'iche' manuscript of 1554–1558 is unknown, and Christenson allows that it may still be at Chichicastenango, with village elders or in the town archive.
Place · the 1550s
Xibalba
Down the Black Road
The Popol Vuh's underworld: twelve lords of death and disease, a road of canyons and rivers, no cave on it.
SignificanceThe lords of Xibalba are defeated by being fooled, not by being fought: the twins let themselves be killed, come back, and trick death into asking for the same treatment. The underworld's power in this reading is beatable by anyone willing to go through it first.
The FindingThe Popol Vuh never puts Xibalba in a cave — its road is steep steps, two canyons, three rivers and a four-way crossroads — and the cave is Barbara MacLeod and Dennis Puleston's 1978 archaeological argument that the Maya entered the underworld through caves.
Practice · 3rd century BCE
The Aj Q'ij (Day-Keeper)
The Count Kept by People
Initiated K'iche' diviners who cast coral-tree seeds to read a day, in a count traced back 23 centuries.
What it isThe count is read in the body as well as in the seeds: the diviner attends to the blood's own twitching, which speaks. Days have character in the 260-day round, so the question is never what will happen but which day you are asking on.
The FindingThe date 21 December 2012 came out of the day-keepers: Thompson settled on the correlation constant 584283 in 1950 because it fitted the 260-day count anthropologists had found still running in the Guatemalan highlands.