Xibalba

Primary source

• Dennis Tedlock (trans.), Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, rev. ed., 1996, Simon & Schuster / Touchstone; first edition 1985. p. 253 n. 92 for Andres Xiloj's remark, reached here through Christenson's note 239 (p. 102), which supplies that reference. Tedlock's volume was not consulted directly for this entry. Moyes separately quotes Tedlock 1996, 138, for the Twins' sentence.The origin of the swept-house remark in this entry's Light, which Christenson attributes to Tedlock's collaborator Andres Xiloj at this reference. Also the translation Moyes quotes when she reads broken cave offerings against the Popol Vuh.
• Allen J. Christenson (trans.), Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, 2003, Mesoweb electronic edition 2007 (mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf), read in full for this entry. Its page numbers print as HEADERS in the top right corner, so marker N stands ABOVE the text of page N and the printed number equals the 1-based PDF page (verified with pdftotext -bbox: on PDF page 101 the token '101' sits at yMin 36pt, above the first body line at yMin 72pt). Christenson's own cross-references inside the notes use his print pagination, which does not match - note 431 on p. 173 cross-refers to 'pp. 132-133' for a passage standing here at p. 118. Xib'alb'a glossed Place of Fear, with the modern K'iche' usage, note 231, p. 100; the lords and their dominions, pp. 101-103; Andres Xiloj on the swept house, note 239, p. 102; Ruth Bunzel's Chichicastenango prayer, note 243, p. 103; the owls' recital of the lords' names, p. 106; the descent - steps, Trembling and Murmuring Canyons, Scorpion, Blood and Pus Rivers, the four coloured roads - p. 107; the father and uncle defeated by the wooden effigies and the heated bench, p. 108; the catalogue of five trial-houses, p. 110, with 'These are merely the names of each of the houses of trial' at the top of p. 111; the mosquito and the roll-call, pp. 148-150; Blade House p. 154, House of Cold and Jaguar House p. 157, House of Fire and Bat House p. 158, Hunahpu decapitated by the death bat p. 159; the killing of One Death and Seven Death, p. 172; the sentence on Xibalba, p. 173; the narrator's verdict and note 436, p. 174; the caves the book does name - the wooden people p. 75, the cave beneath Meauan p. 92, Tulan Zuyva p. 195.Xib'alb'a glossed as Place of Fear, 'the Quiche name for the underworld, ruled by lords of death and disease', with Christenson's note that modern Quiches still use the word for an underground hell inhabited by demons who cause sickness (note 231, p. 100). The lords called the great judges, each given his task and dominion by One Death and Seven Death: sickening the blood (Flying Scab, Gathered Blood), swelling with pus and jaundice (Pus Demon, Jaundice Demon), reducing people to bones and skulls (Bone Staff, Skull Staff), overtaking those who leave sweepings and trash about the house (Sweepings Demon, Stabbings Demon), and sudden death on the road (Wing, Packstrap) - pp. 101-103. The count of twelve rests on two places. At p. 106 the owls recite twelve names and the text adds 'For these are the names of all the lords'; at p. 150 exactly twelve are hailed by name. The two lists are not identical - the roll-call has Bloody Teeth and Bloody Claws where the dominions list and the owls' recital have Sweepings Demon and Stabbings Demon - and Christenson's text nowhere prints the numeral. A checker following the mosquito's bites at pp. 148-149 will count to 'the fourteenth one seated there' because the first two seated are the carved wooden effigies, not lords. The road down, p. 107: steep steps, Trembling Canyon and Murmuring Canyon, Scorpion River, Blood River and Pus River, and a crossroads of four coloured roads where the Black Road calls to be taken - with no cave anywhere on it. The father and uncle defeated at p. 108 by greeting the carved effigies and sitting on the heated bench, and the Twins refusing both at p. 150. The five named trial-houses (Darkness, Shivering, Jaguar, Bat, Blade) at p. 110, which the text at the top of p. 111 says are merely the names of the houses, against the six the Twins actually enter - Darkness p. 150, Blade House p. 154, House of Cold and Jaguar House p. 157, House of Fire and Bat House p. 158 - the House of Fire being absent from the list. Hunahpu's head cut off by the death bat, p. 159, leaving the greater part of his body behind, and set atop the ballcourt. The mosquito that is really a hair plucked from the front of Hunahpu's knee, biting each lord so that each names the next, pp. 148-149. The killing of the two chief lords at p. 172 - 'He was dead then, this One Death'; 'But they didn't revive them' - which precedes any sentence. The sentence itself, pp. 173-174: offerings reduced to croton sap and worn-out griddles and pots, only flimsy and brittle things; the lords no longer able to seize suddenly just any person, but only the sinner and the malevolent; and the narrator's verdict, 'Surely they were not true gods' (p. 174), with note 436, that the Quiches believe the lords have power only over those who have truly committed punishable offences. Note 239, p. 102, recording Andres Xiloj's remark, taken from D. Tedlock 1996, 253 n. 92, that the best way to keep the demons of Xibalba away is to keep one's house swept clean. Note 243, p. 103, quoting a prayer Ruth Bunzel recorded at a shrine in the cemetery at Chichicastenango which invokes lords of sickness and pain, of death on the roads and trails, of vomiting, of fever and dysentery and of smallpox. And the caves the book does name, none of them Xibalba: the caves whose mouths close on the wooden people, p. 75; the cave beneath the mountain Meauan where Zipacna is crushed, p. 92; and the citadel Tulan Zuyva, called Seven Caves and Seven Canyons, p. 195.

Scholarship

• Barbara Mac Leod and Dennis E. Puleston, 'Pathways into Darkness: The Search for the Road to Xibalba', in Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers (eds), Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, vol. 4, 1979, pp. 71-77; read in full from the Mesoweb scan at mesoweb.com/pari/publications/RT04/Pathways.pdf, whose scanned pages carry their own numbering 1-8 rather than the volume's. The paper was delivered at the Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Palenque, 11-18 June 1978 - which is the date this entry's prose gives, and the date Moyes 2016 cites it under - and the volume was published in 1979 by Pre-Columbian Art Research / Herald Printers, Monterey, California, per PARI's own index to the reprint. Puleston died before publication. The character of the underworld is in the opening section, 'Ethnohistoric Sources on the Underworld'; the Belize cave material under 'Archaeology of Caves'; the Coe report under 'The Lowland Origin of Underworld Themes'; the darkness experiments in the closing pages, before the references.The 1978 argument itself: that the caves of the Caves Branch area in central Belize - with their killed vessels, cached pyrite mosaic mirrors and Oliva shells, and unaccompanied skeletal remains among which children about five years old are common - are the reality behind the Popol Vuh's road to Xibalba, and that the extensive lowland river caves suit the conception better than the difficult vertical caves typical of the highlands. Their statement that in Yucatan the underworld was Metnal; that the Popol Vuh's lords were not immortal and so may not have been deities in the usual sense; that their land was not unpleasant and dark, having night and day, trees, animals and maize; and that Landa's account of Metnal as a place where evildoers were tormented is most probably influenced by Christian belief, as are many ethnohistoric sources depicting the underworld as hellish against a celestial paradise. Their report that Michael Coe had demonstrated an important link between the Hero Twins' descent and much of the iconography of Classic period pottery from the Maya lowlands - their own statement, under 'The Lowland Origin of Underworld Themes', and the route by which this entry reaches Coe at all. And their closing proposal - built partly on the replication experiments MacLeod undertook in 1972 and 1973, in which the investigators imposed total darkness on themselves with the goal of forty-eight hours' isolation from time cues and reported synaesthesia and a strong disposition toward supernatural interpretation; the paper does not say which caves were used - that the trials in the House of Darkness may record rites actually administered to elite youth, and that Xibalba was part of a Maya cosmology that was actually experienced rather than only narrated.
• S. A. Gibbs, 'Human Skeletal Remains from Actun Tunichil Muknal and Actun Uayazba Kab', in Jaime J. Awe (ed.), The Western Belize Regional Cave Project: A Report of the 1997 Field Season, Department of Anthropology Occasional Paper 1, 1998, pp. 71-92, Durham. Reached here through Moyes 2016, n. 62 and pp. 183-184, which is where both the bibliographic details and the figures in this entry come from; the report itself was not consulted. Gibbs's MA thesis, An Interpretation of the Significance of Human Remains from the Caves of the Southern Maya Lowlands (Trent University, 2000), is cited by Moyes alongside it.The osteological analysis behind this entry's Shadow: the thirteen individuals Gibbs examined from the main chamber at Actun Tunichil Muknal, five of them children under three, none of them buried. Named in her own right because the Shadow attributes the examination to her, and because on this point Moyes is reporting Gibbs's findings rather than her own.
• Holley Moyes, 'Xibalba, the Place of Fear: Caves and the Ancient Maya Underworld', ARYS: Antiguedad, Religiones y Sociedades, vol. 14, 2016, pp. 171-190; DOI 10.20318/arys.2017.3990; open access at e-revistas.uc3m.es, read in full for this entry (the issue is dated 2016 and was posted in 2018). Metnal and the Yucatan, p. 173 with n. 5; MacLeod and Puleston's priority, and the 100 BCE dating, p. 174 with nn. 6, 7, 10; 'Though the Popol Vuh never mentions caves specifically', p. 175, opening the section headed 'Caves as Entrances to the Underworld'; the archaeologists who discount the underworld affiliation, p. 176 with nn. 19-20; Actun Tunichil Muknal, pp. 183-184 with nn. 62-63; the in-situ refitting and the Popol Vuh parallel, p. 185 with nn. 72-75. Michael Coe appears in this article exactly twice, both times as the source of a vase photograph (n. 32 and the Figure 5a caption) - checked, because this entry formerly attributed to Moyes a statement about Coe that is MacLeod and Puleston's.That the Popol Vuh never mentions caves specifically - stated under the heading 'Caves as Entrances to the Underworld', and so scoped to the route to Xibalba rather than to the whole book - and that B. MacLeod and D. Puleston were the first to argue that the ancient Maya conceptualised caves as entrances to the underworld. That Xibalba is the Quiche name for the netherworld while Maya peoples of the Yucatan peninsula call it Metnal. That some archaeologists, among them J. Brady and K. Prufer, have discounted the underworld affiliation of caves on largely highland Guatemalan ethnographic grounds, and that A. Scott holds there is likely considerable disjunction between those highland groups and the Classic period Maya. The main chamber of Actun Tunichil Muknal: over 500 m from the entrance, reached by traversing a river, dated by two almost identical AMS determinations calibrated to AD 710-950 and AD 720-960, holding fifteen skeletons and unarticulated bone that may represent a sixteenth; fourteen were located by the Western Belize Regional Cave Project and thirteen analysed by S. A. Gibbs, of whom five were children under three, two sub-adults and six adults; not one of the thirteen was buried, all lay on the cave's surface, and eleven of the fourteen were placed in intermittent pools. The in-situ refitting at that cave - no sherd more than 5 m from its fellows, sherds stacked in niches, refitted vessels invariably missing fragments - which is Moyes's own work there, with J. Brady's matching finding at Naj Tunich reported alongside it. And the dating claim carried in this entry's claim_source. Moyes's own reading of the fragmentary pattern against the Twins' sentence is cited here with a caution: she writes that the Twins 'decide to spare their lives', which is a loose summary of a scene that begins with One Death and Seven Death sacrificed and not revived (Christenson p. 172). This entry follows the primary text on that point.

Linked entries

• Part ofThe Popol VuhAttested

  Xibalba is the underworld of the K'iche' Popol Vuh, written between 1554 and 1558 and surviving only in Francisco Ximenez's parallel-column copy of the early eighteenth century. Christenson records the word still in use among K'iche' speakers for an underground hell of demons who cause sickness.

• Set againstThe Egyptian Book of the DeadAttested

  Egypt's spell 125 puts the dead before a tribunal and weighs the heart against the feather. Xibalba's lords hold court too, but the Popol Vuh convicts the court: their offerings are cut to broken pots and they may take only the guilty.

• Set againstEnūma ElišAttested

  Marduk destroys Tiamat and builds a world from her body. The Twins kill One Death and Seven Death and refuse to revive them, but spare the rest of Xibalba and only cut what may be given to it - the underworld is demoted, not abolished, and goes on receiving offerings of broken things.

• Set againstThe Descent of InannaAttested

  Inanna's road down is seven gates, each taking an ornament from her; Xibalba's is steps, two canyons, three rivers and a crossroads where the Black Road calls out to be taken. Both underworlds are reached by travelling rather than by dying. No transmission is claimed - the comparison is a reader's.