Guatemala
A world that was attempted, destroyed, and attempted again before it held.
The Popol Vuh records worlds that failed before this one. The first attempt at humans was of mud and it dissolved; the second was of wood, and those people were destroyed, broken, burned and scattered because they lacked memory and reverence and did not speak the names of their makers. Only the fourth, made of maize, survived and became the ancestors. The present world is the successful iteration of a process that had ended before, which makes the book a creation-and-destruction sequence rather than a single act.
The Hero Twins' descent into Xibalba, the underworld, and their defeat of its death-lords is the renewal won by cunning rather than catastrophe: they are killed and return, and the lords of death are themselves killed and cannot return. That victory sets the present order right after the failed earlier attempts, and it frames the current age as the one that held.
The manuscript is colonial K'iche', written down after the conquest but drawing on pre-contact narrative, and Tedlock's and Christenson's translations make the sequence available in full. The account is treated in The Popol Vuh and the Failed Creations, the regional scheme in Mesoamerican World Ages, and its Aztec counterpart in Five Suns. What Guatemala keeps is the Maya version of a world that did not end on the first try. The end-of-the-world story here is a longer sequence of attempts, each closed, before the one that held, and the survival of the maize people is the reason the story continues at all.
See also
- The Popol Vuh and the Failed CreationsThe K'iche' Maya account of creation as a series of failed endings: humanity is
- Mesoamerican World AgesThe Mesoamerican cosmos is a series of world-ages, each created, destroyed, and
- Five SunsThe Aztec myth of four worlds that have already ended in flood, fire, wind, and
- Mesoamerican EschatologyThe end-of-the-world imagination of the Maya, Aztec, and related peoples, built
- The Long Count and the Year Nothing HappenedThe most believed end of the world in history was built from a calendar reset th
Further reading
- Popol Vuh, ed. and tr. Dennis Tedlock · Simon & Schuster, 1985; from the colonial K'iche' manuscript The standard facing-page translation from the Quiché text.
- Popol Vuh, ed. and tr. Allen J. Christenson · University of Oklahoma Press, 2003 Second full translation with commentary on the creation sequence.
- Robert M. Carmack, Quichean Civilization: The Ethnohistoric Record · University of California Press, 1973
- Munro S. Edmonson, The Book of the Year: Middle American Calendrical Systems · University of Utah Press, 1988