Popol Vuh: The Maya Book Where Gods Made Humans Four Times

The K'iche' Maya book of creation, where the gods make humans four times and then blur the vision of the ones who saw too much.

The Popol Vuh is the sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya. Its gods try to make humans from animals, mud and wood before succeeding with maize, then cloud the maize people's too-perfect sight.

The Popol Vuh, the "Book of the Council" or "Book of the Mat", is the great sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala. It was written in the K'iche' language using Latin letters around the 1550s, apparently to preserve an older hieroglyphic book. The only surviving copy was made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez around 1701, and is now in the Newberry Library in Chicago.

The gods, Heart of Sky and the makers in the primordial sea, try several times to create beings who will speak and honor them. Animals cannot speak their names. People made of mud crumble and dissolve. People of wood have no hearts or memory, and are destroyed by a flood; the survivors become monkeys. Between creations comes the long adventure of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who defeat the lords of Xibalba, the underworld.

Finally the gods make four men from maize dough. These first people are too good: they see everything, far and near, through the sky and the earth. The gods decide this makes them rivals and cloud their eyes, so that they see only what is close, like breath fogging a mirror. Wives are then made for them, and they become the ancestors of the K'iche' lineages.

Scholars value the Popol Vuh as the most complete Maya mythological text and trace many of its scenes on Classic Maya pottery a thousand years older. For readers interested in human origins, its most striking idea is deliberate limitation: humans built to a high standard, then downgraded by their makers on purpose.