Popol Vuh

The Quiche (K'iche') Maya of the west central Guatemalan highlands produced (ca. 1555) one of the more impressive works of literature written to date by a Native American author or authors (it is not known whether its creation was an individual or collective effort). Often called the "American Bible," it is a Mayan description of the creation and evolution of the world; in Quiche it is called the Popol Vuh (Counsel Book).

The work presents the history of the universe in Mayan terms. There are four Mayan cycles of creation, in each of which the gods attempt to produce worshippers for themselves. When they finally succeed, they find they have made man.

The mythology of the Quiche Maya was greatly influenced by their neighbors, and quite particularly by the Nahuatl-speaking peoples, from about the twelfth century on, when the Nahuas infiltrated Guatemala. The resulting Popol Vuh was thus a multicultural product.

The work is nonetheless clearly cognate with the emerging dynastic histories of the Classic Maya on stone monuments, depicting a patrilineal monarchy remarkably similar to that of the ancient Near East and its European successors.

The last creation and, particularly, the last few pages of the Popol Vuh are historical. They constitute a genealogy of the Quiche kings from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and they allude to (but do not always circumstantially describe) prevailing customs of that period.

The Popol Vuh is the single most important native source for interpreting the history and culture of pre-Columbian America. This text, which was not published until the nineteenth century, has aroused the interest of ethnographers, historians, novelists, and practitioners of New Age spirituality. Of special note is the ethnographic work of the Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias on the Popol Vuh and Guatemala in the 1920s and 1930s, which inspired his award-winning novel Hombres de maiz (1949; Men of Maize, 1975).

See alsoAnnals of the Cakchiquels; Ball Game, Pre-Columbian; Chilam Balam; K'iche'; Maya, The; Mayan Epigraphy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Munro S. Edmonson, The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala (1971).

Dennis J. Tedlock, The Popol Vuh (1985).

Additional Bibliography

Chávez, Adrián I. Pop Wuj: Libro de acontecimientos: Traducción directa del manuscrito del padre Jiménez. Mexico City [?]: Ediciones de la Casa Chata, 1979.

Powell, Timothy B. "Recovering Precolonial American Literary History: 'The Origin of Stories' and the Popul Vuh. In A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Preble-Niemi, Oralia. "The Popol-Vuh and the Heroic Cycle in Men of Maize." In The Image of the Hero in Literature, Media, and Society. Edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Colorado State University-Pueblo, 2004.

Recinos, Adrián. Popul vuh: Las antiguas historias del Quiché. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1947.

Uzquiza, José Ignacio. "Relato del Popol Vuh, libro mágico de los mayas-quiché." In La palabra recuperada: Mitos prehispá nicos en la literatura latinoamericana. Edited by Helena Usandizaga. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2006.

Ward, Thomas. "Expanding Ethnicity in Sixteenth-Century Anahuac: Ideologies of Ethnicity and Gender in the Nation-Building Process." MLN 116:2 (March 2001), 419-452.

                                    Munro S. Edmonson