Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya - Mesoweb

describe the creation of all things as if it were occuring in the immediate present, time folding
back upon itself to transport the reader into the primordial waters of chaos at the very
moment the first land emerged:
THIS IS THE ACCOUNT of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm.
Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky.... The face of the earth has not yet appeared.
Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet
anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. (Popol Vuh, p. 67)
This passage is written in present progressive tense, suggesting that the narrator sees it
before him as he writes. This is consistent with the way stories are told in contemporary
Quiché households. The storyteller invites the listener to imagine the setting of his tale, and
nearly always tells the story as if it were happening right then, even if it happened in the
distant or mythic past.
The text of the Popol Vuh was kept hidden by indigenous elders for centuries in the town
of Chichicastenango in Guatemala. So successful were these efforts to preserve early Colonial
texts that two hundred years after the Conquest, a Spanish priest living in Chichicastenango
named Francisco Ximénez wrote that the people of that town possessed many ancient books,
including the manuscript of the Popol Vuh. Ximénez wrote that these books were kept in
secret so that local Christian authorities would not learn of them. Far from being forgotten
tales, he found that these texts were “the doctrine which they first imbibed with their
mother’s milk, and that all of them knew it almost by heart” (Ximénez 1929-31, I.i.5).
Ximénez was able to convince the elders who kept the Popol Vuh manuscript to allow him to
borrow it for the purpose of making a copy.
After Ximénez made his copy, the original text was presumably given back to the Maya
although it has not been seen since the early 1700s. Today we, in the Western world, know of
this great book only through Ximénez’s transcription, which has become one of the principal
resources used by European and American scholars who study Maya history and theology. It
is unfortunate, however, that the great majority of Maya people have not had access to it for
centuries in their own language. Literacy has slowly eroded away among the contemporary
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