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POPUL VUH “The Book of the People” Translated into English by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Griswold Morley from Adrián Recino’s translation from Quiché into Spanish Plantin Press, Los Angeles [1954, copyright not registered or renewed] Page 1 of 196 CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1. The Chronicles of the Indians 3 2. The Manuscript of Chichicastenango 7 3. The Author of the Popol Vuh 8 4. The Writings of Father Ximénez 9 5. The Translations of the Popol Vuh 16 A PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY 21 THE BOOK OF THE PEOPLE: POPOL VUH Preamble 34 Part I 38 Part II 64 Part III 126 Part IV 149 APPENDIX [a] A Note by Sylvanus Griswold Morley 191 [b] A Note by Adrián Recinos 192 [c] Paper Concerning the Origin of the Lords 195 Page 2 of 196 INTRODUCTION 1. The Chronicles of the Indians When the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards was completed, Hernán Cortés, who had heard of the existence of rich lands inhabited by a number of tribes in Guatemala, decided to send Pedro de Alvarado, the most fearless of his captains, to subdue them. In the sixteenth century, the territory immediately to the south of Mexico, which is now the Republic of Guatemala, was inhabited by various independent nations which were descended from the ancient Maya, founders of the remarkable civilization whose remains are to be found throughout northern Guatemala and western Honduras, in Chiapas, and in Yucatán, Mexico. Of the nations located in the interior of Guatemala, the most important and numerous, without doubt, were the kingdoms of the Quiché and of the Cakchiquel, rival nations which had often made war upon each other for territorial, political, and economic reasons, and which continually disputed with each other for supremacy. At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Quiché nation was the most powerful and cultured of all those that occupied the region of Central America. In 1524, when Alvarado attacked the Quiché, the Indians offered vigorous resistance, but after bloody battles they were forced to surrender before the superiority of the arms and tactics of the Spaniards. As a last desperate measure, the Quiché kings decided to receive Alvarado in peace at Utatlán, their capital. But once within its walls, the astute Spanish captain suspected that they were trying to destroy him and his army in the narrow streets between the fortifications, and so he withdrew to the surrounding fields and there seized the kings, condemned them to death as traitors, and executed them before their terrorized subjects. Then he ordered the city razed to the ground and the inhabitants scattered in all directions. When the conquest of the Quiché was completed, it is likely that a part of the inhabitants of Utatlán, especially members of the nobility and the priesthood, who had their houses in the capital and saw them disappear in the devouring flames, moved to Chichicastenango, the next town, which the ancient Quiché called Chuilá, or “place of nettles.” Later the Spaniards named this town Santo Tomás and entrusted its pacification to missionaries of the religious orders, who converted the inhabitants to the Roman Catholic faith and introduced them to the civilization of the Old World. In this way, Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, as it is still called, became an important center of the Quiché Indians, which prospered throughout the three hundred years of Spanish rule and which today is still one of the most industrious and extensive Indian communities of Guatemala and the Mecca of foreigners, who are strongly attracted by the natural beauty of the place and the picturesque dress and customs of its people. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Father Francisco Ximénez of the Dominican Order lived within the thick walls of the convent of Chichicastenango. Father Ximénez was a wise and virtuous man, who knew the languages of the Indians and had a lively interest in converting them to the Christian faith. It is probable that in his dealings with them, and through his help and fatherly advice, he had won their confidence and had succeeded in having them tell him the stones and traditions of their race. Ximénez, as I have said, was an accomplished linguist and, therefore, Page 3 of 196 had the advantage of being able to communicate with his parishioners directly in the Quiché language, concerning which he has left valuable grammatical studies. All of these favorable circumstances helped to overcome the natural distrust of the Indians, and it is probably due to this fact that, finally, the book which they so jealously guarded, and which contained the ancient histories of their nation, came into the hands of this Dominican friar. This document, written shortly after the Spanish Conquest by a Quiché Indian who had learned to read and write Spanish, is generally known as the Popol Vuh, Popol Buj, Book of the Council, Book of the Community, the Sacred Book, or National Book of the Quiché, and it contains the cosmogonical concepts and ancient traditions of this aboriginal American people, the history of their origin, and the chronology of their kings down to the year 1550. The name of its author and the fate of his original manuscript, which remained hidden for more than 150 years, are unknown. Father Ximénez, who found it in his parish at Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, transcribed the original Quiché text and translated it into Spanish under the title Historias del origen de los Indios de esta Provincia de Guatemala. This transcription, in the handwriting of this priest-historian, is still preserved; but no information has survived concerning the original document written in the Quiché tongue, and it is possible that after Father Ximénez had finished copying it, it was returned to its Indian owners and to the obscurity in which it had remained up to then. Ximénez says in the foreword to his second translation of the manuscript that the lack of information about the ancient history of the Indians is due to the fact that they hid their books in which it was written, and if some of them had been found in some places, it was impossible to read or to understand them. For this reason--says the historian--”much has been imagined about these various peoples and their origin.” And he adds: “And so I determined to transcribe, word for word, all of their tales and translated them into our Spanish language from the Quiché language in which I found they had been written, from the time of the Conquest, when (as they say there) they changed their way of writing to ours. In the Relación of Fray Alonso Ponce’s expedition it is said that one of the three things for which the Maya of Yucatan (whom he visited in 1586) were most praised is that “they had characters and letters, with which they wrote their histories and ceremonies and the order of the sacrifices to their idols and their calendar in books made of the bark of a certain tree, which were some very long strips of a quarter or a third [of a Spanish vara] in width which they folded and brought together and in this way it had the form of a bound book in quarto, more or less. Only the priests of the idols (who in that language are called ‘ahkines’) and some principal Indians understood these letters and characters.” The Indians of Mexico and Guatemala also preserved their histories and other writings by means of paintings on cloths, some of which were saved from the general destruction in which the books and Indian documents disappeared. The Bishop of Chiapas, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who, from the beginning of the Conquest, gathered extensive information about the life and customs of the Indians, says, in an oft-quoted passage, that among them were chroniclers and historians who knew the origin of everything pertaining to their religion, the founding of villages and cities, how the kings and lords carried out their memorable deeds, how they governed, and how they elected Page 4 of 196 their successors; they knew about their great men and their courageous captains, of their wars, their ancient customs, and all that belonged to their history. And, he adds: “These chroniclers kept account of the days, months, and years [and] although they did not have writing such as ours, they had, nevertheless, their figures and characters,” with which they could represent all that they wanted to and with them they formed “their large books With such keen and subtle skill that we might say our writings were not an improvement over theirs. Some of these books were seen by our clergy, and even I saw part of those which were burned by the monks, apparently because they thought [these books] might harm the Indians in matters concerning religion, since at that time they were at the beginning of their conversion.” The historians Acosta, Clavijero, and Ixtlilxóchitl say that the Indians learned to recite the most notable speeches of their ancestors and the songs of their poets, and that one or another of them taught these to the youths in schools which were connected with the temples, and in this way they were handed down from generation to generation. In another passage of the Apologética, Bishop Las Casas reports that the Mexican Indians had five books of figures and characters. The first book contained the history and the computation of their time; the second had the days of ceremony and the feast days of each year; the third dealt with dreams, auguries, and superstitions; the fourth with the way in which children were named; and the fifth contained their marriage rites and ceremonies.