Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis 9780226818610

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EMERGENCY

CRITICAL ANTIQUITIES A S E R I E S E D I T E D BY B R O O K E H O L M E S & M A R K PAY N E

Emergency READING THE POPOL VUH IN A TIME OF CRISIS

EDGAR GARCIA

The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by Edgar Garcia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81860-­3 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81859-­7 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81861-­0 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226818610.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garcia, Edgar, 1983– author. Title: Emergency : reading the Popol vuh in a time of crisis / Edgar Garcia. Other titles: Reading the Popol vuh in a time of crisis | Critical antiquities. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Critical antiquities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021059181 | ISBN 9780226818603 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226818597 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226818610 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Popol vuh. | Quiché mythology. | Emergencies—Philosophy. Classification: LCC F1465.P83 G37 2022 | DDC 299.7/8423—dc23/eng/20211214 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059181   This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Birds 1 Wealth 12 Caves 26 Television 39 Demons 49 Migrations 65 Love 78 The Sun

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Mormons 91 Afterword 104 References 107 Index 115

Birds The chattering fills every window now. The squeaks and trilling squabbles layer into the whistling rhythms and chirps, the syllables each too strangely accented to write out precisely. There appear to be more birds in the boughs now, bursting from their winter hiding onto the human hiding that has taken hold in the present public health crisis. The flocks of bugs are thinner this spring. From early morning through the night, the birds—­ especially small and swift ones—­hold dominion in the dappled blue passes between the leafy green and crimson. Even brightly flamboyant ones like the scarlet tanager are bolder in their appearances, darting from the trees into the open skyline while others whistle in envy and admiration. Joining them are sightings of the flicker-­winged redstart and the rushlight-­necked oriole, rarer birds in previous years. Even the usually immovable solemnity of the ravens and crows has been pushed from its high perches by these impetuous songbirds. Most startling for those black-­winged bulks of corvid mystery, often thought of as guardians of the gateway of death and messengers from beyond the gate, must be the return of the whip-­poor-­will. The whip-­poor-­will is a night hunter, swooping through the darkness between the shadows of the trees and sending out the constant refrain after which it is named. If you shine a light in its eyes, it will shine back in two flashes of round, open, ghastly red. The bird looks and acts more like a bat than a bird. It flies in the pitch fast and nimble with its mouth agape catching moths, mosquitos, and flying beetles. Because it hunts

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best in the brightness of the full moon, it harmonizes its reproductive cycle to the moon’s phases—­baby whip-­poor-­wills are born in rhythm with the full-­bellied moon, when its parents can catch enough food to feed their nest. They make their nests on the ground in piles of dead leaves, dusting themselves with the earth to sleep in its umber hollows during the day. For these reasons and more, these earth-­dwelling nocturnal sky-­hunters have been seen as liminal beings in the legend, folklore, and religious traditions of the human cultures situated along their migratory path from Central America to southeastern Canada. Wherever they go, they are associated with prophecy, darkness, death, witchcraft, and spirit possession. Even the saturnine crow does not typically speak its sibylline hexameters in the darkest moments of the night. We thus find the whip-­poor-­will in the nightshift guarding the morbid gardens of the Lords of Death deep in the Underworld in the Popol Vuh. When the nocturnal warblers appear in this K’iche’ Mayan story of creation, we are midway through the long darkness that precedes the creation of humans and the sun. Most of the story takes place in that penumbra, in the darker world that is the whip-­poor-­will’s global domain, a long, darkly glowing scene of anticipation before the sun has emerged to divide the nights from the days. The heroes who eventually will make that happen are twins, and they have just descended into the Underworld to face a series of trials imposed by the Lords of Death. These twins will emerge from the Underworld victorious, bringing forth the maize to make the humans who will summon at last the sun; but first the twins must defeat the prickly subterranean lords. In one of the trials, the twins must pick four bowls of flowers from the gardens of Xibalba or Xib’alb’a—­the “place of fear” that is the K’iche’ Mayan Underworld (folio 12 verso; hereafter, citations of the Popol Vuh are abbreviated as follows: f12v or, e.g., f26r for a recto page).

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Here, in Xibalba, death and disease rule. Here, the whip-­ poor-­will is entrusted to guard the funereal gardens so the twins cannot pick its treasures—­here, flowers are called cotzih, which means also “candles” and “poetry” (f26r). In picking the flowers here the twins would get closer to finding the inner light that would defeat the Lords of Xibalba. Fearing that, these lords order the whip-­poor-­wills, “Keep vigil over our flowers. Do not let them be stolen. For by these we will have defeated the boys. Imagine if they were to have such a treasure. You’d better not sleep this night” (f26r). And while the whip-­poor-­wills do not sleep on the job given to them by the Lords of Xibalba, they are bypassed by a troupe of leaf-­cutter ants in the twins’ service. These ants have large, complex societies with the power to organize themselves even as the whip-­poor-­wills are getting their orders from the deathly lords. When those lords leave, the insect friends to the twins are already in the garden, scissoring free the flower petals and carrying them from the thickets; all while the whip-­poor-­will sings its night song: “Xpurpuwek, Xpurpuwek . . . puhuyu puhuyu” (f26r). This is the K’iche’ Mayan onomatopoeic name for the whip-­ poor-­will, who names itself in its singing. The bird that names itself in its singing or the animal that signifies itself in its cry is a constant trope in the Popol Vuh, and such onomatopoeic naming is how the K’iche’ language—­and Mayan poetics more generally—­projects its sense of linguistic power in a world of animal beings. Poetry is the attempt to temporarily inhabit the perfect language of animals, whose sounds are synonymous with meaning. The contemporary K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal thus writes, The voice of animals is a reminder a remainder of the purpose of language

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Ri na’tasibal re ri qas ucholaj ri ch’abal are ri’, ri kich’abalil ri awaj (2006, 78)

I’ve translated cholaj here as “purpose”; the word also denotes method, order, reason, meaning, line, row, order, arrangement, and attitude (Christenson 2003a, 30; Edmonson 1976, 28). Any of those alternatives would give the poem a slightly different meaning. I’ve chosen “purpose” because the poem’s act of telling us that animals have language begs consideration of what humans might think the point of human speech is, knowing that it is mere echo of the animal speaking that surrounds and precedes them. The animal purpose of language is the signal for which these words I write now are mere resonance; so why write at all? Why should there be poetry in the world, if the animals are out there speaking to us now in a more intimate resolve? What’s the purpose of it? This question gets to a still more fundamental question in the Popol Vuh: Why should the gods have made anything after the animals? Why should they want to make humans? The Popol Vuh emphasizes that the animals are linguistically and ontologically perfect beings—­self-­enclosed wholes who speak their intimacy with the world as such in every utterance. The whip-­ poor-­will’s song in the Underworld is a precise example of this. “Xpurpuwek, Xpurpuwek . . . puhuyu puhuyu,” sings the whip-­ poor-­will in the K’iche’ Mayan-­language transcription of the animal language spoken in Xibalba in the days before humans arrived on Earth. Strikingly, this bird’s speech is also heard in the onomatopoeic English-­language name for the bird: Whip-­ poor-­will, Whip-­poor-­will, poor-­will, poor-­will. In reading these two names next to each other—­Xpurpuwek and Whip-­poor-­will; poor-­will and puhuyu—­one can hear the natural language of the animal world imposing itself on human terms, shaping two very

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different human languages into a unified sound and signification. This signifying sound is the most elemental component of what we might call a rhythm of the Americas—­a rhythm as migrant as these migrant birds, as hemispheric as their yearly migration, as indigenous as their relation to the land and its varied inhabitants, and as unbound as their relational network burrowing into the dusty earth and reaching up through the tall grass, trees, life, and death into crisp skies. With such perfect beings already in the world, why should the gods make humans? In the Popol Vuh the gods ask themselves this very question. They worry over it and hesitate at its implications. Gathered over the ocean in the time before anything has been made, long before the hero twins set out to defeat the Lords of Xibalba, and thus long before humans are formed from the flesh substance of maize, the gods discuss the difficult project of creation. At this moment, we are still “here in the darkness, in the earliest aurora of dawn,” in which most of the book takes place (f1v). The gods are Ri Tepew, Q’ukumatz, K’u’x Kaj (who is also called Juraqan), Kaqulja Juraqan, Ch’i’pi Kaqulja, and Raxa Kaqulja; names that translate as Sovereign, Quetzal Serpent, Heart of Sky (also called Hurricane), Thunderbolt Hurricane, Infant Thunderbolt, and Sudden Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt Hurricane, Infant Thunderbolt, and Sudden Thunderbolt are aspects of Heart of Sky, aka Hurricane, which is appropriate, if we are to imagine a scene over the ocean where the waters and air are roiling in a storm of electrifying life—­but they are also very much their own beings. This four-­part divinity talks with Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, who are also called Framer and Maker, and together “they thought” and “they worried” (f1v). As this sextet or trio (depending how you count the names and aliases) considers how its creativity will make creation happen—­asking themselves “How should the sowing be? How should the dawning

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be? Who will be the provider? Who will be the nurturer?”—­they distinguish themselves from a kind of Creator with a capital C who might be more familiar to readers (f2r). Unlike the primordial creator of biblical tradition, who creates with authoritative decree, these creators displace the fiat lux with something more like quomodo lux? In what way should there be light? This analytical quality of creation is what these hesitant creators call their puz or “power to split things open” (f2r). Rather than decree, they question, investigate, consider, debate, and differentiate. The world before creation is thus already one defined by contradiction and the necessity of interpretation. Its closest approximation in the biblical tradition is the gnostic craftsperson who is also a Creator in William Blake’s spiritual meditations, the kind of Creator about whom one might ask: “What immortal hand or eye,/Dare frame [this] fearful symmetry?” (Blake 1970, 42). In such spiritual questioning, which is also fiery critique, is a sense of the divine whose seat of redemption is not clothed in faith as much as it is in knowledge, criticism, and searching. Thus, when these stormy gods of Mayan criticality make the people of the world, who shall speak to their makers and make good offerings, the gods are frustrated by their first three attempts. In their first attempt they make the birds and animals, whose language is perfect monadism, each gibber, chirp, squeak, squawk, bleat, hum, howl, gobble, and roar signifying a self-­enclosed and perfect world that is alien to the experience of these gods. They do not want a perfected relation between signs and the world because their relations are nothing like that. The gods are beings of fracture, fragmentation, difference, and crisis. In their next attempt they make such critical creatures to speak to them out of mud, but these mud people can scarcely speak because their mouths are sodden mush. There is a problem in seeing their faces, which seems to be a problem in see-

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ing whether these beings can perceive anything at all; they are able to mutter some words, but these words are “without knowledge” (f3v). These mud people are so dissatisfying that they are destroyed by a rain that maybe recalls the destruction of the mud people—­the descendants of Adam—­in the biblical tradition. After that, the gods make people out of coral wood (tz’ite) and reeds, and these people fare better than their predecessors (f4r). They speak and make civilizations, populating and spreading themselves over the whole Earth. But they have no feelings; their hearts are as hollow as the wooden masks with which they hide their faces. Thus, like their predecessors, “they were not capable of understanding,” so they too are destroyed, but in a more vicious manner (f4v). They are drowned and burnt with hot resin, their eyes are gouged out, the jaguars tear their flesh from their bones, their bones are ground to dust, and even their pots, pans, grinding stones, dogs, and other animals turn on them, saying, “We will eat you; we will try you in our mouths and tear you up!” (f5r). The few survivors of this wooden generation become what are today the spider monkeys that swing in the mountain trees of Central America. The problem with all three of these defunct creations is that they do not perceive and speak in a way that is relatable to the gods. The gods want people who have a sense of the crisis that motivates creation, including the crisis of having a creation that is inseparable from failure, criticism, contradiction, and revision—­and indistinguishable from the inherent polyphony of creativity, that chattering of implacable others in the making of made things. The birds were too perfect, the mud people too porous, and the wood people too insensitive. What these gods want are people with the same sense of urgency that reflects their (the gods’) experience of a world that is fundamentally incongruous, in dialectical or contradictory tension, and hence constantly changing and inspiring differentiation. The emer-

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gence of people can only happen with a people who have a sense of real emergency. The Popol Vuh is at its heart a book about emergencies. But it has a peculiar sense of what an emergency can do. It aspires to teach its readers how emergencies are sites of profound fracture and disarray, while also being sites of social, intellectual, and artistic emergence. And its understanding of the power emergent in the emergency involves the primordial crisis of the gods in the crises of colonial and contemporary life. It encourages readers to see such crises in an implicated way—­to see how cosmogenic movements affect and are affected by the happenings of historical and contemporary times. The gods wish to see themselves reflected in their creations because they understand that the actions of their creations will, in turn, affect the experiences of the vulnerable, anxious, and certainly not omniscient or omnipotent creators. Humans, when they are finally made, are given that inner light—­that puz of poetry and critique, the power to split things open—­that brought them into being (and that the Lords of Death so desperately wanted to keep from them). With this power, humans are entrusted with the ability to make life—­to make emergence from emergencies—­that the authors of the Popol Vuh cannily assume. Witness as these Maya writers begin the story and blur themselves into the gods they describe: “This is the story, these things. It is still silently rippling. It is still murmuring undisturbed. It is still rippling unperturbed. It is completely still in the sighs of the sky’s womb. These therefore are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, cave, canyon, meadow, forest. The sky alone is there; the earth’s face is still unclear. The sea alone is spread there; the sky’s womb is everywhere” (f1v). The present-­tense telling of the story of the Popol Vuh puts its storytellers in the immediate time of world creation.

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Their creativity is synonymous with Creation with a capital C, as the world comes to form itself in their words. These are not just endeavors to speak words and make worlds outside of historical time. These words are spoken soon after these Maya writers tell us that their “instrument for seeing clearly” (ilb’al saq, which is how they describe the Popol Vuh) is now hidden, for they “write these words amidst the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom” (f1r). These writers emphasize that their world creation must take place in the historical crisis of colonialism. This is a story of creation that must begin in colonial depredation; it bears a sense of creativity that must start in historical experience. As colonial transplantation, wealth extraction, and European diseases devastate the Guatemalan highlands, driving these writers underground, with their books hidden and their words occluded, these writers (writing in 1702, when the extant text of the Popol Vuh was transcribed) set out to remind their readers that the world-­making power of that hidden book is still here, still there in the splitting power of their words. The emergency is very real for these writers, who write under a colonial duress that frames even the beginning of their act of world creation. Yet such emergency only seems to animate the necessity of the Popol Vuh, in its aim to translate crisis to creativity. In its pages, the darkness of colonialism becomes the darkness before the dawn, the world before it is made, staging the descent into an Underworld to retrieve an inner necessity by which light and the means for seeing clearly can be brought again to the world, and the world itself be thus brought again into being. The historical context of the writing of the Popol Vuh is certainly one of profound fracture and disarray, but the book presents itself as a means for stepping out from the darkness into a new day. Its content is shaped by colonial history, there “amidst the preaching of the Christian God,” but its form is designed to absorb that

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history into an indigenous, K’iche’ Mayan cosmogony, which is “still silently rippling. . . . still murmuring undisturbed.” The message is: If such things as we see today must take place, they take place in a sky-­womb of Mayan making. Flitting through that womb, the whip-­ poor-­ will is not exempt from historical reckoning. Though the gods were frustrated that this little bird, like the rest of its animal kin, could not speak with change and difference in its vocal inflections, those inflections nonetheless come to define centuries of exigency that would directly affect the lives of these gods. How strange it is that in the whip-­poor-­will’s migrating song a Mayan language finds itself echoing and echoed in a spread of West Germanic speaking over the northern hemisphere in the last few hundred years. It is almost as strange to think about that as it is to consider that the only extant copy of the Popol Vuh abides nearby me at the Newberry Library in Chicago, after its own forced migration out of Central America to France and then the United States. For birds, migration is not an ahistorical matter—­they change migration patterns regularly, adapting to climatological and environmental pressures, navigating with ancestral insight on stars, low-­frequency sound, and perception of magnetic fields and polarized light. Finding themselves after a long journey in a new place, they learn about risks, dangers, resources, and lifeways from local birds. They observe and adapt. But they also impose their resilient rhythms on the new landscape—­they sing their songs and hail on the layers of whistles and chirps to interpolate in their music. They return in emergency and crisis to acts of emergence with startling consistency. They perch at the gateway separating life from death, leaping through it with their wings and syrinxes. The syrinx is what makes them so hard to transcribe or translate: unlike the larynx, this vocal organ is split in two, allowing birds to vocalize two sounds at once—­to harmonize with themselves, but also to

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perform difference in their speech. Like the gods of the K’iche’ story of creation, birds speak in constant contradiction. I wonder still why these gods bother with anything more after making the birds.

Wealth I can’t help but feel bad for those sleepless, sunless wooden people, unhaunted even by their hollowness and perpetual night, destined to be destroyed by animals and earthenware who felt even more than they could. They thought they were watching the sun grow in their cities, but they were not. Their world spread so far as a vulture’s shadow. Barely visible in that thatched gloom, the masks they made for themselves were indistinguishable from the faces they lacked. Still—­they had made those masks and cities; their footprints had spread over the earth; and they must have told their children the stories of stranger masks and cities in far-­off lands, while their wooden bodies creaked with old age and the weary memory of the startling things they’d seen in their silvery, lightless world. There is nothing about the story that suggests they lacked ambition, anticipation, hope, or hunger. They saw a horizon and imagined what sights awaited them there, no matter that it was all in the same “darkness that wasn’t good for anything except making more little dead ones” (de Lión 2012, 22). These words are from the novel Time Commences in Xibalbá, whose story is set in the miserable days of the Guatemalan Civil War. Its author—­Kaqchikel Maya writer Luis de Lión—­was killed in that war in 1984. The novel was published after his death, which at the time was not yet a veritable death, since the author was merely absorbed into the invisibility of those fifty thousand people forcibly disappeared by the Guatemalan Army.

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These disappearances terrified people with the thought of losing not only their lives, but of losing even the possibility of existing in the cursus of life and death—­to be rendered neither alive nor dead, but disappeared. Reappearing in 1999, midway through a junta dossier brought to light in a Harper’s Magazine exposé, the author’s black-­and-­white photograph is surrounded by operational codes that indicate that he was kidnapped amid the screeching evening traffic late Tuesday afternoon on the fifteenth of May (a cassette player with a tape of classical music in his hand); and that he was held for twenty-­one days before his extrajudicial killing on the fifth of June, alongside eleven others—­Edgar, Alejandro, Sergio, Pablo, Loreto, Gerardo, another Pablo, Oswaldo, Flavio, Marta, and Bernardino (Doyle 1999, 50–­53). It is certain that he was tortured during that time, but more ambiguous is the kind of care he might have received. Problems with his diabetes had kept him in bed for two weeks before his disappearance, so it is a strange but inescapable question whether he was sufficiently tended for those twenty-­one days to allow him to be tortured for whatever secrets his interrogators imagined they could get from him, or when that mental rattling that arises from ruinous blood glucose levels gave them what they wanted. When they had raided his house on two previous occasions, they had found no weapons, only countless books—­red embers of hidden knowledge for the paranoia of a military dictatorship. De Lión’s novel takes place in this world where people are neither alive nor dead, only suspect, if at all visible—­in a village outside of Guatemala City, some version of the pueblo of San Juan del Obispo, where de Lión was born. In this village the sun does not rise, the people are sleepless, the matches do not catch fire, and time itself is felt like a balloon that floats over the earth but never quite touches it. The crux of this people’s geography is also the source of their many crises—­the church, one

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of the first in Guatemala and home of its first bishop, Francisco Marroquín. Marroquín arrived in what became the Kingdom of Goathemala with the colonial warlord Pedro de Alvarado in 1528. The bishop’s providential sense of action was typical of colonial transplantations: he reorganized regional rule to concentrate people into crowded, disease-­vulnerable cities (that also produced famines as a result of abandoned lands left uncultivated), with the aim of accelerating religious conversion and cultural reformation; he ordered the destruction of all Mayan books and religious objects, in order to eliminate the remnants of demonic belief; and he claimed religious stewardship to defend the property rights of colonizing armies (their right to appropriated land and enslaved people). Marroquín was the spiritually accommodating cultural wing of Alvarado’s military expeditions. But transplantation is never perfect, and often it inspires the overgrowth it sets out to eliminate. In the 1550s Marroquín supported a program to Christianize the children of Maya elites by teaching them Latin letters. The success of this program is most remarkable today for having taught the art of alphabetical letters to the Maya writers who produced the first alphabetic transcription of the Popol Vuh around 1555. This is the now invisible book that the authors of the version of the Popol Vuh that is presently at the Newberry Library in Chicago (the version from 1702) refer back to, the book they say they will bring out from its occlusion in their hearts (and possibly from its hiding place in the caves outside Chichicastenango, where some say the older book is today): “Now we write these words amidst the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom. We will bring it forth, because there is now no means for seeing clearly the Popol Vuh, the instrument for seeing clearly” (f1r). From 1702 to 1555 the core crisis of the text remains the same: colonialism. But thinking about the text retrospectively from 1702

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back to its 1555 original changes how we might see the nature of its crisis. It gives such crisis a kind of depth that we don’t tend to attribute to crisis in our momentary sense of it. We tend to think of crisis in either present or past terms—­a hidden hole we fall into or a hole into which we fell in some hapless previous instance. Crisis is rarely imagined with the depth that might cut a ravine across a deep past (1555–­1702), or cut into the present moment (1555–­1984)—­forcing us to think about present emergencies in terms of the longer emergency that is colonial transplantation. It is hard to think about emergency as long ongoing, but that is precisely what the authors of the Popol Vuh want us to do, and it is what de Lión wants us to know about that book when he envelops his village in 1984 in the same darkness, disease, torture, and disappearance that envelops the world of the Popol Vuh in 1555 and 1702. The point of this correlation is that the emergency of colonialism was as little a thing of the past in 1702 as it is today. And it would seem from the references to the church in both these tellings of the Popol Vuh that that emergency is hemorrhaging from the wound of religious indoctrination. But that is only a skeletal analysis of what is being said. The blood and flesh of the critique appears midway through the book in the bizarre interruption of the creation story by a seeming tangent that is the real, open wound of the whole book—­when the story veers from the genre of cosmogenesis, or world creation, to the picaresque tale of the defeat of the giant, luxurious bird named Seven Macaw (Wuqub’ Kaqix). Seven Macaw is orange in my mind. In the text of the Popol Vuh, he appears after the destruction of the wooden people, although his story takes place while those people still walk the earth. The Popol Vuh is constantly turning on its own timing in this way, reminding readers of the recursiveness of time, its persistent returns to those critical moments that remain, in

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their ongoing loops, unfinished, open like a wound but also open to change, revisitation, and revision. We are back in the world of the wooden people, before there was a sun. In this time of scarce light, there was one who raised himself up and said he was the sun—­“the way and the light” (“nim nu zaquil in binibal . . .”) (f5v). These are Seven Macaw’s words, which echo the words of Jesus Christ, who told his apostle Thomas that he was “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). This is just after Jesus has described his spiritual singularity as a kind of luxury, a blessing of “many rooms” (John 14:2). Like Christ, Seven Macaw describes his resplendence in terms of wealth: “My jeweled eyes are the pathway for people. My teeth glitter with jewels and turquoise that shine like the face of the sky” (f5v). Jesus’s speech takes place on his last night with the apostles, when he reveals his fate and comforts them with his words of glory. These words are organized into seven “I am” statements: I am the bread; I am the light; and so forth. Likewise, Seven Macaw’s opening speech delivers seven “I am” statements: I am great; I am taller; and so forth (f5v). Jesus’s seven “I am” statements shine in the mirror of his seven holy signs: changing water into wine, healing the paralytic, and so on. Distressed that such glory will soon leave the face of the earth, the apostles of Christ are comforted in his spiritual innovation, for this is when he introduces the concept of the holy spirit inside them all. In this moment the concept of the trinity—­the constellation of the father, the son, and the holy spirit—­emerges into Christendom. Shining in his own mirror of the thrice-­formed Christ, Seven Macaw is in tri-­union with his two sons: Zipacna (a maker of mountains) and Cabracan (a destroyer of mountains). These three are worshipped by the wooden people, although, as the Popol Vuh says, “Seven Macaw was truly not the sun” (f5v). He thinks he shines, but it is only the sparkle of his jewels; he thinks he sees but does not see: “His vision does not reach beyond where he sits. The shine

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of his face does not even reach the sky” (f5v). Thus Heart of Sky sends the hero twins to blow this puffed-­up macaw off his stately perch—­“for people cannot be created where only gold, silver, and jewels are glorified” (f6r). The twins must clear the earth of this intrusive bird—­plopped into the story like the appearance of Christianity in the Guatemalan highlands in the early sixteenth century—­so that the real people can emerge, so that the real sun might be born. Floating in the anecdotal ether around the discourses of phenomenology, there is a reported statement (some say it was Heidegger who said it; some say it was Husserl; but just as likely it was neither, or not exactly what was said, or maybe just suggested) that European philosophy is a tautology and non-­ European philosophy is an oxymoron (Maffie 2014, 5). The position has eroded in the last century, as the study of cosmogenesis and myth has emphasized the structural and formal features of non-­Western world-­creation stories. But lagging is a sense that these creation stories might also have ideas for how to organize and regulate behavior, and that these non-­European rules and moral principles might be a part of the branch of philosophy called ethics. The ethics of the Popol Vuh are here in the story of Seven Macaw. This story is told against the grain of an intrusive and presumptive endeavor of religious conversion. The tale’s target is the lack of practical humility in the Christianization of Maya people. Humility is a key virtue of the Popol Vuh. When people do not have it, when they aggrandize themselves (“hun cut cunimarizah rib”), they are doomed to self-­destruction (f5v). Seven Macaw is taken down because the hero twins are able to convince him that his towering wealth could tower still more; they tell him that they can turn his eyes and teeth into still brighter jewels, and he allows them to take these things, leaving him blind and unable to eat. Vainglory is undone by its own sense

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of emptiness. Seven Macaw soon dies, and his sons in turn are tricked and destroyed. One of the trickiest things in the philosophical thinking of the Popol Vuh is its syncretism or assimilative quality. Its authors are keen not to deny the fact of Christianizing pressures. Instead, they incorporate these pressures into their sense of time and reality: these evangelizing intruders are familiar, aren’t they? They are so much like that prideful macaw of the old stories. Yes, I’ve seen this one before in the narrative steles at Izapa (800–­100 BCE). And I’ve seen it in a painted vase at Nakbe (550–­830 CE). And I’ve seen it on the last page of the Venus table in the Dresden Codex (1300–­1400 CE). What’s Dresden? Oh, don’t bother. Those stories of the Popol Vuh are very old, but here we are again in the errors of its silk-­slippered Pantalone. Will the gods ever stop making wooden people? Will people never learn humility? That is one way to read the ethics of the story of Seven Macaw. But with it we are still in the bones of the tale. There is still the insistent matter of this Mayan Pantalone’s luxury. The problem is not only that Seven Macaw has puffed himself up into a false redeemer; it is that he has done so by virtue of his wealth, in pursuit of still more wealth. High in the hogberry tree when the twins find him, surrounded by a fruit hoard, the macaw bird glittering with gems and precious metals in his teeth and eyes is no less than an antecedent and guiding light for Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. This is Marx’s mostly straightforward idea that the origins of capital can be identified in original or primitive exploitations. The upward enrichment of feudal relations, the enclosures of common lands, the looting of precious minerals from far-­off countries, and the enslavement of people all create a surplus of wealth that can be reinvested to make more wealth, leading in time to the capitalist system. Marx compares his ori-

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gin story of capitalism to other, less convincing origin stories: “Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In time immemorial there were two sorts of people: the diligent, intelligent, and, most importantly, frugal elite; and the lazy rascals, wasting their substance and more in riotous living. . . . Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins” (1992, 873). Marx hopes to explain two things with these creation stories: the exploitative origin of accumulation, and the continuity of such original exploitation in its living legatees. In this story of world creation, the capitalist world tree is seeded by colonial gains. Marx wishes to vanquish the fantasies that the poor deserve their poverty for their laziness, and that the crisis that created poverty is inaccessibly past. Like the authors of the Popol Vuh, the German philosopher insists that the past emerges in the crises of the present, just as present emergencies were already emergent in our far pasts. Wealth is entwined with an ongoing new-­world emergency. One ethical message here is that those living today are responsible for the myths that sustain them—­and, if those myths sustain only a small few (enabling exceptional greed), the many have the responsibility to revise the cosmogenesis. The gem of Marx’s historical analysis is, as it is in the Popol Vuh, its explicit relation to Christian creation stories. In both accounts primitive accumulation is bound up in Christendom. For Marx, it does not extend beyond the comparison of capitalist creation stories to biblical ones. But in the Popol Vuh, these two worlds are genetically linked: the devotion that Macaw’s religious vainglory inspires in the wooden people enables his luxury. He is the spiritual wing of the wealth extraction schemes that handsomely stud his wings. This correlation has not been lost on the Maya revolutionary movements of the twentieth

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and twenty-­first centuries. The 1980 denunciation of the massacres in Guatemala—­the “Declaration of Iximché”—­draws a straight line from the theft and massacres of the warlord Pedro de Alvarado to contemporary theft and massacres of Maya people in Guatemala under an economically exploitative political regime, even citing the Popol Vuh as it does so. Likewise, the 1998 “Fifth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle” by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas explicitly connects Seven Macaw and his sons to the contemporary neoliberal governance of Mexico and its police and law apparatuses, again citing the Popol Vuh as its evidence of an exploitative system emerging from colonialism. Still again, in 2012 the political group Las Abejas, or “bees,” of Acteal, who seek justice for the massacre in the city of Acteal in 1997, issued an urgent communique calling for the recognition that the military state and complicit supreme court of Mexico are present-­ day avatars of Seven Macaw’s sons. They go so far as to compare Seven Macaw to the Mexican state, calling him (and it) “a lord of the Underworld” that has been their source of suffering “since the time of the Spanish conquest.” These comparisons express an ongoing theme of exploitative schemes that plague the Maya people of Mexico and Central America. These are the same schemes that create the poverty and despair of de Lión’s novel: Macaw also invests in a fruit industry that subsidized the civil war to protect its plantations. A person must have a heart made of wood not to be appalled at how many have died over bananas. That is what they grow in Xibalba—­the place of fear—­and it is from those fields of the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) that de Lión’s Xibalba emits its darkness into the world. Wandering through such gloom, the novel’s people revolt against the church, the center of all their suffering. Their acts of iconoclasm target the icons made of wood—­wooden Christs, wooden saints, and wooden vir-

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gins. When wood burns in that shadowy world, it emits its first semblance of life: “the charred wood turns the color of wounded flesh; . . . the smell of seared flesh fills the white house” (2012, 760). Last night the city I live in burned, and it smolders like a wound today. While sirens and low-­earth rattles of metropolitan violence rattle the windows, masked ones have destroyed storefronts, cars, and municipal architecture to express profound dismay at the persistent destruction of human life too black or unworthy to matter. These fires were lit in the major cities in this country, already in shock from months of public health crisis, economic duress, and political scandal. The thin, acrid smell of hatred is in the air. Thrust into Macaw’s empty eye sockets and toothless gums were maize kernels, desperate hope amid the gloom that such a symbol might make the earth give people the food they needed. But after the violent mydriasis, de Lión’s people are unsure who is even alive: They looked to see whether their bodies were charred, if they had marks of torture on their bodies, snakebites, places where barbed wire had bitten into their flesh; and then they tried to remember, whether it had been heaven or hell they had come back from, what road they had come back on, how they had been made a part of the world again, at what moment they had been resurrected, what the transformation from dust to physical shape and from physical shape back to life had felt like, and they scratched themselves to see if they bled, they looked at their footprints in the earth to see if they had the shape of a real-­flesh foot, they tried to count their ribs, tried to see if they were missing any pieces of flesh, any calluses, any strands of hair, they went to the cemetery to see if there were any open graves, they leaned over the water storage barrels to see if they could see their reflections so that the water would let them know if they were alive, or they banged

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their heads together to see whether that would wake them up, that it had all been a dream, and when they finally realized that it had all indeed been a dream, still, just to be sure, they looked for the most recent photographs they had taken and looked in the mirror to make sure they weren’t other people now, they remembered their names so that, when they could speak again, if they could speak again someday, they could tell themselves that they were themselves.  .  .  . (49)

In the story of the Popol Vuh the people are always almost glorified, just short of the moment when they can speak the sun into existence. They must suffer so much before it is their time. The sun only sprouts out from the eastern sky in the last pages of the book. In the meantime, they are left to watch the stars fizzle and burst like slowly encrusting gems in a seemingly endless sidereal haze. They are in the place of fear waiting for time to move, watching the stars reflected in the rainwater pooled by those earthenware vessels that hate them so much, watching those stars closely for any sign that time might soon move. To watch those crystallizations of time, Mayas have not only horizon astronomy, charting the stars in relation to the horizon, but also coordinate astronomy, charting the movement of stars in relation to one another. That distinction has been made by analysis of the astronomical significance of the story of Seven Macaw (Tedlock and Tedlock 1993, 35). In K’iche’ Mayan astronomy, Seven Macaw is the asterism or semi-­constellation for the seven stars of the Big Dipper. This asterism circles the North Star in a counter-­clockwise motion, visible in North America any night of the year, while in Guatemala it is obscured beneath the horizon from mid-­July to mid-­October during the stormy season. These are the days when Seven Macaw has been defeated. But he rises again to his perch high in the sky in late May to early June, which is also when Venus (associated with

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one of the hero twins) hangs in the western evening sky and hogberries ripen. We will soon see Venus disappear from the west, while the hero twins descend into the Underworld, later to emerge from the east in the dawn. Hence, we can tell that this lavish bird is no true sun, because he does not travel the ecliptic across the sky, the royal road—­as do the sun and moon, bisecting the off-­ramp to Xibalba, which is the dark rift in our Milky Way. Instead he keeps to his corner in a mansion, failing always to hold dominion over the unperturbed pole star. As Seven Macaw topples once again toward the edge of the visible Earth, farmers are reminded that the time to plant is at hand. These are the days for the sowing, when seeds are put into the earth to dawn on the other side of the rains. In a celestial revolution that might surprise Seven Macaw, he turns out to be not only the avatar for the accumulation that delights him, but also an answer to those principal questions in the Popol Vuh: “How should the sowing be? How should the dawning be?” (f2r). By a peculiar association with a seasonal asterism, Seven Macaw becomes the very thing that his avarice so offends: a world seed to feed the people. He goes from being an ideological villain of the tale to an embodiment of its celestial theory of world renewal. Such celestial revolutions in meaning prompt anthropologist Barbara Tedlock to distinguish Mayan conceptions of dialectic from Marxist ones: “The multimetrical temporal rituals described here involve dialectical thought patterns that go beyond the simple dialectics of polarization (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), as historically exemplified in Hegelian and Marxist thought, to include dialectics of overlapping or mutual involvement” (1992, 196). Seven Macaw is neither villain nor promising seed, but both at once in a constant overlap that reminds readers how crisis is typically experienced: positives and negatives oscillate through our objects and events, shifting places and disrupting our sense of the world’s order. Our seemingly

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secure sense of things is undermined, and we must shift our shaky positions in an always unstable world. In the Popol Vuh, such shakiness is a sign of life. It is the wobble that sets things into motion, until they come back again after participating in their contradictions, in ceaseless acts of what might be called apocatastasis. Apocatastasis is the astrological term for the return of stars to the same place in the night sky. This constant return of stars to their places in the sky is a sign of their restitution. It is an important concept in Stoic philosopher Chrysippus’s idea of world ages; in Vico’s and Leibniz’s readings of self-­reflection in Stoic world-­age theory; in ideas of messianic return in Judaism; in Christ’s appropriation of such messianic return when he claims to fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant and the prophecy of Elijah; and in the early Christian commentator Origen’s interpretation of such fulfillment as a promise that all intelligence will return to its proper place in the Godhood—­as is more fully developed in later gnostical writings. Here, the term helps to denote the special ethical meaning of overlap in Mayan dialectics. But it also helps to redeem something of Marx from Tedlock’s words, because it was a term of special significance for Marxist philosopher and sometime mystic Walter Benjamin. If you think it odd that a Marxist would be digging in astrological language to explain Marxism, you have hit upon the precise oddness that Benjamin wants to think about with his idea of apocatastasis: “It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too—­ something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis” (1990, 459). Unlike Marx, Benjamin refused to give up on the old stories of creation, believ-

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ing that he needed to return constantly to all the old stories—­ mythic, mystical, and religious, even the one about Adam—­and to see such stories through their negatives and positives, their ideology and critical possibilities, until they could be seen at last as illuminating not a deep past but a present emergency, and to be seen not only as present emergency but as a promise of emerging redemption. Even the dead will be redeemed, all the dead. Benjamin edges into Mayan worlds in such thinking, worlds situated in twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century revolutionary thought and activism, but also worlds that give mythical and historical emergence to such contemporary thinking and political engagement—­such as the world of the Popol Vuh and its inheritors. Benjamin refuses to give up on the discarded and dispossessed, even the apparently villainous, because these beings must all testify to and answer for the violence, injustice, and terror of the world; and they must also be transformed into the positive overgrowth through which the sun’s light at last will shine. Speaking as if he is there looking up at the starry night sky of the Popol Vuh, he insists that the negatives and positives will one day be one, that there will be redemption following the revolution in the skies, and hence that there will be a dawning. But we are not there yet, for Seven Macaw has only started his descent, and there is still the story of the hero twins in the Underworld to tell. And we will come back to the problem of wealth.

Caves Around 1492 a now nameless boy walked in the hot, papistic sun along the Oppian spur of the Esquiline Hill in northeast Rome. His goatskin shoes scratched softly at the volcanic tuff, scraped perhaps by the mixture of sand and gravel from the Tiber’s primordial spread. Pressing into the sandy, clumped tuff, his foot gave way in a cleft, and he fell or was pulled down into a massive grotto with vaulted ceilings, labyrinthine halls, and disquietingly geometric niches and exedras. Maybe the light from the cleft let him see the flourish of these hidden passes in their glowing frescos and resurrected mosaics, or maybe he saw it when he came back with a torch to light his way, in the way that others would do after him—­such as the painters Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and the young Raphael and Michelangelo. The boy had discovered the first-­century CE emperor Nero’s pleasure palace. For this prodigal compound built on the rubble of the great fire in 64, Nero appropriated lands in the valley and slopes of the Esquiline, Caelian, and Palatine hills. This was the Domus Aurea, or Golden House. But it wasn’t a house exactly: its three hundred rooms—­a maze of tunnels and chambers—­ were dedicated to entertainment. Porticos from the atrium led to dining halls, sculpture gardens, groves, an artificial lake, and a domed court whose ceiling spun like the stars turning in the sky. Everywhere you looked in that palace, you would have seen its spirit of excess in gold leaf and rambling painted plaster. Here, mosaics were not limited to the ground; they brought the

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delight of ceilings to life too. Here, frescos were not false windows onto the natural world; they were sightlines onto mythological scenes that stretched the imagination. The unruly bodies of the Roman gods and their contemporaries—­centaurs, fauns, gorgons, giants, and sea goats—­danced and tore themselves from scene to scene in lurid sweeps that mesmerized the artists that went down into that hole. The strange-­bodied monsters of the Roman caves advanced on the allegorical painting of the early sixteenth century, engendering a new style that came to be known by the Italian word for “cave”: grotto. In the early sixteenth century, patrons requested the grotesque style by name, calling for an art of cave-­dwelling monsters, unreal forms, anthropomorphic phantasmagoria, and the mysteriously incongruous. The cathedral of Siena wrote into the contract for their new library in 1502 that Raphael’s “grottesche” style be copied there (Charney 2018, 221–­24). The pillars, or loggia, of Pope Julius II’s apartments in the Vatican, as well as the hot bath that Pope Leo X built there for the lusty Cardinal Bibbiena, are studded with the same erotic chimeras of subterranean form. In the years when the boy’s fall into the Oppian hole spurred ancient monsters to exit Rome’s caves, the andesite sculpture of the snake goddess Coatlicue was finished in the lake-­island city of Tenochtitlan, chief city-­state of Mesoamerica. The eight-­ foot, three-­ton statue of Coatlicue towered over the brows of prince and priest, overlooking the commanding symmetry of the Aztec city-­state—­crisscrossed by canals and terra-­cotta aqueducts in a grid whose causeways were enclosed in the lush green of floating gardens. The snake-­headed goddess wears a skirt of snakes elaborated with human hands, eagle talons, and jaguar fangs and paws. Like the martial state over which she looms, she asserts the power of life and death over any person who stands before her. But the sculpture isn’t only a symbol of

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imperial power. She is gruesomely dismembered—­her body is a configuration of mutilated and hemorrhaging parts. Even the state is only so many wounds. In that same spur of the sandy Esquiline Hill, another beast emerged from a hole in the earth—­the sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons. The Trojan priest and his two sons have lost their three right arms. Groped by the snake, those half-­appendages look like its further extrusions, metabolized into the snake’s contortions. Their agony is its sway. When Tenochtitlan fell to the strangely pale Spaniards in 1521, its citizens hid Coatlicue below a water canal. The statue was not pulled out of its secret lodging until 1790, when workers digging an aqueduct struck upon her. Her excavators then saw what would have been hidden from those that stood before her in Tenochtitlan: at the massive statue’s base is also carved an image of Tlaltecuhtli, the earth lord from whose torn-­apart body all things are made. Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt watched the emergence of these Earth-­beings and gasped at their “incorrect and horrendous” form (De León 2010, 266). They were grotesque in all but name. These cave-­beings—­emerging from another side of time in the earth’s depths, hidden from the casual disappearances and erasures of history, abiding in the contorted darkness of snakes and spirits deep underground—­must want something with the people on the surface. They await their time, reclining in the low rumble beneath our feet until, like a sudden rain in the summer heat, they spread over the earth. In the creation stories of greater Mesoamerica, humans were once such underground dwellers. They rippled in subterranean pools until cosmic pressures pushed them through a hole into emergence in the upper world. In their codices, the Nahuas came through the seven-­chambered caves of Chicomoztoc into the light of Aztlán, the utopia where they lived briefly before

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their dispersal into the seven city-­states in central Mexico that include resplendent Tenochtitlan. In the creation story of the Diné, or Navajo, people, published as the Diné Bahane’ (Zolbrod 1995) but also brought to life in the dry paintings and always evolving told stories, the holy first ones climb on a reed, scaling several levels through successive challenges, which today are still incomplete. There are further holes above through which to ascend. And even below, the Diné knew the Hopi and other Pueblos, who also come up through a concentric hole, after which they are transformed from lizard-­like people into five-­ fingered caretakers of maize (McPherson 2019, 52–­56). The gift of maize is central to all of these Mesoamerican emergences. It is the staple food that permits life and the symbol that the living can look at to reflect on the transitions through the darkness of holes in the earth into new life. It is also a technological innovation of the Americas: Mesoamerican tall grasses were selectively bred to make modern maize ten thousand years ago, a genetic combination of wild teosinte and tasseled zea. Maize is a foundational human achievement and a fundamental symbol of human reckoning with a landscape of wilderness and necessity. The grotesque quality of this sacred crop was quickly recognized in Europe. Maize appears for the first time there in those pillars in the Vatican that Raphael and his team of artists painted (1519) to mimic the unruly bodies of the Domus Aurea (Nero’s buried pleasure palace) that so violently stretched the imagination. Like the green sway of subterranean life strangling the Trojan priest, or the earth lord hidden beneath the pitched weight of the dismembered Aztec goddess, this fruiting grass from the Americas snuck out into the turquoise sky of papal festoons as if to say it would survive every outgrowth, hiding a while, then sprouting to spread itself over the earth like a ceaseless, metamorphous, and pollinose rain. The journey to the Underworld in the Popol Vuh is made in

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this spirit. Its central message is about the power of maize and its necessity for the emergence of people. Underworld descents in the epic tradition are often expressions of political necessity: Aeneas’s quest below to retrieve imperial prerogative and rights of conquest for Rome; Jesus Christ’s harrowing of hell to extend Christendom backward in time, to all times; and Dante’s journey through the Roman Catholic inferno to descry cosmic order in the chaotic midstream of political unrest in late thirteenth-­ and early fourteenth-­century Florence. In some ways the Popol Vuh is like these works. It has cosmic realpolitik in it, but it also emphasizes that none of its political life can be realized without the gift of maize. After the hero twins defeat Seven Macaw, the story leaps back in time to tell the story of their father and uncle (also twins). The father and uncle, named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, are summoned to the grim court of the Underworld by its lords, whom the twins had offended with loud ballgames above. The lords present the twins with a series of tests that they fail to pass, and they are executed. Their descendants—­the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalenque—­are subsequently tasked with the redemption of their forebears. Their descent to the Underworld court is victorious; they outwit the Xibalban aristocracy and retrieve the substance to make humans. These humans establish the line of K’iche’ Maya lords and kings whose stories are told toward the end of the Popol Vuh, reaching all the way into its present moment of the 1550s. That final stretch of the Popol Vuh reaches into the fourteenth generation from the first people, and it includes the K’iche’ diplomat Juan Cortés, who went to Spain in 1557 to petition King Philip II to recognize Maya sovereignty in Guatemala. His ship was raided by French pirates, and scholar Allen Christenson speculates that in the loot they took could have been a now lost copy of the Popol Vuh (2003b, 298). It would make sense that

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Cortés would take the Popol Vuh with him to Spain: the book lays bare a primordial relation between the K’iche’ people and the Guatemalan highlands, extending their presence there into the mists of mythic time. More cynical readings suggest that the book’s emphasis on K’iche’ emergence in the highlands is made to prioritize their claims to territorial sovereignty, at the expense of other Mayas in Guatemala such as the Mams, Tz’utujils, and Kaqchikels (with whom the K’iche’ had long been at war). The story of the Popol Vuh is placed in a context of war and geopolitical crisis, and its authors certainly assert their immediate material interests in such conflict. But that is only one part of the text, its surface, because hidden like the maize festoons in the papal palace is the significance of agriculture for the entire political machine. The hero twins descend to the courts of death to retrieve the substance for life, maize, whose centrality to the story cannot be overemphasized, and which even seems to cut against the political prerogatives of the rest of the tale. I wonder if the K’iche’ diplomat Cortés saw his situation mirrored in the story of the Popol Vuh. Like its hero twins, he was headed for a court that controlled so much death. It had brought warfare and disease to the highlands, and it had spread its morbid dominion in all directions. Who were these lords of death? And how could he redeem his forebears? Reading the Popol Vuh, he might have been reminded that the crisis of courts is not a European invention. There were also political problems in the old days; there were problems of imperial narcissism and human suffering; there had been Neros in the highlands; there was greed and corruption; there was avoidable crop failure and environmental devastation; there was war and overinvestment in ballgames and pageantry, stomping jubilantly over the heads of the dead in a way that brought down the old fathers. And where are those fathers today? Where are the kings and their vassals? Where even are the finely spinning tas-

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sels of the ancient lords? Where is the jade of empire? Where is its bloodied obsidian? And what, if not these things, outlasts? The Popol Vuh answers this last question with a burst of life in the earth. In the story’s deepest depth, when the father-­ uncle twins have been defeated in the Underworld and before the sons have redeemed them, is the story of the Xibalban girl Blood Moon. Blood Moon hears that these visitors from the upper world have been killed, and that one of their discarded heads has made a miracle: the tree where it is lodged now bears fruit. Echoing the primeval scene in the garden of Eden, Blood Moon is tempted by the fruit, which the Xibalban lords had prohibited her from eating, and which the tree—­speaking to her—­ tries to dissuade her from tasting. But Blood Moon insists, and as she reaches for the fruit, it spits in her hand. With this she is impregnated with the hero twins. Seeing the bulge, her father shuns her, and she barely escapes with her life into the upper world. There, she brings the miracle of abundant maize, bearing a source of sustenance to the world above: “She did not even pick the ear of maize, and these ears multiplied in her net, overflowing it with food” (f17v). We can see a resemblance between this agronomic gift from below and the children she bears. Like seeds, these Maya Dioscuri are partially ascended from the world of the dead (the earth below that is Blood Moon’s origin); and partially descended from the world of the living (the earth above that was One Hunahpu’s origin before his Underworld descent with Seven Hunahpu). They are at once the planting and growth; the sowing and dawning; the death and life of all things; and, in their transformations, they are the work of Blood Moon in transforming death into life, through both her body and agronomy. Hence, the Maya anthropologist Juana Batzibal Tujal calls Blood Moon “a dialogue between human nature and vegetal nature; that is, she shows how the human is engendered in [the] natural vegetal world. Hence is sexuality

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sacred, cosmic, indeed divine” (2000, 41). According to Batzibal Tujal, Blood Moon represents a deeper concern in Mayan cosmological thinking for relationality (and not identity) as the root of existential extensivity: that is, the way in which beings extend into other beings. Blood Moon represents relationality and indeed a concept of mediation and media (30). Blood Moon’s children are engendered by interspecies, multi-­stratal, interdimensional contacts and relations, which in turn give us the substance from which we are made (i.e., maize). She is both rootedness and extension; extensive because rooted, and rooted because she extends. Blood Moon is the technique of the farm, or milpa, that lets people grow food. Through her gift, people live and pass life on to subsequent generations in the saved seed, cycles of planting, repetition of life in the yearly harvest, and the paradoxical possibility of the difference or revision that the cycle enables for those who attend to the cycle. Each sprouted plant is a repetition of its ancestors but this does not condemn their world to mere repetition. Thus, the repetition and difference of the names of the first twins and their sons: One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu; then Hunahpu and Xbalenque. Knowledge of the agronomic cycle enables the sons to repeat but revise their father’s actions. Unlike the fatalistic bifurcation that characterizes action in Greek and Roman epic, where action now will forever shape an inescapable destiny down a chosen path, action in the Popol Vuh does not bifurcate. It loops back on itself, in generational repetitions that enable revision, redemption, and reconfiguration of the seemingly fated or forlorn. Blood Moon teaches her sons how to be victorious in Xibalba; having seen the fate of their father, she knows how her sons must act differently. And this is the difference and the historical lesson of maize as a source of power over history. It makes the seemingly ineluctable intelligible and, thus rendered, workable.

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For its focus on cyclical revision, the katabasis, or Underworld descent, of the Popol Vuh is less like the Underworld descent of epic, and more like the Underworld descent of georgics, the poetic genre of agricultural life. Virgil’s γεωργικά (georgika), Greek for “farm things,” has in it the quality of descent found in the Popol Vuh. In this work the Roman poet is less constrained by his duty to express Roman imperial mandate through the story of Aeneas. Here the poet presents a different kind of Underworld descent in the story of Orpheus. More concerned with the matter of running a farm, the story of Orpheus in the Georgics is nested in a bizarre recipe for making bees from the murderous abuse of an ox (specifically, the recipe calls for the brutal but not skin-­piercing bludgeoning of an ox, and its subsequent covering by a tarp, to grow from its corpse bees). In framing his story of Orpheus in a study of such farming techniques, Virgil encourages readers to think of Orpheus not as a person but as a kind of process—­a means of making life grow out of death (1999, book 4). The georgic strain of an Orphic mode is also heard in Ovid’s version of the tale, where the necessary cost for bringing life out of death is the dismemberment, or sparagmos, of the katabatic figure, the one who goes into the world below—­and who is given over like cornstalk to farmers unceremoniously sheathing its silky ears (book 10). The contemporary poetry of the Orphic mode tends to make such silent ritual personally traumatic: the “rose that enthrones from lost days” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (“Rosem, du thronende, denen im Altertume”) (1970, 80); and Robert Lowell’s dilapidated trill, “the season’s ill . . . I myself am hell” (2007, 94–­95). These are poems of a psychological Underworld, but even here the resonance of blooms and seasons outlasts. Blood Moon likewise outlasts. She of the caves comes to the surface to teach its people that what repeats is an opportunity for revision, and what appears revised is only so much repetition. Thus, does she teach

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people how to make life from dead things; and how caring for the corn gives both lasting sustenance and intellectual insight. Caves are sacred in Mesoamerican cosmology. They are mouths of the earth, frequently compared to the jaguar’s maw. They are dangerous but powerful places. They could eat you up, transport you to another world, take you to the moment of creation, or release old ghosts and primordial, otherworldly beings onto the earth. They are the birthing place of clouds, rain, stars, and the sprouted seed. But they are also involved with the historical matters of the world above. They send forth their strange-­bodied creatures to challenge our sense of continuity. They break the world open to close it again in chthonic cycles. In 1975, poet Ámbar Past founded Taller Leñateros in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. This foundation enables Mayas in Chiapas to make books with traditional dyeing, papermaking, printing, and binding techniques. These were the first books to be made with traditional Mayan bookmaking techniques since the old codices five hundred years ago. Even the Popol Vuh manuscript that is in Chicago is written with European-­made ink on European paper. One of their works is a collection of Tzotzil Mayan songs to the earth—­Conjuros y Ebriedades (1998), translated to English as Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women (Past, Bakbolom, and Ernandes 2005). Echoing the authority of Blood Moon, in Tzotzil cosmology the world of caves is a special domain of women. Many of the songs in the collection are addressed to the goddess of soil and growth, situated in caves and other openings of the earth; they are spoken in supplication for that which sustains. The name of the earth goddess is Kaxail or Kaxil. And she is also addressed as Kajval, as in a sung prayer by Xunka’ Utz’utz’ Ni’, an oral poet, maker of bamboo fireworks, basketweaver, and mother of nine outside the town of San Andrés Larráinzar—­whose sung crisis extends far to the North.

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Take into account, Kajval, that I am speaking to you. I bring you smoke. I offer you flowers. Take into account, Kajval, what you are going to give me. The others have horses. They have sheep. They have hens. Trucks. Take into account, Kajval, how much you are going to give me. I don’t want to work on a plantation. I don’t want to go to someone else’s house. I don’t want to work far away. I don’t want to go to Los Angeles. I don’t want to work in Florida. (110)

Utz’utz’ Ni’’s song is in the classic form of parallelistic Mesoamerican couplets, the same speech patterns of the Popol Vuh (“How should the sowing be? How should the dawning be?”; “She did not even pick the ear of maize, and these ears multiplied in her net”), and like that old work it looks to the earth for sustenance and continuity; but here the song does so in the insecure circumstances of having to migrate to the United States if its singer cannot grow food. The Popol Vuh sings its earthy loops

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in the disruption of colonial violence; but here Earth’s loops are sought amid an economic system that takes land from people to enforce their participation in mercantile production, while also criminalizing their pursuit of work in the industries of the north where that work is found—­recalling the EZLN and other Maya revolutionary couplings of the villains of the Popol Vuh with agents of neoliberal governance. These are flames and wickers of exploitation that will not burn out until there is justice and true restitution—­five hundred years of exploitation notwithstanding. Utz’utz’ Ni’’s husband is an undocumented migrant working in a slaughterhouse in Tennessee, and she does not want to have to leave her land too (Vicuña and Livon-­Grosman 2009, 524). Thus, in a way that reaches back to the sowing and dawning of the sun in the Americas, she asks Earth’s sacred holes to hold her in place. But Kaxail isn’t just an idealization of pastoral comfort. The song’s drama comes from the Tzotzil Earth goddess’s known ambivalence. Cuban anthropologist Calixta Guiteras Holmes writes as follows of Kaxail: She brings forth and fosters all creatures, but is simultaneously their common grave. She relentlessly swallows back, as a monster, the beings that she produces. All that live on her surface come from her interior and return there. She is all-­producing, all-­maintaining, all-­devouring. The cosmic forces—­fire, wind, rain, the eclipse, the earthquake—­are manipulated by the earth. Disease and famine are manifestations of her wrathful moods. . . . She punishes and destroys. She commands continual respect and sacrifice. Her protection can be acquired only with constant care and vigilance and is forfeited by the slightest breach or misdemeanor. She is man’s conscience and appears to him in the guise of a woman; her commands are strictly obeyed. (Past, Bakbolom, and Ernandes 2005, 49–­50)

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The goddess is a jaguar formed of soil, moisture, and severity. Her caves are a common lot for those who walk the earth; we all will find our way into her waiting paws. After all, they lead into those labyrinths from which the beasts of history are now and again released, as if to remind us how little we change in all our epochs and cultural metamorphoses. They rumble and roam the earth in the monstrous bodies of the old ways—­the ways of sowing and summoning the dawn, and of risking the crisis of doing so. Even the empire of my hour has its holes in the earth split open with the emergence of so much emergency. Utz’utz’ Ni’’s song reminds me of a wrenching moment in the film El Norte (Nava 1983), when the two Maya siblings flee genocide in Guatemala (their father’s severed head was lodged in a tree, like that of One Hunahpu, prompting their distressed and forced departure from their homelands) and cross the border from Tijuana into the United States through a long, rat-­infested sewage drain. The disease of the rats in that drain will kill one of the siblings—­the danger of caves is at that moment very real—­but not before she gives the film its poetry: “We came here only to sleep, to dream. All things are lent to us. We are only on Earth in passing.” These words do not leave the earth in their speaking, even if their speaker must. They have broken loose from the labyrinth of history and demand now a reckoning. Like the subterranean passes of the Popol Vuh, they force us to ask: What will America do in response to the migrant reality emerging from its many caves, clefts, drainpipes, and irreconcilable contradictions?

Television The talking head in Xibalba says one of the strangest things in the Popol Vuh. After Blood Moon persuades it to let her taste its fruit, it spits in her hand and (when she looks down at her hand but finds nothing there) it says, “It’s just a sign (retal) I’ve given you—­my saliva, my spittle” (f16r). A retal is a sign, but especially a divinatory one. K’iche’ Maya diviner Andrés Xiloj Peruch says that at this moment Blood Moon is dreaming, because a dream of saliva in the hand is one of two matters: “It depends on whether the saliva is good or bad. When it is good, it has a lot of foam; when it is just clear water, it is bad. But here in the Popol Vuh, one isn’t told which kind of saliva it is” (Tedlock 1996, 261). The strange thing about this moment is that it blurs together a sign and an event. Here we are told that Blood Moon is receiving a portending sign (the spit in her hand), while we are also asked to understand that this is the moment of her impregnation by the tree’s fruit (via the spit in her hand). The spit is thus both premonition and action; sign and event. While the sign of spit points to her future, its effects are also already felt in the present moment. What Blood Moon dreams is already happening. Whatever insight about the future she is supposed to receive is knowledge of events just then already enacted. This is a distinct feature of signs in the Popol Vuh, which distinguishes its sense of signs from a sense of signs that may be more familiar to readers. The Western idea of the sign is inherited from the ancient Greeks, for whom the sign was a crisis of

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mixed signals. For the Greeks, signs, especially divinatory ones, are transcendental messages whose meaning is corrupted by the vehicles into which they are forced: marks on a page, vibrations of a voice in the cracking air. The gods wish to speak to us but, eternal as they are, when they force their timeless speech into the limited particulars of our material signs, their true meaning is distorted and confused. The gods see with a “glance that knows all things” (as Pindar said of Apollo) (1997, 252–­53), but when they speak to us, they must do so in “verbs or nouns, which men use as symbols in their intercourse, and thereby behold mere counterfeits and likenesses of what is present in thought, unaware of the originals” (as Plutarch said of Apollo’s oracle at Delphi) (1959, 123). Language is at its root evidence of communicational crisis. The Mayan sign is also certainly in a crisis of meaning, but rather than a crisis of mixed signals, it is a crisis of amalgamated ones. In Blood Moon’s premonition, the sign is a message and a happening; it is a represented thing and the thing itself; it is the glance that knows all and that daring gaze that brings everything into palpitating existence. But who is the one doing the glancing and gazing here? Whose is the all-­seeing eye? Another strange feature about Blood Moon’s omen is that she needs it at all. She is, after all, a goddess; and shouldn’t the gods know what is going to happen? Not in the Popol Vuh. In this world, even the gods must consult the oracles to learn about time’s unfolding. You may remember that at the book’s beginning, when the gods are debating the “how” of creation, they visit the two diviners Xmucane and Xpiyacoc. In the moment of creation, when the gods are bringing everything into existence, there are already diviners in the world—­two ajq’ijaab’ or keepers of days (which is what K’iche’ Maya diviners still call themselves today). The gods say these two are older even than the gods. Xmucane and Xpiyacoc, also called grandmother and

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grandfather, divine by interpreting a spread of maize kernels and seeds from the coral tree, as is still done today, alongside the movement of stars (f4r). In their reliance on the tools and techniques of these diviners, the gods echo a constant reliance in the Popol Vuh on instruments of sight such as crystals, mirrors, reflecting pools, dreams, and even the book itself (which it calls “an instrument of sight,” or ilb’al) (f1r). But if the gods must rely on such instruments, if even they come to the diviners to learn about time’s unfolding, where is the all-­seeing message coming from? If premonition is not from the gods, where is it from? What is its source? Whose vision is this instrument of sight letting us see? The answer is time itself—­which is admittedly metaphysical but not as abstract as it might seem. Representations of calendar dates in Mayan glyphic writing are often presented as embodied figures—­anthropomorphic beings who hand the days to each other in a nightly exchange (Houston 2014, 118). These embodied days connote the idea that time is alive and in constant transference. The job of the keepers of the days is to track these time-­beings, especially as these beings reveal their movements in star positions, migratory patterns of birds, shapes of tossed maize kernel and coral seed, calendrical cycles, and the involuntary, analogical features of dreams. These forensics of the future require deep attention to what is happening—­which is not a revelation that comes from the gods, but a revelation that is given in the cues, clues, and aspects of time’s unfolding. It is a poetics of paying attention in a panorama whose wide stretch, intricacy of depth, and constant activity tends to shutter acts of noticing. It is easy to be overwhelmed with how much happens. But the gods of the Popol Vuh recognize that even they ignore such arts of attention at their peril. Rather than a very abstract notion of what a sign is, this sense of signs is bound up with the happenings of a shifting world.

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These signs carry material worlds and carry their instabilities. When Blood Moon receives notice of her fate, she is already participating in its unfolding—­the sky cracks open in her hand to tell her that she will pass through that sky into another world that has just then already spit like an ominous rain into her hand. When the hero twins descend into the Underworld, they are their fathers repeating the descent to steal puz from the lords of the Xibalba, to break open the spell of death in the still-­ sleeping world. When the creators of the story of the Popol Vuh (those Maya authors in Chichicastenango) sit down in their puz to recite the great creation story, inhabiting the voices of the Creators in its telling—­“these then are the first words, the first speech”—­they are the Creators with a capital C, as unsure, anxious, discursive, hedging, and attentive to the old ways as the gods are in their moment of creativity (f1v). When the creation is performed on stage—­as in the Achí Mayan play Rabinal Achí or in what Allen Christenson calls the Tz’utujil Mayan “ceremonies of world renewal” that take place every year in Santiago Atitlán during Easter week (2016, 16)—­the actors do not dramatize origins, they enact the actual origination whose theatrics remind people how very captive to performance the world always is. Signs and the things they signify are amalgamated, but this does not mean that signs are trapped in an unchanging relation to the things they signify. Signs and objects are unified in their shared expression of the supple, ever-­shifting movement of time through the breath-­like mists of groaning caves and the hissing of bird-­filled trees. Another way that time coalesces the symbols and objects of the world is through mirages, which occur when layers of air bend the light at the horizon, creating an inverted visibility of objects just over the earth’s curve. If the layer of heated air is condensed enough as a kind of bubble, it acts as a magnifying lens that makes relatively minor objects into magnificently

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aggrandized desert palaces, crystal ships, celestial megaliths, and otherworldly chariots. These images are not stable. As that stretch of Earth’s surface rolls away from the sun and the heated air mixes into cooler air, the image will vibrate, maybe tower, creep, or stoop, then pull away into a darkening distance. These intense visualizations of the sun’s heat on the earth’s body are also called Fata Morgana, after the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay. You can see this optical sorceress riding against the deserts of North Africa in German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971). Set behind the foreground of colonial ruin in the Sahara and Sahel deserts, the film focuses its lens on the focalizing lenses of mirages made by airplane exhaust, desert heat, oil rigs, and the smoldering of European extraction industries and the wars to protect those industries. It is a brutal but sublime semi-­documentary, whose visions of the desert furnace are organized into three sections: Creation, Paradise, and the Golden Age. The voiceover for its story of creation is German-­French film critic Lotte Eisner reading the Popol Vuh. But what does the Popol Vuh have to do with the mirages of the Sahara Desert? What does the Popol Vuh help to focalize in those desert images? And what do those desert images help to make visible about the Popol Vuh? The point of closest contact between the Popol Vuh and the Sahara mirages is visual wonder. Just as mirages bend light to make visible the objects on the far side of Earth’s curve, pulling objects out of a diurnal future into a visible celestial phantasmagoria, the Popol Vuh is an instrument for seeing the future in a panorama of events that signify in their subtle movement. Knowing that the visibility of time’s movement can be augmented with the right tools, the gods rely on crystals, mirrors, reflecting pools, dreams, and books to see their world unfolding; and I wonder if they study desert wonders and watch films as well. Eisner’s reading of the Popol Vuh transforms its

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words into film theory. This is largely due to the fact that it is she reading the text. Eisner was a film scholar of the generation of antifascist intellectuals in the 1920s that fled Germany or were killed by the Nazis in the 1930s (such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Fritz Lang). Fleeing to France, Eisner joined Henri Langlois in developing the Cinémathèque Française, the famous film archive that was a smuggling project during the war—­hiding films and film artifacts from the Nazis. These themes of subterfuge, crisis, and political resistance flash up in her great contribution to film theory, The Haunted Screen ([1952] 2008). The ghosts that haunt the screen of early German cinema—­ the book’s focus—­are inheritances of German expressionism (think: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”). Eisner is fascinated by the deepest contradictions of expressionism, such as its simultaneous emphasis on subjective experience and immersion in atmospheres. The expressionist style is made out of interior vision that is also, somehow, intuitively metaphysical. Individuals reflect their environments; and environments are nothing but the bare experiences of lonely, primordially angsty people. To hear this scholar recite the cosmogony of the Popol Vuh, with its own emphases on the primordial contradictions floating over the face of the earth, is to hear its resonance as a theory of seeing. In such resonance, the Popol Vuh’s themes of visibility and invisibility; audibility and unknowability; creation and nothingness; and existence and anticipation become a very German expressionist meditation on the metaphysics of subjectivity. Hence in so many mirages we see an image of ourselves reflected in the hellfires of Earth’s atmosphere which are, of course, made by us. Painfully, what we see when we look there is—­as Herzog says of his film—­an “elegy of demented colonialism.” The Popol Vuh is also that. But what really cinches the strangeness of Eisner’s smug-

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gling German expressionist themes into the story of the Popol Vuh is her ability to do it at all. Just as the signs of the Popol Vuh are intimately bound up in its objects, its changing objects also bind together the meaning of its signs. Just as the sign in Blood Moon’s hand is also the world cracking over her head—­ and the world cracking over Blood Moon’s head is also the sign in her hand, foretelling that new life; and just as the creators of the Popol Vuh create new life in their role as Creators of the Popol Vuh; and just as the Rabinal Achí and Easter week ceremonies of Santiago Atitlán enact world creation in theatrical performance—­Eisner’s voice gives the Creators of the world in the Popol Vuh a strange self-­reflection in twentieth-­century barbarism and vulnerability. The same can be said of American filmmaker Patricia Amlin’s animated Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya (1989). This film is best known for its innovative visual technology: it uses images from Mayan ceramics in celluloid puppetry to depict the story of the Popol Vuh. The idea to do this was prefigured in Guatemalan scholar and attorney Albertina Saravia’s illustrated Popol Wuj ([1965] 1995), which scours the surviving Mayan codices to find images for the book’s stories. This was my first version of the Popol Vuh—­the old, worn-­down copy that I received as a child is in front of me now—­and it remains a popular version of the text in Guatemala, with many reprints. Amlin takes its effort one step further by making the images of the tale walk, prowl, flit, crawl, fly, and strut on the haunted cinematic screen. This is its visual summoning. But powerful as well are its means for summoning with sound. Its voiceover is the work of El Teatro Campesino, the Chicano theatrical troupe founded by Luis Valdez on the back of pickup trucks in the Delano Grape Strike picket lines (1965) of the United Farmworkers Union led by César Chávez. This “peasant theater” brought together commedia dell’arte, miming, improvisation, folk humor, Meso-

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american ritual performance, and sociological analysis to dramatize the crises of exploitative farm labor and the necessity of unionization, and it also elevated Chicano cultural self-­ awareness by performing the Mesoamerican creation stories alongside the histories of colonialism and racial discrimination in the United States. Assisted by the voice of Yakama Nation artist Larry George, the voices of El Teatro Campesino (Tina Candelaria, Xochi Candelaria, Diane Rodriguez, Paulina Sahagun, Anahuac Valdez, Luis Valdez, Kinan Valdez, Tony Curiel, and Luis Oropeza) infuse the creation story of the Popol Vuh with themes of labor exploitation—­especially the use of race to make humans into beasts of burden, mere bodies to bear the costs of primitive accumulation or Seven Macaw’s legacy. Amidst so much catastrophe, it is a wonder any poetry comes through. But the birds sing, and the gods return to the scene of creation, new instruments in hand, to see what the future holds and play the old songs. In Ámbar Past’s collection of Tzotzil Mayan spells and songs, Incantations, she tells the story of María Ernándes Kokov, who found her ilb’al (her “instrument of seeing”) in television (f1r). Some Tzotzil healers say that they learn their craft from talking boxes—­and sometimes (as in the 1850s–­1900s Caste Wars, or the 1867 War of the Rose) these talking boxes, talking hearthstones, or talking crosses have led military campaigns to enact the large-­scale healing that justice and retribution bring to a society. The boxes are understood to give voice to oracles from the other side of time’s horizon—­openings of the future in the material objects of the present moment. During a lunar eclipse in 1996, Kokov—­who calls herself a defender of the Angels—­ taped her oracular transmission from her home, on the Huitepec volcano amid a cloud forest between the antennas of Televisión Azteca and a traditional Tzotzil shrine. In the falsetto voice of the spirit who speaks through her, she said:

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“Are you there? I’m from the Universe. I want bread and half a crate of soda pop. Are you there, Sons of Man? Sane as always? Got a question? OK, I’m on my way. Just a minute. Don’t worry. Rin-­Ran-­Rin! I’m back. What was lost can be found. I’m going to look for it near Venus and punish the guilty one. Tipín, tipín, tipín! you’ll hear my whip. Ay, ay, ay! the thief will cry out. Nothing to be done. That’s destiny. That’ll be fifty pesos. And a kilo of incense. See you later, Sons of Women. Goodbye, Defender of the Angels.” (Past, Bakbolom, and Ernandes 2005, 38, 173)

Echoes of the old stories—­Blood Moon, Seven Macaw, and the hero twins—­can be heard here. But it is also clear that the trans-

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mission is not a recitation; the objects in immediate need—­ bread, soda pop, pesos, and incense—­give the song its sense of inner necessity. It is a supplication for the simple stuff of life. But, as such, it is also very much like the basic message of the Popol Vuh, which tells its readers to seek sustenance and uphold those things that sustain. And, like the Popol Vuh, it insists that while such knowledge may be hidden now, “what was lost can be found.” Still, here we are asked to seek such basic sustenance in transmissions through a televisual field that appears also to be catching signals of advertisement for bread and soda pop. Does soda pop sustain? No—­but it does often have corn syrup in it—­ so it does often have traces of that holy crop maize. The closer you listen, the closer you observe, the harder it is to distinguish between the signal and the echo. Just as soon as you think you hear the signal, it becomes its echo; and then, just then, the echo takes on the quality and authority of original sound. Such is the nature of the spit in Blood Moon’s expecting hand.

Demons The Popol Vuh is a story of creation that delays creation until its final pages. The larger share of the book tells the story of hesitations to create, creational mishaps, considerations of the role of language and sacrifice in creation, a series of descents to the Underworld to learn the necessity behind creation, the coming to life of the animals and maize, and finally the story of the first humans who help to bring the first dawn—­that is, creation—­ into being. Most of the book takes place in a penumbral anticipation just before the dawn—­a book-­length apeiron, or scene of tense waiting—­in which various gods, demigods, animals, proto-­humans, and humans try to bring a kind of boundedness of time (the dawning, the days) into existence. The power to create is summoned in language: what is needed to bring about the dawn from the darkness is a proper way of speaking, of ordering the world in language, which—­the book says—­is one and the same with a proper way of seeing. To speak correctly is to see correctly. The book calls itself “ilb’al” (“instrument for seeing”) and says that this instrument is presently lost (“rumal maha bi chic ilbal re popo vuh”)—­hidden perhaps (“euaxibal”)—­in spite of the fact that the thing that is saying so is there, before us, that is, the book itself (f1r). Why would the present object say that it is not there? A bit of textual history helps to clarify the book’s point. The object itself, the only extant transcription of the original K’iche’ Mayan story of creation, was made by a Dominican friar in 1702. Internal

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evidence from the text (i.e., the way it locates itself in Maya history) suggests that this friar was working with an older text of the Popol Vuh (likely written, maybe hieroglyphic, possibly oral, and certainly in consultation with Mayas in Chichicastenango who still held that older text) that dates to shortly after the arrival of the warlord Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. The book is explicit about its colonial context. Its preamble sets the story of Mayan creation “amidst the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom,” and says that this is why the authors can no longer see their own book, no longer see their “own shadows,” no longer see “the dawn of life” (f1r). In this opening sequence the book equates its penumbral anticipation, in its moment in the darkness before the dawn, with the darkness of colonialism. What cannot be seen cannot be seen because the right way of speaking is now blocked. What must be done is to unblock the right way of speaking, to unfold the way of telling the story of creation, to lift up again that ilb’al, in order to give rise again to the dawn, in order to see once again the days. While he delivers the only extant version of this very old story of creation, the colonial friar named Francisco Ximenez is not a hero in this story. As a functionary of the Roman Catholic Church, Ximenez was instrumental in the colonial uprooting of indigenous culture and the transplanting of European belief into Maya minds. His transcription of the Popol Vuh is explicitly framed as an action in this broader project of what scholar Néstor Quiroa has called colonial “extirpation.” What we receive of the Popol Vuh today was originally bound up with a kind of colonial factbook aimed to help convert the indigenous population of Spanish Guatemala. This four-­part conversion manual included a grammar of three Mayan languages; an “art of evangelization” (or guide for the conversion and governance of indigenous people); the story of the Popol Vuh itself; and a series of “escolios” or commentaries on the Popol Vuh

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that do not equivocate in telling readers that these stories are inspired by the devil, and fostered by the sheer “erratic” nature and ignorance of the Mayas (Quiroa 2018). Unlike other more outlandishly destructive colonial friars, such as the zealous Diego de Landa, who burned all the Mayan books he could find in Yucatan, Ximenez tried to channel the idolatrous Mayan tales into proper Catholic form, to use them in the project of evangelization. He delivers the Popol Vuh to posterity, but it is given over in the cast of dark colonial days in which the book sees itself. If it is to speak, it must speak through Ximenez, meaning that its prospect for speaking is indeed dim. Pictured above is a moment in the manuscript of the Popol Vuh when Ximenez’s presence interrupts the story, when we can see clearly the darkness in which the book finds itself. The left column is the transcription of the K’iche’ Mayan, and the right column is the Spanish translation. Toward the top you can see a parenthesis on both sides, with words in Latin on the left and Spanish on the right (“Demonium loquens cis” on the

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left, and “Demonio q’les hablaba” on the right) (f36v). In those languages those words mean “the devil is speaking here” or “the devil spoke henceforth to them.” This is Ximenez’s only parenthetical textual interruption in the entire book, and it is surprising for how late it occurs (f36v), near the end of a book of fifty-­six folios that has been filled with what Ximenez would have considered idolatrous gods, incorrect speech, and damnable stories. So why here? Why so late? Ximenez’s demonization of the scene makes you want to read it more closely. Who is this late-­coming, grimly refulgent apparition of what that old poet of demons and angels John Milton would have called “darkness visible” (2007, 297)? At this point in the story the hero twins have long ago descended into the Underworld to receive the blessing of life-­ giving maize. The first humans have been made from that maize, and these first humans are presently in a state of migration trying to find a place to settle and the right words with which to appease the gods and give rise to the dawn. But they haven’t quite figured out the right language with which to pay their debt to the gods, and they worry that they’ll never do so: “Alas, our language has been abandoned. What have we done? We are lost. Where did we go wrong? We had our one language when we left Tulan. We had our sprouting and creation. Whatever we’ve done, it’s not good” (f36v). At this moment of crisis, a person appears to these first humans, a messenger from Xibalba; that is, Ximenez’s demon, who says, “‘This is your true god. He is your provider. He is also the substitute and reminder of your Framer and your Maker. Do not give fire to the nations unless they give something to this one—­Tohil, first. You are not asking them to give you anything. You are asking for what rightfully belongs to Tohil. It’s his fire to give, in return for whatever they give,’ said the person from Xibalba. He had wings like a bat’s wings. ‘I am a messenger from your Framer and your

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Maker,’ said the person from Xibalba” (f36v). The appearance of the bat-­winged spiritual broker in the story is no less surprising than the intrusion of Ximenez’s demonological commentary in the text. Both appear out of nowhere, and each vies for the redemption of Maya lifeworlds. But while the bat-­winged being emerges from within the mythworld of the story, Ximenez’s demon arrives from outside it. One is intimately possessed by the interior of the Popol Vuh, and the other discloses something at a distance. One comes from its Underworld, and the other comes from across the ocean. One irrupts in it, and the other interrupts it. One is a volcano, and the other is a coming storm. Here is a conduit of fires within, and here also is a looming fulmination. The looming fulmination is Ximenez’s Latin and Spanish commentary telling us that this is the devil speaking. In that flash of colonial interruption, readers get the trace of a social world imposing itself on the Popol Vuh in 1702. The Spaniards have arrived. Their power is like an ocean of flame in the eastern sky, now speaking itself into existence over the earth’s darkening face. And, while Latin and Spanish are still marginal languages in the early eighteenth-­century Guatemalan highlands where this text is transcribed, the principle of incorporation is already here in a text whose larger framework is designed to help convert the Mayas to Christianity. The four-­part book in which the Popol Vuh (the one at the Newberry Library in Chicago) was bound is something like the World Factbook produced by the CIA as a resource for US government officials. Like that book, Ximenez’s book (including the Popol Vuh, the friar’s commentaries on that damnable text, the Mayan grammar books, and the art of evangelization) is designed to help regulate Maya thinking and assimilate it into the colonizers’ world. In Ximenez’s “Demonio q’les hablaba,” the interruption discloses the secret demonism of the Mayan mythworld, revealing from

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across an ocean how that mythworld traverses a Guatemalan mountain range of hidden hells and gateways to hell. That interruption maps the visionary atlas of Christendom. Such an atlas is meant to inspire paranoia and surveillance. The mountains and dense forests of Central America are hard to cross, and it would be impossible to control the landscape if all inhabitants in the many corners and hollows of its chains, cones, plateaus, valleys, slopes, and spurs were allowed to think they had inner light—­that powerful puz. No—­those people must be made to feel that inside themselves is the same darkness through which the Christian Lord, the anointed one, walked for those forty nights in the devil-­haunted Judaean desert. So that they may see that their spirit is nothing other than temptation from below, give them the soul whose debt to him who hath shed the blood is our debt to collect. We are asking for what rightfully belongs to him. This new one asks for sacrifice, much like that older one—­ the one called Tohil, whose messenger is Ximenez’s demon. But there is a difference. And one way to think about the difference is in the distinction between the inside and outside of speech, especially poetic speech. This distinction between the inside and outside of poetic speech has been expressed as a distinction between form (the inside) and diction (the outside). To quote literary scholar Daniel Tiffany, such moments of dictional interruption as Ximenez’s “Demonio q’les hablaba”—­ when language interrupts language—­are often tasked with “signing and auditing, addressing and spying” (2020). Such interruptions intend to surveil and control—­they are expressions of a poem’s “outside” attempting to understand and control its internal workings. The aim of Ximenez’s interruption is to make the Mayan mythworld into a devilish fiction, to transform it into content within the order of Roman Catholic world form. Ximenez believes he can do this because he thinks there is

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only one kind of form—­Roman Catholic form—­and everything else is just content to affirm that one world order. His voice in the text is the storm on the horizon telling the people below that their caves will no longer protect them from the coming rain. Still, there is the matter of the voice coming from the caves telling the people of their “true god,” who “is also the substitute and reminder of your Framer and your Maker” (f36v). This voice of the bat-­winged messenger from Xibalba also interrupts the story—­it stops the Maya forebears in their tracks to remind them of their original relation to the hollows of the earth beneath their feet. It interrupts from below to remind them of their debts to interior worlds—­the interior world of the earth beneath them, and the interior world of their own inner light. It reminds them of the peculiar quality of their creation story—­framed and made in terms of substitutions and reminders, never quite authoritative, but always questioning, doubling, diverging, and remaking. What I mean here is that Ximenez’s interruption is not the only interruption that has world form in it. The Xibalban’s interruption also has world form, which is pushing back on the colonial interruption, conditioning it and speaking beneath and around it, reminding its readers of the linguistic forms informing the world form of the present speaking. Here those first people tell us they have lost their shared language—­these first humans tell us that they “are lost” insofar as they had “but one language when [they] left Tulan,” and thus they had their “sprouting and creation” (f36v). In the pains of this loss, in the depths of the anxiety of having lost their shared language, they summon the bat-­winged being. This being then instructs them in the arts of representation, giving them a kind of theory of divine representability: “This is your true god. He is your provider. He is also the substitute and reminder of your Framer and your Maker” (f36v). At this moment, the bat-­winged being (who is likely Camazotz, a death-­

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bat god of sacrifice who resides in the Underworld) speaks to these first humans in a classic Mayan structure of parallelistic speech: your true god/your provider; substitute/reminder; your Framer/your Maker. One of the central themes of the Popol Vuh is that humans have to learn to speak in this way to honor the gods. The relation between poetic parallelism and divine speech hinges on a Mesoamerican idea that the cosmos is dialectical, but it is a special kind of dialectic, in that it never resolves into synthesis. In their constant self-­differencing, Mesoamerican paired items never settle into a stable identity or essence, but rather remain conditioned and animated by their disidentification in some other thing. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock says that this non-­synthesizing dialectic gives the phenomenology of the Mayan mythworld a jittery or oscillating quality, as any being is always in relation to some other being, producing intermixed signals in any one being’s utterance, so that meanings are always changing in the inescapable pull of multiplicity, discontinuity, and disidentification (Tedlock 1998, 183–­84, 186–­87). In this world, structure is conjuncture, being is beings, meaning is discrepancy, and identity is difference. What Camazotz tells these first humans, then, is that their true language—­the residue they must recover to find their shared tongue, the substitute and reminder of what framed and made them—­is here in his speech patterns, in his way of speaking in twos, which he relates to real sacrifice. Blood will pay the human debt to the gods; but split speech will channel that offering appropriately, digging that conduit for inner light (puz) that in an earlier time the Xibalbans had tried to keep from humans. It is impossible to overemphasize how widespread is the emphasis on such speech doubling in the Popol Vuh. It is its formal life-­force, coursing on every page, surging into the context in which those pages are inscribed, and splitting that context open into a scene of Mayan linguistic making. As I’ve

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mentioned, the book is savvy in its self-­location against Christendom. But it does more than contrast itself to Christianity; it also absorbs that arriving doctrine into Mayan world form. While the Popol Vuh admits that it is written “amidst the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom,” its primary aim is to “bring it[self] out” of that darkness, “now that there is no means for seeing it clearly”: “we shall write, we shall plant the ancient word, the sprout and source for everything” (f1r). By now you will have noticed the layering of parallel phrases in these sentences, enfolding the context of Christendom into parallelistic Mayan form, and thus putting the relation between Maya authors and Catholic transcriber into dyadic Mayan world form. If there must be Christendom, the book says, the contact of Christian and Maya will take place inside the dual design of the lifeworld of the Popol Vuh. This skillful doubling happens even in individual words. At its very beginning, when the Popol Vuh sets out its aim to be “a means of sowing, a means of dawning,” it introduces a surprising misspelling for the word “sowing”: euaxibal (f1r). This is a bizarre spelling for “sowing” because it means, in fact, “something that is hidden.” The correct spelling for something that is sown is auaxibal. In his meticulous literal translation of the Popol Vuh, Allen Christenson quietly edits this word to awaxib’al, or “something that is sown,” which makes sense in the broader context of the Popol Vuh, which uses the parallelism of the sowing and the dawning in at least seven other places (Christenson 2008, 13). But here at the book’s opening, which is dramatically staging the context for its dawning in the darkness of ongoing colonization, it is striking that the writers of the Popol Vuh sonically blend together the words for hiding and sowing, forcing from the expected parallelism (the sowing, the dawning) a new meaning in the new context of present hiding amidst political and epidemiological danger: that which must

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now hide, that which cannot now be shown or clearly seen, shall be that which will be revealed to have the burst of sprouting inside it. In a single orally complex word, pushing against the alphabetism into which it is being forced in its transcription, the Maya authors are presenting the parallelistic complexity of their situation: their hiding shall reveal itself, in time, to have been a time of sprouting, whence the sun will emerge to reveal the persistence of Mayan time and reality. The conundrum of having a formal structure of revelation that ends up creating the veil it sets out to pull back is a familiar one—­perhaps recalling Heraclitus’s famously mistranslated fragment, “nature loves to hide” (Hadot 2008, 1). But rather than participating in a dialectic of revelation that produces the feeling of hiddenness it sets out to dispel, the idea of hiddenness in the Popol Vuh—­apparent in the odd spelling of a single word, “euaxibal”—­suggests a structure of hiding that does not just create the feeling of hiding, but that indeed hides to give life. This trope of hiding is the poetry of the seed found in the Popol Vuh. While this form of time and reality bursts out of the earth in the book (the sprouting, the dawning, and the leap of Camazotz from the earth’s hollows), form here is not a retreat inward. It is an act of capturing the situation in which the Maya poets found themselves, unfolding an exterior in which the new speaking of Christendom, the new tongue, with its diction, and with its alphabet, will be spoken. The world unfolds in this way—­indicating itself through its poetic forms informing world form: “This is the account, here it is”: Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples, now it still sighs, and it is empty under the sky.

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Here follow the first words, the first eloquence . . . (Tedlock 2010, 313–­15)

I quote Tedlock’s translation here because its striking lineation mirrors (and echoes) K’iche’ Maya attorney and scholar Luis Enrique Sam Colop’s translation. In his 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, Tedlock translates a selection of the Popol Vuh in this way. Sam Colop (who was Tedlock’s PhD student) translated the entire book in this way, into Spanish, to show how the Popol Vuh’s parallels are constantly mirroring and echoing one another, creating layers of artful splits and dialectical relations at all scales of expression and interpretation. Colop’s translation showcases how the poetic form of the Popol Vuh moves across languages and captures local linguistic effects (for instance, the mirroring of the Spanish “ésta” and “está” [“this one” and “it is”] that echoes the passage’s figural parallelism) in parallelistic speech: Ésta es, pues, su narración: todo está en suspenso, todo está en reposo, en sosiego, todo está en silencio; todo es murmullo y está vacía la bóveda del Cielo. Ésta es, pues, la primera palabra la primera expresión . . . (2011, 3–­4)

This speech isn’t just talking about creation. It is enacting it. It is unfolding creation in the form in which creation must happen: substitution as remembrance, structure as conjuncture, being as beings, meaning as discrepancy, and identity as difference. When the Popol Vuh describes itself as ilb’al, an

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“instrument for seeing,” this is what it is talking about (f1v). It is proposing its form as theoretical and historical form—­as a way of seeing, understanding, and shaping artistic expression, conceptual interpretation, and historical knowledge. It is not just mere content to be interpreted and interpolated by European form; it is the form by which to interpret and illuminate the world beyond itself. This is one of the book’s touchstones: it offers frameworks for expression and interpretation explicitly. It wants us to think in its forms—­to think in terms of the heterogeneity, polyphony, translatability, non-­isomorphy, reciprocity, recurrence, and revision embedded in its parallelism—­to hear, and therefore see, euaxibal and auaxibal at the same time. So, in the end, the Popol Vuh does in fact give us a sense of its sense of what is its originary, shared language, but it does not develop that sense through its diction only. Its distinct forms of speaking prefigure the appearance of Ximenez’s demon, interpolating that demon into a dialectical or parallelist relation with the bat-­god Camazotz. At that crossroads, diction meets diction in a broader framework of interanimation, a Mayan world of persistent parallels between the critical and creative, between the world-­shaking and world-­making uses of language. In the conceptual form of the Popol Vuh, the meeting of Ximenez’s dialogic demon and Camazotz’s dyadic poetry is itself dialectic, non-­synthesizing, and persistent. That encounter is resoundingly internal to the structure of the lifeworld of the Popol Vuh, while it also reaches outward in its capture of the historical moment of the text’s inscription. It is worth noting that Ximenez’s dictional interruptions do not appear in any of the English-­or Spanish-­language translations of the Popol Vuh that I know. Mention of these interruptions is made in the paratextual or parenthetical apparatus of a footnote or endnote in the published translations. While such elision of colonial diction into the parenthesis seems appropri-

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ate for foregrounding the indigenous text itself, paradoxically it gives the dictional interruption more force than it deserves. My sense is that the Popol Vuh is designed to handle such interruption, to configure and cast it inside Mayan form. Ximenez’s fatal flaw—­his hamartia—­was to be convinced that he could capture the content of Mayan stories in Catholic world form (the format of the conversion manual and the world form in which Camazotz is a demon speaking to Mayas). But the Popol Vuh has its own form—­its own sense that it is the world form, and its own means for enacting that world. And who today considers Ximenez when thinking about the Popol Vuh? Indeed, the outstanding quality of the Popol Vuh is its ability to capture all such local features of historical crisis (colonial and otherwise) into its framework of parallelism and the concepts associated with parallelism: heterogeneity, polyphony, translatability, non-­isomorphy, reciprocity, recurrence, revision, and the non-­synthesizing dialectic of Mesoamerica. And the Popol Vuh is certainly not the only indigenous work of the Americas that is savvy about how its forms inform a conception of form as such. I think of the recent collection of essays edited by scholars Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz) and Theresa Warburton, Shapes of Native Nonfiction. The editors of this collection emphasize that one of the most important recent shifts in the study of indigenous literatures is a turn of attention to form, to thinking about these literatures not just as content, but rather as process, as “intentional form which shapes the content that is garnered through its exploration” (2019, 5). Quoting another pair—­Lenape scholar Joanne Barker and I-­Kiribati and African American scholar, poet, and activist Teresia Teaiwa—­they add that this shift moves “away from a focus on a static idea of ‘Native information’ and instead emphasizes the dynamic process of ‘Native in formation’” (5). Such a shift does not necessarily turn away from the discursive contexts of a

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given work; it only highlights how the formal niceties of a given work—­the Popol Vuh, for instance—­actively shape the dialogic and social world in which it finds itself. Cultural form informs world formation. And this idea of native poetry “in formation” is in keeping with an idea that a poem’s diction can envelop, and at the same time be folded into, its form. We perceive a poem’s inner substance because of its surface effects, its poetic forms dancing in sound and sight; and we can feel those forms dance because they have the same inner light that shines in our reading minds. And what better place to consider the dance between interior and exterior than the border? What sharper context for the formation of poetic boundary is there than the political borders that separate languages, people, cultures, and societies? Considering how our demons emerge at the borders of our worlds, I wish to share with you a Mayan poem in its Scottish translation—­a Scottish border ballad for contemporary times. The poem is from a late collection by Ak’abal, translated from K’iche’ into Scots by Rosemary Burnett and James Robertson. It tells the tale of an old, old people—­our first humans, maybe—­ who went looking for new languages and found instead a form of discrepancy, derangement, and even sheer translatability in which their language was at last transformed. In this world, creation must happen on the last page, at the end of the great rise and descent of a long, long night: The tale is tellt o an auld, auld people. Scunnered wi their ain tung—­sae it’s said—­ they set themsels tae biggin a ben—­ mool upon mool—­ till it raxed up intae the cloods.

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Up yonder, it wis tellt, they haundit oot languages. Sae they thocht they’d try it oot . . . Ye had tae hae baws tae get up there. The first thing tae dae Wis cowp a wheen muckle drams. On the wey back doun, ye were jist haiverin, pure pish . . . but in anither language! (Ak’abal 2010, 32)

In this poem the first people find themselves as soon in the clouds as in the depths of an instructive drunkenness. They teach us that the difference of language is sometimes only so much hallucination as the flush of ethanol in our veins—­a blabbering of tongues among humans nonetheless. But it is a difanalgesic and fearful—­ so dangerous ference nonetheless—­ indeed, and there are demons who live in that dangerous anxiety too. That other, old poet of demons and angels, Walter Scott, recorded a Scottish border ballad that tells of the demon that lives at those hallucinated gates. This one is called the “redcap”—­a malevolent goblin who lives in the ruins along the borders of our worlds (1849, 244–­45). He soaks his cap in the blood of those victims who die trying to cross the gates (Henderson 1879, 253). Last night the redcaps held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 the demons destroyed the property of thousands of black Americans, killing perhaps as many as three hundred. It was one of the worst concentrations of racial violence in the history of the United States. But one scene does not make a situation.

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I wrote those words the day after Donald Trump’s rally at Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 20, 2020, when the redcaps were in a stupendous frenzy to deny the present pandemic and to uphold white privilege in a place where white presumption had massacred so many lives in 1921. I return to these words in my revisions to this book the day after the same redcaps—­the wearers of the MAGA hat—­have stormed the US capitol on January 6, 2021, embracing a deranged idea that a messiah known as “Q” has promised them redemption for their violence, ignorance, presumption, and total subordination to a racial autocrat intent on overturning a democratic election. This is not a goblin tale—­ this is a tale of borders and misrule (which, strangely, took place on the night of the Lord of Misrule, Twelfth Night, that is, January 6). The blood of history colors the hats of contemporary crisis. My only question in considering the demons of our world, in their irruptions and interruptions, is (to quote the English bard in his drama of Twelfth Night): “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (Shakespeare 1785, 36).

Migrations At this point in the story, the great houses are in migration. The first people have been made from maize—­the grandfathers and grandmothers of lineages in such Maya groups as the K’iche’, Mam, Kaqchikel, Achí, and Tz’utujil—­and they have left their site of emergence in the far east, amid the sea there. There is controversy around the translation of their site of emergence, which is described in the Popol Vuh, the story we are telling here, as “chaca palo” (f48r). The controversy surrounds the word palo, and whether it means “across,” “beside,” “astride,” or “amidst” the sea (chaca). The issue is what kind of movement is said to take place in relation to the eastern sea: movement from its one side to its other side, from its side inland, or from inside it outward. These choices have political significance. “Across the sea” seems to look to Europe as a source of origins that are troublingly resonant with the arrival of conquering armies eager to identify as bringers of new life. “Beside the sea” appears to solve that problem, but at a cost, because it cuts off Mayas of the Guatemalan highlands from oceanic transits in the Caribbean Sea that connect them culturally and socially to Mayas in the Yucatan peninsula. To come from “beside the sea” is to have no activity over it. Moreover, coming from beside the sea without coming out of it keeps emergence disconnected from the roiling energy of ocean waters—­the roil that is identified in the book’s opening as divinely creative (i.e., Heart of Sky also called Hurricane whose

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aspects are Thunderbolt Hurricane, Infant Thunderbolt, and Sudden Thunderbolt, all present at the scene of creation over the turbulent ocean). In ancient Mayan art, gods can be seen paddling over the water, sometimes emerging from the water or from some such aquatic entity as a sea turtle, water lily, or ocean serpent (Chinchilla Mazariegos 2017, 209–­11, 216–­19). How such entities unfold in the translations is as protean as you might expect. For chaca palo Allen Christenson prefers “across the sea” (2008, 14, 223), and Dennis Tedlock prefers “beside the sea” (1996, 175), which is similar to Luis Enrique Sam Colop’s “de la orilla del mar” (2011, 168), which he prefers because he feels the people emerged in the western sierra of the Cuchumatanes around 2200 BCE but had to travel east to Petén and the coast and back to discover their sense of return (203–­4). With a similar aim but different conclusion, the K’iche’ Maya elder Adrián Inés Chávez—­a k’amalb’e (leader) of his K’iche’ community in the twentieth century—­communicated the importance of a sense of primordial return by translating chaca palo as “de allá del otro lado del mar” (from over there on the other side of the sea) because it relates the deep past of Mesoamerica to Mesopotamia. He felt it critical to reveal the intertwined civilizational accomplishments in script, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and architecture (2001, 1, 89). In an interview with Guatemalan television host Gina Lavandier in 1982, he advanced the possibility of a shared emergence for these planetary hotspots of civilization in the nodal empire of Atlantis. In this primordial, multiethnic island society founded by the titan Atlas, somewhere in the thus named Atlantic Ocean, Chávez saw not a rebuke to Maya accomplishment, but a sense of its central place in a shared deep time that the many people

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of the planet are still trying to grasp: primordial Mayan planetarity. Such, he says, is the understanding seeded in the Popol Vuh that will unite the Americas: “This book will unite the people of the Americas through religion, not through politics; . . . that is its great lesson” (Chávez 1982). To keep chaca palo in the sea changes of its controversy, I’ve translated it as “amid the sea there”—­a translation that I feel is capable of assuming many forms of movement and relation to the sea whence it hails. But most important to take away is that the term is only significant in relation to movement precipitated by crisis. In the story of these first people, there is no source without urgent egress, no emergence without the migration in which they find themselves in search of a domain that will sustain them, no beginning without the act of going out into the blowing wind and rain. In telling the story of the first peoples of the Americas, who arrived in these lands long before there were any such words as Americas or first peoples, Salish Kootenai scholar, novelist, anthropologist, and sometime BIA bureaucrat D’Arcy McNickle also starts amid the sea: “There is a new land over there. Across some water. Somebody has been there, and come back again. So we hear. They had all the meat they could eat. It is a plentiful land. Life is easy.” The world was full of rumors just then. A marvelous thing had happened. A new land had been discovered, just when it was needed too. The people had wandered to the end of the world, in quest of food and safety. Somewhere in their rear, and in their dim racial memory, were scenes of mortal struggle. . . .

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Now, there were these rumors. A new land. A plentiful land. Life was easy over there, across some water. (1949, 15)

McNickle’s first migrants from Asia by way of Beringia emerge from a haze of sea spray and rumor, stray talk and salty, frigid susurrus. Behind them are generations of hardship to fortify the dream those same hardships keep stealing from them. McNickle’s work—­They Came Here First—­is subtitled “the epic of the American Indian,” and it begins with a stunning story of migrants troubled over the dream and necessity of migration. There are those among them who have a vision of what is possible by migration; but there are also those among them who sense the danger, risk, and terrific uncertainty involved in migrating. These migrant groups are extended kin networks, and there is much strain on the network about whether to go and, in going, how to do so (or for how long to keep going). It’s only midway through the lengthy opening that you learn these people are those ancient migrants who crossed the Bering land bridge in pursuit of large game, and who hence spread in various subsidiary family lines into all parts of the American continent. It may be that some people did come that way, but certainly not all the people, and likely not the first ones. But, in any case, we have resources for reconceptualizing hemispheric origins and the metapolitics that emerge from such ideas of origination. Migrant horizons. I get the sense that McNickle wanted to get the social atmosphere of migrant horizons right—­calling the world of those first ones a world of rumors—­of rumors of a new world and even of a new worlding possible by the effort of the quest. He may be wrong about how the Americas were first populated (he is writing in the 1940s), but he is spot-­on about the feelings that make migration stories necessary: the speculation and change-­of-­world poiesis. In my reading, that is the great les-

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son from the migration stories of the Americas—­ancient and contemporary. The key event for that book is the great migration across the Bering Strait that was once believed to be the source of the indigenous populating of the American hemisphere (hence linking Asia and the Americas). We now have evidence of cultural diffusion far into South America long before the Last Glacial Maximum formed the land bridge connecting North America and North Asia around 20,000 years ago—­evidence that human occupation began as early as 33,000 years ago (for instance, the Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico and very old sites in Brazil at Serra da Capivara and other nearby sites in Piauí). We also now have evidence of ancient seafaring transpacific movement (material and genetic evidence of Polynesian and Aboriginal Australian movements across the Pacific Ocean); and, just as importantly, there are plenty of stories that insist there was no such migration to the Americas—­that is, that the original people of the Americas have origins here, sprouting directly from the land here like maize, squash, quinoa, tomato, pawpaw, pinto bean, or blueberry. Still, nonetheless, there are the stories of actual, intellectual, and mythological movement on the hemisphere. Primordial hardship; the sharpened edge of risk; walks hardened amid so much precarious necessity. It seems to have lasted from the beginning of time, for so long that it became a tradition, soaked into the creation stories and ceremonies of emergence. This is not just the tale of Beringia. It is the creation story of the Americas, seeded in movement and saturated in stories of a critical emergence into migration. The spirit of Kiowa poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday’s classic of Native American worldmaking The Way to Rainy Mountain, first published in 1969, arises in these themes. This book tells the story of the author’s journey to ancestral tradi-

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tion, which is itself a tradition of epic itinerancy: “The journey began one day long ago on the edge of the northern Plains. It was carried on over a course of many generations and many hundreds of miles. In the end there were many things to remember, to dwell upon and talk about” (1976, 3). These are the journeys of the Kiowas from their place of emergence into their sustaining lands, and they are reenacted in the poet’s journey to a sustaining tradition, a sense of reemergence in the darkness: “The journey herein recalled continues to be made anew each time the miracle comes to mind, for that is peculiarly the right and responsibility of the imagination. It is a whole journey, intricate with motion and meaning; and it is made with the whole memory, that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural” (4). The line that distinguishes myth from history, and that separates the scene of emergence from the scene of its inscription, and that differentiates cultural memory from personal imagination, is excised. The poet’s mental journey is tangled up in the crisis of migration that brought the first people into being, and whose being is marked by a memory of need, persistence, journeying, loss of life and direction, and—­there, amid the gifts of sea and earth, like the sun sprouting from the hazy thicket of a distant horizon—­vision and growth. At times I feel as if Momaday is commenting on the story of the migrant first people in the Popol Vuh: “It was a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age” (6). Or, when he writes, “From one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world” (7). Out of emergency into migration. Chicana poet and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) told this same story as an epic of Mexican emigration amid the United States. I choose the word “amid” here because I feel it is capable of assuming the many

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forms of movement and relation to the northern state whence the crisis of migration today hails. Anzaldúa contrasts the labor exploitation that closed borders enable to the ancient exertion of long walks in search of life-­sustaining land: “We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán” (1987, 33). Aztlán is the site of emergence that the old Aztec (aka Mexica) storytellers brought to life in their words, from which they departed on their long walk southward into the central valley of Mexico, where they founded the island city-­state Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco. By the time they got there and built their city, after generations of walking—­notes scholar Camilla Townsend—­not one of them “could or would have carried memories of a childhood in Aztlán; it was a communal memory of a home or homes abandoned long ago that they carried with them” (2019, 27). Their memory, so quickly evolving from the rubble of their many departures and losses, was as imaginatively exfoliated as Anzaldúa’s. Out of the historical scrub, the story of migration. Out of migration the stories. The year before last, when all the closures of the world now would have seemed like a story you might read in a book, I traveled to the Sonoran Desert to meet Alfredo Figueroa. Figueroa is a veteran Chicano activist who has dedicated his later years to protecting a constellation of geoglyphs outside Blythe, California. He guards these glyphs because his lifetime of research has led him to conclude that they are the historical ruins of Aztlán. He took me there, along California’s border with Arizona, astride the Colorado River. There, you find massive intaglios or geoglyphs of ancient origin not unlike the famous intaglios in Peru known as the Nazca lines. Measuring from 95 to 167 feet long, the Blythe intaglios depict human and animal figures; and

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appear to have astronomical features relating to the sun, the moon, and the Pleiades. The dating of these sidereal geoglyphs is a matter of some controversy, with conservative estimates placing their construction around 450 years ago and longer estimates dating their construction around 2,000 years ago. In their Anales de Tlatelolco, the Aztec storytellers say they left these lands in 1065 CE. Figueroa—­who pointed out the caves of Chicomoztoc whence the first peoples of the Aztec cosmogenesis emerged—­calls this landscape la cuna, or “the cradle,” where humanity emerged from a hole in the earth (2017, 18). This is not ethnogenesis; it is genesis. The difference is your implication in that world. Today that cradle of scorched land is spread over the same terrain in the Sonoran Desert that anthropologist Jason de León calls the “Land of Open Graves.” In his book of that name (2015), de León explains that this is the desert funnel that the United States Border Patrol enlists as a human-­and-­nonhuman network of desert heat, dryness, animals, smugglers, and militiamen to do the mercenary work of what is called “Prevention through Deterrence.” This strategy of funneling migrants into a desert whose hostility is supposed to deter them is necro-­setting, a theater literalizing death as the sovereign trope of these States. On the stage are the bodies of the mutilated dead meant to scare would-­be migrants away. The drama is the dread through which those who cross must cross; into that dread leaps the harlequin of national belonging. There will be more migrants. The changing climate in Central America—­fewer (and more unpredictable) rains, and longer dry seasons—­increases the rate of crop failures. Food supplies are devastated, and agricultural work disappears (Lustgarten 2020, 12). Whereas previous migration patterns tracked from cities in the south to cities in

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the north, now there is the influx of migration from rural, previously self-­sustaining farmlands to cities along the hemispheric spine leading to the United States. Everyone can expect to know more Guatemalans, Belizeans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Panamanians, and indeed Mexicans in the coming years. Not all these people want to leave their homes; the journey north is an incalculable risk amid hostile environments, governments, and people. They do what you might do in their situation. They take the long walk. They are met by the new colonialism—­which may be the new, new colonialism, or just the same old colonialism. This new old colonialism is a retreat inward, a closing off from unlivable lands, and hence a sealing away from responsibility for the planet’s heat, dryness, desperation, and open graves. In the detention centers and immigration courts of the North there is already a crisis of linguistic torrent. Earlier this year, an article in the New Yorker pointed out that at least half of the two hundred and fifty thousand Guatemalan migrants detained at the US-­Mexico border last year were Mayas, many speaking only Mayan languages: “Mam was the ninth most common language used in immigration courts last year, more common than French. Three Guatemalan Mayan languages made the top twenty-­five: Mam, K’iche’, and Q’anjob’al” (Nolan 2020). Enshrining this crisis, the editors of The Guatemala Reader (Grandin, Levenson, and Oglesby 2011) include a prayer in Q’anjob’al Mayan from a mother in the Cuchumatán mountains, recited for her migrant sons: God Jesus Christ At the edge of the mat the sides are not joined But here are flowers and candles

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From your daughter, Lord. Your sons are there, The hands and feet of Enrique are there, The hands and feet of Gervasio. A few flowers, candles For the hands and feet of Enrique, The hands and feet of Gervasio; Here are their flowers and candles, Lord. Oh God, it is said there is no money, It is said there are no quarters. Let something reach her hands, reach her feet, Lord. (592–­94)

The context for the prayer is transnational capital, and its addressee is a Christian God; but the old ways of speaking in parallels and doubles—­the way the authors of the Popol Vuh bring their world into being—­remain in the prayer tradition of the Cuchumatán mountains where, Colop says, the people first emerged (2011, 203–­4). Note also that the mother’s world is described as a “mat” (pop) just as it is in the book’s name—­the Popol Vuh—­which means literally “the Book of the Mat.” In the last line of the passage, the mother’s hands and feet are one and the same with her sons’ hands and feet—­walking for work, crisscrossing the earth in movement that might wish to keep the mat’s threads taut. The mat signifies the ceremonial mat on which the village council sits and societal counsel is given in traditional Maya communities. “The Book of the Mat” is thus a book of council and counsel. The mat also has cosmic connotations. In the conception of time given in the Popol Vuh, time is neither linear nor cyclical, but rather intersected with itself. It is like a weaving in which different threads are the domain of gods, ancestors, humans, and animals. In this weaving, movement on one thread affects the intersecting threads. Threads

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that intersect include the domains of people of present times, ancestral times, and mythic times, woven into each other so that activity on the strand of present time affects the experience of the ancestors, semidivine first beings, and animal kin; just as the movement of semidivine first beings, ancestors, and animal kin on the threads of times past and persistent affects the experience on the strand of present human time. This is the great mat on which the book is brought forth. This is also the key revelation of the book’s second half, after the first humans have been made, who in their migration exist somewhere between mythical time and historical time, walking their way into the present day of the book’s writing. Tedlock calls it the book’s “mythistorical” method—­indicating that “the presence of a divine dimension in narratives of human affairs is not an imperfection but a necessity, and it is balanced by a necessary human dimension in narratives of divine affairs” (1996, 58–­59). Tedlock attributes the narrative repetitions in the Popol Vuh to this impulse to see the past in present events and see present events in light of an ongoing historical and mythical past. He depicts it as a reassertion of patterns, which is not a repetition, but a constant return by which the travelers reassess, revise, reconfigure, or double back on history and divine creation. “This is the story, these things. It is still silently rippling. It is still murmuring undisturbed” (f1v). Still, the most horrifying moment of the mother’s prayer for her migrant sons is its second line, which considers the possibility that they may have traveled to a place at the mat’s edge, where its “sides are not joined.” Could it be that at the far edges of the Mayan world, where its migrants have spun into California, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and so on, the threads of the mat are unraveled? Are the people

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there thus disconnected from the dimensions of historical time and divine affairs? Do they live like the wooden people—­without heart and ancestral hearth? I would say: not with so many migrants in our midst. Looking back on what I have just written, I remember Figueroa telling me of his family’s participation in the Peace and Dignity Journeys that began as a counter-­celebration to the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Rather than celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of an event that brought violence, disease, exploitation, and the genocide of primitive accumulation or Seven Macaw (the death god of the EZLN and Acteal Avispas) to these lands, the Peace and Dignity Journeys celebrated indigenous persistence and interconnectivity across the continent; and they did so with a six-­month collective journey of relay runs beginning in Alaska in the North and Tierra del Fuego in the South, with relay runners meeting in Teotihuacan, Mexico. The runners that came from the north carried a staff entwined with eagle feathers given by indigenous tribes along the way, and the runners from the south likewise picked up condor feathers from indigenous tribes along their way, carrying the evidence of tribal persistence, hemispheric connectivity, and a right to move actually, intellectually, and spiritually across the continent. These long runs have continued every four years since 1992. One of the runners is musician, activist, and glyph-­caretaker Jesús Figueroa (Alfredo’s son), who collected songs from fellow runners and tribes along the way. He sang one of those songs while we stood on a hot, wind-­exposed hill in the desert through which the United States enacts its policy of “Prevention through Deterrence.” In this land of open graves, he sang a Yucatec Mayan walking

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song that he learned from a Maya runner in Chumash country: that is, what we today call Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in California. Jesús (or Chuey, as he is also known) told me the song’s lyrics mean, “I am here, you are here, and we go forward together”—­ which is an interpretive and contextual translation of the literal meaning of the Yucatec Mayan words: “Right here, right in this spot; right here, right in this spot; right here, right in this spot; we are going; we are going.” I cannot think of a better example to demonstrate that in these theaters of death and forced migration there is so much life, resilient through its walks, and in that walking bringing dignity and prestige to the desert lands and their fine-­edged, knifelike beauty: Wayan’e, wayan’on’e Wayan’e, wayan’on’e Wayan’e, wayan’on’e Táan k bin Táan k bin

At the site of so much administered death, where families suffer through heat and hatred, there are songs that honor the desert life in its continued migrations. This is a landscape in colonialism, and a landscape in cosmogenesis. In bringing creation out of a colonial crisis and, thus, drawing creation out into a crisis of migration in the present moment, the Popol Vuh reminds its readers that these two aspects of its speech—­crisis and creativity, emergency and emergence—­ move together, half-­falling and half-­pushing forward, like heat-­ stripped legs over desert sand.

Love If you have had to clear out a rat-­infested basement, sweeping up the peanut-­size, pear-­shaped feces and clearing dusty corners of shriveled rat carcasses; or if you have contracted a mosquito-­ borne illness, or just had to suffer through recovering from the violent itchiness of a blanket of stings on your skin; or if you have had to sleep through that heat from ant-­bites burning like desert rocks into your flesh all through the night; then you know why it is we humans often hate the little rodents and bugs of the earth, calling them vermin and pests. These names describe animals in relation to human comfort. They remind us that this world offers no privilege of paradise to its human inhabitants. Not in any straightforward way, at least: the penetrating tips of the littlest beasts pierce directly at the heart of human life. Because they are so small, yet so dangerous, they seem to be the easiest creatures to hate. Even the terror of the jaguar, who could crush your skull with its jaws, is given a nobility for the power of life and death it holds over its subjects. Disease-­ bearing rats and mosquitos get no such noblesse. These are the ones we let ourselves hate to hate the ignoble fact of our always almost invisibly coming disease and death. These are also the ones that the Popol Vuh is most intent on teaching us to love. In the story, without the help of the rat, mosquito, and ant there would be no humans. The rat helps the hero twins find the ballgame equipment to take on the Lords of Xibalba; the mosquito distracts their grandmother while they

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search for the ballgame equipment, and later acts as their spy, tasting the marrow of the deathly lords to learn their secret names; and the ants smuggle the flowers guarded by the whip-­ poor-­wills, so the twins indeed defeat the deathly lords, and obtain the maize to make humans. Even the louse—­tiny parasite sneaking in the hairs of its animal hosts—­has the special job of delivering the great summons from the Underworld to the twins. It is carried in a mordant, trophic chain: the messenger louse is eaten by the toad, who is eaten by the serpent, who is eaten by the falcon, who flies the summons to the twins, who make the falcon vomit the snake, who vomits the toad, who vomits the louse, who finally delivers the summons. The systems that mediate speech—­here, a most serious arraignment to the court of death—­are transits through our insectile, animal, alimentary, and laryngeal parts. Our most revolting parts complete the circuit that activates life in its ability to communicate. Like you, the authors of the Popol Vuh knew what it was to be irritated by pests. Whether their houses were built of stone or wood, and the roofs made of beam and mortar or thatching, the floor plans were typically open, with unobstructed doorways and windows to permit airflow (Thompson 1967, 142–­43, 248–­ 49, 265). Such architecture allowed passage to the critters of the Earth. In the Popol Vuh, for its work in helping the twins, the rat is given rights of passage on the rafters of the house and the privilege of eating scraps of food around the house; the mosquito is revealed to be the divine hair that grows on one of the hero twins’ legs; and the ants get the honor of dispatching the forlorn Xibalbans after their lords are defeated. In every instance, the lowly creatures are integral to the story of creation. Their relative importance in making the world contrasts with the implied unimportance of humans in a world that gives privilege to rats, mosquitos, ants, and lice—­all pestilential vectors for our irremediable physiology of pestiducts and shivering nerves.

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The words of that last sentence came to me under the spell of reading English poet John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which I picked up because I felt the book’s title could serve, in some alternate universe, as a subtitle for the Popol Vuh. Written in the year of his severe sickness in 1623, these meditations tell the story of a body that has succumbed to plague, paranoid about the possibility of its redemption in spite of its transparent infectability, yet coming to see in such exposure evidence that people carry inside them the world, worms and all, and that the entire world carries a person on, even with all those worms. In Donne’s emergency emerges his sense of how occasions emerge through us. His critical illness was a pause to inspire devotion over how scarcely visible the difference is between people and their environments. These meditations include his most famous lines: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, the main; [ . . . ] therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (1999, 103). Donne’s insight is that the world is continuous with the person, and the person with the world, and that this insight comes when the world arises through a person in mortal sickness. Pestilence becomes his source of poetry. Still, I feel Donne is missing something at the end. What is missing, in my mind, is that at its end Donne’s book clings to an idea of greatness, to a necessary human triumph over the world—­a need that sweaters itself up against the more terrible implications of his devotions. A footstep below the angels, humans stand, bold and cold, above the natural world that gives them so much present worry: “It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but

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the map, and the man the world” (1999, 19). What is missing is humility—­certainly not before God, but before those little creatures that bring on the terrors and troubles of the world when we extend ourselves into it. Of course, when humans extend themselves out, as Donne says, their bodies are vulnerable to infinite pricks, bites, vapors, miasmas, poisons, and disease. These are the little things that remind us of whose world this really is; of those who bring it into being and who keep it alive, and for whom creation is a privileged place. This was the humbling that escaped the wooden people of the Popol Vuh. You may remember that these wooden ones failed to care for the little creatures, so they were burnt up, gouged, crushed, and chewed to bits, while these little ones said to them, “Why didn’t you give us food? We would look at you and you would chase us away, chasing us out. You raised sticks to beat us while you ate. That’s the only way you would speak to us. We couldn’t speak like you, so you gave us nothing. How could you not notice us? You did notice. You just put us aside. Today therefore you will try the teeth in our mouths. We will put you in our mouths and eat you up” (f5r). As I write this, a mosquito crosses the shaft of light in front of me, and I itch along my calves, and I cannot help but swat it away, and scratch my legs in frustration. The thick, dank heat of August in Chicago has brought these little beasts on. And I truly do not feel any love for them. But that inability is the challenge posed by the Popol Vuh. It asks me to ask whether these beasts, pricking between my leg hairs, couldn’t also be the hairs of a god attaching itself to my skin. Couldn’t they be elemental kin? Can I not find an understanding of myself through which to love and embrace them? And what do I lose when I don’t learn to love such unlovable creatures, swarming at my legs for a dram of blood to live another few hours? Parasites! Never send to know for whom the parasite bites, the Popol Vuh says, it bites for thee. I mean to say: it bites to remind thee of thy littler place in a

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world of little creatures made. Except them, thou be diminutive to nothing. In the Popol Vuh, the lesson of love arises not when love is easy but when it is hard. Outside of the world of animals, many relations in the book are also fraught by challenge and distress. You can see such tension in the relationships of the hero twins with their maternal family (denizens of Xibalba, whom they are out to destroy); with their wayward father and uncle (obsessed with the ballgame, never present in their lives—­an aspect of the Popol Vuh that comes to life in poet Stacy Doris’s translation of it into American football play diagrams), whom they meet on one occasion when their incommunicative father gives birth to death; with their jealous half-­brothers (whom they change into monkeys, in an echo of the fate of the artful but hollow wooden folk); and in the relationship of the hero twins’ mother with their father’s mother (suspicious of this interloper from the Underworld); and indeed in the hero twins’ relationship with this paternal grandmother (a relation in which scholar and former curator at the Museo Popol Vuh in Guatemala City Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos sees primordial sexual anxiety, especially in the way that the twins send the mosquito to pierce their grandmother’s water jug) (2017, 111). And there is the matter of the twins’ relationship with each other. Chinchilla Mazariegos points out that it is surprising that after their heroic exploits the twins ascend to the sky to become the sun and moon, because these celestial bodies are often gendered in Mesoamerican myth, including in the K’iche’ world found in the ethnographically rich Título de Totonicapán (ca. 1554): “And they called the sun and the moon ‘a young woman’ and ‘a young man’; they called the sun Hunahpu and the moon was called Xbalenquej by them” (169). Thus in the Popol Vuh we learn after the twins’ adventures are over that one of the two might have been a woman; or, at least, that one of these two might be coded as feminine, complicating

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their nights together in Xibalba with an erotic tinge (that may resonate with the young men’s houses that were located near ballcourts, houses that were sometimes ornamented with large phallic sculptures). It may be too much to imagine a homoerotic or ambiguously intersexual feeling evoked at this moment in the Popol Vuh; but it also may be too little not to. Archeologist Rosemary Joyce writes that the two-­sex model is insufficient for encompassing the ambiguous bodies of Mesoamerican sculpture, shifting between human and animal (Xbalenque is often depicted as half-­human, half-­jaguar), and female and male, let alone in such examples as the caves of Naj Tunich—­sometimes called the entrance to the Mayan Underworld—­where petroglyphs appear to depict penile bloodletting rituals, masturbation, and same-­sex embrace (2009, 106). It is impossible to know whether (and what kind of) anxiety was elicited by same-­ sex desire in the ancient Maya world; but that occlusion may itself be telling. The lesson of love here may be that sometimes its difficulty is inescapable; sometimes what makes it so powerful is that it has no choice but to emerge amid danger, anxiety, and calumny. The spell transmogrifies now in the writings of poet and monk Thomas Merton. Merton wrote eloquently on the value of love as a challenge. He understood love to be a deeply creative impulse, which (like all acts of creativity) had to reckon with the inheritance of ourselves as limited embodiments, poorly appreciative of what it is to be something other than our “selves” that end at the limits of our own skins: Love is a positive force, a transcendent spiritual power. It is, in fact, the deepest creative power in human nature. [ . . . ] It is a living appreciation of life as value and as gift. It responds to the full richness, the variety, the fecundity of living experience itself: it “knows” the inner mystery of life. It enjoys

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life as an inexhaustible fortune. Love estimates this fortune in a way that knowledge could never do. Love has its own wisdom, its own science, and its own way of exploring the inner depths of life in the mystery of the loved person. Love knows, understands, and meets the demands of life insofar as it responds with warmth, abandon, and surrender. (2002, 34)

Merton’s idea of love is lovably ambiguous about its object, stringing it across living experience itself, keeping its eyes wide open to seeing its spiritual power in the unpredictable necessity of desire as it arrives in a soul’s body. You cannot know what person or creature you will have to love, or what its particular challenge will be, be it human desire or animal necessity, but—­ for your own sake and the sake of the cosmic order (according to the Popol Vuh)—­you will have to keep yourself faithful to its inexhaustible wisdom, because it is only through that path that you will find the cavernous pass to what Merton calls “the inner depths of life.” Accordingly, Maya anthropologist Juana Batzibal Tujal has identified relationality as the concept that holds the Mayan cosmos together. Her emphasis is not on identity or community in a stable sense; rather, she points out that even before there is a creation in the Popol Vuh, there is a relation among the gods, each of whom plays a part in maintaining a situation of relationality: “Life itself is nothing but relations of mutual respect; the most important thing then is to destroy relations of domination, marginalization, and inequality” (2000, 36). Explaining how this framework structures the many pairings and couplings in the Popol Vuh, she adds that such a relational sense of personhood always doubling on itself conditions even how the Popol Vuh presents disciplinary, epistemological, and phenomenological possibilities. That is, it conjoins relations of theory and praxis, poetry and politics into a unified, cruciform project: “One tool for understanding such identity is

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the Mayan cross; . . . the vertical line indicates the profundity or rootedness of our culture, while the horizontal line represents its outward projection and extension” (41). The value of love as a challenge is the pull that both of those directions simultaneously demand, downward or inward as we extend into the world, and outward into the world as we reach into our inner selves. And it is only in that cave that you will see that love is nothing less than an instance of meeting the demands of a life lived for others. That ancient curvature gives love its final warmth of surrender. You know it when you have to bend for it. You know it also by the warm pain in your soul’s spine from so much giving. Could you stand to imagine that love is no throne, but a pedestal for the knees of your heart forevermore? If so, the bugs call on you to see their little hands on your comforted imagination, saying, “Now I have met thee there where thou has so often departed from me; but having burnt up that bed by these vehement heats, and washed that bed in these abundant sweats, make my bed again” (Donne 1999, 17). These lovers will never leave you after all, and all they ask of you is your animal responsibility. Can you at least be an animal for love? You might begin by mimicking the ancient Mayan statues, in which the K’iche’ k’amalb’e Adrián Inés Chávez saw the great lesson of a contemporary Mayan greeting ritual. As he explained in his interview with Gina Lavandier (1982), palms closed over his chest, Chávez explained how people open their hands outward to signify a sacred disposition: “To give and not ask—­to offer heart—­that was a world of happiness. But today the world is upside down. We ask and we give nothing.”

The Sun Things would need to go no further if this were any other kind of book. But this is not a book like any other that wishes to be a closed procession, starting at one end of time’s fold to flatten it out a few hours during which its there and then spreads over your here and now, until it finds its way to some consequences that release you from its overlay. Its story has multiple starts at one end, and multiple ends at the other; all working together to form that angled surface of glass through which the light of the world is dispersed into its spectral components: humans (past and present), animals, insects, gods, and demigods are all frequencies interfering here with one another. “These therefore are the first words, the first speech”: “How should the sowing be? How should the dawning be?” (f1v, f2r). By now you know how it must be: there must be contradiction, multiplicity, Underworld descent, sacrifice, sustenance, and revisability. And when the book catches a share of these things it wraps up: the hero twins discover maize and become the celestial lights, and the humans are made. But the book does not end there, and we soon learn that the world is still in darkness, waiting for these humans to bring the dawn out from the eastern sky. The first humans thus wander around for some time, suffering trials and growing intellectually to be able to bring light out of the horizon. When they do, with poetry and ritual, it is a glorious moment in the book. It is as if the sun does not so much emerge from the eastern ridge as the earth and its

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human and nonhuman inhabitants turn toward that glistening light, pulling the planet into its rotation, which makes it appear as if the sun rises in the sky: Then when the sun emerged the small animals and the large animals exulted. Really, they all emerged from riverways and canyons and came up there onto the mountain, where they turned their faces to the sun’s rise. The puma and jaguar cried out—­but the first to sing was a bird, the parrot. Their exaltation was absolute. They spread their wings—­the eagle, the white vulture, the small birds, and the large ones. They rejoiced, along with the bloodletters and sacrificers. [ . . . ] However many peoples there might be today, there were countless peoples then too, but there was just one dawn for them all. (f40r)

Finally, the attention and poise of Earth’s creatures have turned the planet toward the sun in such a way as to bring the sun into view. When the sun emerges, it dries out the earth (we thus learn that all along the earth has been soggy and muddy), and instantly it turns many animals and demigods to stone (we thus learn that some stones are in fact these beings of an earlier era presently crystalized). Finally, the fullness of creation ratifies itself. Finally, the book reaches its conclusion. Of course, this is not the case. There is no “finally” in this book. What follows instead is one of its most perplexing and upending moments: “xchihtahic vcatanal xacu vcut bal rib ta xalaxic xachi cu vlemo ri xcanahic maui qui tzih are chiquih ri cavachinic xqha chupan quitzih” (f40v). I translate this as follows: “He revealed himself only when he was born; it is only its reflection left today. The sun that is visible is not the real sun—­as tradition says.” When we finally get the sun to emerge from its hiding place in the story’s cursus, when its world finally

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turns with the cyclical motion of a sown seed now sprouting into the dawn, we learn that it is not the real sun, that it is a lemo—­a word that signifies both “reflection” and “reflecting instrument”: that is, a mirror. The book that has presented itself as an ilb’al—­an instrument for seeing the dawn—­now tells us that the dawning sun also is an ilb’al, another instrument for seeing: a mirror in the sky. The instrument in our hands is reflected in the instrument that gives us the light to read, which (if it is only a reflection itself) must be getting its light from elsewhere. What is the source of light in the world then? We are certainly directed toward primordial generativity, a real world that precedes the world in which we live. But if the Popol Vuh has taught us anything, it is that a signal cannot be separated from its echo. Echoes become the origin of the signal that echoes in turn. Frequencies of past and present constantly interfere with each other. We are thus encouraged to imagine that the mirror in the sky is a mirror actually. And what do you see when you look into a mirror? When the first humans were made, there was a problem. They saw too clearly. This displeased the gods, who did not like for humans to have such divine sight—­seeing through objects and temporal distances. Hence the gods clouded human sight, blowing a blinding fog over it which, the book says, was “like breath on a mirror” (“xmoyic quehe ri xuxlabix vvach lemo”) (f34r). In Dennis Tedlock’s book of that name—­Breath on the Mirror (1993; a study of the living, contemporary landscape of Mayan myth and cultural resistance)—­he says that the Maya authors of the Popol Vuh wish to have their comments on the sun’s reflection tell us something about how our words interact with the visible world. He indicates this by translating that textual moment in an unusual way: The sun that shows itself is not the real sun. (44)

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The graying out of the words appears to indicate a self-­ cancellation in the text. Tedlock says he does this because it is as if the authors of the Popol Vuh are trying to tell the reader “what these words would say if we could hear what was hidden inside them,” which is that the real sun is in fact here in the visible world, but the apparatus, the words interacting with our scanning eyes, have a kind of fog over them (44). In this moment one might think of the Athenian philosopher Plato’s constant differentiation between images and reality, the images being an intelligible projection of a deeper and truer world of form. But what the Popol Vuh is saying here is not quite what Plato means in his own meditation on the sun and eyesight in the dialogue Timaeus. There, the Greek philosopher describes sight and the sun’s light as kindred motions, a kind of fire emanating from a real world of which we can have no vision except as reflection: “All such appearances are necessary consequences of the combination of internal and external fire, which form a unity at the reflecting surface, though distorted in various ways, the fire of the face seen coalescing with that of the eye on the smooth reflecting surface” (1974, 62). In Plato’s world, when you look into the mirror, you will never see yourself in the world actually—­you will see the interaction of substances flowing from a world beyond your perception. That is not what the Popol Vuh is saying. In its world, when you look into the mirror, you will have a fog distorting what you see, but with the right kind of attention (and instruments) you can clear the reflecting surface—­the instrument for seeing—­and see the world actually. But you should not expect that in doing that you will see Plato’s real world of unchanging models. The sun is not the sun actually, because it is subject to the same ceaseless screen that is time originating itself in what you see. To see that screen clearly, even the gods need clarifying screens. Remember Blood Moon’s divination. Remember the

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creators who must consult first the diviners. After the sun reveals itself to the world, the people are reminded of their fractured fortunes and dispersed fate. The glory of the dawning light reminds them of everything they have lost along the way—­everything held now in spectral light. They call their lament “Our Burial”: Alas! We lost our way at Tulan! We splintered ourselves—­ We left behind our older brothers, Our younger brothers too. Where did they see the sun? Where were they when it dawned? (f40v–­f41r)

How perfect for this book, always surrendering to transformation, to endow the sun’s arrival—­the culmination of creation—­ with a lament for what has been lost along the way, with a consideration of the fractured multitude of people spread now over the earth. The dramatic singularity of the sun’s emergence is dispersed, like a shaft of light through a prism, into migrant frequencies. We already know that these frequencies must involve the fact of colonial disorganization as well contemporary disasters of military dictatorships, resource theft, forced migration, extrajudicial killings, and climatological collapse. The perplexing but powerful thing about the Popol Vuh is that it does not so much want to make its there and then our here and now as it insists on making our here and now its own. Its sun is not the sun actually; it is a mirror facing the blazing world. And what do you see when you look into a mirror?

Mormons The lands of the ancient Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, and Mulekites have some specifications internal to the stories told in the Book of Mormon: there must be ocean waters to the east and west of an isthmus or narrow neck of land, which separates a drier northern land from a wetter, bountiful land, which leads southward along a great river to highlands, wilderness, and then another land touched on the east and west by the sea. On this ribbon-­like twist of earth spread 3,500 years of history—­ settlements, betrayals, flights, battles, reconciliations, more battles, miracles, conversions, assimilations, fractures, insurrections, and all manner of societal flourishing and collapse (ca. 3100 BCE–­420 CE). There are militaristic kingdoms, royal lineages, sacred towers, urban sprawls, agricultural states, interstate roadways, maritime networks, and a rich tradition of records-­keeping and an archival priesthood. While these peoples stretched 150 generations, constituting multiple cultural systems in different languages, not always overlapping and only rarely peacefully coexisting, what they all shared was an origin in the tribes of ancient Palestine and, just as importantly, a mutual settling and destiny here in the Americas. When the angelic spirit of the Nephite prophet Moroni revealed this history to Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the 1820s—­a history that was written mostly by Moroni’s father the prophet and great redactor Mormon, based on records available to him in the mid-­300s CE—­neither son nor father both-

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ered to give an exact location for the events, other than that they happened here in the American continent. This left Smith and his (soon to grow) community of Mormons to speculate on the whereabouts of their faith. Out of this speculation came a few major possibilities: either the history was spread over the Americas entirely, telling thus an intercontinental story of the peopling of the Americas by ancient Jews who became in time the indigenous peoples of these lands, or it was a much more localized tale, limited to a geographical region somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. A consideration of travel times described in the Book of Mormon seriously challenges the former possibility, so the latter solution—­the limited geography model—­has intrinsic logistical appeal. In a limited geography, the events of the Book of Mormon can be localized to one network of the many ancient peoples of the Americas living in a contained physical and cultural landscape. The first candidate for this landscape is the place where this history was revealed to Smith, the Great Lakes region of North America. This might be called the hard artifactual thesis, because it relies on Smith’s own emphasis on the discovery of artifactual evidence of these ancient people in the lands straddling the Great Lakes, the most important of these artifacts being the golden plates on which these histories were inscribed, buried by Moroni near Smith’s home in Palmyra, New York. There are certainly many isthmuses in these parts that could have been the narrow neck of land separating the Book of Mormon’s land northward from its land southward. But such placement cannot make sense of drier, hotter lands described in the Book, let alone its mention of mountainous highlands and searing heat at the start of the new year. It also stretches the imagination to think that 3,500 years of history in the Great Lakes could be described without any mention of snow or ice. Another candidate for this landscape, then, is the Isth-

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mus of Tehuantepec, separating modern Mexico in the north from Guatemala and Central America to its south, enclosed on either side by oceans whence the ancient Jewish tribes would have arrived to the Americas. This reckoning might be called the flexibly cultural thesis, because it sees in the Mesoamerican cultural traditions of this region a vivid reflection of the cultural traditions, civilizational achievements, and social predilections described in the Book of Mormon. In this thesis, the ancient people of Guatemala are situated roughly in the southward land of the Nephites. Mormon and his son are thus Mayas by another name. My memory of all this begins with the vivid illustrations in publications of the Latter-­Day Saints Church, the biggest Mormon church (but by no means the only one). As a result of vigorous missionary efforts in Guatemalan communities in Guatemala and outside it, an uncle of mine converted to Mormonism in the early 1980s. On any Sunday I happened to be with that branch of my family, I went to Mormon church and at that age—­roughly between eight and twelve—­I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the Roman Catholic Church I attended with other family, except that in one we were served white bread and water, and in the other an unleavened wafer and wine. I suppose I preferred the bread and water. But what I remember most distinctly were the images in Mormon publications that I thumbed through at my uncle’s home—­publications with such enticingly mysterious names as Liahona and Ensign. Of these iconological encounters, the image that stands out in my mind is one in which Jesus Christ appears on the stone steps of a partially ruined Mesoamerican city, surrounded by supplicants dressed in brightly colored, feathered garb, while in the far distance a Mayan pyramid stretches into a skyline bisected by an imposing mountain range. Palm trees sway in the winds of what appears to be a coming storm; hieroglyphic writing is

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vaguely traced in the stone structures. (Central to the story of the Book of Mormon is also the arrival of Christ in the Americas during the days of his entombment in Jerusalem, during which time he came here to convert the tribes of his fellow Jews in the Americas.) Researching the painting—­titled “Jesus Teaching in the Western Hemisphere (Jesus Christ Visits the Americas)”—­I learn that it was made by an artist named John Walter Scott in 1969, and that today it hangs in the Latter-­Day Saints Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Scott is also known for his illustration work in such pulp, science fiction, and adventure magazines as Western Story, Ka-­Zar, Wild West Weekly, Marvel Science, Mystery Tales, Uncanny Tales, and Uncanny Stories. Considering that the Nephites are supposed to be Mayas by some other name, one would expect the histories and stories of the Maya people (especially those in the Nephite southward lands, that is, the Guatemalan highlands inhabited by the K’iche’ Mayas) to echo those of the Nephites. And in many instances, in a striking way, they do. After all, the Popol Vuh does have its peculiar controversy over whether the first people came from the other side of the sea, alongside the sea, or amidst the sea; followed by their long migration from their site of origins to their promised land. And there are the suggestive parallels between Blood Moon’s story and a composite narrative of the temptation of Eve and the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception. This is not to mention the book’s explicit reference to its occurrence “in Christendom” (f1r). Other K’iche’ Mayan works of the sixteenth century—­such as the Título de Totonicapán (whose original was long thought lost until it was shown to anthropologist Robert Carmack by its K’iche’ guardians in 1973, republished from photographed copies in 1983)—­ are more outright about their relation to ancient Palestine. Like the Popol Vuh, this history of the K’iche’ people begins in the time of creation and follows the first people into the present

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moment of the book’s writing in the sixteenth century. It corroborates details of the creation and K’iche’ Maya life described in the Popol Vuh. In addition, because it is much more detailed about the location of the events it describes, it helps in specifying the geography of the migration story across Guatemala and Mexico told in the Popol Vuh. But it also says in dramatically straightforward terms that the antecedents of K’iche’ people are to be found among the ancient Jews: “We are the descendants of the Israelites, of Saint Moses. From the tribes of Israel came our grandfathers and fathers. They came from where the sun arises, over there in Babylon where they celebrated the rites of Lord Nacxit; thus is the origin of our lineage” (f7v). In this book, biblical place names such as Moab are Mesoamericanized as Chimoab (f7r). Elsewhere, even the gods become one god in the biblical way: “Indeed, they [the K’iche’] said that it was an act of God’s love for them, because they prayed to only one god, to Ts’akol-­Bitol, amid the sky and earth. For they were truly the descendants of Abraham and Jacob” (“xa x ulok’obal wi dios chiquech rumal xa juna ts’akol bitol xquitsij unic’ajal caj ulew xecha rumal xa x e wi uc’ajol umam abrajan jacob”) (f9r). The appearance of the Spanish-­language word for god in this sentence—­“dios”—­is enough of a signal that the context is colonial, creating the familiar feedback loop of power that compels the book’s writing to begin with, here—­as in the Popol Vuh—­in the present darkness of Christendom. A cynical reading of the passage would then be that the Mayas’ self-­associating with the ancient Israelites was a means of self-­preservation, feeding their colonizers the necessary tropes by which they, the colonized, could persist in the new order of things. I call this a cynical reading because it does not take into account the immense care and thoughtfulness that these authors give to making the Judeo-­Christian objects make sense within their sense of things. “Ts’akol Bitol” translates as the

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“Framer” and “Maker” who appear in the first lines of the Popol Vuh, where they are pluralized (i.e., Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent): these are two beings who are working together, as one—­in the Mesoamerican tradition of dyads, twins, and doubles—­to energizingly animate oppositional parts and, as Batzibal Tujal remarks, to evoke the radical relationality of the Mayan cosmos. In the passage quoted above, this pair is poetically paired with Abraham and Jacob, as if this grandfather and grandson were a reflection of the Framer-­Maker pair. If the conceptual framework of pairing needed more emphasis, the K’iche’ authors were happy to give it: in placing Ts’akol Bitol “amid the sky and earth”—­they invoke the classic Mayan figure of world dualism, “caj ulew,” or “sky-­earth.” Signifying “world” in a dualistic or parallelistic sense, “caj ulew” is an expression of the interanimating oppositions that are key to Mesoamerican conceptions of ontological dualism, epistemological ambivalence, non-­ synthesizing dialectic, and constant relationality—­a world always in tension, interaction, and motion. Here, it frames the colonial encounter itself within the terms of non-­synthesizing oppositionality that gives rise to new worlds and their regenerated inhabitants. Never settling into the stability of objects in singular identities—­never comfortable in isomorphy—­things in Mesoamerican worlds remain in constant oscillation, iterability, intensification, multiplication, and relationality. While they nod their heads here to “only one god, to Ts’akol-­Bitol,” the K’iche’ authors recognize that the energy for that nod comes from a deeper intensity of contradictions and conflicts that is now hidden amid so much colonial danger. It is the knowledge hidden in the words you read. Of course, what is hidden (euaxibal) is also sown (auaxibal) in the Popol Vuh (f1r). What is buried in the earth is buried so that it might grow in time. It is fascinating to read the Book of Mormon for what hidden ripples might be curling in it from

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the Popol Vuh: for both works the uses of instruments of seeing (ilb’al) are central (when Smith was given golden plates—­akin to nineteenth-­century printing plates but also to the hammered writing plates of antiquity—­he was also given an elaborate visual instrument by which to translate them, which he later simplified to seer stones in a hat); the importance of the revisability of creation is certainly central to both traditions (you might consider that the Mormon god can change his mind over time and indeed has done so many times over the past two hundred years, on topics as wide ranging as polygamy and race); likewise you would have as hard a time tracking events because of the repetition of names in the Book of Mormon as you might in the Popol Vuh, because both works are fixated on the problem of antecedence; and indeed both exploit this problem of repetition to create doublings, dialectics, and back-­and-­forth movements in content and form (the Nephites and Lamanites are opposed tribes who repeat and reiterate but reframe all of one another’s mistakes). But, if we are going to take Mormon claims of conceptual origination in the world of the Popol Vuh seriously, then we have to put those claims to the hardest test. Does the Book of Mormon indeed teach us anything about the Popol Vuh? I think that it does, early on in the Second Book of Nephi, when its author discusses a world that is properly dyadic: For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-­born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. Wherefore, it must needs have been cre-

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ated for a thing of naught; wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of its creation. (2 Ne. 2: 11–­13)

This passage stands out in my mind for communicating some of the powerful intractability of oppositions that gives Mesoamerican philosophy its distinct view of the world and its workings, and that gives the textual strategy of the Popol Vuh its staying dynamic. There is no other place in the Book of Mormon that I’ve found with as striking a sense of dualistic interanimation, of mutual pairs in endlessly generative tension. That is the energy that endows the Popol Vuh with its formal and contextual force: it is a story of creation that is written within and against the destructive crisis of colonial power. In the spirit of Nephi, it must needs have been created for the purpose of death, corruption, and misery; wherefore this thing shall say there is power, mercy, justice, and law; there is righteousness and happiness, otherwise there needs have been no such punishment on earth, otherwise all things would have vanished away. The Popol Vuh can be profoundly frustrating in that way. It troubles me to read its moment when it calls the Spanish warlord Pedro de Alvarado “Donadiu” (a borrowing from the Nahuatl-­ language name Tonatiuh or sun god), which denotes that the authors of the Popol Vuh accepted that this new sun was a supersession of the previous sun—­that the colonizers were the founders of a new world order, a new sun in the sky—­in line with a continuous process of world renewals extending from the debates of the originary gods over creation into the present moment of colonial encounter with the otherworldly others from across the eastern sea. The still more distressing thing about it is that this celestial identity is given to the warlord in the same sentence that the torture inflicted by the Castilians is documented: “And they were ruling when Tonatiuh arrived—­they were tortured by the Castilian people” (“arecut que aha uaric taxul Dona-

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diu xehitza xic rumal castillan vinac”) (f55v). Dennis Tedlock points out that Alvarado’s method of torture was to hang detainees by their wrists for extended periods of time, while various physical pains were inflicted on them to extract confessions before this sun god burned them alive (1996, 335). Such torture is painful to imagine, let alone to have to process into one’s cosmology. But that is exactly what the Popol Vuh does. And the fact of the matter is that this absorption of Alvarado into the Popol Vuh’s cycles of dawning was not merely a tragedy of colonialism. That kind of intellectual assimilation is key to the book’s philosophical method. In his study of Mayan ceremonies of world renewal, Allen Christenson points out that such assimilations reflect an attitude in which people saw “nothing new in Christianity and wished [by way of such syncretism] to continue to worship their own gods” (2016, 127). In making Alvarado into nothing more than another god thirsty for more blood, the authors of the Popol Vuh place him in a pantheon for which they were the privileged interpreters. While this villainous type had brought pain and destruction to their world, it remained their world in which he lived and, from which, like all suns, he would eventually pass. This Tonatiuh—­a Castilian-­bodied, Nahuatl-­ named interloper—­was only another aspect in a never-­ending process of Mayan world renewal. Such absorption can be found in just about any moment of colonial encounter in the Popol Vuh you might see: the book brings the objects and events of the world into its world, producing many mirrors by which the world—­our world, your world—­is a reflection of its creation and creativity. It is frustrating to see Alvarado celebrated as a sun god, but it is in that frustration that the deepest lesson of the Popol Vuh reveals itself: the names, objects, and events do not matter as much as the forms, and the forms of this world tilt toward multiplicity. It is a radical, almost unimaginable multiplicity—­and I say it

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is almost unimaginable because of how much ambivalence and ambiguity it engenders in some of the most profoundly distressing questions about colonial power. The names of the warlords are integrated as reflections of some other, older mirror of life moving along the narrow necks of the imagination trying to breathe in the constrained state of memory’s violent erasure. Does the mirror in your voice make it hard to swallow, does it make it difficult to breathe? Or is the endless reflection and intractability of it all easy for you too? You might be asking at this point what I think of the Mormon claims of their religious indigeneity in the Americas—­ what I think about a scholar such as John Sorenson writing a book titled Mormon’s Codex, whose basic claim is that the Book of Mormon displays the defining features of ancient Mesoamerican writing and so can be categorized alongside the Popol Vuh as Mayan literature. In this work, I cannot answer that question, but the radical ambivalence of the Popol Vuh offers something that the Book of Mormon does not: that is, the transcendental, emancipating, empowering, if sometimes totally distressing world of the word maybe. This is not to say that the geological, historical, or genetic evidence supports Sorenson’s claims (it does not); or that those claims ought to guide the evidence (I’m not convinced that they should)—­especially considering the ongoing cultural violence of missionary efforts, Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical in Mexico and Central America. Rather, it is interesting to think that in the encounter of Mayan texts and Mormonism, two traditions of syncretism interact and thus make something like a feedback loop of desires, wherein each wishes to absorb the intellectual traditions of the other, amplifying therefore the absorptive energy of the other, so that in the end what can be heard are so many echoes whose signal is indistinguishable from the sonic gains of the amplifying mechanism, the poetry of assimilation.

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Contemporary Maya Mormons are masters of such poetry. Taking the racial and temporal premises of Mormonism to their logical conclusion, contemporary Maya Mormons in Guatemala often see themselves as having a primordial relation to the Abrahamic covenant into which white North American Mormons are adopted (Murphy 1983, 178–­79). Hence Mormon anthropologist Thomas Murphy points out that Guatemalan Mormons have built on the racial and temporal specificities of the Book of Mormon to prioritize Maya cultural life, including such things as the Popol Vuh, since these works are further evidence of a primordial, pre-­Columbian relation to their biblical emergence. They note that there are “many similarities between the Book of Mormon and the Popol Vuh,” and they explicitly identify Jesus “with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent in the Popol Vuh” (182–­83). These appropriations of biblical figures into a Mayan world give Maya Mormons ownership over the past and future of Mormonism, effectively sidelining white Mormons of North America as secondary, late converts to an ongoing and outlasting Maya cosmogenesis. Noting the central importance of the Popol Vuh for such claims, Murphy adds, “socially and symbolically, Guatemalans can claim something most other Mormons lack: a sacred local manuscript they believe complements the imported religious text of the Book of Mormon” (183). Such poetics of religious primacy are not just incidental to the Popol Vuh; they are the lifeblood in its beating, syncretic, polyphonic, and relational heart. Put another way, that poetry of assimilation is prefigured, even masterfully staged, in the way that the Popol Vuh tells its story. It is a work built on the destabilizing power of the word maybe. This was a feature of Maya intellectual life that was most frustrating for the colonizing Spaniards, arriving from their world of starkly distinguished good and evil, European and indigenous, holy and hellish, and admirable or strictly fearful,

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damnable, and condemnable. When King Charles III sent the Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz to survey his lands in Goathemala in the 1760s, he was told that, of the many frustrations to be found in those lands, the most pervasively pernicious was the widespread use of the word maybe. Cortés y Larraz writes, With respect to whether the Indians are religious, when one speaks with them about the mysteries of our Holy Faith, they never respond affirmatively, but add “maybe.” This happens constantly, so if the Indians are asked, “Is it true that there are three persons in one Godhead?” they answer, “Maybe it’s true, Father.” “Who knows if Jesus Christ is in the Holy Sacrament?” But it’s worth noting that in my experience they respond the same way no matter what question they’re asked. Are the roads good? Are the rivers wide? Is one pueblo far from the other? They always respond, “Who knows if the road is good?” “Maybe the river is wide.” “It could be that the pueblo is far.” (2011, 96)

I suppose that in responding to this example, a Mormon commentator might note that one of the founding tenets of the Nephite settlement was its supposed fierce protection of free speech and religious liberty, its own kind of place for the power of the word maybe. But I wonder how far the readers of the Book of Mormon, responding to its guiding spirit in the Popol Vuh, would be willing to go with that word maybe. Could they go as far as the authors of the Popol Vuh? Are they willing to see Smith’s Mormon amid so much sea-­churn of Mayan intellectual ambivalence? Is the undeniably American Book of Mormon an ancient American book in the full intellectual scope of the poetry and philosophy of Mesoamerica? My aim here is not to resolve such questions, but to point out how the Popol Vuh insists on dialectical irresolution; how it encourages readers to hold such ques-

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tions open, to keep ambivalence, multiplicity, translatability, and creative criticality in play. Like the unnamed speakers of Cortés y Larraz’s colonial factbook, the Popol Vuh indeed instructs us toward one answer: hmm, maybe.

Afterword This book of essays has been written in the ongoing quarantine that has kept us all from each other, crept into our siloed selves as so much fear and paranoia, and revealed how much of our fear and paranoia about a world willing to sacrifice its most vulnerable is in fact a justified fear and paranoia. When the public health crisis picked up in early spring 2020, I had just finished teaching a course on the Popol Vuh. I did not expect to stay with the book as long as I did after that class; but, as the book in your hands demonstrates, the Popol Vuh was not done with me yet. Its sense of how emergencies emerge, and how that emergence can be a source of social, political, and intellectual growth grew like a fire in my mind. It burned away easy distinctions between the emergency we are in now and the longer, ongoing emergency of colonialism. And it shed a light on how those who have suffered the worst of that crisis have made that crisis into something more than defeat—­how the authors of the Popol Vuh and its indigenous and nonindigenous inheritors have continued to reframe crisis as creativity, critique as creation, and emergency as emergence. It is in honor of all those people—­whose inheritance has come with tremendous loss and sacrifice—­that this book is written. I dedicate it to the countless disappeared—­the named and unnamed people—­whose lives have vanished in the violence, stupidity, and arrogance of colonialism in its historical and contemporary forms. I submit this work in their honor hum-

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bly, while also taking pride in the dynamic intellectuality that the Popol Vuh makes possible. While I wrote these essays in the intense separation of stay-­ at-­home orders, quite removed from the resources of libraries and friends, I had the tremendous gift of having to stay at home with my partner and constant interlocutor Alexis Chema. Without her, this work simply would not be. Other friends whom I saw on occasion during this time (on a patch of grass on the Midway), whose conversation gave me immense inspiration and guidance, are David Gutherz, Timothy Harrison, Jose-­Luis Moctezuma, and Carmen Quiñones-­Merport. Earlier conversations and correspondence with Raven Chacon, Wendy Ewald, Andrew Finegold, Candice Hopkins, Julia Marsan, Harold Mendez, Eamon Ore-­Giron, Srikanth Reddy, Cristián Roa, Daniel Tiffany, and John Wilkinson were also invaluable. And I simply would not have come into this project without the encouragement and intellectual support of series editors Mark Payne and Brooke Holmes. All unattributed translations here are my own. My translations and interpretations of the Popol Vuh in this essay have been aided by the tremendous contributions of several scholars: Adrián Inés Chávez’s Pop Wuj: Poema Mito-­histórico K’iche’; Allen Christenson’s Popol Vuh: Literal Poetic Version and Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya: The Great Classic of Central American Spirituality, Translated from the Original Maya Text; Luis Enrique Sam Colop’s Popol Wuj; Michael Bazzett’s The Popol Vuh; Nathan Henne’s Reading Popol Wuj: A Decolonial Guide; James Mondloch’s Basic K’ichee’ Grammar: Thirty-­ Eight Lessons; and Dennis Tedlock’s Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings—­among other works. My earlier conversations with the Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian at the Newberry Library, Analú María López, have also been deeply infor-

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mative. To all these scholars for their direct and indirect help I am thankful. My observation of birds was assisted by James Cassidy’s Book of North American Birds; Chandler Robbins, Bertel Bruun, and Herbert Zim’s Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America; and David Allen Sibley’s What It’s Like to Be a Bird. Most importantly, I cup my hands to my chest in deepest gratitude to the anonymous authors of the Popol Vuh, and to the countless voices and hands who have brought that work along—­in its many forms and instances—­over the course of so many suns, each one of which is only the same sun in critical repetition, here again as always.

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Index Achí Mayan works, 42. See also Rabinal Achí Acteal massacre, 20 Aeneas, 30, 34 Africa, 43 ajq’ijaab’ (keepers of days), 40. See also divination; diviners Ak’abal, Humberto, 3–­4, 62–­63 Alaska, 76 Amlin, Patricia, 45–­46 Anales de Tlatelolco, 72 ancestors. See antecedence animals, 3–­4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 49, 72, 74–­ 75, 78–­79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 antecedence, 10, 18, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 42, 69, 74–­75, 76, 82, 91, 95, 96, 97, 102. See also revision, poetics of anxiety (cosmic), 5, 6, 8, 13, 21, 52, 54, 55, 63, 80, 82, 83, 104 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 70–­71 apeiron, 2, 12, 22, 38, 44, 49, 50, 86 apocatastasis, 24–­25 architecture, Mayan, 79, 83 Asia, 68–­69 assimilation, poetics of, 9–­10, 18, 53, 54–­55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 99–­101 asterism, 22, 23 astronomy, 22, 66, 72. See also apocatastasis Atlantis, 66–­67 auaxibal (sown), 57, 60, 96 Aztec cosmology, 72

Aztlán, 28–­29, 71 balladry, 62–­63 ballgame, Mesoamerican, 30, 31, 78–­79, 82, 83 Batzibal Tujal, Juana, 32–­33, 84–­ 85, 96 Benjamin, Walter, 24–­25 Bering Strait, great migration across, 68, 69 Bible, 16 Big Dipper, 22. See also astronomy birds, 1–­5, 10–­11, 27, 76, 87; gods and, 4, 6, 10, 11 Blake, William, 6 Blood Moon, 32–­34, 39, 94; caves and, 34–­35; children, 33; omen, 40; premonition, 39, 40, 42, 45 Blythe, CA, intaglios, 71–­72 Book of Mormon, 91–­94, 96–­98, 101, 102; origin, 91–­92 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 70–­71 Cabracan, 16. See also Seven Macaw (Wuqub’ Kaqix) caj ulew (sky-­earth or world), 95, 96 calendar, Mesoamerican, 41 Camazotz (bat god), 55–­56, 60 Canada, 2 capitalist creation stories and origins of capital, 18–­19 Capitol attack (January 6, 2021), 64

116 

Caribbean Sea, 65 Catholicism, 54–­55; Francisco Ximenez and, 50–­51, 54–­55 cave-­beings, 27, 28 caves, 55; Blood Moon and, 34–­35; disease in, 38; goddesses and, 35, 38; in Mesoamerican cosmology, 35; Roman, 27; terminology, 27; women and, 35 Central America, 2, 7, 10, 20, 54, 72–­ 73, 93, 100 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 53 chaca palo, 65–­67 Chávez, Adrián Inés, 66–­67, 85 Chávez, César, 45 Chicago, 10, 14, 35, 53, 81, 105 Chichicastenango, 14, 42, 50 Chicomoztoc, caves of, 28, 72 Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo, 66, 82 Christendom: Jesus Christ and, 16, 30; Marx and, 19; Popol Vuh and, 9, 14, 16, 19, 50, 54, 57, 58, 94, 95, 99. See also Catholicism Christenson, Allen, 30, 42, 57, 66, 99 Christian creation stories, 19 Christian God, 9, 14, 50, 54, 57, 74 Christianization, 14, 17, 18, 53 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 53 Coatlicue (snake goddess), 27, 28 colonial crisis, 8, 9, 98; bringing creation out of a, 77 colonial extirpation, 50 colonial interruption, 53, 55 colonialism, 9, 14, 44, 50, 77, 96, 98, 99; darkness of, 9, 50; emergencies and, 8, 9, 15, 104; new, 73 colonial transplantation, 9, 14, 15 Colop, Luis Enrique Sam, 59, 66, 74 Colorado River, 71 Columbus, Christopher, 76 contradiction, 6, 7, 11, 24, 44, 96. See also dialectic

INDE X

corn. See maize Cortés, Juan, 30–­31 Cortés y Larraz, Pedro, 102, 103 cosmic order, 30, 84 cosmogenesis, 8, 15, 17, 19, 77, 101 cosmogony, 10, 44 cosmology, 35, 72 cotzih. See flowers (cotzih) COVID-­19 pandemic, 104, 105 creation: gods and, 4, 7–­8, 40, 42, 46, 88–­90, 98; the power to create, 49. See also sun: birth of the creation stories, 8–­9, 17, 19, 28–­29, 46, 55, 69, 70; capitalist, 18–­19; Marx and, 19 creators, 6; diviners and, 40–­41, 90 Creators, 6, 42, 45 crisis(es), 8, 15, 41, 104; experience of, 23–­24; of the gods, 7, 8; of the past and present, 19. See also colonial crisis; migration: crisis of; and specific topics criticality, Mayan, 6. See also puz (inner light) Cuchumatán mountains, 66, 73–­74 cultural traditions. See flexibly cultural thesis Dante Alighieri, 30 darkness, 1–­2, 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 29, 49–­50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 86, 95 de Alvarado, Pedro, 14, 20, 50, 98–­99 death, 1–­3, 31, 32, 77–­79 deathly lords, 3, 31, 79; Lords of Death, 2, 8. See also Lords of Xibalba Declaration of Iximché, 20 de León, Jason, 72 de Lión, Luis, 12, 13, 15, 20–­22 demons, 14, 62–­64; Ximenez and, 51–­54, 60, 61 deserts, 43, 54, 76–­78. See also Sonoran Desert

INDE X   117

dialectic, 7, 23, 56, 58–­61, 86, 96, 97. See also revision, poetics of Diné Bahane’, 29 disease, 3, 9, 14, 31, 37, 38, 57–­58, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85. See also COVID-­19 pandemic disidentification, 56, 60–­61, 84–­85, 96. See also dualisms divination, 39–­41, 43, 46, 89–­90 diviners, 39–­41, 89–­90. See also Xmucane and Xpiyacoc (grandmother and grandfather) divinity, 75 Domus Aurea, 26–­27, 29. See also Nero Donne, John, 80–­81, 85 dreams, 22, 38, 39, 41, 43, 68 drunkenness, 62–­63 dualisms, 36, 56–­60, 61, 74, 84–­85, 94, 96, 97–­98 earthenware beings, 12, 22 Eden, 32 Eisner, Lotte, 43–­45 El Norte (film), 38 emergency(ies), 8, 9; colonialism and, 8, 9, 15, 104; emergence and, 7–­8, 10, 19, 38, 104 Ernándes Kokov, María, 46–­48 euaxibal (hidden), 49, 57, 58, 60, 96 expressionism, 44–­45 EZLN. See Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) farms and farming (milpa), 23, 31, 33, 34, 72–­73 Fata Morgana (mirage), 42–­43 father-­uncle twins (One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu), 30, 32, 33, 42 Fifth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, 20 Figueroa, Alfredo, 71, 72, 76

Figueroa, Jesús, 76–­77 flexibly cultural thesis, 93 flowers (cotzih), 2, 3, 4, 36, 73–­74, 79 form, 27, 28, 36, 51, 54–­62, 67, 71, 89–­90, 97, 98, 99–­100, 104, 106 Framer-­Maker pair, 5, 52–­53, 55, 56, 95–­96 France, 10, 44 Georgics (Virgil), 34 German expressionism, 44–­45 goblins, 63, 64 God (Christian), 9, 14, 50, 54, 57, 74 goddesses, 27–­29, 35, 37–­38, 40; caves and, 35, 38. See also Blood Moon gods, 6, 40–­41, 43, 52, 56, 84, 95; birds and, 4, 6, 10, 11; Christianity and, 99; creation and, 4, 7–­8, 40, 42, 46, 88–­90, 98; crisis of the, 7, 8; list of, 5 Great Lakes, 92 grotesque, 27–­28, 29 Guatemala, Mayas in, 30, 31, 38, 53, 65, 73 Guatemalan Civil War, 12 Guatemalan highlands, 9, 17, 31, 53, 65, 94 Guatemalan Mormons, 93, 101 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 23. See also dialectic Heraclitus, 58 hero twins (Hunahpu and Xbalenque), 2, 30–­33, 82, 86; animals and, 17, 18, 78–­79; Blood Moon impregnated with, 32; family relationships, 82; relationship with each other, 82; Seven Macaw and, 17, 22–­23, 25, 30; in Underworld, 23, 25, 30, 32, 42, 52, 79; Xibalba and, 2, 3 Herzog, Werner, 43–­45

118 

Holmes, Calixta Guiteras, 37 Hunahpu, 30, 32, 33. See also hero twins (Hunahpu and Xbalenque) Hurricane (creation god), 5, 65–­66 “I am” statements, 16 ilb’al (instrument of seeing), 9, 46, 50, 88; Book of Mormon as, 96–­ 97; Popol Vuh as, 41, 49, 59–­60, 88, 96–­97 immigration, 52. See also migration immigration courts, 73 Incantations (Past), 35, 46 insects, 1, 3, 78–­79, 81–­82, 86 intoxication. See drunkenness Iximché, Declaration of, 20 Jaguar, 7, 27, 35, 38, 78, 83, 87 January 6 Capitol attack (2021), 64 Jesus Christ, 16, 24, 30, 73, 93, 94, 101, 102 Kaqchikel Maya, 12, 31, 65. See also de Lión, Luis katabasis (Underworld descent), 2, 9, 23, 29–­31, 34, 42, 49, 52, 83, 86 Kaxail/Kaxil/Kajval (earth goddess), 35–­38 K’iche’ authors, 96. See also specific authors K’iche’ language, 3, 4, 51 K’iche’ Maya diviners, 39, 40. See also Xiloj Peruch, Andrés K’iche’ Maya lords, 30, 31–­32 K’iche’ Mayan astronomy, 22–­23 K’iche’ Mayan story of creation, 49. See also Popol Vuh (“Book of the Mat”) K’iche’ Mayan Underworld. See Xibalba (Xib’alb’a) K’iche’ Mayan works, 94. See also K’iche’ Mayan story of creation K’iche’ people, 31, 66, 94–­95

INDE X

Kiowa, 70. See also creation stories language, 39–­40, 41–­42, 45, 54–­55, 100; purpose of, 3–­4, 5, 6, 56–­57 Laocoön (Trojan priest), 28, 29 Latter-­Day Saints Church, 93 lemo (reflecting instrument or mirror), 16, 22, 31, 43, 59, 87–­88, 89, 90, 99, 100. See also sun: that shows itself vs. the real sun light, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 25, 26, 28, 42–­ 43, 54, 55, 56, 62, 81, 86–­87, 88, 89–­90. See also lemo (reflecting instrument or mirror); puz (inner light); sun lords: K’iche’ Maya, 30; of Underworld, 30. See also deathly lords Lords of Xibalba, 3, 5, 32, 42, 78. See also deathly lords love, 85; lesson on, 78, 81–­83; Merton on, 83–­84 Lowell, Robert, 34 maize, 29–­32, 41, 52; first humans as made from, 52, 65; power of, 30, 33 Marroquín, Francisco, 14 Marx, Karl, 18–­19, 24 Marxism, 23, 24 Maya Mormons, 101 Mayan languages, 73. See also K’iche’ language McNickle, D’Arcy, 67–­68 Merton, Thomas, 83–­84 Mexican emigration, 70–­71, 73 Mexico, 20 migrant birds, 2, 5, 10 migrant horizons, 68 migration, 52, 67–­73, 75, 76; crisis of, 70–­71, 77, 90, 94, 95; great houses in, 65. See also immigration migration stories, 68–­71, 95

INDE X   119

Milky Way, 23. See also astronomy milpa. See farms and farming (milpa) Milton, John, 52 Momaday, N. Scott, 69–­70. See also Kiowa Mormon (Book of Mormon prophet), 91, 93 Mormonism, 93, 97. See also Book of Mormon Mormons, 92, 101 Moroni (Book of Mormon prophet/ Mormon’s son), 91–­93 mosquitos, 78–­79, 81, 82 mountains, 16, 54, 73, 74, 87, 92, 93. See also Cuchumatán mountains multiplicity, 5–­6, 8, 10–­11, 27, 32, 36, 56, 86, 90, 91, 96, 99–­100, 103. See also polyphony Murphy, Thomas, 101 myth(s), 19; vs. history, 70, 75. See also creation stories; and specific topics mythistorical method, 23–­24, 75 mythworld, Mayan, 53–­54, 56. See also specific topics Nava, Gregory, 38 Nazca lines, 71 Nazi Germany, 44 Nephi, Second Book of, 97–­98 Nero, 26, 31. See also Domus Aurea Newberry Library, 10, 14, 53 North Star, 22. See also astronomy One Hunahpu, 30, 32, 33, 38, 42 onomatopoeia, 3–­5, 48, 62. See also retal (sign) Orpheus, story of, 34 Ovid, 34 parallelism, 56–­61; concepts associated with, 61. See also dualisms

parenthesis, 51–­52, 60–­61 Past, Ámbar, 35, 46–­47 Peace and Dignity Journeys, 76–­77 pests/pestilence, 78–­80. See also mosquitos philosophy, 17 Pindar, 40 plains, 70 Plato, 89 Pleiades, 72. See also astronomy Plutarch, 40 polyphony, 7, 10–­11, 60, 61 Popol Vuh (“Book of the Mat”), 8, 49, 74; fundamental questions in, 4; themes, 44–­46, 56; translations, 57–­60, 82. See also specific topics Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya (film), 45 prayer, 73–­75 primitive accumulation of capital, 18–­19 puppetry, 45 puz (inner light), 6, 8, 42, 54, 56 Q’anjob’al Mayan works, 73–­74 Quetzal Serpent (Maker), 5, 101 Quiroa, Néstor, 50, 51 Rabinal Achí, 42, 45 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 26, 27, 29 rats, 78, 79 relationality, 5, 6, 15, 18, 19, 22, 31, 32–­33, 55, 82, 84–­85, 96, 101. See also dualisms repetition, 33, 34, 42, 75, 97, 106. See also antecedence retal (sign), 6, 39–­40, 45, 48. See also language revision, poetics of, 7, 15–­16, 33, 34, 42, 46, 60, 61, 64, 66, 71, 75, 86, 97. See also apocatastasis

120 

INDE X

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 34 Rome, 26–­27, 30

syncretism, 18, 99–­101. See also assimilation, poetics of

Santiago Atitlán, 42, 45 Scots language, 62–­63 Scott, Walter, 63 Second Book of Nephi, 97–­98 seeds, 19, 23, 32, 33, 35, 41, 58, 67, 69, 88. See also antecedence; revision, poetics of; sowing seeing, instrument of. See ilb’al (instrument of seeing) Seven Hunahpu, 30, 32, 33, 42 Seven Macaw (Wuqub’ Kaqix), 16, 18–­23, 46, 47, 76; compared with Jesus Christ, 16; death, 18; defeat of, 17, 22, 30; ethics of the story of, 17, 18; hero twins and, 17, 22–­ 23, 25, 30; “I am” statements, 16; overview and nature of, 15–­17, 20, 23; sons, 18, 20; words, 16 sexuality (erotic), 27, 32, 82–­83 Shakespeare, William, 64 Smith, Joseph, 91, 92 snakes, 21, 27, 28, 66, 79 Sonoran Desert, 71, 72 Sovereign (Framer), 5, 101 sowing, 23, 36–­38, 57, 86–­88, 96 Spain, 30–­31 Spanish conquest of the Maya, 20, 28, 53, 65, 101 Spanish language, 51–­53, 59, 60 spit (saliva), 32, 39, 42, 48. See also Blood Moon; retal (sign) stone, 7, 8, 18, 46, 79, 87, 97 sun, 2, 16, 58, 70, 86–­90, 98, 106; birth of the, 16, 17, 22, 82, 90, 98, 106; hero twins and the, 82; names for the, 82; that shows itself vs. the real sun, 87–­90; visualizations of sun’s heat on earth, 43 sun gods, 98, 99

Taller Leñateros, 35 Teatro Campesino, 45–­46 Tedlock, Barbara, 23 Tedlock, Dennis, 56, 75, 99; Breath on the Mirror, 88–­89; translation, 39, 58–­59, 66 Tehuantepec, Isthmus of, 92–­93 television, 46. See also specific topics Tenochtitlan, 27, 28, 29, 71 Teotihuacan, 76 They Came Here First (McNickle), 68 Tierra del Fuego, 76 Tiffany, Daniel, 54 Tijuana, 38 Time Commences in Xibalbá (de Lión), 12. See also de Lión, Luis Título de Totonicapán, 82–­83, 94–­95 Tohil, 52–­53, 54 Tonatiuh, 98–­99 torture, 13, 98–­99 Townsend, Camilla, 71 transformation, 7, 16, 21, 25, 29, 32, 34, 38, 43–­44, 62–­63, 67, 68, 72–­ 73, 82, 90, 97. See also translatability translatability, 9–­10, 56, 60, 61, 62, 65–­66, 67, 77, 88–­89, 97, 103 Trump’s Tulsa rally (2020), 64 Ts’akol-­Bitol, 95–­96. See also Framer-­Maker pair Tulan, 52, 55, 90 Tzotzil Mayan works, 35, 37, 46–­48 Tz’utujil Mayan works, 42 Underworld, 9, 20, 82, 83; bat-­ winged beings and the, 53; hero twins in the, 23, 25, 30, 32, 42, 52, 79; journey to the, 29–­30; Lords of Death and the, 2; poems of a psy-

INDE X   121

chological, 34; whip-­poor-­wills and the, 2, 4 Underworld descents, 30, 32, 34, 42, 49, 52. See also katabasis (Underworld descent) United States, 10, 36, 38, 46, 63, 70, 72, 73, 76 US-­Mexico border, 73. See also migration Utz’utz’ Ni’, Xunka’, 35–­37, 38 Valdez, Luis, 45–­46 Vatican, 27, 29 Venus (planet), 18, 22–­23, 47. See also astronomy vermin, 78. See also rats Virgil, 34

wooden people, 7, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20–­21, 76, 81, 82 Xbalenque, 30, 33, 82, 83. See also hero twins (Hunahpu and Xbalenque) Xibalba (Xib’alb’a), 2–­4, 12, 20, 23, 33. See also Lords of Xibalba Xibalbans, 32, 39, 52–­53, 55, 56 Xiloj Peruch, Andrés, 39 Ximenez: demons and, 51–­54, 60, 61; fatal flaw (hamartia), 61 Ximenez, Francisco, 50–­55, 60–­61; Catholicism and, 50–­51, 54–­55 Xmucane and Xpiyacoc (grandmother and grandfather), 40–­41 Yucatec Mayan works, 76–­77

wealth, 16–­19. See also specific topics weaving, 74–­75. See also Popol Vuh (“Book of the Mat”) whip-­poor-­wills, 1–­4, 10, 79

Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), 20, 37, 76 Zipacna, 16. See also Seven Macaw (Wuqub’ Kaqix)