Episode Details

In The Head Restored, Xbalanque convokes all the beasts in the night, small and great, and each chooses its food; last comes the Turtle, and it is set in place of Hunahpu's head, and eyes are sculpted upon it, and the Heart of Heaven himself hovers over the House of Bats while the face is finished; at dawn the head is whole and truly Hunahpu's, and on the ballcourt a rabbit hidden among the acorns draws all Xibalba away in pursuit while the true head is set back in its place and the turtle is broken into a thousand pieces before their eyes. In The Death of the Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, never vanquished by the trials, instruct the seers Xulu and Pacam how their bones are to be answered for, and lay themselves down together, embracing, upon the great pyre Xibalba has built; but the ground bones cast into the river sink at once, and are changed into handsome young men. In The Fish-Men and the Two Dancers, the brothers appear on the fifth day in the water as two fish-men, and then as two poor ragged dancers, whose wonders — a dog slain and revived, a house burned with the princes seated inside and restored whole, a man sacrificed and made glad again, and the dancers themselves killed and raised — draw all Xibalba to watch; and when Hun-Camé and Vucub-Camé beg for the same dance, they are sacrificed and not given back their life, and Xibalba flees and surrenders. In The Fall of Xibalba, the dancers name themselves and their fathers before all Xibalba and pronounce its sentence: its splendour is ended, its ball shall roll no more, and its portion is pots of baked earth and the grinding of maize; the grandmother keeps the Living Canes, which greened again when the twins were burned; funeral honours are rendered to the fathers at Pucbal-Chah; and the twins rise into the midst of the light and become the sun and the moon, while the four hundred young men killed by Zipacna rise as stars. These are the K'iche' people's own book, written down by K'iche' authors in the 1550s and preserved in Fr. Ximénez's copy, read here with respect as the sacred and historical book it is.

Chapters:

0:00 Opening

0:04 The Head Restored

5:02 The Death of the Twins

9:26 The Fish-Men and the Two Dancers

18:37 The Fall of Xibalba

From the Popol Vuh in the French translation of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris, 1861), from the K'iche' text preserved in the copy of Francisco Ximénez — a fresh in-house English rendering.

Popol Vuh.

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