Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [216]
Once again, we have the Spanish conquerors to thank. After their arrival in the Americas in the 1500s, the Spanish—as many conquerors do—prohibited the use of the Mayan and other native languages and began to enforce the use of Spanish and Latin as the common vernacular. Of course, Catholicism became the official—and, presumably, only—religion wherever the Spanish went. And wholesale “culturecide” began to take place. In an introduction to his English translation of the Popol Vuh, scholar Dennis Tedlock describes the Spanish approach to destroying a culture: “Backed by means of persuasion that included gunpowder, instruments of torture, and the threat of eternal damnation, the invaders established a monopoly on virtually all major forms of visible public expression, whether in drama, architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. In the highlands, when they realized that textile designs carried complex messages, they even attempted to ban the wearing of Mayan style clothing.” (Oh, those terrible Spanish. But just remember, in America you can be thrown out of a shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt with a message the authorities don’t like. And the French banned the head scarves worn by Muslim girls in public schools. Clothing is, and always has been, a form of spiritual, cultural, and political expression.)
During the mid-sixteenth century, working secretly and anonymously, Mayan priests and clerks who had been taught Latin translated copies of the old hieroglyphic Mayan books into Latin. They also began to blend Catholicism in with their own religious beliefs, merging the two much the way the African practitioners of Santeria and voodoo did in the Caribbean. Around 1700, a Latinized version of ancient Mayan texts was discovered by a Franciscan priest in a Guatemalan town. Instead of destroying the book—which is what happened to most ancient Mayan and Aztec hieroglyphic writings—the priest translated it into Spanish and added the names of some of the Spanish governors of Guatemala to the lists of Mayan kings. Maybe the priest thought this addendum would keep him out of ecclesiastical hot waters if his heresy was ever discovered.*
This, then, is how the Popol Vuh survived. Coming down from Mayan scribes who valued the “ancient word” over the “preaching of God” forced on them by the Spanish, the Popol Vuh is a rare and important source, although one that is clearly filtered through the Spanish colonial era.
Divided into five parts and a little over one hundred pages long in English, the Popol Vuh begins with a Creation account in a world that has only an empty sky above and a sea below. Central to this Creation narrative are two groups of gods, one from the sea and one from the sky, who decide to create the earth, plants, and people. The role of the people, interestingly, is to praise the gods and provide them with offerings. The first people the gods make have no arms and can only chatter and howl—so they become the first animals. A second try produces a being made of mud, which cannot walk or reproduce and which dissolves into nothing. After consulting a wise old divine couple, the gods make a third attempt and create people out of wood. But the results are only slightly improved. The wooden people can speak and reproduce, but they prove to be very poor at praying and providing the requisite offerings.† The god Huracan—a name appropriated by the Spanish and transformed into the word “hurricane”—decides to do away with the wooden people with a flood, and he sends a gigantic rainstorm along with terrible monsters to attack them. The people are destroyed, but some manage to survive in the jungles and become the ancestors of the monkeys.
After this round of botched human creation, the Popol Vuh shifts to a long, complex, and admittedly bizarre narrative account of the