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Flourishing for over a thousand years
(200 BC to 900 AD), the Classic Mayan world was organized at its
height into fifty or more independent states encompassing more
than 100,000 square miles of forest and plain. The divine ahauob
ruled millions of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, warriors and
nobility and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples,
palaces, and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations numbering
in the tens of thousands. Outside of their realm, the Maya engaged
in war, trade, and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains
of Central Mexico. Theirs was a civilized world.
The Maya described the inhabitants
of their world, both human and superhuman, in elaborate and powerful
stories. These myths, like those in the Bible, not only described
but also explained the nature of those beings and their relationships.
Because the Maya wrote primarily upon perishable paper, our understanding
of their literature and the many forms such stories must have
taken is severely limited. There is one example, however, of a
Mayan Bible, a compilation of stories that explains the essence
of living experience. It is called the Book of Council or the
Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya people.
The Heroes of Maya myth were twins. In the seventeenth-century
Popol Vuh myth, they were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque. In the
version of the myth preserved in the Popol Vuh, these twins were
the offspring of an older set of twins who had been called to
Xibalba for making too much noise playing the ballgame. The twins
were tricked by the Lords of Death, defeated, and sacrificed.
The Lords of Death buried one twin under the ballcourt in Xibalba
and hung the skull of the other in a gourd tree as a warning to
others so ill-advised as to offend the powerful Xibalbans. Found
by the daughter of a Lord of Death, the skull impregnated her
by spitting in her hand. Frightened by her enraged father, the
girl fled Xibala to the Middleworld, where she wandered until
she found the grandmother of the dead twins.
After many adventures, these twins found the ballgame gear
their grandmother had hidden after the death of the forebears.
The two became great ballplayers and in their turn disturbed the
Xibalbans who lived in the Underworld just under the ballcourt.
They too were called to Xibalba to account for their unseemly
behavior, but unlike the first set of twins, they outwitted the
Lords of Death and survived a series of trials designed to defeat
them.
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