Reading group: the Popol Vuh’s making of people, from mud to wood to maize, in two sittings
Today's question of the day asks whether the world ever began. Here is a creation story that cares less about the first moment than about how hard it was to make people properly.
The Popol Vuh is the sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala. The text we have was written down in K'iche' in Latin letters in the sixteenth century, and survives in a copy made by a Dominican friar, Francisco Ximénez, around 1700. Its first part describes the makers trying, and failing, to create beings who will speak their names and keep their days.
Their first attempt, from mud, crumbles and dissolves. The second, people of wood, can talk and multiply, but they have no hearts and no memory of their makers, and they are destroyed in a flood. Only the third, made from maize dough, succeeds. Then the makers find that the maize people see too much, as far as the gods themselves, and they cloud their eyes, like breath on a mirror.
Sitting one: the silence before creation and the failed peoples of mud and wood.
Sitting two: the making of the first four maize people and the clouding of their sight.
Questions to bring:
– The wooden people fail through lack of memory and gratitude, not lack of intelligence. What does that say about what humans are for?
– Why would makers limit the knowledge of what they made? Compare the tree of knowledge in Genesis.
– Is a creation story an explanation, a set of obligations, or both?