Jessica Sequeira writes:

Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue-green plumage, birthed the world from a vast and placid ocean. The Popol Vuh provides the narrative of this creation of humankind and the subsequent mythology, history and culture of the K’iche’ Mayan Indigenous people in central highland Guatemala.

Animal, human and godlike worlds form a flowing whole, communicating and shapeshifting, engaged in relations of love, friendship, rivalry, instinct. In the Popol Vuh, humans don’t domesticate or sentimentalise animals, but recognise their form of existence. They hunt them, send them on errands, take down their messages from gods, sacrifice them, play games with them. The animal was not a lower being, over whom, as the Europeans believed, God had granted man dominion. For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were neighbours, alter egos and a form of communication with the gods.

The first half of the Popol Vuh is circular and mythological, drawing from a mystical notion of time linked to the firmament. The second half is more historical and linear, chronicling events from the reigns of Mayan kings to the tragic arrival of the Spanish colonisers. Based on oral and performative traditions, the Popol Vuh as a whole displays a fascinating self-awareness about the changing relationship with gods and animals, in which new ideas of morality, sedentary existence, subservience to gods who offer temporary happinesses, such as food and women, and control over animals differ from the more fluid arrangements of times before, preceding and possibly auguring the Spanish conquest. [Continue reading…]