“These books were seen by our clergy, and even I saw part of those which were burned by the monks, apparently because they thought [they] might harm the Indians in matters concerning religion, since at that time they were at the beginning of their conversion.”
– Bartolomé de Las Casas
Of the numerous hieroglyphic books that once existed in the Maya lowlands all that escaped the Spanish purges of the 16th century are four incomplete codices. Of those written in the highlands of Guatemala, not a single Precolumbian book is known to have survived. But Maya literacy did not end with the arrival of the Europeans. Soon after the Spanish conquest of the region in 1524, Spanish priests taught members of the highland Maya nobility how to read and write the K’iche’ Maya language using a modified Latin script. The Maya in turn wrote a number of books based on the contents of the earlier texts. By far the most important extant example of such a book is the Popol Vuh. It is one of the world’s great works of literature, containing an account of the creation of the world, the acts of gods and heroes at the beginning of time before the first dawn, and the history of the highland Maya people themselves, without adding material from European sources.
By its own account it is a faithful record of the contents of the ancient Popol Vuh text which could no longer be seen.Although the traditions of the book were compiled after the Conquest, “under the law of God and Christianity,” its K’iche’ Maya authors venerated their traditional Maya gods as luminous, wise beings who brought life and light to the world through their creative works.
Such unapologetic reverence for the ancient gods would have been offensive to the Spanish missionaries. Those who were found in possession of such books were persecuted and even killed. As much as 200 years later, many ancient books were still kept in secret by the K’iche’s so that the Spanish authorities would not learn of them.
The fact that the contents of the now lost, original Popol Vuh predated the Spanish Conquest gave them an aura of mystery and power. Its authors referred to the ancient book upon which the Popol Vuh was based as an ilb’al, meaning “instrument of sight or vision.” The word is used today to refer to the clear quartz crystals that K’iche’ priests use in divinatory ceremonies. Thus, the rulers of the K’iche’s consulted the Popol Vuh in times of national distress as a means of seeing the future:
They knew if there would be war. It was clear before their faces. They saw if there would be death, if there would be hunger. They surely knew if there would be strife. There was an instrument of sight. There was a book. Popol Vuh was their name for it.
Two hundred years after the Conquest, a Spanish priest named Francisco Ximénez living in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, in the early 18th century wrote that the people of that town possessed many ancient books, including the manuscript of the Popol Vuh. Far from being forgotten tales, he found that these texts were “the doctrine which they first imbibed with their mother’s milk, and that all of them knew it almost by heart.”
He was able to convince the elders who kept the Popol Vuh manuscript to allow him to borrow it for the purpose of making a copy. Ximénez transcribed the K’iche’ text of the Popol Vuh, and added a Spanish translation of its contents. It is unknown what happened to the 16th century manuscript, although presumably Ximénez returned it to its K’iche’ owners. Today we in the Western world know of this great book only through Ximénez’s transcription, which has become one of the principal resources used by European and American scholars who study Maya history and theology. It is also a sublime work of literature, comparable with other great epic poems of the ancient world such as the Iliad and Odyssey of Greece, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata of India.