A Message of Peace from Mayan Elder, Don Alejandro Oxlaj

by Stefan

Dated: May 11, 2007
From: Don Alejandro Oxlaj, Guatemala de la Asuncion

Don Alejandro is charged as the primary keeper of the teachings, visions and prophecies of the Mayan people. He is head of the National Mayan Council of Elders of Guatemala, Day Keeper of the Mayan Calendar, a 13th generation Quiche Mayan High Priest and a Grand Elder of the Continental Council of Elders and Spiritual Guides of the Americas. He is also an international lecturer on Mayan Culture. Don Alejandro gives us this timely message: a call to action, a call to come together and be as one. Don Alejandro Hill be performing a Sacred Maya FIRE Ceremony in Guatemala, and be joining the thousands of others around the planet during the Break through Celebration.

“Brothers and Sisters of all colors, holding hands around the planet on May 22nd 2007, let us reflect on this, let us meditate in our own way, in our own language, according to our own culture or religion, because we have only one Sun to shine upon us equally, one air that we breath and gives us life, one water that we drink and becomes blood in our veins and all live on Mother Earth. She feeds us, she holds us. Brothers and Sisters of all colors, together united in meditation to make conscience to the men in power, governors, politicians, business people: no more war, no more contaminating bombs, no more death. Together we can make a difference.”

Dear Brothers Joseph and Carl (Giove and Calleman):
In the name of the Heart of the Heavens and the Heart of the Earth, greetings to you. In the name of the Maya National Council of Elders, Spiritual Guides of Guatemala, we address the following to you for your great magnetic connections at the global level:

The Spirit of the Maya Nation and the Spirit of Mother Earth make us look for ties of friendship with all peoples of the world. The Maya Prophecy tells us ” …We will meet for we are one like the fingers of the hand”. We all are children of the Earth, we are flowers of the garden of our Creator coming in different colors, in different shapes, in different sizes, with different aromas; speaking different languages, and each one worshiping and meditating in their own way to the same Creator who has different names according to their own culture. We hope this communiqué reaches all institutions, in private sectors as well as governmental ones; landowners, scientists, and all people in general. Brothers and sisters, there has been over 500 years of extermination in the face of the earth, extermination of humans, extermination of our brother animals and ancient trees, every day at a faster speed. The elders from the National Council of Elders and Spiritual Guides of Guatemala are keepers of mystical and millenary knowledge. Like the birds, tirelessly in their flight, they live to see the prophecies fulfilled.

We want to make all people and governments in the world conscientious, and have them analyze and reflect at the situation of the planet in the present time. Let us start by remembering that the Americas were a paradise 500 years ago. Virgin forests, cities of beautiful animals, cities to an innumerable variety of colorful birds, flying in freedom; they provided food for everyone. The waters were abundant and pure; and the people, they lived in their own traditions, guarding their cultures and conserving the beauty of Mother Earth. Our ancestors lived to be over 100 years old, free from contagion and illnesses. They were respectful and obedient to the laws of our Creator.

Let us talk now about our present times. We enjoy new advances in technology, inventions that make everyday life easier for us, we all use them, but the negative side is that we are finishing up our forests, and contributing to the contamination of the planet, the rivers are drying out, the waters are being contaminated. Our crops are affected by plagues as well as plagues killing our animals. We are threatened by contagious illnesses, incurable illnesses unknown in the past. Very harmful are the use of chemicals, the insecticides, transgenic seeds, etc. And most of all, these days, the nuclear testing: nuclear bombs and a great deal of war weapons, and the war in itself sterilizing or killing the planet Earth and affecting all living beings. Many people are homeless, children begging in the streets, others are involved in prostitution.

Predators are on the rise. Dead people appearing daily in the streets, kidnappings, extortion, shootings in the schools, parents killing children, children killing children, parents raping their own kids. All this is a direct result of the contamination. There is no respect; no respect for life. The authorities sell themselves. The justice can be bought or sold.

Now lets speak about the future. We, the traditional Mayan elders, and all indigenous peoples in the world, meditate on the future. We don’t think only for today, the present, we think for tomorrow, for our children, grand children and future generations. We see a dark shadow approaching, a shadow that will cause a lot of harm. It is the great contamination. All this is due to man’s creation. We are digging our own graves. Wars are being transported to other countries; they reason in their speeches it is on behalf of freedom, but the result is more slavery. They speak that it will bring new development, but the result is more hunger for the underdeveloped countries. If we continue like this, the time will come when there are no more soldiers to form battalions. The Maya National Council of Elders of Guatemala ask all nations of the world – their governors and the governed ones – to put a stop to the contamination; and to the big and small enterprises, to find alternatives. We don’t want any more wars, no more death, no more nuclear testing, no more chemicals, because the warming up of the planet is unbearable to Mother Earth. If we don’t change, sooner or later, she will strike back with millions of lives lost.


Our Creator created us here over the face of the earth to worship him, to love and respect each other. We all are equal, we are flowers of the earth, in different sizes, of different colors, with different songs, with different smell, but all looking at our Creator, honoring him with different dances, different music, different ceremonies.

We all plead to him, we are his children, he is the creator of all that exist, all that we see and all which is beyond our senses. He has given us our life with an intelligence to do well. Brothers and Sisters of all colors, holding hands around the planet on May 22nd 2007, let us reflect on this, let us meditate in our own way, in our own language, according to our own culture or religion, because we have only one Sun to shine upon us equally, one air that we breath and gives us life, one water that we drink and becomes blood in our veins and all live on Mother Earth. She feeds us, she holds us.

Brothers and Sisters of all colors, together united in meditation to make conscience to the men in power, governors, politicians, business people: no more war, no more contaminating bombs, no more death.


Together we can make a difference.
May 22nd 2007 is 5 Ajpu, the Day of Grand Father Sun, he shines upon all of us equally, he doesn’t know discrimination, he doesn’t get lost on his path, he doesn’t get ahead or behind of himself. He gives us warmth, he gives us life. One Sun, one Air, one Water, One Mother Earth. May 22nd 2007 day of Grand Father Sun, Grand Mother Moon. The Maya Prophecy says: “Arise, all arise, not one nor two groups be left behind, together we will see once again the place from where we have come from”

Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj/ Wandering Wolf
Grand Elder of the National Council of Elders Mayas,
Xincas and Garifunas of Guatemala

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Popol Vuh (Mayan) Council Book translated by Dennis Tedlock

1550 AD
POPOL VUH: THE MAYAN BOOK OF THE DAWN OF LIFE
translated by Dennis Tedlock with commentary based on the ancient knowledge of the modern Quiche Maya

(C) Copyright 1985, Dennis Tedlock
Are 4u ua nuta4alibal, nupresenta
chiquiuach ri nantat, comon chuchkajauib
mu4hulic uleu, mu4hulic poklaj, mu4hulic bak.

PREFACE
You cannot erase time.
ANDRES XILOJ

THE TRANSLATOR of the Popol Vuh, as if possessed by the story the Popol Vuh tells, must wander in darkness and search long for the clear light. The task is not a matter of deciphering Maya hieroglyphs, since the only surviving version of the Popol Vuh is a transcription into alphabetic writing, but the manuscript nevertheless abounds with ambiguities and obscurities. My work took me not only into dark corners of libraries but into the forests and tall cornfields and smoky houses of highland Guatemala, where the people who speak and walk and work in the pages of the Popol Vuh, the Quiche Maya, have hundreds of thousands of descendants. Among them are diviners called "day-keepers," who know how to interpret illnesses, omens, dreams, messages given by sensations internal to their own bodies, and the multiple rhythms of time. It is their business to bring what is dark into "white clarity," just as the gods of the Popol Vuh first brought the world itself to light.

The Quiche people speak a Mayan language, say prayers to Mayan mountains and Mayan ancestors, and keep time according to the Mayan calendar. They are also interested citizens of the larger contemporary world, but they find themselves surrounded and attacked by those who have yet to realize they have something to teach the rest of us. For them it is not that the time of Mayan civilization has passed, to be followed by the time of European civilization, but that the two have begun to run alongside one another. A complete return to conditions that existed before Europeans first arrived is unthinkable, and so is a complete abandonment of indigenous traditions in favor of European ones. What most worries day-keepers about people from Europe, and specifically about missionaries, is that they confuse the Earth, whose divinity is equal to that of the celestial God, with the devil. As day-keepers put it, "He who makes an enemy of the Earth makes an enemy of his own body."

In the western part of what was once the Quiche kingdom is a town called Chuua 4,ak or "Before the Building." It is listed in the Popol Vuh as one of the citadels that were added to the kingdom during the reign of two great lords named Quicab and Cauizimah. When they sent "guardians of the land" to occupy newly conquered towns, Before the Building was assigned to nobles whose descendants still possess documents that date from the period of the Popol Vuh manuscript. Among contemporary Guatemalan towns it is without rival in the degree to which its ceremonial life is timed according to the Mayan calendar and mapped according to the relative elevations and directional positions of outdoor shrines. Once each 260 days, on the day named Eight Monkey, day-keepers converge from all over the Guatemalan highlands for the largest of all present-day Mesoamerican ceremonies that follow the ancient calendar. That Before the Building was already a religious center before the fall of the Quiche kingdom is indicated by the Nahua name that Pedro de Alvarado's Mexican-Indian allies gave it: Momostenango, meaning "Citadel of Shrines." It was in this town that I began my search for someone who might be able to light my way through some of the darker passages of the Popol Vuh. At the same time I began making sound recordings of contemporary narratives, speeches, and prayers, looking for passages that might resemble the Popol Vuh.

For field-workers in a Citadel of Shrines, visiting sacred places, listening to prayers and chants, and learning how to reckon time according to the continuing rhythms of the Mayan calendar can be a dangerous business. Barbara Tedlock and I almost came to the point of giving up our various research projects and leaving town when a day-keeper named Andres Xiloj divined that we had not only annoyed people at shrines but had entered the presence of these shrines without even realizing that we must be ritually clean in order to do so. But it was this same day-keeper, a man who is also the head of his patrilineage, who took on the task of answering all our inquiries about the shrines, the people who went there, the calendar, and the process by which he had divined the nature of our offense. One day, when we had come to the point of asking for a detailed description of the training and initiation of day-keepers, he dropped what seemed to be a broad hint that the best way to find out the answer to such questions would be to undertake an actual apprenticeship. After debating the meaning of his remarks all night, we asked him the next day whether he had meant that he would in fact be willing to take us on as apprentices, and he said, "Of course." There followed four and a half months of formal training, timed according to the Mayan calendar, that left us much more knowledgeable than we had ever intended to be.

Diviners are, by profession, interpreters of difficult texts. They can even start from a nonverbal sign, such as an ominous invasion of a house by a wild animal, and arrive at a "reading," as we would say, or ubixic, "its saying" or "its announcement," as is said in Quiche. When they start from a verbal sign such as the name of a day on the Mayan calendar, they may treat it as if it were a sign from a writing system rather than a word in itself, arriving at "its saying" by finding a different word with similar sounds. It should therefore come as no surprise that a diviner might be willing to take on the task of reading the Popol Vuh, whose text presents its own intriguing difficulties of interpretation.

When Andres Xiloj was given a chance to look at the text of the Popol Vuh, he produced a pair of spectacles and began reading aloud, word by word. His previous knowledge of alphabetic reading and writing was limited to Spanish, but he was able to grasp the orthography of the Popol Vuh text with very little help. When he was puzzled by archaic words, I offered definitions drawn from Quiche dictionaries compiled during the colonial period; in time, of course, he readily recognized the more frequent archaic forms. He was never content with merely settling on a Quiche reading of a particular passage and then offering a simple Spanish translation; instead, he was given to frequent interpretive asides, some of which took the form of entire stories. In the present volume the effects of the three-way dialogue among Andres Xiloj, the Popol Vuh text, and myself are most obvious in the Glossary and the Notes and Comments, but they are also present in the Introduction and throughout the translation of the Popol Vuh itself.

My work in Guatemala took me not only to the town called Before the Building (Momostenango), but to the ruins of Rotten Cane (Utatlan), to the mountain called Patohil, to the pile of broken stones at Petatayub, and to towns such as Santa Cruz Quiche, Spilt Water (Zacualpa), Above the Nettles (Chichicastenango), Above the Hot Springs (Totonicapan), Willow Tree (Santa Maria Chiquimula), and Under Ten Deer (Quezaltenango). To the patron saints and earthly spirits of all these places I pay my respects, especially to Santiago and his scribe, San Felipe, at Momostenango; to San Juan and to the divine Uhaal and Roz Utz stones at Agua Tibia; and above all to Uhaal Zabal, 4huti Zabal, and Nima Zabal.

Library pilgrimages have taken me to nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Tozzer Library at Harvard; to the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; to the Latin American libraries at Tulane in New Orleans and the University of Texas in Austin; to the special-collections library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; to the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City; to the Archivo General de Centroamerica in Guatemala City; and to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I saw, felt, smelled, and heard the rustle of the manuscript of the Popol Vuh.

Such is the magnitude of the present project that it stretched over nine years; except for one of these years and part of another, it necessarily took a backseat to the countless complexities of university life. Most of the Guatemalan fieldwork was carried out during the summer of 1975 and throughout 1976. Much of my effort to transform masses of research and multiple trial runs at translation into a book was made during evenings and weekends at home, and it was also carried on during all-too-brief retreats to such places as Tepoztlan, south of Mexico City; Panajachel, on the shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala; and in the woodlands and rocks near Cerrillos, New Mexico, south of Santa Fe. But even when one is confined to Massachusetts, there are ways in which the world of the Popol Vuh makes itself felt. During the months in which
I completed the manuscript for the book you now hold in your hands, I could see Venus as the morning star if I looked out the window of my study early enough.
Thinking back over my work on the Popol Vuh brings a great many people to mind; I apologize in advance to those who should have been remembered here but were not. Having learned my lessons about ancestors from my Quiche master, I will begin with persons who are now deceased. Robert Wauchope, when I first began my graduate work at Tulane in 1961, soon became convinced that I should eventually go to Guatemala to do archaeological fieldwork; he lived long enough to know that fourteen years later I finally did get to Guatemala, but as an ethnologist, linguist, and translator rather than an archaeologist. My first lessons in how to read and interpret manuscript sources from Spanish America were given to me by France V. Scholes in the Coronado Library at the University of New Mexico, during the summer of 1964. He and Wauchope enjoyed full careers, but the career of Thelma Sullivan, the finest of all scholars working with texts in the Nahuatl language, was cut short; she stood out among Americanists in general as one of those rare individuals who realize and demonstrate that precision in translation is not to be confused with mechanical literalness. Also cut short was the career of Fernando Horcasitas, who gave a splendid lecture on Nahuatl theater one fine warm evening in Cuernavaca when Barbara Tedlock and I were waiting for the Guatemalan border to reopen after the great earthquake of 1976.

And then there is Abelino Zapeta y Zapeta, who in 1979 became the first Quiche to serve as mayor of Santa Cruz Quiche in centuries. He offered gracious words of greeting to an international conference on the Popol Vuh that took place in his town. For the time being it must also be said that he was the last Quiche to serve as mayor. A year after the conference, while he was riding home from work on his bicycle, he was assassinated by gunmen who were seen driving away in an army jeep. The day may come when the Popol Vuh will be entirely at home in Santa Cruz Quiche, the town where it was written, but that day may not be soon.

Turning to those who are still living, and beginning with graduate school, I first think of Munro S. Edmonson. I have come to disagree with him about a great many matters affecting the Popol Vuh, as he well knows, but I have not forgotten his seminar on the Maya at Tulane, which I took more than twenty years ago. When he offered a list of possible research topics to the students in that seminar, I was the one who chose to do a class presentation and term paper on the Popol Vuh. But my first fieldwork in anthropology took me closer to my home in New Mexico: I went to the Zuni, who live on the northern frontier of Mesoamerica. When it came, at long last, to doing field research among the people whose ancestors wrote the Popol Vuh, it was Robert M. Carmack, of the State University of New York at Albany, who introduced Barbara Tedlock and myself to the western highlands of Guatemala. He did this with a generosity that is rare among ethnographers- and with a wisdom, still rarer, that led him to abandon us to our fate once he had gotten us into the field.

Among the people of Guatemala, I give special thanks to Andres Xiloj Peruch, who not only traveled with me through the Quiche text of the Popol Vuh but taught me how to read dreams, omens, and the rhythms of the Mayan calendar. Thanks also go to his daughter Maria, who has boundless patience and kindness; to Santiago Guix, who showed the way down many a path; to Gustavo Lang, who offers a steady hand in any emergency; to Lucas Pacheco Benitez, who combines a warm heart with an intimate knowledge of the spiritual properties of stones; to Celso Akabal, who offers genial toasts at his home near the shrine called the Great Place of Declaration; to Vicente de Leon Abac, who knows how the ancient customs originated; to Esteban Ajxub, who eloquently prays and sings for others; and to Flavio Rojas Lima, who knows how to make foreigners feel welcome at the Seminario de Integracion Social Guatemalteca.

In matters of Native American linguistics and poetics, I am especially thankful for more than fifteen years of unceasing dialogue with Dell Hymes. Others who come to mind here are Allan Burns, the first to reveal that conversation is the root of all Mayan discourse; Lyle Campbell, who went beyond his normal duties in providing myself and others with an introductory course in Quiche at the State University of New York at Albany in the fall of 1975 and who taught me the value of Cakchiquel sources; Ives Goddard, who convinced me that even the most intractable manuscript materials on Native American languages may conceal moments of great accuracy; T. J. Knab, who helped me with Nahuatl loanwords in the Popol Vuh and with Nahuatl metaphors; and James L. Mondloch, who answered some of my questions about Quiche syntax.

In matters of ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology I think of Duncan Earle, who revealed that the "mushroom head" of the Popol Vuh is in fact an herb; Gary Gossen, who knows that in trying to comprehend the contemporary highland Maya we are dealing with nothing less than a civilization; Doris Heyden, the first to reveal the full meaning of the secret cave at Teotihuacan; Alain Ichon, who excavated the site called Thorny Place in the Popol Vuh; David H. Kelley, who personally convinced me in far-off Calgary that classic Maya vase paintings do indeed illustrate scenes from the Popol Vuh; J. Jorge Klor de Alva, who knows that the "spiritual conquest" of Mesoamerica has in fact never taken place; Linda Schele, who brought the hieroglyphic texts of Palenque closer than ever to the Popol Vuh at the eighth Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in Austin; and Nathaniel Tarn, who in earlier times played the role of anthropologist among neighbors of the Quiche and later returned as a poet.

Anthony Aveni, John B. Carlson, and Floyd G. Lounsbury have heard out my ideas concerning the calendrical and astronomical interpretation of the Popol Vuh. Michael D. Coe, who well knows what a calabash tree is, not only provided welcome praise for the translation but generously permitted the use of the vase drawings reproduced here. Peter T. Furst and Jill Leslie Furst are steady friends who can be counted upon to do unexpected things, like raising toads, cooking sharks, and praising the fertility of skeletons. But above all I am grateful to my wife-colleague Barbara Tedlock, scholar and artist, who has meanwhile been telling her own story about places and times in Guatemala.

At various times over the years I have discussed portions of this work with four past and present colleagues in the University Professors Program at Boston University, all of whom have views on the subject of translation: William Arrowsmith, Rodolfo Cardona, D. S. Carne-Ross, and Herbert Mason. Others who have lent patient ears include the poets Robert Kelly, George Quasha, Jerome Rothenberg, and Charles Stein, along with the book-rancher Gus Blaisdell and the apple-farmer Jeff Titon. Thanks also go to Richard Lewis, of the Touchstone Center in New York, who provided me with the opportunity to do a public performance of parts of the translation at the American Museum of Natural History.

My fieldwork in Guatemala in 1976 was done with the aid of a Fellowship for Independent Study and Research from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Released time for the continuation of the translation of the Popol Vuh was provided, during the academic years 1979-80 and 1980-81, by a grant from the Translations Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is ably and thoughtfully administered by Susan Mango. During 1980-81 I received additional aid in the form of a sabbatical leave from Boston University.

From the beginning of our work on the Popol Vuh, Andres Xiloj felt certain that if one only knew how to read it perfectly, borrowing the knowledge of the day lords, the moist breezes, and the distant lightning, it should reveal everything under the sky and on the earth, all the way out to the four corners. As a help to my own reading and pondering of the book, he suggested an addition to the prayer that day-keepers recite when they go to public shrines. It goes like this:

Make my guilt vanish,
Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth;
do me a favor,
give me strength, give me courage
in my heart, in my head,
since you are my mountain and my plain;
may there be no falsehood and no stain,
and may this reading of the Popol Vuh
come out clear as dawn,
and may the sifting of ancient times
be complete in my heart, in my head;
and make my guilt vanish,
my grandmothers, grandfathers,
and however many souls of the dead there may be,
you who speak with the Heart of Sky and Earth,
may all of you together give strength
to the reading I have undertaken.


Go here to continue the article:
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The Popol Vuh -English Version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley

The Popol Vuh
The Sacred Book of The Mayas
The Book of The Community

English Version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley
(© 1950 by the University of Oklahoma Press)
Translation by Adrián Recinos


FORWARD BY SYLVANUS G. MORLEY
The Popol Vuh, or Sacred Book of the ancient Quiché Maya, as it has been happily subtitled, is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the most distinguished example of native American literature that has survived the passing centuries.

The original redaction of this most precious fragment of ancient American learning is now lost; however, it seems first to have been reduced to writing (in characters of the Latin script), in the middle of the sixteenth century, from oral traditions then current among the Quiché, by some unknown but highly educated, not to say literary, member of that race.

This now lost original was again copied in the Quiché language, again in characters of the Latin script, at the end of the seventeenth century, by Father Francisco Ximénez, then parish priest of the village of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango in the highlands of Guatemala, directly from the original sixteenth-century manuscript, which he had borrowed for the purpose from one of his Indian parishioners.

The Popol Vuh is, indeed, the Sacred Book of the Quiché Indians, a branch of the ancient Maya race, and contains an account of the cosmogony, mythology, traditions, and history of this native American people, who were the most powerful nation of the Guatemala highlands in pre-Conquest times. It is written in an exalted and elegant style, and is an epic of the most distinguished literary quality.

Indeed, the chance preservation of this manuscript only serves to emphasize the magnitude of the loss which the world has suffered in the almost total destruction of aboriginal American literature.
SYLVANUS G. MORLEY
Museum of New Mexico
Santa Fe

PREFACE BY ADRIÁN RECINOS
Of all American peoples, the Quichés of Guatemala have left us the richest mythological legacy. Their description of the Creation as given in the Popol Vuh, which may be called the national book of the Quichés, is, in its rude strange eloquence and poetic originality, one of the rarest relics of aboriginal thought.--Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races, III, 42.

The national book of the Quiché, which contains the mythology, traditions, and history of this remarkable American people, was not known by the scientific world until the past century, when two European travelers, Carl Scherzer and Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, published, respectively, the first Spanish version made in Guatemala at the beginning of the eighteenth century and a contemporary French translation. The two illustrious travelers visited the Central American countries almost at the same time, in 1854 and 1855, and both interested themselves in the study of the aboriginal races of Guatemala, which were those that had reached the highest degree of civilization in the center of the New World.

In the library of the University of San Carlos in the city of Guatemala, Scherzer found the manuscript which contains the transcription of the Quiché text and the first Spanish version of the Popol Vuh, made by Father Francisco Ximénez of the Dominican Order. This first Spanish version of the Quiché document was published by Scherzer in Vienna in 1857.

The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg carried his interest in the Indian cultures of Guatemala much further. Having lived for some time in the country, he was in contact with the Indians, learned the Quiché and Cakchiquel tongues, and upon his return to Europe he published in Paris, in 1861, a handsome volume entitled Popol Vuh, Le Livre Sacré et les mythes de l'antiquité américaine, avec les livres héroiques et historiques des Quichés, which contains the original Quiché text, a translation into French, an extensive introduction, and rather full notes. The publication of this work at once attracted the attention of the public to the native peoples of Central America, whose existence and cultural achievements were at that time completely unknown in Europe and the United States. Since then, the book has been used by historians and ethnologists in their investigations of the native races and civilizations of America.

Brasseur de Bourbourg collected a number of old manuscripts in Guatemala, which he took with him to Europe and used in his writings on the history and the Indian languages of Central America. Among them was the volume which contains the Arte or grammar of the three principal languages of Guatemala, the Cakchiquel, the Quiché, and the Zutuhil, written in the eighteenth century by the same Father Francisco Ximénez, who was parish priest of Santo Tomás Chuilá, the present Chichicastenango. The same manuscript volume includes also the transcription and translation of the Popol Vuh, composed of 112 folios written in two columns, which has the title Empiezan las historias del origen de los indios de esta provincia de Guatemala. This volume, in the handwriting of Father Ximénez, was acquired in Europe by Edward E. Ayer, and today forms part of the valuable linguistic collection which bears his name and is preserved in the Newberry Library of Chicago.

The catalog of the Ayer Collection, however, did not list the manuscript of the Historias del origen de los indios, which as has been said, is bound together with that of the Arte de las tres lenguas by Father Ximénez. For this reason it was a very pleasant surprise to me to find it at the end of that volume, when I visited the Newberry Library for the first time in 1941. I wish to express here my gratitude to Mary Lapham Butler, in charge of the Edward E. Ayer Collection, for the facilities which she made available to me to complete my research in that center of study.

Comparing the original text transcribed by Ximénez with the text published by Brasseur de Bourbourg, I noticed some differences, important omissions, and other changes which affect the interpretation of the Quiché document· Furthermore, the possibility of clarifying and correcting passages in the existing translations stimulated my desire to undertake a new version direct from the original Quiché into Spanish. Thus, by making use of the work of my predecessors in this field, I would somewhat advance knowledge of the document that Bancroft has called the most valuable heritage which we have received from aboriginal American thought.

When the Spanish version was published in Mexico in 1947, my distinguished friend Sylvanus Griswold Morley, recognized as the highest authority on the Maya civilization, became interested in having an English translation made of this old book of the Quiché. It seems strange, indeed, that while this historical and mythological masterpiece is known in several Spanish, French, and German translations, there is no complete version in English for the use of readers and students of the English-speaking world. Mr. Morley's enthusiasm found generous response in the Rockefeller Foundation, always disposed to lend its support to intellectual pursuits, and with its valuable assistance the present English translation has been carried to a happy conclusion.

In both the Spanish and the English version of the Popol Vuh, I have tried to keep to the original text and to adjust myself strictly to the peculiarities of the Quiché language, which is simple and synthetical and yet does not lack elegance of expression. It would have been easy to give the narrative a literary form more pleasing to the modern reader; but this could have been done only by sacrificing the fidelity which must be the translator's guide in a work of this kind. In general I have tried to preserve the original construction, its passive forms and its frequent repetitions. In doing so, I have found very helpful the grammars and vocabularies of the Quiché and Cakchiquel languages compiled by the Spanish missionaries, which may be consulted in various libraries of Europe and the United States. The words of the original manuscript appear in footnotes when they have been omitted or altered in the transcription by Brasseur de Bourbourg. The spelling is that of the original text. Father Francisco de la Parra, in the middle of the sixteenth century, invented four characters to represent certain sounds peculiar to the Indian languages of Guatemala.

These phonetic signs sometimes appear in the Ximénez manuscript, but they are not reproduced here because it is not considered necessary. In their place the generally accepted equivalent is given. The sound of v is the same as that of u, as was the custom in Spanish colonial times. The h has the same sound as in English. The initial x which occurs in certain Quiché words and proper names is the sign of the feminine and the diminutive and is pronounced like sh. For example, Xbalanqué and Xmucané are pronounced Shbalanqué and Shmucané respectively.

The original manuscript is not divided into parts or chapters; the text runs without interruption from the beginning until the end. In this translation I have followed the Brasseur de Bourbourg division into four parts, and each part into chapters, because the arrangement seems logical and conforms to the meaning and subject matter of the work. Since the version of the French Abbé is the best known, this will facilitate the work of those readers who may wish to make a comparative study of the various translations of the Popol Vuh.

The etymology of the proper names is a difficult matter and lends itself to dangerous conjectures and deceptive suppositions. For this reason, I have accepted only those which seem natural, without entering into an analysis of the components of the ancient names, a work which seldom gives real results. In various places, however, I have pointed out the relation of these names to others of the Maya tongue, to which the Quiché has a close resemblance, and sometimes with the Náhuatl tongue of Mexico, which has greatly influenced the languages of Central America.

I have also proceeded with caution in the use of geographical names. Some of the places mentioned in the text still retain their old names; but many others are known by the Mexican or Spanish names which were given to them after the Conquest. The modern names of the ancient places which it has been possible to identify may be found in the notes.

The map of the Maya-Quiché region, which has been especially prepared for the better understanding of the book, gives an idea of the wanderings of the Guatemala tribes and of their final settlement in the interior of the country. It serves, also, in my opinion, to explain the geographical and ethnical unity which exists among the peoples of southern Mexico and Yucatán and the native races which in pre-Columbian times occupied the land of Guatemala; and shows clearly the course of the large rivers, through which in those days an active intertribal trade was carried on.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation for its valuable help, as well as my appreciation of the brilliant co-operation of my late friend Sylvanus G. Morley and of the able American writer Miss Delia Goetz in the making of the present English version. I wish also to mention the contribution of Isaac Esquiliano in the design of the dust jacket. And last, but not least, I wish to acknowledge the interest and encouragement of the University of Oklahoma Press with regard to the publication in English of the Quiché book.
ADRIÁN RECINOS
Guatemala, C. A.

PREAMBLE
This is the beginning of the old traditions of this place called Quiché. Here we shall write and we shall begin the old stories, the beginning and the origin of all that was done in the town of the Quiché, by the tribes of the Quiché nation.

And here we shall set forth the revelation, the declaration, and the narration of all that was hidden, the revelation by Tzacol, Bitol, Alom, Qaholom, who are called Hunahpú-Vuch, Hunahpú-Utiú, Zaqui-Nimá-Tziís, Tepeu, Gucumatz, u Qux cho, u Qux Paló, Ah Raxá Lac, Ah Raxá Tzel, as they were called.* And [at the same time] the declaration, the combined narration of the Grandmother and the Grandfather, whose names are Xpiyacoc, and Xmucané,** helpers and protectors, twice grandmother, twice grandfather, so called in the Quiche chronicles. Then we shall tell all that they did in the light of existence, in the light of history.

*These are the names of the divinity, arranged in pairs of creators in accord with the dual conception of the Quiché: Tzacol and Bitol, Creator and Maker. Alom, the mother god, she who conceived the sons, from al, "son," alán, "to give birth." Qaholom, the father god who begat the sons, from qahol, "son of the father," qaholah, "to beget." Ximénez calls them mother and Father; they are the Great Father and the Great Mother, so called by the Indians, according to Las Casas; and they were in heaven.

**Xpiyacoc and Xmucané, the old man and the old woman (in Maya, xnuc is "old woman"), equivalents of the Mexican gods Cipactonal and Oxomoco, the sages who, according to the Toltec legend, invented their astrology and arranged the counting of time, that is, the calendar. Although in the Quiché legend there was also the other abstract pair previously mentioned, Xpiyacoc and, above all, his consort Xmucané, this pair had a more direct contact with the things of this world; together they were what the Mexican archaeologist Enrique Juan Palacios calls "the active Creator-couple who are directly concerned with the making of material things."

This we shall write now under the Law of God and Christianity; we shall bring it to light because now the Popol Vuh, as it is called,*** cannot be seen any more, in which was clearly seen the coming from the other side of the sea and the narration of our obscurity, and our life was clearly seen. The original book, written long ago, existed, but its sight is hidden to the searcher and to the thinker. Great were the descriptions and the account of how all the sky and earth were formed, how it was formed and divided into four parts; how it was partitioned, and how the sky was divided; and the measuring-cord was brought, and it was stretched in the sky and over the earth, on the four angles, on the four corners, as was told by the Creator and the Maker, the Mother and the Father of Life, of all created things, he who gives breath and thought, she who gives birth to the children, he who watches over the happiness of the people, the happiness of the human race, the wise man, he who meditates on the goodness of all that exists in the sky, on the earth, in the lakes and in the sea.

***Popo Vuh, or Popol Vuh, literally the "Book of the Community." The word popol is Maya and means "together," "reunion," or "common house." Popol na is the "house of the community where they assemble to discuss things of the republic," says the Diccionario de Motul. Pop is a Quiché verb which means "to gather," "to join," "to crowd," according to Ximénez; and popol is a thing belonging to the municipal council, "communal," or "national." For this reason Ximénez interprets Popol Vuh as Book of the Community or of the Council. Vuh or uúh is "book," "paper," or "rag" and is derived from the Maya búun or úun, which means at the same time both paper and book, and finally the tree, the bark of which was used in making paper in ancient times, and which the Nahua call amatl, commonly known in Guatemala as amatle (Ficus cotinifolia). Note that in many words the n from the Maya is changed to j or h in Quiché. Na, "house" in Maya, is changed to ha, or ja; húun or úun, "book" in Maya, becomes vuh or úuh in Quiché.

Go here to read the rest:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/academy/7286/popolvuhmain.html#anchor416344


P.S. I am wondering why the (Rockefeller Foundation) are invovled in this?

Also, to view this -open a new window browser from your desktop and copy the link in the address window. ~LisaMarie~