The Popul Vuh—aka the Book of Conquests and the Book of Community—is essentially a guidebook to the fascinating world of the ancient myths of the distinctly defunct Mayan civilization. At its heart, however, the Popul Vuh is really about the origin of the creation myth of the Quiche Maya peoples. These are peoples that called home what we know today as the land mostly contained within the borders of Guatemala.
Two creator gods known as Gugumatz and Huracan commence upon a difficult odyssey of making a whole new world. Turns out that this is more difficult than it seems. The very first attempt resulted in animals like the plentiful birds that still exist south of the border today as well as large cats and, as always it seems, snakes. This creation attempt also resulted in the trees and forestation. After that promising start, however, things took a turn for the worst. Gugumatz and Huracan looked down at all they saw and surveyed their creation and realized something horrible: the animals they had created were not endowed with the power of speech. Which wouldn’t be so bad were it not for one very important thing: those who cannot speak lack the power of heaping praise upon their creator the magnificence of their intelligence and godlike powers. Lacking the requisite beasts necessary to show them the worship they felt they deserved, Gugumatz and Huracan took to plan B.
Plan B resulted in the creation of a figure that is really and truly astonishing in its similarity to the Hebrew legend of the Golem. The Quiche Maya creation gods had created a figure designed from mud. Mud, it turns out, is really not the optimum material from which to fashion a brand new being. As a statue, the creations did very well; they looked exactly as Gugumatz and Huracan envisioned. Once they made to move, however, chaos broke loose as they crumbled like poorly mixed concrete.
And so it was on to the third attempt at creation. Sensing that they were not fully equipped with all the necessary powers to fulfill their promise, Gugumatz and Huracan this time brought in some outside assistance in the form of magicians and other divine beings. Rather than using mud, the creator gods followed the trajectory of the Big Bad Wolf by upping the ante a bit and going with wood as their material of choice. The result once again looked really good, but suffered from one very enormous and looming problem: consciousness does not adhere to timber, apparently. Heck, the consciousness of these wooden creatures lacked even the simple ability retain the memory of those which had given them life. Which, like the inability to speak, is of absolutely no use to creator god looking to be worshiped.
So the third time was certainly less than harming for Gugumatz and Huracan. And the fourth? Success! Turns out that the best material for making a creature with the consciousness and speaking ability that allows for it to worship its creators appropriately was corn. Or, as they might have called it, maize. The first four successful humans became the founders of the Quiche Maya and one of the very first things they did was to pay tribute to and show great acclaim for their creators for instilling them with life.
Gugamatz and Huracan may have been slow on the uptake when it came to getting the mixture just perfect for creating humans that could worship them, but they were way ahead of the game when it came to ensuring that their creations never managed to become their equals. How did they manage to keep their creations in their proper place? By restricting their powers of comprehension and constructing them with built-in fallibilities.
