I. QUICHÉ AND CAKCHIQUEL[97]
By some accident of history the most significant literary records of the Mayan peoples—and, in their way, of any American stock—are not preserved to us from the builders of the monumental cities, the Maya themselves, but from two closely related tribes belonging to the southernmost group of the Mayan race. The Quiché (frequently, Kiché) and the Cakchiquel (or Kakchiquel) dwelt in the mountains of Guatemala overlooking the Pacific, where, except for the Nahuatlan Pipil, to the east of them, their neighbours were other Mayan tribes—the Tzental, the Mame, and their kindred to the west; the Pokonchi, the Kekchi, and others to the north; and the Chorti to the east. It is in the lands of these groups, mountain valleys draining toward the Gulf and the Caribbean, that the ruins of the monumental cities chiefly lie. At the time of the Conquest their sites had long been abandoned, though it must not be supposed that the tribes occupying the land were savage. On the contrary, they lived in well-built, fortified towns, with fine residences for the chiefs and pyramid temples for the service of the gods; but the remains of the cities of the Conquest era have yielded no such wealth of art as has been revealed by the exploration of the homes of the ancestral Maya, nor do the traditions of the tribes who inhabited the region at the coming of the Spaniards throw any light upon the builders of the ancient cities which, indeed, they seem scarcely to have known. Rather, when the Quiché and their kindred entered the land, it appears to have been long deserted: "Only rabbits and birds were here, they say, when they took possession of the hills and the plains, they, our fathers and ancestors from Tulan, O my children,"—so runs the beginning of the Cakchiquel Annals.[98] These Annals, like the Popul Vuh, or "Sacred Book," of the kindred Quiché, profess to give a migration-legend of the ancestors of the tribe and an account of the historic chiefs, but neither the one record nor the other runs to a remote period; both point to a comparatively recent entrance into an abandoned country, the date of which Brinton would set at less than two centuries anterior to the Conquest; nor is there any certain clue which would associate the Quiché-Cakchiquel histories with those of the contemporary Maya.
The relationship of the two centres of Mayan culture, Yucatec and Guatemalan, is, however, more than merely linguistic and racial. When the Maya of the later days of the Old Empire were pushing northward into the peninsula, exploring and establishing cities, others of their kindred were penetrating the mountains to the south, and the last town of the south to rise and fall (as shown by its dated monuments) was at Quen Santo in the Guatemalan province of Huehuetenango. Whether or not something of the old culture was transmitted through these groups or their descendants, whom, indeed, the Quiché and Cakchiquel may have been, identities of mythic reference make it certain that all Maya groups had some primitive community of experience. Moreover, the southern tribes clearly shared with the northern their literary and artistic bent. The story of the defeat of the Quiché, in the Cakchiquel Annals,[99] tells how the latter slew "the son of the chief jeweller, the treasurer, the secretary, and the chief engraver" of the Quiché monarch—officers whose very character gives the picture of an accomplished society; and it may well be assumed that the literary taste and historic feeling manifest in the Annals and the Popul Vuh are but evidences, literary rather than graphic in character, of the genius which marks the whole Mayan race. Brasseur de Bourbourg says[100] of the Popul Vuh that "it is composed in a Quiché of great elegance, and its author must have been one of the princes of the royal family," while of the Annals (which he names Mémorial de Tecpan-Atitlan, and which was indeed, in greater part written by a noble, Don Francisco Ernandez Arana Xahila) he declares that "the style is varied and picturesque and frequently contains passages of high animation." The translations of both documents quite sustain these opinions of their literary excellence.
Las Casas, who was as familiar as any man with the general character of native American culture, and especially with that of Guatemala of which he was bishop, gives a general characterization of native learning in his chapter (Apologética História, ccxxxv) on "the books and religious traditions of Guatemala." In the kingdoms and republics of New Spain, he says, "among other offices and officials, were those who acted as chroniclers and historians. They possessed knowledge of the origin of all things relative to religion and to the gods and their cult, as well as of the founders of their cities, of the beginnings of their kings and lords and seignories, of the manner of their election and succession, of how many and what lords and princes had passed away, of their works and actions and memorable deeds, good and bad, and of whatever they had governed well or ill; also, of their great men and good, and of strong and valorous captains, of the wars that they had made, and of how they had distinguished themselves. Moreover, of the first customs and the first comers, of how they had since changed for good or ill, and of all that pertains to history, in order that they might have understanding and remembrance of past events." Furthermore, he adds, these chroniclers kept count of the days, months, and years, and "although they had no writing similar to ours, nevertheless they had figures and characters representing all that they needed to designate, and, by means of these, great books of such clever and ingenious art that we may say that our letters were of no great advantage to them." The office of chronicler, it is added, was hereditary, or belonged to certain families.
After the Conquest many of the natives who had acquired the alphabet adapted it to their own tongue and recorded their histories in the new characters. Numbers of such books were known to the Spanish writers of the sixteenth century, and it is from these that the Popul Vuh and the Cakchiquel Annals have survived.
II. THE POPUL VUH[101]
The Popul Vuh is the most striking and instructive of the myth-records of primitive America. Other legends are as comprehensive in scope, as varied in material, and as dramatic in form; but no other, in anything like the measure of this document, combines with these qualities the element of critical consciousness, giving the flavour of philosophic reflection which lifts the narrative from the level of mere tale-telling into that of literature. Something of this character is clearly due to the fact that it was written down after the introduction of Christianity by an author, or authors, professing the new faith; yet it is equally clear to a reader of our day that this is not the whole cause, that there is in the aboriginal material itself such an element of deliberate reflection as appears in the Aztec rituals recorded by Sahagun and in some of the Incaic fragments, though scarcely to be found elsewhere in the New World, at least in the myths as they have been preserved to us.
The work is divided into four parts, consciously literary in arrangement. The first recounts the creation of the earth and of the First Peoples, together with the conflicts of the Hero Brothers with Titan-like Earth-giants. The second part depicts the duel of the upper-world heroes with the nether-world demonic powers: an elder pair of Hero Brothers are defeated, later to be avenged by the younger Hero Brothers—the slayers of the Earth-giants—who overcome Death in his own lair and by his own wile. This incident of "the harrowing of Hell" belongs in mythic chronology to a cycle of events earlier in part than the gigantomachy, and it is obviously for dramatic reasons that the longest book of the Popul Vuh is devoted to it. With the third part the original narrative is resumed, narrating the creation of the ancestors of the present race of men and the rise of the Sun which now rules the world; while the fourth and last part continues the tale, giving myths of cult origins, tribal wars, and finally records of historic rulers, thus satisfying the feeling for consecutiveness and completeness.
