Methaphors of Relative Elevation, Position and Ranking in Popol Vuh

Resumen

This paper is an account of work very much in progress on the textual analysis of Popol Vuh, and is one study among others (since this theme is attracting a number of students today) of inter-connections and mutual illuminations between Popol Vuh and the contemporary ethnographic record in Highland Guatemala and Chiapas.

For some considerable time now Popol Vuh has been considered as the major extant text of the Mesoamerican literary traditions, and as one of the most remarkable of all human creation stories, both for its beauty and for the complexity of its cosmological and mythical messages. While it may or may not have had a hieroglyphic original, the present alphabetic version of Po pol V uh wars written down somewhere between 1545 and 1558 by an anonymous member of the Cavek lineage of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala. This lineage had been a ruling house until it fell to the Spaniards in 1524. The manuscript was copied by Francisco de Ximenez, a Spanish priest, some 150 years later. While there are references to Christianity in the text, these are few and it is generally regarded as one of the purest extant accounts of prehispanic Maya world-view. At the end of the hook, what we call mythical history shades into the historical history of the Quiche, so that the hook can serve as an illustration of the extent to which these two kinds of history are not held apart by Maya generally. It is also an ethnohistorical treasury for the comparative study of pre and postcolumbian Maya ideology.