El origen de la creación según los ch’oles

Resumen

Gebhardt Domínguez, a native speaker of Ch'ol from Agua Azul, relates in Spanish a mélange of the stories he heard in his childhood about the origin of the creation, and the order in which the different beings that populate the earth came into existence. He begins with the story of how Ch'ujtat, the one with the big heart, was the only one who existed and how he pulled the umbilical cord from his heart to make the first orange tree and the earth. Then Ch'ujtat made the twelve "Chuntewinikes" (the forks or pilar men) so that they could carry the earth on their shoulders. It was then that Ch'ujtat pulled loose the umbilical cord that attached the earth to him so that it would be separate as it is now. Then he created the first plants.
After the creation of the earth, the next part that Gebhardt describes is how Ch'ujtat created the first beings who turned the into monkeys after a flood because they had been too intelligent, and then how Ch'ujtat made two more children, but ones that were less intelligent so that they would have to learn as they grew into men. One of the young men married ixik, `woman', and they had two children. After recounting a number of other episodes, Gebhardt closes his story with the tale of how the woman, carrying a pet rabbit, and Ijts'in, the younger of her children, jumped into space, she to become the moon, now known asch'ujniá, while Ijts'in became the sun.