The Maya Hero Twins, The Lords of Death & Our Shaky Duality
A story of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Maya Culture Heroes who defied Death and brought the worlds of ‘Civilisation’ and Nature together to do so.
This week, tumbling down the Temple Stairways of the step-pyramid bookshelves of The Library of Found Things is a much beloved Story from the K’iche’ Maya.
Long ago, there were two brothers, two excellent Ball Players. One called One-Blowgunner and another called Seven-Blowgunner. However, the noise from their game in the ball court annoyed the irritable Lords of Xibalba - the Land Of The Dead - who invited the pair to their realm to play against them. The stakes? Life and death, of course. And, well, the two poor brothers lost.
However, not long after their loss, Xquic (pron. Shkik) a daughter of one of the Lords of Death and another inhabitant of Xibalba, discovered One-Blowgunner’s head hanging from a calabash tree. After a terse and antagonistic conversation, One-Blowgunner convinced Xquic not to pluck his head from the tree and eat it but, instead, to hold out her hand. She did so and he spat in it, which in true mythological form, resulted in her immediate pregnancy.
Now, this was a particularly awkward situation for Xquic to find herself in because, to everyone in Xibalba, hand-spitting was an entirely new and surprising way for someone to become pregnant. The overprotective and radical elders of Xibalba reacted as well as you can imagine to such news and Xquic fled their wrath. She ran to the Ballplayers’ mother who also didn’t believe her and put her through hell before Xquic ultimately gave birth to a pair of twins named Hunahpu (pron. Hoonachpoo) and Xbalanque (pron. shbalanke). Hunahpu was glabrous and calm, while Xbalanque was wilder and covered in hair.
These twins, born of a human man and a Lady of Xibalba, became skilled hunters and showed their wit and wisdom many times as they outwitted their older, fully human brothers and even that insufferably braggadocios god Seven-Macaw. They also used their smarts to outwit their grandmother, who had set them to task performing tedious chores that would have taken the precocious boys hours and hours. However, they used their superhuman skills with an axe to clear a whole field in an hour but when they returned the next day they saw that the animals of the forest had undone all of their work.
Bemused as to why the animals would do this, the Twins set out to capture and interrogate one of them. Soon enough, they caught a rat who told them that the reason the animals undid their good work was because they were not destined to hunt or clear forests, they were destined to be Ballplayers, like their father and uncle. However, their grandmother had hidden the ballgame equipment in her grief at the loss of her children. The rat, whose nose had explored every cranny of that farm, told the twins where the equipment was and, when they found it, they set out on a path that would lead to their glory and their demise.
The Twins played in the same ballcourt as their father and uncle and they too irritated those fickle gods before they received the same summons from Xibalba their forebears had. When she found out, their grandmother was devastated. She told them what had happened to her sons, how the Lords of Xibalba had toyed with them by making them perform trials and, in their ignorance, they had fallen into every trap the Lords arranged. But the Twins had all of Nature on their side, so they sent a mosquito to Xibalba to learn how to avoid falling into the first deadly trap: a simple game of guessing the gods’ identities amongst inert mannequins.
When they arrived in Xibalba, the Twins successfully passed the first trial and continued to thwart the evil Lords’ fun. They addressed the Lords by their true names. Then they pretended to keep alight their cigars in The Dark House by attaching bright macaw feathers to their tips. They played ball against the Lords and each ballgame that resulted in a draw also preceded a trial. They were sent to the House of Razors, where the knives moved of their own deadly accord. The Twins promised each blade all the flesh of future animals and the knives stopped dead in their fatal mission. Then the twins convinced Leafcutter Ants to perform the trial of recovering flowers from the heavily-guarded Gardens of Xibalba, which they did and returned unseen. They survived the Cold House through pure willpower and the Jaguar House by feeding their would-be predators bones. And it was only through a mistake in the Bat House that Hunahpu finally succumbed to the Lord’s deadly machinations. They had to last the night in this dark house and, wondering if morning had arrived, Hunahpu put his head out of his heading place and pop, a bat lopped it right off.
At the next ballgame, the Lords of Xibalba demanded to use Hunahpu’s head as the ball. Xbalanque agreed because, the night before, he had made a request for help from all the animals in Nature. A humble coatimundi heard Xbalanque’s request and brought him a squash. Xbalanque asked a rabbit to help distract the Lords of Xibalba and the rabbit did so and, mid-way through the game, Xbalanque replaced his brother’s head with it. He put his brother back together and the squash burst, humiliating the Lords of Xibalba.
It was at this point the Twins knew their luck was running out. The Lords of Xibalba are not to be trifled with and they proved as much by throwing the Twins into a giant oven and burning them to cinders. The Lords, in their juvenile tantrum, ground the Twins’ ashes to dust and threw that dust into the river.
Of course, this wasn’t the end of the Twins. You see, they let themselves be thrown into the oven and, through mysterious means, they even ensured that their dust would end up in the river. In the primordial waters, they first turned into catfish and then into humans with distinct features from before. The Lords of Xibalba rejoiced in this strange pair and clapped as they performed feats of incredible magic, most notably feats that entailed death and rebirth. They killed a dog and brought it back to life, they burned down houses and erected them again in the blink of an eye. Xbalanque even sacrificed his own brother, only to have him come back to life to raucous laughter and applause from the Lords.
The highest Lords of Xibalba, in their revelry, demanded that the Twins perform the same miracle on them and the Twins were delighted to acquiesce to their request. They sacrificed and dismembered the Lords to cheers from all around but they did not revive them. They waited for the other Lords to realise and, once they did, they told them who they were and that they now held power over the Land of Xibalba. No longer would the humans above offer the Lords riches, now that they had solved the cycle of life and death.
The Twins returned from Xibalba victorious and they even dug up the remains of their father and uncle, to bury them properly. Then, no doubt after taking a couple of swipes to the head from their relieved grandmother, they flew into the sky to become the sun and the moon.
What a magnificent Story! Our only source of it, like many sacred Maya Stories, comes from the Popul Vuh, a collection of ancient K’iche’ Maya stories that were transmitted orally until they were finally written down in the 16th century.
The K’iche’ were one of many indigenous and ethnolinguistic groups that made up the ancient Maya people. Much of what we know about their culture and theology revolves around cycles (see what I did there? Your ‘Writer Clown’ is back), as is most evident in their famous calendar systems. In the case of the Story written above, the cycle of life and death is clearly at the heart of its meaning. Most historians acknowledge this, pat themselves on the back and wander off to replace the elbow patches on their jackets. However, there’s another aspect of this Story that I’m more interested in here and that’s the presence of ‘The Wild Man’.
The Wild Man is a folkloric / mythological / religious trope that has appeared in sacred Stories since time immemorial. We have examples like The Green Man, Silvanus, Suibhne Mac Colmáin (Mad Sweeny) and Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin) but there are many others where the ‘Wild Man’ is contrasted with a ‘civilised’ (for lack of a better term) lover, brother or twin. The Epic of Gilgamesh and his “wild companion” Enkidu is the earliest example of this.
The name Hunahpu is connected with the day that ends an important cycle in the Maya calendar and, on much of the surviving iconography, Xbalanque is depicted as a man covered in hair or as an actual jaguar. So, we have a presence of the ‘civilised’ / ‘civilised’ dichotomy iat the heart of the Maya religion too. Not exactly a ‘new’ concept but a long way from the earlier, more famous example (ancient Sumer), which makes it particularly interesting for those of us who like to take a step back and look at world religions from a distance to find the ‘humanity’ in them.
There are lots of stories of twins in ancient cultures and some of them are antagonistic (good vs evil) but many of them represent other dichotomies like mortal - immortal and gaiety - seriousness. The contrast of wild - ‘tame’ appears in many of these sacred Stories too, particularly in the Americas, such as the Crow Story of Curtain Boy and Spring Boy, the Hidatsa Story of Lodge Boy and Thrown Away, and the Caddo Story of Village Boy and Wild Boy. Now that historians are finally acknowledging the fact that indigenous peoples in North America were in contact with the indigenous peoples of Meso- and South-America, we have more evidence of this being a strong cultural factor.
So what? Well, lots of historians still talk of the reception of myths in terms of how a ruler would receive it. That Stories of heroes and gods were like a ‘preparatory school’ for rulers and the rest of the people just went along with it. However, isn’t it more likely that these Stories that were intended to unify a people in some way were more relatable to the populace as a whole, not just a ruler? Also, how does a single ruler identify with two main heroes? How might a single ‘non-ruler’ for that matter? Well, that’s where I think the beauty of such Stories lies. To identify with the ‘hero’ of a story is to see a part of yourself in them and vice versa. To identify with Hunahpu and Xbalanque simultaneously you have to identify with the civil and the wild aspect of your own nature.
Now, I’m not saying that after reading this post you should sit naked with your anus ‘in commune’ with the soil but maybe the Story is telling us to … go outside more often than we do? In a world where being without headphones, a mobile phone, a tablet or a radio is considered an impressive act (I’m a Millennial, if it wasn’t obvious, so I’m not immune to this) going to a patch of grass and being quiet for a minute is a pretty bloody powerful thing. You know this because you’ve done it and said weird things like “that fresh air did me good” and “Ah what a view”!
Then there’s the other side of this ‘wildness’: your animalistic nature. We use terms like ‘in the bedroom’ and ‘down there’ to refer to the most natural activity humans participate in and we use these terms because said ‘activity’ has the potential to cause ecstasy but also cause devastating harm. We live in societies in which sex is at once sanitised and stifled with artificial rules (“never before marriage,” “only between a man and a woman,” et cetera ad nauseam) because our society has no formal way of acknowledging this animalistic part of ourselves.
We have within us - all of us - the capacity to be as calm as a mountain or as beastly as a cocaine bear. Until we acknowledge the capacity for both we will continue to be so careless with our own nature that we allow the ravaging of natural spaces and cause pain to each other with our words and actions.
I think - I reckon, spoken in the tone of a bemused neophyte - that’s what this ‘wild man’ character is for in myth. It’s not different from us, it is us. Humanity didn’t just pop out of a concrete jungle, fully-clothed with a penchant for pumpkin spiced lattes. We came out of nature and we’ve spent the past 100,000+ years doing our very best to make things more comfortable for ourselves and, in the meantime, we have pushed down our more ‘animalistic’ tendencies until they become taboo and fester in our subconscious.
The idea that we have both a savage and a civilised side to us is necessary to bear in mind and, most importantly, uniting those sides is good! Allowing one to dominate the other can have disastrous consequences. It can result in no sex (Asexuals aside, this is not fun), no passion, no civility, and no empathy. Hunahpu let his logical curiosity result in having his head bitten off by a bat and it was Xbalanque’s ‘wild’ side that led him to call on nature to help him resolve that very same situation. If we can learn anything from the story of the Maya Hero Twins then I think it lies in the fact that they are Culture Heroes, they remedied a blight on humankind and became the sun and the moon all because they embraced their dualistic nature and they did so with openness, wisdom, wit and frivolity. Wouldn’t that be nice to recreate in our daily lives?