Huracan

Before dawn, while only the sky and a god called Heart of Sky are there, a word travels through the dark to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent. The two speak, then think, then worry over what they have said, until they agree with each other and join their thoughts into one accord. The Popol Vuh names Heart of Sky as three held together: Thunderbolt Hurricane first, then Newborn Thunderbolt, then Sudden Thunderbolt, all three carrying the single name Hurricane. Out of that agreement, trees and bushes begin to grow, and life stirs where a moment before there was none. Heart of Sky and the Sovereign Plumed Serpent do not stop there. They turn their talk toward a harder question: how the sowing should go, and who will provide for what is still to be made.

Kerridwen's for a falcon tells the same morning differently. Here it is dry land itself that answers the call, rising out of the water while Gucumatz looks on. Gucumatz's joy is for Hurakan, and this telling marks Hurakan as the greater of the two gods that day. Vegetation spreads across the new earth, and Hurakan and Gucumatz fill it with animals, commanding each one to speak its makers' names aloud. Not one of them can. They roar, they howl, they whistle, and no clear word comes from any mouth. Hurakan and Gucumatz answer that failure by turning on their own creation: the animals lose their claim to the earth they were just given, and are condemned to be hunted and eaten, their flesh doing the work their voices would not.

Hurakan and Gucumatz shape four men from yellow and white maize, and the work goes too well. Kerridwen's for a falcon says plainly that the men turn out too perfect, so the gods shorten their sight. The Popol Vuh names the same four men Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Not Right Now, and Dark Jaguar, and tells the correction itself: Heart of Sky changes their design, marring their eyes until vision flickers, as suddenly as breath fogs a mirror. Afterwards they can only see what is close to them, and with the fog comes a deeper loss: they no longer hold the understanding, or the knowledge of everything, that once came with clear sight. The Popol Vuh calls this the true making and modelling of the first grandfather, the first father, by Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth.

While the four men sleep, the same gods make four women to match them, and Kerridwen's for a falcon names these eight as the ancestors of the Quiche people. Even with dimmed sight, the new husbands and wives still say they cannot see clearly, and this time they blame the sun, which has not yet come. Not every telling agrees on how the maize people began. Coleman's Dictionary of Mythology gives their race a different origin: grown from maize the animals themselves planted, or, in another version within the same entry, shaped by the gods from maize ground down with water, with no fog laid over any eye. What both versions agree on is the material: people made of maize, the last of the three peoples this page follows.