The Original Children of the Corn
I think I found out where Stephen King, writer of such hair-raising stories like Carrie, Salem’s Lot, and The Stand, got the title for his scary short story Children of the Corn. I think he got it from the Maya.
The Popol Vuh, a poem that tells the Maya story of creation, is not just a riveting read, but it also helps us to understand how the Mayans and other Mesoamericans thought about the world.
In 1701, a Dominican priest named Francisco Ximenez who spoke three Maya languages, arrived at the church in the town of Chichicastenango in Guatamala. He convinced the Maya to let him examine a copy of the Popol Vuh that they hid in the back of Santo Tomas Church. The priest copied, made a side-by-side Spanish translation, and returned it to the Maya. It seems that the Maya wrote down the original manuscript between 1554 and 1558, shortly after the Spanish conquistadors conquered the country.
Ximenez moved to Rabinal, a small town slightly more than a hundred and twenty-five kilometers east of Chichicastenango, where he made another copy of the Popol Vuh. In 1854, an Australian traveler named Carl Scherzer found it in Guatamala City and copied it again. His copy was published in Europe and it was used by the original scholars who studied the Maya civilization.
In the 1970s, an archaeologist named Michael Coe, famous for his work on the Olmec civilization, recognized that parts of the Popol Vuh story appears on painted pottery from royal Maya tombs. Coe realized and argued convincingly that the Popol Vuh was a much older and much more significant story than scholars previously thought. Centuries before it was written down, the Popol Vuh shaped the world view of generations of Maya, inspiring them to learn its moral lessons and to connect with their ancient cultural roots.
In this epic Mayan poem, it says:
In the beginning, there was nothing except an endless sky hanging over a primordial sea. A group of gods asked a pair of creator gods, called the Maker and the Modeler or the Bearer and the Begetter, to create the earth. These two gods create the earth with the power of their words. They part the waters and land rises up like the back of a turtle. It must have been an awesome sight. Three stones are set in the sky, which means that we can connect the story of the Popol Vuh to the start of Maya time.
Next, the gods want to create creatures that will serve them, praise them, and give them sacrifices. First, the gods create animals. Although the animals can move, they can’t talk and they can’t make sacrifices to the gods. The gods realize this is not going to work so they banish the animals out to the wilderness.
Now the gods try to create human beings out of mud, and the mud people manage to talk, but they are very fragile. The mud people disintegrate as soon as they get into contact with water, so the gods let it rain and wash them away.
Next, the gods make humans out of wood. These humans are sturdy and can talk, but they are bloodless, dry, and affectionless, and they ignore the gods, so the gods decide to destroy them too. These wooden people have become numerous, so the gods send a great flood to destroy them, but the flood fails to kill all the wood people and the gods send down demons to kill those who survived. Even the demons fail to kill all the wooden people, so the gods make everything hostile to the wood people, everything including their furniture, their pots, their pans, and all their utensils. Everything rises up and attacks them and finally they kill every last one of the wood people.
The first three creations of the gods: the animals, the mud people, and the wood people were all unacceptable.
Two gods, Hun Hunahpu and his brother Vucub Hunahpu, loved to play a ball game. Hun Hunahpu had twin sons named Hun Batz and Hun Chouen, who also loved to play the ball game. The father and his sons played the ball game with their uncle all day long, but these games made a lot of noise which disturbed the Lords of Death. Angry, the Lords challenged the two older gods to travel down to Xibalba which means “place of fright,” the Maya underworld, to play a ball game against them.
The two older gods travel to the underworld and at a crossroads they choose the black path. The Lords of Death give them several trials which they fail, so the Lords sentence the two gods to death. The Lords sacrifice them and burn their bodies in the ball court of Xibalba.
The Lords hang the head of Hun Hunahpu in a calabash tree, which then grows fruit that looks just like his face. The Lords forbid anyone to pick fruit from that tree, but one day, one of the lords’ daughters, Lady Blood, wants to taste the forbidden fruit, so she reaches out, when suddenly the head spits in her hand and impregnates her in this way with Hunahpu and Xbalanque, twin brothers.
After the twins are born, Lady Blood brings her children home to the world above, but their older brothers grow very jealous of them. They make the lives of the younger boys miserable. Then, one day, the younger twins set out to hunt for birds. They ask the older brothers to bring the birds from the trees, but when the older brothers climb into a tree, the younger twins turn them into monkeys. Even today, the modern Maya say that the people of the previous creation were monkeys.
At this time the earth was still shrouded in darkness, because there was no moon, sun, or stars. A giant bird that was a boastful creature full of false pride, with jewel eyes, a shining beak, and feathers like gold and silver, called Seven Macaw, wanted people to see him as a god, so he climbed a huge tree and proclaimed that he is the sun and the moon.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque, decide to shoot Seven Macaw down, but the bird rips off Xbalanque’s arm. A stela depicting the scene is older than two thousand years, proving that the Popol Vuh is much older than its written form.
The twins flee to their grandparents and ask for help to defeat Seven Macaw. They all come up with a plan and trick Seven Macaw into giving up his teeth for kernels of corn. This makes him vulnerable and then they pluck out his eyes. Seven Macaw realizes that he is defeated and he dies of shame.
The grandparents put Hunahpu’s arm back and it heals perfectly.
The tale of Seven Macaw serves a cautionary tale against false pride. He is remembered at a temple at a large Maya site at Caracol in Belize. There are bird masks on both sides of its staircase, one side showing a bird with shiny teeth and the other side showing a bird with teeth that look like corn kernels.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque become corn farmers but they are not successful at it. Every night after they chop the plants down, it grows back again magically. A talking rat tells them that they are not meant to be farmers but ball players like their fathers. The rat shows them where the equipment of their fathers is hidden in the roof of the house.
The boys find the ball court where their fathers played and they start to practice. They enjoy it very much, but like their fathers they also make so much noise that it bothers the Lords of Death in Xibalba. The Lords send an owl which commands the twins to come down to the land of the dead.
The two boys take the same path as their fathers did and when they arrive at the crossroads, like their fathers, they take the black road. The Lords of Death tempt the boys with the same tricks as they did their fathers, but the boys overcome the trials and they arrive in the underworld where the Lords challenge them to a ball game.
The Lords of Xibalba win the first game and the second game ends in a tie. The lords try many times to trick and murder the boys, but they always escape. Now the Lords speculate that the boys might be magical children whom they may not be able to defeat.
Eventually the boys end up in the House of Bats, where they hide all night in their blowguns to avoid the bats. However, Hunahpu grows restless and he pokes out his head and a killer bat decapitates him. Xbalanque switches the head with a gourd and uses magic to bring Hunahpu back to life.
The two boys realize that the Lords of Death will never be satisfied until they are dead, so they come up with a way to let the Lords sacrifice them without truly dying. One night at a dinner with the Lords, the boys jump into the cooking fire, killing themselves. However, five days later the boys reincarnate in the form of actors.
They go around entertaining the people of Xibalba by performing several magical tricks. First they burn down a house and bring it back. Then they sacrifice a dog and bring it back. For their pièce de résistance, their most amazing trick, they sacrifice each other and bring each other back to life again.
The Lords of Death demand that the twins perform the same show for them. One of the Lords asks to be sacrificed and they do, but then they don’t bring him back to life. Then they say:
“We are Hunahpu and Xbalanque. We’ve defeated you, and you’ll never again bother the people on earth.”
In this way the twins avenged their fathers. They resurrect their father and their uncle and promised that people will pray to them at the ball court. Then the twins ascended into the sky to become the sun and the moon. This creates the conditions where humans can flourish.
Now the gods make human beings out of maize, yellow and white corn, and this finally works. These two beings, one male and one female are just like Adam and Eve supposedly the ancestors of us all. However, the gods made them too good, and they realize that there is very little difference between the humans and them. To make them less god-like, the gods blur the sight of the humans a little.
This myth proves that the Mayans learned how to cultivate maize very early on. Historians and anthropologists can reconstruct much of the way of life of the Mayans by referring to the pots and pans and other utensils described in the ancient poem. The fact that it took four tries to get humans right means that the Mayans felt pretty good about themselves since they are supposedly the refined product of a prolonged process.
The Mayans saw themselves as “children of the corn” and I think this is where Stephen King got the title for his now famous short story that led to a series of films about children who sacrifice adults to a demonic spirit, “He Who Walks behind the Rows.” Like the Mayans these small town cult members murder other humans in a gruesome way to appease their god. King also refers to the world being built on the back of a tortoise which is an old Native American Indian myth, in his thick, scary novel “It,” another story of his that was turned into a movie, so I am sure that the master of the macabre is a maven of mythology. We are thus in good company.
Maize had much more value for the Mayans than merely economic and sustenance. Their civilization was built on it and if we want to understand who the Ancient Maya were, we have to understand the Popol Vuh. I am excited to learn more about them and I hope you are too.
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Thank you.
Bibliography
Barnhart, E. (2015) Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed. The Great Courses. Chantilly.
Voth, G.L. (2010) Myth in Human History. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.