The First Four Humans

The first four humans, the first four earthly beings who were truly articulate when they moved their feet and hands, their faces and mouths, and who could speak the very language of the gods, could also see everything under the sky and on the earth. All they had to do was look around from the spot where they were, all the way to the limits of space and the limits of time.

But then the gods, who had not intended to make and model beings with the potential of becoming their own equals, blew mist into their eyes, and limited human sight to what was obvious and nearby. Nevertheless, the lords who once ruled a kingdom from a place called Quiche, in the highlands of Guatemala, once had in their possession the means for overcoming this nearsightedness, an ilbal, a “seeing instrument” or a “place to see”; with this they could know distant or future events. The instrument was not a telescope, not a crystal for gazing, but a book.

The Book:

The lords of Quiche consulted their book when they sat in council, and their name for it was Popol Vuh or “Council Book.” Because this book contained an account of how the forefathers of their own lordly lineages had exiled themselves from a faraway city called Tulan, they sometimes described it as “the writings about Tulan.”

Because a later generation of lords had obtained the book by going on a pilgrimage that took them across water on a causeway, they titled it “The Light That Came from Across the Sea.” And because the book told of events that happened before the first sunrise and of a time when the forefathers hid themselves and the stones that contained the spirit familiars of their gods in forests, they also titled it “Our Place in the Shadows.”

And finally, because it told of the first rising of the morning star and the sun and moon, and of the rise and radiant splendor of the Quiche lords, they titled it “The Dawn of Life.”

From: Popol Vuh: the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life