While reading Popol Vuh from pages 1 – 120,  I felt it was written almost like a storybook, telling of the “tales” of the gods and heroes. I also found that there was a great emphasis on pride along with what seemed to be the best actions to “please” the gods. 

The first story relates to the beginning of how people and animals came to be. Animals were created as a new form of life but because they could not praise the gods their flesh would be eaten, almost like a punishment which they would live with forever. In this case the struggle to live in the world came down to eat or be eaten, and to serve the humans which could praise the gods. The creation of the humans was ultimelty to praise the gods and stroke their ego of being “all powerful”. However the first humans created were deemed greedy and ungrateful so they were destroyed by the forces of the gods. This sort of reminded me of the story of Noah’s Arc from the bible, in which god sends a flood to wash away the evils of the earth to start over. Lady Blood’s desire for the fruit also relates back to the story of Adam and Eve to which both women are tempted to reach out to the fruit and are cursed because of their actions.

In the later stories one may notice that having too much pride leads to a downfall in other powerful beings. Zipacna and Cabracan were very prideful and met their demise because of their pride. Zipacana death was ironic since the “maker of mountains” was crushed by a mountain, and Cabracan paid no attention to the danger that he was with the twins who killed his brother, even trusting the food they gave him which ultimately killed him. The lords of Xibalaba’s greediness and pride make them easily to fool when Lady Blood sends a fake heart to them to which they are bind and believe it is a real heart. Then there are the older brothers of the twins who climb the trees to prove they are better and are turned into monkeys. To be turned into monkeys or animals may relate to how the twins did not see them as worthy to continue to have a human life. A passage from Popol Vah, “pride swelled into evil” reminds me alot of how the bible tries to warn those of the various evils from pride which can lead to jealousy and greed. The lords of Xibalba also reminded me of the bible’s seven deadly sins. This makes me wonder if the indigenous stories were translated or written in a manner that were influenced by Chrisitan view. So did the K’iche’ origin stories actually have this great emphasis on pride with the gods and demigods, and what exactly were their definitions of evils? 

A few other things that also caught my attention was the choice of words. In the line of which Seven Macaw describe his pain to his wife, “Two maniacs shot me and dislocated my jaw!” sort of surprised me at first. I am not used to seeing the word “maniac” in a lot of texts and did not expect to see it here. I looked into the origin of the word and it started being used within the 1500s. Perhaps this word was in the original text or perhaps this word was closest or even a more simple word that was used for translation.