and bore children, erected wooden homes and temples, lived their small lives in honor, worshipping their magnanimous gods.
As the cycles wore on, however, a dark swirl began to form unnoticed in the cosmic sea, slow at first, but spinning ever faster down the years, a furious typhoon of spite and vengeance.
Then—at the end of the seventh cycle of this second age, on the day 4-Wind of the year 1-Flint, the 364th since Feathered Serpent had become the sun—Heart of Sky, Hurricane, the Smoking Mirror emerged from the trackless ocean and stormed across the earth.
His winds blasted and scoured the mountains, shredded fields and forests, emptied lakes and wore boulders down to pebbles. The wooden abodes of humans were ripped entirely from the face of the earth, and people themselves—much lighter than giants—were lifted by the gales and flung into the void.
Feathered Serpent, horrified and impotent, reached out to the few remaining men and women and gave them a desperate gift: tails to anchor them to whatever trees remained and feet that gripped the branches like a second set of hands. Thus were born the tlacaozomahtin, ape-men, who still live in dark corners of the world.
Mere moments after saving this small remnant, Feathered Serpent was beset by the howling, apocalyptic winds of his brother’s long-simmering wrath. Though he lifted flaming wings to beat aside the blast, the sun was torn from the sky and hurled beyond oblivion.
Thus did the second age of the world end in vengeance.
The Third Age
Hurricane—for he had truly ceased to be Heart of Sky—spent his ire and then stood alone upon the rocky, desolate earth. He called down the gods to begin again the work of creation, restoring flora and fauna, filling rivers and lakes, smoothing the rugged contours of the world.
With his red and blue sons, the god of the smoking mirror took clay from the guts of the earth and fashioned beings to serve and worship him. Wanting to more closely watch and rule them, he persuaded Tlaloc, lord of rain and lightning, to leave his paradise and his new bride Xochiquetzal to become the sun.
For several calendar cycles, Hurricane was content with the sacrifices and adulation of his creations. But the envy that had taken root in the dark god continued to grow. He looked upon Tlaloc’s wife Xochiquetzal and saw that she was the most beautiful being in the universe. It was intolerable that she pair herself with a lesser god.
So Hurricane entered Tlalocan and stole the goddess of fertility, forcing her to marry him and live within his dark heaven. Tlaloc, devastated, burned even brighter in the sky, glowering with betrayal and anger. With no lord or lady to instruct them, the tlaloques—servants of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed god—ceased pouring water from the sky. Rain stopped falling. A great drought swept the world.
The people of the Third Age cried out to Tlaloc, begging for rain and a surcease from his anguished heat. But their prayers annoyed the sun. This attempt at humanity had been fashioned by his enemy’s hands, so why should he care? He spitefully refused to provide moisture, insisting that every thinking creature suffer as much as he did without his beloved. The men and women of earth continued to beg him as the rivers and lakes gradually dried up.
Hurricane allowed the suffering for a time, enjoying the constant stream of supplications and sacrifice. But he finally tired of Tlaloc’s tantrum. He descended to confront the god of rain.
Tlaloc would not heed the commands of his betrayer. They clashed above the parched earth, the sun bombarding Hurricane with massive waves of fire that were churned and spun away by typhoon whorls—toward the sea-ringed world. The whole earth burned, great storms sweeping across the land on screaming, furnace-like winds. Most people died, but a few found shelter in mountain caves. Furious that any of his foe’s creations should survive, Tlaloc had his servants draw magma from deep within the earth, making it explode out of vast volcanoes and flow hungrily over the surface of the world.
At that moment, 312 years after being expelled from creation by his brother, Feathered Serpent returned, glowing with renewed power, determined to save what he could. Struggling against Hurricane and Tlaloc both, he subdued them and forced them to their respective spheres before they could wreak the utter devastation of the world.
The small bands of survivors now begged Feathered Serpent to have mercy on them. The creator god transformed these last people, giving them wings and pulling quills from his own flesh to cover them. Now gifted with flight, his brother’s creations rose above the lava sear, borne aloft by drafts of heated wind.
Feathered Serpent knew that remaking this burning world would task the very limits of the gods’ abilities. He hoped that he could avoid the mistakes and envies of the past as he sought to craft humans who could be his partners in preserving the order of the cosmos. But the winged survivors of this destruction he allowed to make their homes in the high crags and cliffs of the new world as long as they kept to themselves.
For their age, the third, had ended in conflagration after only six calendar cycles, on the day 4-Rain of the year 1-Flint.
The Fourth Age and the Hero Twins
Follow me now into the dim beginnings of the Fourth Age. The cataclysm is over, the conflagration has snuffed itself to ash, and the sea-ringed world is dark but for the light of the stars and a faint smear of perpetual dawn on the eastern horizon.
It is an epoch of gods, great and small, who strive to restore the shattered earth.
Some bend their knee to the cosmic order, to the competing wills of Feathered Serpent and Hurricane, carrying out their appointed tasks without a word of complaint.
Others choose to forge a different path.
A few become heroes.
Two in particular survive down the years in some form or another throughout southern Mexico: bright paint in crumbling friezes, curling lines on rotting pages, stone statues in which their young profiles are captured forever, rebellious and brave.
Two brothers. Twins.
They are depicted again and again with distinctive headbands, one dark, the other sewn from a jaguar’s pelt. We often find them with their father, a god of maize.
The millennia have effaced their names from most Mayan tongues. Archeologists, crafting a code to categorize forgotten deities, call the father God E. His sons are God CH and God S.
But in the highlands of Guatemala, despite all odds, the K’iche’ Maya preserved these ancestral stories, even after the glyphs of mighty empires had fallen into disuse. With letters learned from Spanish priests, they transcribed those ancient words in their native tongue.
The Popol Vuh, they called this sacred scripture. The Book of the People.
Come closer, friends. Let me open that tome, let me find the right page, and I will tell you of the wondrous deeds of the Hero Twins: Xbalanque and Hunahpu, as the K’iche’ name them, playful and courageous young men who mocked death itself.
Then let us weave strands of
