1552 Bartolome de Las Casas's scathing account of treatment of natives, History of the Indies, is published.

1570 Iroquois in northern North America form a league of tribes known as the Iroquois Confederacy.

1607 Foundation of first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. First African slaves arrive in 1619.

1620 Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

BREAKING NEWS FROM THE NEW WORLD...

In the Central American rain forests of Guatemala, in 2004, archaeologists uncover a royal palace beneath the thick tropical canopy. Inside a tomb within the palace ruins, resting on a stone platform, they find the body of a Mayan queen who reigned more than twelve hundred years ago. Her remains are surrounded by pearls and crown jewels, along with masterpieces of carved jade and artifacts that throw new light on an ancient people about whom there are still mysteries. The researchers who make this remarkable find say it may unlock many secrets of a magnificent civilization. (New York Times, May 11, 2004.) A tomb near Mexico's 2,000-year-old Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan is uncovered in 2004, yielding the remains of ten headless human bodies, most likely sacrificial victims. This extraordinary, if grisly, discovery comes after some 200 years of excavations at the site of the first major city in the Americas. Located about 35 miles northeast of Mexico City, and home to an estimated 200,000 people in 500 CE, Teotihuacan mysteriously collapsed about 200 years later. With its massive Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun, it was called "the place where men became gods" by the Aztecs when they rose to power in Mexico in about 1400 CE. (Reuters, December 2, 2004.) In a case pitting scientists against Native Americans, a federal court rules in 2004 that the skeletal remains of "Kennewick man," discovered in Washington state in 1996 and the oldest human remains yet found in North America, can be studied for scientific purposes. Tribes from three states in the American Northwest had sued to prevent any further investigation of the 9,200-year-old skeleton under a law that requires the reburial of any Native American ancestral remains. The researchers hope that more extensive testing and study of "Kennewick man"-who was shown to be unrelated by DNA to any of the tribes-will shed more light on long-standing mysteries over who came to the Americas and when they arrived (New York Times, July 20, 2004).

T.

hese headline-making stories all point to the long, rich, yet still grossly misunderstood history and mythic traditions of the ancient Americas. Each new scientific advance and archaeological find makes it increasingly clear that our image of Native America has been tainted by the antiquated, "cowboys and Indians," Hollywood version. Or that we romanticize Native Americans as "noble savages" living in Eden-like spiritual and ecological harmony. Or, more recently, they have been depicted mostly as wealthy casino operators running gambling meccas on tribal lands. Needless to say, none of these views is accurate or complete, in part because there were-and are-so many different Native Americans. Just as the people of Africa were a diverse group, the Native Americans were also a multicolored, many-voiced lot. Set apart by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and living on two large continents that span the Western Hemisphere, the native peoples of the Americas ranged from the Aztecs of Mexico, the Mayas of Central America, and the Incas of South America, to the vastly different tribes of North America. These tribes included the Sioux and other people of the Great Plains; the Navajos and Hopis of the Southwest; the "Five Civilized Tribes" of the Southwest; the "Iroquois Confederacy" of the Northeast; and the Aleuts and Inuits of the Arctic regions-to name just a few of the hundreds of Native American groups.*

The mythologies of the Native Americans were as rich and diverse as the people themselves. Full of nature deities, mischievous animal tricksters, heroic braves, and dueling twins, they all included a great, world-encompassing Creation story. This thinking led to a deep reverence for nature and the concept of a benign Earth Mother. As Native American historian Vine Deloria puts it in his provocative book God Is Red, "For many Indian tribal religions the whole of creation was good, and because the creation event did not include a 'fall,' the meaning of the creation was that all parts of it functioned together to sustain it."

Presiding over most of these traditions-which were all preliterate except for the Mayas and Aztecs-was the shaman. This powerful figure supervised group chanting, healing, spirit communication, sweat lodges, and the pipe rituals aimed at connecting with the "Great Mystery." In the Mesoamerican civilizations, shamans formed a priestly class-like the Celtic Druids-that presided over blood rituals and human sacrifices. Not intended for squeamish audiences, these sacrifices included tearing or cutting out the still-beating heart from a victim's chest to appease the gods. This grotesque cruelty was sometimes performed on infants while their mothers looked on.

One of the great scientific and academic debates simmering today has to do with who the Native Americans were, how they got to the Americas in the first place, and how long they have been here. Usually, when you hear the expression "Early American," it refers to colonial-era antiques and life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But those "early Americans" were Johnny-come-latelies compared with the true "early Americans," who lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier. What you probably learned about their history in school goes something like this: Near the end of the last great Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers crossed the 1,000-mile-wide land bridge connecting Siberia to what is now Alaska and Canada. This crossing took place before the great North American ice sheets melted and raised sea levels by some 300 feet, inundating the grassy steppe that allowed people and animals to move between Asia and North America. Probably pursuing large game such as mastodons, these really-early Americans spread out over the two continents and gradually diversified into the tens of millions of people who were present when the Spanish arrived in 1492.

But an array of new research from the worlds of archaeology, biology, and linguistics has shaken that notion to its permafrost foundation. It is now more widely accepted that the real "Pilgrims" may have come to the Americas 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, probably in successive waves of migrations carried out over a long time span, from Siberia, Mongolia, and other parts of Central Asia. Kennewick man, for instance, has been related-based on DNA evidence-to the Ainu, the prehistoric people who first inhabited Japan. Instead of strolling across the land bridge now covered by the Bering Straits, in one great prehistoric walkathon, perhaps Kennewick man and some of the other first Americans came in small, skin-covered boats, hugging the Pacific coastline down to the southernmost parts of South America. Gradually, these ancient people spread out across both continents, a process that continued for a long time.

The likelihood of many waves of immigrants would help explain the tremendous diversity of tribes, languages, myths, and civilizations the Europeans encountered when they arrived in the 1500s. Well before the beginning of the Common Era, tribes had spread out across North America, and impressive civilizations had begun to emerge in Central America and Mexico. These civilizations included cities that were larger, cleaner, and more organized than most European cities of the same period. Their inhabitants wrote hieroglyphic books and erected temples and pyramids as sophisticated staging areas for their religious rites. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived, these extraordinary accomplishments would be relentlessly and mercilessly plundered, and the Mesoamerican city-dwellers would experience death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.

To some degree, myth may have helped make that destruction possible. While some scholars now question the notion, many historians have long held that one reason a fairly small group of Spaniards was able to subjugate populations numbering in the millions lay in the story of an Aztec god named Quetzalcoatl. According to Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl had departed from the Aztec people with the messianic promise of returning to usher in a new Golden Age. Supposedly, the notion that these white Spanish explorers might be the returning Aztec messiah helped win the Aztecs' initial welcome, if not their hearts and minds. The Spanish then used treachery, technology, and brutality as the real means to conquest. European diseases, against which these Native Americans had no natural immunities, did the rest of the dirty work.

Far more significant, myth played a role in crushing religious traditions, which contained striking similarities to Catholicism. Powerful images of death, penitence, self-mortification, blood sacrifice, and a dying-and-reborn god-many of them central to Catholicism-pervaded the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan traditions. These parallels were not lost on the Spanish soldiers and the priests who followed them. Professing concern for the Mesoamerican soul, the Spanish co-opted native beliefs and set about their real goal-acquiring massive tracts of land and seizing as much gold and silver as they could for Spain's royal coffers.

The path to exploitation in North America was a variation on a theme. Unlike the fairly swift, relentless Spanish conquest of the natives of Mexico and South America, the Europeans moved more slowly in North America. They had to. First, there were hundreds of tribes and groups to conquer, across a huge and largely uncharted space. While some of these people lived in sophisticated, organized settlements, others occupied remote places or were on the move, following the buffalo and better weather. The Europeans had to work longer at dropping a moving target that quickly learned the value of fighting back and was often quite good at it.

But in the end, the song remained the same. What took place all over North America was a grotesque Groundhog Day, in which identical awful things happened over and over, minus a happy ending. The pattern was this simple: The Europeans arrived and were welcomed and often aided by the natives. Once the conquerors had promised to keep the peace, they aggressively expanded, broke treaties, declared war, pitted one tribe against another, and unwittingly (for the most part) introduced diseases that nearly exterminated the native people, along with their language, mythic traditions, and sacred beliefs. In the four hundred years between Columbus's arrival and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, upward of 90 percent of an estimated 40 to 100 million people were wiped out in one of the largest "ethnic cleansings" the world has ever witnessed-all in the name of progress, "civilization," and the God of Christianity.

The story of what was lost is still being written as new discoveries are made each day. A palace with a Mayan princess is found. Sacrificial victims in an ancient tomb are unearthed. The skeletal remains of an early man are opened up for study. And a new generation of scholars, eager to retell this tale from the "loser's" point of view, continues to stir up the long-accepted histories and theories of what happened to the "primitive" people of the New World. As a result, each day new light is shed on the vibrant mythic traditions of the Americas.

MYTHIC VOICES.

They must be good servants and very intelligent, because I see that they repeat very quickly what I told them, and it is my conviction that they would easily become Christians, for they seem not to have any sect. If it please our Lord, I will take six of them that they may learn to speak. The people are totally unacquainted with arms, as your Highnesses will see by observing the seven which I have caused to be taken in. With fifty men all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire.

-CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, from his diary, October 12, 1492*

The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call Cudouagny, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells what the weather will be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars.... After they had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that Cudouagny was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven, Who gives everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell....

-French explorer JACQUES CARTIER(14911557), describing the Hurons of eastern Canada How did Native American myth go up in smoke?

What is "civilized"? What is "savage"? To the "civilized" Europeans who came to the Americas in the 1500s, the answer was simple. "Civilized" meant clothes-wearing, literate, European Christians. The word "savage" meant "Indian." Led by medicine men smoking pipes, having visions, curing with herbs, and rejecting the white man's "salvation," the native tribes were, in the European view, doomed souls. Unfortunately, that view dominated from the sixteenth century on.

Maybe that is why the public today is still largely in the dark about Native American mythology and beliefs. The Europeans-and later, Americans-didn't just crush the Native American "savages." They composed the diaries and letters, painted the artwork, took the photographs, and wrote the first histories that either ignored or demeaned a conquered people. They suppressed native mythologies and languages to near-extinction, allowing them to go up in the smoke of burning villages. Church schools, missionaries, and government agencies like the notorious Indian Affairs Bureau added to the catastrophe, forcing native children to accept "Anglo" names and denying them the right to speak their mother tongues or learn their ancestral sacred stories. Sacred native places were built over and renamed-a process still going on as a Wal-Mart outlet goes up near Teotihuacan in Mexico, or an astronomical observatory is placed on a mountain sacred to the San Carlos Apaches in the state of Arizona.* People who shrug this off might see the issue differently if Native Americans secured rights to build a gambling casino atop Arlington National Cemetery.

But there is more to the story. As the authors of The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions write, "Indian country in North America is still home to hundreds of religious traditions that have endured, despite a long history of persecution and suppression by government and missionaries.... Native American sacred beliefs are as dignified, profound, viable, and richly faceted as other religions practiced throughout the world. Native sacred knowledge has not been destroyed or lost but in fact lives on as the heart of Native American cultural existence today."

What is known of these sacred traditions today comes largely through efforts during the past century to interview native survivors who preserved an oral tradition. These survivors included Black Elk, whose 1932 memoir, Black Elk Speaks, records the visionary recollections of an Oglala Sioux holy man who witnessed the nineteenth-century spiritual revival called the "Ghost Dance" and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Memories such as his have been added to the handful of written sources that do exist, such as the Popol Vuh, a re-creation of sacred Mayan writings discovered 300 years ago in a Guatemalan church, and a few hieroglyphic books from the Aztecs and Mayas. From the Spanish colonial era, there is also a large library of works about native beliefs, but these are somewhat suspect, given their source-often priests, or natives who may have wanted to curry favor with their Spanish masters, or deceive them.

More recently, the effort to preserve Native American traditions has been invigorated by a generation of scholars far more sensitive to their subject. In September 2004, more than 20,000 members of some 500 Native American tribes gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. Built at a cost of more than $219 million, the museum housed the Smithsonian Institute's hundreds of thousands of Native American objects.* There is also a revival of interest in tradition among young Native Americans, who hope to save something of their past as a complement to their heightened political activism in both the United States and Latin America. Award-winning poets, short-story writers, and novelists such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie have joined in the rescue effort with creative works such as Ceremony, Love Medicine, and Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven, which explore tribal mythic traditions and their impact on contemporary Native Americans. Finally, archaeology and other scientific research have also added immensely to a picture that has been rescued from the ashes of the Native American holocaust.

MYTHIC VOICES.

You said that we know not the Lord of the Close Vicinity, or to Whom the Heavens and earth belong. You said that our gods are not true gods. New words are these that you speak; because of them we are disturbed, because of them we are troubled. For our ancestors before us, who lived upon the earth, were unaccustomed to speak thus. From them we have inherited our pattern of life, which in truth they did hold; in reverence they held, they honored our gods.

-Aztec scholars to the first Franciscans in Mexico City, 1524 Is there an "American" mythology?

Vast differences distinguish the many cultures and people once lumped together as "Indians." The Cherokee farmers of the Southeast were very different from the Great Plains Sioux who followed the buffalo herds that sustained them. The democratic Hodenosaunee (or Iroquois) of the long houses in the Northeast had little in common with the Pueblos in their adobe "apartment buildings" in the Southwest. And none of these native people could be confused with the city dwellers of Mexico and Central America, or the resilient oceangoing fishermen of the Northwest and Arctic. But there are common patterns among the beliefs of many Native Americans, which, some scholars think, may stretch all the way back to shared prehistoric origins in Asia. These characteristics include: A "Great Spirit." A supreme god with ultimate power who both has created and oversees the universe is a common feature in Native American mythology. Often male and usually related to the sun, the great spirit goes by many names, as David Leeming and Jake Page point out in The Mythology of Native North America. "Usually this supreme god-the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery, Father Sky, Old Man, Earthmaker, or one of several other names-is the prime creator."

To the Huron of the Northeast woodlands, the Creator god is Airsekui, to whom the tribe offers the first of its fruits and meats each harvest and slaughter time. To the Incas of South America, he was Inti, the godhead who also founded the Inca dynasty. To the Sioux, Osage, and other tribes of the midwestern plains, the Creator god is more of a force than a personalized deity, and is called Wakonda or Wakan Tanka. Wakonda is the force behind all life and creation, wisdom, knowledge, and power. Sometimes envisioned as a large bird, Wakonda sustains the world and gives authority to the medicine men. For Algonquian tribes (who range across North America from the East Coast through the Great Lakes to the Rockies), the high god is Kitchi Manitou or "great mystery," a divine energy that created the world by thinking of it, exists in all things, and can be sought-in almost Eastern mystical terms-to achieve selfhood.

An Earth Mother. Source of all fertility, the Earth Mother is a popular deity in the Americas, who is nearly always a nurturing force. In the myth of the Cherokee-originally from the southeastern United States and forced west to Oklahoma in the notorious "removals" of the 1830s-their Earth Mother is the goddess known as Grandmother Sun. To the Hopi of the Southwest, she is Spider Woman or Kokyanwuuti, the goddess of Creation who teaches the people how to weave and make pottery.

Often these Earth Mothers or great goddesses have twin children or grandchildren-another common Native American theme-who are frequently tricksters. One Earth Mother of twins is the main goddess of the Navajos of the Southwest, who call themselves Dine ("the people"). Born from a piece of turquoise and made pregnant by the sun god, their Earth Mother is known as Changing Woman, or Estsanatlehi. She is a miraculous birth-giver, whose twin children-Monster Slayer and Born for Water-make the world safe for the Navajos. Changing Woman creates people from a mixture of corn dust and skin from her breasts. Growing old and young in a never-ending cycle, Changing Woman lives on an island in the west, from which she sends life-giving rain and fresh winds to keep the people alive. One of the most important rites among the Navajo is the female puberty ritual, a four-day ceremony in which a girl becomes a woman and gains the healing power granted by Changing Woman.

"Earth Diver" Creation Stories. Probably the most prevalent and archetypal Native American Creation story, especially in North America, features an animal-typically a beaver, beetle, duck, or turtle-who plunges into the waters covering the earth and returns to the surface with bits of mud or soil, from which the Creator then makes the earth.

To the Yuchi and Creek of Alabama and Georgia, the earth diver is Crawfish, who goes to the bottom of the water where the Mud People live. Angry that Crawfish comes and goes, stealing their mud and constantly stirring up the water, the Mud People try to stop him, but he moves too fast. Buzzard soars over the mud and dries it out with his wings, making the mountains and valleys. Finally, great mother (the Sun) gives light to the world and drips her menstrual blood on earth, giving birth to the first people.

For the Seneca of the Northeast, the earth divers Toad and Turtle work together to create land. They do this after Star Woman, the daughter of the Sky Chief, falls through a hole in the sky. Caught by birds, she rests on Turtle's back until Toad brings up enough soil from beneath the water to create the earth for her to live on.

Tricksters. Like Africa's mythology, Native American traditions show a special fondness for the malevolent and often aggressively oversexed trickster-animal gods such as Coyote and Hare, or a man-animal like Iktomi, the Spiderman of the Lakota Sioux. The Aztecs of Mexico have a lusty collection of tricksters called Centzon Totochtin, or "Four Hundred Rabbits." And classic Maya pottery also depicts a rabbit stealing-in true trickster fashion-an unidentified old god's hat and clothes. Some of these tricksters were the inspiration for two modern American cartoon icons-Wile E. Coyote of Road Runner fame and a "wabbit" named Bugs, whose animated antics are far less malicious and X-rated than those of their ancient ancestors.

Sometimes the tricksters are cunning "culture heroes," like the Mayan twins of the Popol Vuh who confound death with their amazing abilities. Many scholars believe that the now-ubiquitous Kokopelli-the hunchbacked flute player depicted on prehistoric Anasazi rock art in the Southwest-was a combination trickster-fertility god, similar in many respects to the Greek Pan. Kokopelli may have even been based on legends of an actual trader from Central America who made his way to the South and left a lasting impression. Other Native American tricksters are smart, brave, and resourceful-but they can also be vindictive, spiteful, and selfish. In some accounts, tricksters create man, steal fire from heaven, survive floods, and defeat monsters.

Summarizing tricksters, Native American myth expert Richard Erdoes writes, "Always hungry for another meal swiped from someone else's kitchen, always ready to lure someone else's wife into bed, always trying to get something for nothing, shifting shapes (and even sex), getting caught in the act, ever scheming, never remorseful." Tricksters are, he adds, "clever and foolish at the same time, smart-asses who outsmart themselves."

The Shaman. A figure revered in many worldwide traditions, the shaman, or "medicine man,"* plays a central role in many tribes throughout the Americas. Widely thought to be a carryover from the ancient Siberian beginnings of Native America, and sometimes related to the trickster, the shaman in Native American tradition is the person considered to have magical powers that come from a direct contact with the supernatural, usually through ecstatic trances or dream visions. Shamans were often healers who used a combination of herbal remedies and "spiritual" healing-traditions that continue today across the Americas.

American tribal names for the shaman vary, and it is not a term used by American tribal people. For the Arctic Inuit, the shaman or medicine man is Angakoq, who is the repository of lore and magic and the actual connection to the spirit world. To the Oglala Sioux, the shaman is a wichasha wakon, a holy man like Black Elk, who, at the age of nine, had a powerful spiritual vision. Serving as tribal priests, diviners, and healers, the shamans underwent training that usually included a "vision quest," in which the initiate sought to communicate with the spirit world. The shaman's apprenticeship might last anywhere from a few days to many years, as novices had to experience extreme hardships to learn how to control "spirit helpers." In Peru, centuries after Catholicism was established, the Church continued to "investigate" what it called idolatrias ("idolatries"), which involved curers and diviners who persisted in the traditional worship of sacred Incan places in the mountains. Like many Native American tribes and cultures, the Incas regarded many places and things as huaca ("sacred"). These included springs, stones, caves, and mountain peaks, each of which had its own spirits.

The Totem. Somewhat unique to Native Americans, but similar in some respects to the African fetish, the totem is a symbol of a tribe, clan, or family. But it is also an object imbued with spirit power. As writer Jonathan Forty describes it in Mythology: A Visual Encyclopedia, "The totem was a coat of arms, an altar, shrine, flag, and a family tree all rolled into one."

Although "totem" is most often associated with the great carved poles that lined the village streets of the Northwest and Alaskan tribes, the word comes from the Chippewa (or Ojibwa) of the Great Lakes area. In the broader sense, "totem" is a powerful symbol that united people who sometimes occupied vast territories. In discussing the importance of the totem to people in what he calls the "primal world," religion authority Huston Smith writes in Illustrated World's Religions, "To be separated from the tribe threatens them with death, not only physically but psychologically as well. The tribe, in turn, is embedded in nature so solidly that the line between the two is not easy to establish. In the case of totemism, it cannot really be said to exist. Totemism binds a human tribe to an animal species in a common life. The totem animal guards the tribe, which, in return, respects it and refuses to injure it, for they are 'of one flesh.'" That idea is so powerful that a clan might have rules against killing or eating the species to which their totem-a bird, fish, animal, plant, or other natural object-belongs. (Maybe you have a "Jesus fish" on your car? Or wear your favorite team's tiger, wildcat, or cardinal on your cap? Or maybe you pledge allegiance to a flag with an eagle on top? Totem, totem, totem.)

In the Pacific Northwest, highly skilled artisans carved the family and clan emblems on the elaborate cedar totem poles that eventually came to be viewed as "status symbols." Captain Cook, the English explorer, saw these totems during his travels in the Pacific Northwest and noted them in his journals in the 1700s. The famed photographer of the Native Americans Edward S. Curtis first took pictures of them in the late nineteenth century as part of an expedition to Alaska led by railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, who stripped entire villages of their totems and other sacred objects. But the early history of totem poles is otherwise obscure, except for legends hinting that they go very far back in time.

In a flagrant example of attempted "culturecide," in 1884, the Canadian government outlawed the large ceremonial gatherings called the "potlatch," at which totem poles were raised. Many native children were then sent to government schools, and totem pole carving nearly died as an art form. There has been a revival in recent decades among a younger generation of artists who want to preserve the old ways. By the way, the "low man on the totem pole" usually wasn't. In fact, the bottom figure was often created by the best carver, who wanted his work to be most visible.

THE MYTHS OF THE MAYAS.

The Mayas once occupied an area that today consists of the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo; part of the states of Tabasco and Chiapas; and most of Guatemala, Belize, and parts of El Salvador and Honduras. Recent discoveries show that the Mayan civilization began to reach its peak as early as 150 BCE and grew vibrantly until 900 CE. By then, most of the Mayas had moved to areas to the north and south, including Yucatan in Mexico and the highlands of southern Guatemala, where they continued to prosper until Spain conquered most of their territory in the mid-1500s. Descendants of the Maya still live in Mexico and Guatemala-where they are among the world's poorest people. They speak Mayan languages and retain many of the religious customs of their ancestors.

MYTHIC VOICES.

There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest. Only the sky alone is there; the face of the earth is not clear. Only the sea alone is pooled under all the sky; there is nothing whatever gathered together. It is at rest; not a single thing stirs. It is held back, kept at rest under the sky.

Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the pooled water, only the calm sea, only it alone is pooled, Whatever there might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night. Only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light. They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feather, in blue-green.

-from Popol Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock What is the Popol Vuh?

The Holy Bible of Judaism and Christianity is a book of Creation, a list of divinely ordained rules and rituals and a foundation history of the Hebrew people, which includes a list of ancient Israel's many legendary and real kings. Perhaps most important, the Bible is believed to be the word of God.

The Mayan Popol Vuh is a book of Creation, a list of divinely ordered rules and rituals and a foundation history of the Mayan people, which gives the Mayan kings a heavenly mandate and links them to a list of legendary rulers. Perhaps most important, the Popol Vuh was believed to be the word of the gods.

So, the Bible and the Popol Vuh have some things in common. Both books were the sacred texts at the core of their culture's religious traditions. Both were written down by scribes only after centuries of oral transmission. Both contain poetic accounts of Creation and grim stories of death and destruction. Yet, most people have never heard of the Popol Vuh. There aren't Popol Vuh study courses offered in most local colleges. Or pamphlets with scriptural excerpts from the Popol Vuh. Or concordances published for easy referencing of the Popol Vuh. To a significant degree, the book is a well-kept secret.

Once again, we have the Spanish conquerors to thank. After their arrival in the Americas in the 1500s, the Spanish-as many conquerors do-prohibited the use of the Mayan and other native languages and began to enforce the use of Spanish and Latin as the common vernacular. Of course, Catholicism became the official-and, presumably, only-religion wherever the Spanish went. And wholesale "culturecide" began to take place. In an introduction to his English translation of the Popol Vuh, scholar Dennis Tedlock describes the Spanish approach to destroying a culture: "Backed by means of persuasion that included gunpowder, instruments of torture, and the threat of eternal damnation, the invaders established a monopoly on virtually all major forms of visible public expression, whether in drama, architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. In the highlands, when they realized that textile designs carried complex messages, they even attempted to ban the wearing of Mayan style clothing." (Oh, those terrible Spanish. But just remember, in America you can be thrown out of a shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt with a message the authorities don't like. And the French banned the head scarves worn by Muslim girls in public schools. Clothing is, and always has been, a form of spiritual, cultural, and political expression.) During the mid-sixteenth century, working secretly and anonymously, Mayan priests and clerks who had been taught Latin translated copies of the old hieroglyphic Mayan books into Latin. They also began to blend Catholicism in with their own religious beliefs, merging the two much the way the African practitioners of Santeria and voodoo did in the Caribbean. Around 1700, a Latinized version of ancient Mayan texts was discovered by a Franciscan priest in a Guatemalan town. Instead of destroying the book-which is what happened to most ancient Mayan and Aztec hieroglyphic writings-the priest translated it into Spanish and added the names of some of the Spanish governors of Guatemala to the lists of Mayan kings. Maybe the priest thought this addendum would keep him out of ecclesiastical hot waters if his heresy was ever discovered.*

This, then, is how the Popol Vuh survived. Coming down from Mayan scribes who valued the "ancient word" over the "preaching of God" forced on them by the Spanish, the Popol Vuh is a rare and important source, although one that is clearly filtered through the Spanish colonial era.

Divided into five parts and a little over one hundred pages long in English, the Popol Vuh begins with a Creation account in a world that has only an empty sky above and a sea below. Central to this Creation narrative are two groups of gods, one from the sea and one from the sky, who decide to create the earth, plants, and people. The role of the people, interestingly, is to praise the gods and provide them with offerings. The first people the gods make have no arms and can only chatter and howl-so they become the first animals. A second try produces a being made of mud, which cannot walk or reproduce and which dissolves into nothing. After consulting a wise old divine couple, the gods make a third attempt and create people out of wood. But the results are only slightly improved. The wooden people can speak and reproduce, but they prove to be very poor at praying and providing the requisite offerings. The god Huracan-a name appropriated by the Spanish and transformed into the word "hurricane"-decides to do away with the wooden people with a flood, and he sends a gigantic rainstorm along with terrible monsters to attack them. The people are destroyed, but some manage to survive in the jungles and become the ancestors of the monkeys.

After this round of botched human creation, the Popol Vuh shifts to a long, complex, and admittedly bizarre narrative account of the Maya's two sets of semidivine national heroes, the twins One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, and another set of twins, named Hunahpu and Ixbalanque-the slayers of demons who defeat the gods of the underworld. The extraordinary adventures of these two sets of twins have all the makings of a modern hit video game. A heroic quest into a multilevel underworld filled with demons with names like Scab Stripper, blowguns, monsters, deadly bats, and frequent decapitations all occupy the center of the elaborate Mayan tales described in the Popol Vuh. (Which gods like a good ball game?) Who were the Mayas who produced the Popol Vuh?

Peeking inside the Popol Vuh raises the question-how did the civilization that produced this extraordinary book evolve?

The simple answer is "farming." Civilization in Mesoamerica-the area now known as southern Mexico and much of Central America-began when people shifted from hunting-gathering to farming. Creating small villages in clearings in the rain forest, the first farmers of Mesoamerica raised tomatoes, peanuts, avocados, tobacco, beans, squashes-many plants and foods unknown in Europe until Columbus carried them back. But these farmers' most important crop was maize, which evolved from a tamed wild grass. Commonly known as corn, maize would become the staple of the Mesoamerican diet, feed its herds and support large populations.* By about 1700 BCE, improved farming techniques were producing maize in surplus quantities-an economic necessity for developing a more advanced civilization.

The first major Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs, had settled along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in what is now Veracruz and Tabasco, around 1500 BCE. Clearly poised to achieve great things, the Olmecs created, within a few hundred years, a fairly sophisticated society with temples, pyramids, a single ruler, and a powerful religion-based culture that spread throughout Mesoamerica. One of their distinguishing accomplishments were the great carved heads of supernatural beings and animal deities produced out of large basalt stones that weighed up to 36,000 pounds (16,300 kilograms). These massive stone blocks had to be transported more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) through difficult terrain, without benefit of the wheel or large draft animals, and were most likely rafted on rivers. Discovered at Olmec sites at La Venta in Tabasco and San Juan Lorenzo in Veracruz, five of these colossal heads can now be seen at an outdoor park in La Venta, and others are displayed in museums, including the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City and the Veracruz Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa.

The Olmec religion, sculpture, and other arts would significantly influence all the later Mesoamerican groups, including the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Mayas. Eventually producing cities with towering pyramids and broad plazas centered mostly in Guatemala and southern Mexico, Mayan civilization, new research shows, began to reach a level of complexity as early as 150 BCE-much earlier than previously thought-and reached the peak of its development about 200 CE, then continued to flourish in a "classic period" for hundreds of years, declining around 900 CE.

Although not an empire in the usual sense, the Mayas formed a loose collection of about ninety city-states, with several different languages. But theirs was one of the first cultures in the Americas to develop an advanced form of writing, a hieroglyphic picture-language that was used to record the sacred texts. The Mayas also made great strides in astronomy and mathematics, developed an accurate yearly calendar, and produced remarkable architecture, painting, pottery, and sculpture. By about 900 CE, for reasons unclear, most of the Mayas abandoned the cities of the Guatemalan lowlands. Invasion and changing climates may have been the cause, but some of the Mayas moved south and others north, to the Yucatan Peninsula. There, between 900 and 1200 CE, the city of Chichen Itza grew into the largest and most powerful Mayan city.

Like all Mayan cities, Chichen Itza was a religious center with a temple where a priestly class resided and served the needs of surrounding rural populations. Each day, priests performed the daily sacrifices and rituals. Farmers from nearby villages would come to the city to attend regular festivals that included dancing, competitions like the ball game (see below), dramas, prayers, and sacrifice. Sometimes these sacrifices involved ordinary foods. But human sacrifices were also demanded to appease the gods.

Governed by a council of nobles, Chichen Itza dominated Yucatan with a combination of military strength and control over important trade routes until it declined around 1200. For the next two hundred years, the Yucatan was divided by civil wars, and the Mayas later merged with the Toltecs, a warrior group that moved in from northern Mexico. In the early 1500s, the Spanish invaded the Mayan territories, and by 1550 had overcome almost all the Mayas, enslaving those who survived on the large-scale plantations they began to build.

Which gods like a good ball game?