How Our Mother Beloved Maiden was Saved from an Untimely Death:  A christianized version of the Xkik’ tale of the Popol Wuj

Exegesis and Comparison

The study of the Beloved Maiden text provides us with a unique opportunity to compare its content with an older, similar tale from the Popol Wuj. The latter document is probably the most famous Maya text. It has been argued that the document is a compilation of tales, dance-dramas, religious prayers and historical chronicles, aptly edited into one ongoing story line. The editing was done somewhere in the mid-fifties of the XVI^th century, predominantly by members of the Nim Ch’okoj of the Kaweq lineage. There is good reason to think they created the document in order to support their choice to the highest rulership of the K’iche’ confederation, that of the Keeper of the Mat (Ajpop). Various ruling lords had been killed by the Spaniards and the K’iche’ political structure was in a state of chaos (Tedlock, 1996; Van Akkeren, n.d.).

Still, most of the stories and characters of the Popol Wuj circulated among the Maya for centuries and perhaps even millennia, and, as illustrated by the Beloved Maiden text, are still alive today. I have shown elsewhere that the story of the trapping of Sipakna is also still told in Baja Verapaz, and that the version, which ended up in the Popol Wuj probably originated there (Van Akkeren, 2000a; 2000c). Finding the Beloved Maiden text in Rab’inal gives additional support to the hypothesis that many sections of the Popol Wuj are staged in Verapaz (Van Akkeren, 2000a; Acuña, 1998; and Van Akkeren, n.d.). It further demonstrates that its tales belong to the realm of oral tradition, which evolved in time, picking up new imagery and dropping old when cultural orders shifted. Below follow some of the themes, which emerged from the comparison of both texts.

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