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

Human Sacrifice

Some five hundred years after the Popol Wuj was written, Maya of Rab’inal still hold on to the tale and have preserved much of its pre-Columbian story lines and concepts. It is surprising, for example, to find how a delicate theme, as that of her death-sentence, has survived. There are other versions of the story – probably as many as there are Maya priests, each having his own interpretation – and in one of them the priest actually mentions the plate and the sacrificial knife, which the father of Our Mother Beloved Maiden hands over to the executioners San Miguel and San Vicente. In the Popol Wuj, the objects are called sel, which is a gourd cut in half, and saqi tok, "white sacrificial knife" (Edmonson, 1971:lines 2319 and 2325). In the abovementioned version these instruments appear as jun plato de china and jun cuchilobem, mingled Spanish/Achi-K’iche’ for "a china plate" and "a knife" (copy recorded by Alain Breton; I thank him for letting me quote from it). It is further extraordinary that the version I recorded is more detailed in the fake proofs of her execution than the Xkik’ tale in the Popol Wuj itself. It shows that it was just as much an oral document, as it still is today, and thus, that the version, which ended up in the Popol Wuj was but an interpretation of the XVI^th Kaweq narrator who recited it to the scribe (Van Akkeren, 2000a:51-57).

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