Popol Vuh ⋆

The Repatriation Question

The repatriation debate effectively commenced the moment that Adrián Recinos (re)discovered “Popol Vuh” within the Ayer 1515 ms at The Newberry Library. The answer lies in defining the substance of “Popol Vuh.”more ›

Manuscript History and Provenance

Among the thorniest problems with Popol Vuh scholarship are the ethical issues of using unprovenienced material. Immovable Maya temples, altars, and stelae are self-authenticating. Other archaeological in situ artifacts are meticulously inventoried by their excavators to preserve their evidentiary value. Father Ximénez’s text, however, is not so easily addressed.

No dispute exists that the oldest surviving text of Popol Vuh is The Newberry Library’s Ayer ms 1515. Neither is there any dispute that it has been at the Newberry since the turn of the twentieth century when it was donated by Edward E. Ayer who had purchased it from Alphonse Pinart who had received it from Brasseur de Bourbourg. The disputes that Ayer ms 1515 is (or is not) Ximénez’s manuscript arise from inconsistent and contradictory statements from Brasseur concerning how and where he obtained Ayer ms 1515. Understanding the pedigree and provenance of Ayer ms 1515 Popol Vuh requires understanding the people that interacted with it.

Unlike modern literary texts, Popol Vuh is not defined by the static text that appears within the four corners of its pages. From Ximénez’s initial act of conservation to the present day, every edition and ever study of Popol Vuh promotes a different agenda. Ximénez plainly disclosed a evangelical purpose, though his paratext was cleaved from the narrative very early on with Brasseur’s 1861 edition. Scherzer seems somewhat disinterested in the narrative itself but rather keen for being known as its discoverer. Brasseur was plainly jealous of Scherzer’s recognition and Brasseur endeavored to turn his edition into an ethnological study. Today, arriving at an objective understanding of Popol Vuh’s significance requires a fundamental understanding of the agency of its conservator, Francisco Ximénez, of its first editors Carl Scherzer and Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and to a lesser degree, of Alphonse Pinart and Adrián Recinos.

Francisco Ximénez

Father Francisco Ximénez (1666 – 1729) came as a Dominican missionary to the New World in February 1688. His companions were initially dispatched throughout the province to learn the native languages. Although initially delayed by the completion of his novitiate and his subsequent acceptance of an administrative assignment at the seminary, by 1691 Ximénez was in San Juan Sacatepéquez learning Cakchiquel. He attained sufficient mastery in only two months so as to be more ›

Juan Gavarrete

The name Juan Gavarrete appears only in connection with Popol Vuh and his identity remains apocryphal and elusive. Whatever can be gleaned from the scant historical record indicates that Gavarrete was an archivist working in Guatemala City in the mid-nineteenth century.more ›

Carl Scherzer

Karl Ritter von Scherzer (1821 – 1903) was born May 1821 in Vienna. Scherzer‘s true occupation remains a mystery, but he was never a physician. He worked a stint as a printer in both Leipzig and Paris and his participation in the 1848 revolution resulted in temporary exile. Scherzer spent three years in North America with Moritz Wagner from 1852 to 1855. It was during this trip that in 1854 Scherzer encountered several colonial manuscripts in the municipal library and in the library of the Universidad de San Carlos including three of Ximénez’s works: more ›

Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg

Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814 – 1874) was born September 1814 in Bourbourg, France. After his ordination in 1845, Brasseur was recruited by Abbé Léon Gingras to serve in Québec. While his superiors insisted on additional studies in ecclesiastical history, Brasseur instead delved into the archdiocesan archives there at Québec and “published” his Esquisse biographique sur Mgr. de Laval, premier Evêque de Québec. Brasseur then left for Boston where he had previously formed a good relationship with Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick. Brasseur returned to France in late 1846 or early 1847. He joined an expedition to Mexico where he resided from 1848 to 1851.more ›

Alphonse Pinart

Alphonse Pinart (1852 – 1911) ambled through adolescence without direction until he met Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg at the 1867 World Fair in Paris. He was inspired to pursue a career in ethnology, though not in the same line as Brasseur. Whereas Brasseur keenly focused on Central American ethnohistory, Pinart preferred the languages of the Pacific ocean, from North America to the Indonesian islands.more ›

Edward E. Ayer

Edward Everett Ayer was born in November 1841 about the time that a military road established by Congress turned his birthplace of Southport (Kenosha) Wisconsin into an increasingly significant trade route. Ayer’s father opened a general store, contracted a blacksmith, and even dabbled in grain brokering. He sold his enterprise to buy land five miles south where a train station was to be built, and he had the fortune to participate in the planning of the town of Harvard, Illinois. His efforts led to limited railroad construction contracts.more ›

Adrián Recinos

Adrián Recinos (1886 – 1962) was born July 1886 in Antigua, Guatemala to a notable family of Huehuetenango. He graduated from the Instituto Nacional Central de Varones in 1902 and subsequently earned a law degree from the Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales at the Universidad de Guatemala in 1907. Recinos entered politics the following year. more ›

Maya Books and Writing

There simply is no evidence that highland Maya had copious glyphic ‘texts’. Editors and scholars of Popol Vuh frequently write and speak of “hieroglyphic books” among the Maya. The idea of Amerindian books and the prevalence of the same among the Maya derives from the memoire of Fray Diego de Landa more ›

Francisco Ximénez

Juan Gavarrete

Juan Gavarrete’s identity and his involvment with Ximénez’s manuscript is apocryphal and elusive. Whatever can be gleaned from the scant historical record indicates that Gavarrete was an archivist working in Guatemala’s capital in the mid-nineteenth century. It is unclear whether he was employed by the national government or by the Universidad de San Carlos, or whether the two were distinguishable.more ›

Carl Scherzer

Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg

Alphonse Pinart

Edward E. Ayer

Adrián Recinos

Pinart’s Occupation

Alphonse Pinart was never a book dealer. There is not much internet information on Alphonse Pinart, but the biography composed by Ross Parmenter documents that Alphonse Pinart was an ethnolinguistmore ›

Popol Vuh’s Title

Popol Vuh is not an original title. Ayer ms 1515 (which is the oldest surviving source text) does not have an actual title and its heading merely says “las historias del origen de los indios.”more ›

Gavarrete’s Copyscript

Juan Gavarrete’s copyscript is not lost. (as the photo below shows). Jack Himelblau (1989) and Munro Edmonson (1973) lept to incorrect conclusions. more ›

Manuscript Composition

Ayer ms 1515 was likely bound in Guatemala. Giselle Simón, former Director of Conservation Services at the Newberry Library, considers the binding technique consistent with nineteenth-century work, albeit a relatively “crude binding” which “the Newberry would not have bound.” more ›

Scherzer’s Occupation

Carl Scherzer was never a physician. At least one source suggests that Scherzer was a lawyer, but his only documented employment was as a printer and as a statesman. The misconception that Scherzer was a physician flows from Scherzer’s self-assumed honorific in his 1857 edition of Popol Vuh and possibly began with Recinos’ 1947 Spanish edition and/or 1950 English translation.more ›

Popol Vuh

Fresco depicting scene from Popol Vuh Popol Vuh is a religious narrative of the Central American Maya indians. Stated more precisely, Popol Vuh is a periconquest oral mythistory (myth + history) of the highland Quiché (K’iche’) Maya. The mythic component comprehends a creation story, a diluvian suggestion, and epic tales of anthropomorphic ancestors. The myth transitions into history through its tale of an eastward ancestral migration to observe the first dawn through which the sojourners acquire fire and evolve distinct languages, tribes, and clans. We are told how the Quichean tribes arrived in the western highlands and there is an anecdotal account of how the Quiché rise to prominence over their Cakchiquel and Tzutuhil relatives. Popol Vuh also describes a society that, anthropologically speaking, seems to depict settlement and intertribal conflict of the terminal late classic period (roughly AD 790 to 1000). Popol Vuh concludes with regnal genealogies leading to the time of the Spanish conquest (AD 1524). Ontologically speaking, Popol Vuh exists as a product of exponential supposition and as a consequence there are really two distinguishable conceptual and physical Popol Vuh entities.more ›

Ma(r)king Popol Vuh

Refereed Journal. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry have argued that “to mark a text is also to make it; [and] features such as punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, white space and marginalia, marks that traditionally have been ignored in literary criticism, can be examined for their contribution to a text’s meaning.” In 2007 The Newberry Library disbound the oldest surviving text of Popol Vuh for conservation. That process made it possible to examine a number of paratextual markers calling into question popular perspectives of Popol Vuh as Indian auto-ethnography. This refereed article published at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to raise modern awareness of the manuscript’s paratext and its meaning for traditional assumptions of Popol Vuh’s survival and its narrative/textual boundaries.more ›

Ayer ms Prologues

My doctoral dissertation presented the first edited collection of all four Ayer ms 1515 prologues. My hope is that making these prologue transcriptions available online will raise awareness of their contribution to Poppl Vuh’s textual and narrative meaning and spark investigations by other scholars.more ›

Disparities of Discourse in Popol Vuh

Conference Paper. Francisco Ximénez’s transcription and translation of Popol Vuh is not as straightforward and sterile as is generally presumed. The task requires intricate management of the textual and semiotic grids, both in the the Quiché transcription and in the Spanish translation.more ›

Rethinking the Context of Popol Vuh

Doctoral Dissertation. Although seventeenth-century Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez is credited for conservation of Popol Vuh, no critical attention is given to his personal agency and his ecclesiastical agenda. The oversight is particularly disconcerting where he plainly states in his prologue, “Esta mi obra, y trabaxo discurro q’ avra muchos q’ la tengan por la mas futil y vana de las q’ he trabaxado, asi lo pensaran muchos; y yo lo discurro al contrario, porq’ entiendo ser la mas util, y neçesaria.” My investigation is founded on answering the question: Why did Father Ximénez believe conservation of this text to be his crowning achievement? I answer this question by examining the four prologues of the Ayer manuscript to uncover Ximénez’s significant interaction with the text.more ›