An Insufficient Canon: The Popol Wuj, Book of Mormon, and Other Scriptures

Abstract

As we sat in the cozy living room of his modest home in Antigua, Guatemala, in July 1993, an ecclesiastical authority from a local ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) declared his belief that the Popol Wuj (also called Pop Wuj and Popol Vuh)1 was one of the “other scriptures” that Jesus spoke about in the Book of Mormon (3 Ne 23:6). As an undergraduate student of anthropology at the University of Iowa, I had come to the former colonial capital of Guatemala for language study and a small research project under the guidance of the esteemed linguist, Dr. Nora England. The focus of the research project, funded by the Stanley Foundation, was on health and religious conversion, not scripture.2 Yet, throughout four months of participant observation and health-oriented interviews, Guatemalan Latter-day Saints of Ladino and Mayan heritages repeatedly shifted the conversation to a topic they preferred to discuss: the Popol Wuj, a sacred narrative originating in their homeland, that of the highland Maya.The Popol Wuj, identified as “the Mayan Bible” by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes,3 and the Book of Mormon, presented as another testament of Jesus Christ, each share in their questioning the sufficiency of a Christian canon that silences Indigenous voices. This essay traces the development and evolution of Mormon ideas about the Popol Wuj, both in Guatemala and the United States. Settler scholarship on the Popol Wuj from the field of Book of Mormon studies has focused more on historical parallels between the sacred texts, rather than on the shared revolutionary claims of their extracanonical scriptural status. The acceptance and presentation of the Popol Wuj as yet another scripture beyond the Bible and the Book of Mormon by Indigenous Mormons is a qualitatively different approach than that found among settler colonial Latter-day Saints. Settler scholars, primarily from the United States, have employed the Popol Wuj as support for the historical claims of the Book of Mormon, avoiding a stance about its scriptural status. Over time, though, the historical claims of earlier authors and church leaders have eroded as more recent scholars have pointed to accumulating evidence challenging the veracity of historical linkages between the two texts. Indigenous scholars from both Guatemala and the United States in the twenty-first century have drawn from decolonizing methodologies to advocate a more inclusive approach that employs the Book of Mormon as sanction for the acceptance of Indigenous sacred narratives, such as the Popol Wuj, as “other scriptures.”This article begins by situating the Popol Wuj within the context of other contemporary K'iche’ texts, portions of which have only recently been published in English. This context is followed by a brief overview of the history of various translations of the Popol Wuj. The next section chronologically follows engagement with the Popol Wuj within the field of Book of Mormon studies. My ethnographic experience is then placed within this chronological narrative, as well as within the context of local developments in Guatemala. The narrative then returns to a chronology of engagements with the Popol Wuj within Book of Mormon studies, with an emphasis on the erosion of historical claims in recent years and the emergence of decolonizing perspectives that share a congruence with an emphasis on scriptural status of the Popol Wuj that I observed in Guatemala in 1993. My hope is that shifting scholarly analysis away from how Indigenous narratives might substantiate or challenge the historicity of the Book of Mormon to how shared claims to extracanonical scripture might validate both Mormon and Native sacred traditions can help illuminate Indigenous experiences more generally within a globalizing religious tradition.The Popol Wuj (ca. 1554–ca. 1558) is one of approximately “forty extant autochthonous K'iche'an texts written by Highland Maya elites within the first several decades of engagement with Christian missionaries.”4 It needs to be read intertextually, particularly in reference to two other contemporary K'iche’ texts: the first volume of Dominican Friar Domingo de Vico's Theologia Indorum (1553) and Title of Totonicapán (ca. 1554).5 All three texts share the same Latin script, developed by Catholic missionaries and taught to K'iche’ elite who participated in the production of each account. At least one popol winaq (member of K'iche’ governing council), Diego Reynoso, likely contributed to all three texts; assisting Vico in his weaving of Christian and Mayan theology in Theologia Indorum, as a “minor author” among a larger committee for the Popol Wuj, and as the “principal author” of Title of Totonicapán.6 In contrast to the Popol Wuj, which would appear in various translations in European languages beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the first critical folios of the Title of Totonicapán and selections from Theologia Indorum remained untranslated from K'iche’ into European languages until the late twentieth century. They first appeared in English translations by religious studies scholar Garry Sparks in 2017 and so would have been unavailable to most Latter-day Saint scholars discussed below.7K'iche’ authors in the sixteenth century displayed their willingness to use colonial technology and ideas as a means of resisting Christian domination and displacement. These newly translated documents show direct colonial influence in both structure and content of the opening narrative of the Popol Wuj, despite the clear Indigenous antiquity of stories in other portions of the text. They also demonstrate that the K'iche’ authors understood some implied connections to the creation, fall, flood, Sinai, Trinity, tower of Babel, etc. in the Popol Wuj in analogical rather than historical terms. Sparks explains: “The Popol Wuj conceivably interpreted the Christian book of Genesis as having been only part of the true story of creation—not so much wrong as merely incomplete and deficient compared to the story provided more fully in the Maya narrative tradition.” The Popol Wuj can be understood not just to offer a view into the pre-Hispanic world of the Maya, but also as “an early product of an emerging colonial Christian milieu, or . . . [a] direct indigenous response to, and possibly against, Christendom.”8 The Popol Wuj, read in its sixteenth-century context, alludes to but implicitly challenges Christian interpretations of Maya narratives as represented in K'iche’ by the Theologia Indorum.Vico's first volume of Theologia Indorum appears in K'iche’ in 1553. Both Popol Wuj and Title of Totonicapán, appearing about a year or so later, respond directly to the first volume of Theologia Indorum, but not to the second from 1554. Most importantly for, and largely unknown to LDS scholars, “the first lines of the Popol Wuj appear to mirror the opening lines in the proemium of the first volume of the Theologia Indorum.” The opening passages of both texts share key terms and phrases framing origin narratives, poetic structures, comment on status of the respective texts, declarations on aim and scope, demonstrations of revelation, references to Christian “talk of God,” and an expectation of enhancement of the readers by the respective texts. As Sparks explains, “the Popol Wuj seems to use the first volume of the Theologia Indorum as a foil against which to reassert a distinctively pre-Hispanic worldview.”9 The Title of Totonicapán also borrows directly from Theologia Indorum and some of the same stories that appear in the Popol Wuj to construct alternatively “a Hispano-Catholic cosmology and biblical genealogy of migrations” integrated with “pre-Hispanic migrations and genealogies of the leading lineages of the K'iche’ confederacy.”10 Superficial allusions to Christianity in the Popol Wuj appear rather explicitly in the Title of Totonicapán. Notable examples of Maya and Christian amalgamation there include: uniting of creator gods; aligning Christian heaven with primordial brothers who become the sun and moon; references to “sapote” as a forbidden fruit; Cain's murder represented as occurring in a milpa (Indigenous farming plot); tukan, a boysenberry-like shrub, portrayed as the burning bush encountered by Moses; an equation of the Mesoamerican and biblical cities of Tulan and Babylon; the incorporation of analogous stories of a flood and tower of Babel into K'iche’ traditions; and the legitimation of the authors’ descent from both the first four lineages of the K'iche’ as well as the Hebrews, Israelites, and Canaanites from the Bible.11Recognizing the Dominican Vico's initial approach to the integration of Mayan and Biblical narratives in the Theologia Indorum is vital for understanding the Popol Wuj and the Title of Totonicapán. Educated in the analogical theology of Thomas Aquinas at Salamanca, Vico sought analogous stories in K'iche’ narratives as an explanatory tool for communicating Christian concepts and ideas. These analogies were not intended to be read as literal historical accounts of an ancient American past. Sparks warns, “Later scholars run the risk of reading an early mendicant missionary's text literally where he is, instead, establishing an analogical relationship between Jews and native peoples rather than a univocal relationship.”12 For example, in the Title of Totonicapán the receipt of divine revelation occurs in seven caves rather than on a mountain, this event becomes the K'iche’ “Sinai” despite the variable setting. Similarly, noble lineages traced to Tulan in the Popol Wuj are traced instead to Babylon in the Title of Totonicapán. Thus, Tulan becomes analogously the K'iche’ Babylon.13 Neither the authors of the Theologia Indorum nor the Popol Wuj and Title of Totonicapán responding to it understood these relationships between peoples and places as either biological or historical. Thus, Latter-day Saint scholars described below who would prioritize history from the Popol Wuj over its sacred content misunderstood and misrepresented the original intent of its K'iche’ authors. In fact, the nonliteral view of kinship relations is not just a product of Vico's Thomist philosophy but also reflects longstanding K'iche’ practices of altering genealogies for political purposes, imposing new lineages on conquered peoples, and regular use of adoptive and fictive kinships.14Modern knowledge of the Popol Wuj derives from an alphabetic rendering of older, no longer available, glyphic texts by Maya intellectuals between 1554 and 1558 in the town of Quiché about fifty miles northwest of today's Antigua in the highlands of Guatemala. Francisco Ximenénez, a Catholic parish priest in neighboring Chichicastenango, made the only extant copy of the K'iche’ text between 1701 and 1703, alongside which he included a Spanish translation. Carl Scherzer, an Austrian physician, found the manuscript in 1854 resting in the library at the University of San Carlos where it had been since the closing of Guatemalan monasteries in the 1830s. He published Ximenénez's Spanish translation in Vienna in 1857. After 1854, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French priest and advocate of an American Indian origin in Atlantis, slipped the manuscript out of the country. Bourbourg published a French and Quiché version of the manuscript in Paris in 1861. The copy of the Ximénez manuscript he used has been located at the Newberry Library in Chicago since 1912.15Hubert Howe Bancroft constructed an 1882 English abridgment and translation from the Spanish and French editions by Scherzer and Bourbourg. He identified the “Popol Vuh” as “the national book of the Quichés” and considered it a genuine reflection of “the intellectual soil of America” with “a tinge of biblical expression” that “consciously or unconsciously to the Quiché who wrote, influenced the form of the narrative.”16 Bancroft's condensed version would draw early attention from English language scholars of the Book of Mormon. Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias published a Spanish translation in 1927. Twenty years later, Guatemalan Adrián Recinos produced a Spanish translation that is credited with “bringing Popol Wuj into the mainstream consciousness in Guatemala.”17 Recinos's Spanish version would also be the source of the first full English translation by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Griswold Morley in 1950, which they subtitled Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya.18Anthropologists Munro Edmonson and Dennis Tedlock each produced English translations in 1971 and 1985 (updated in 1996) from the K'iche’ that gave emphasis to poetic, parallel couplets in the text. Tedlock studied and collaborated in his translation with a K'iche’ diviner, Andrés Xiloj Peruch of Momostenango.19 Native K'iche’ speaker Luis Enrique Sam Colop produced a Spanish translation in 2008 that undermined diffusionist interpretations of the Popol Wuj by changing a phrase about a pilgrimage previously translated as coming “across the sea” to “on the edge of the sea.”20In the twenty-first century, Brigham Young University (BYU) art historian Allen J. Christenson published multiple translations from K'iche’ into English. He directed his first partial translation in 2000 towards an LDS audience: Popol Vuh: The Mythic Sections. He describes the Popol Wuj “as the single best source of authentic Precolumbian [sic] history and religion from the New World outside the scriptural canon.”21 He subtitled a subsequent full translation in 2007 The Sacred Book of the Maya.22 Like Edmonson and Tedlock, Christenson emphasizes the poetic, parallel structure of the Popol Wuj, making this parallelism most apparent in a combined English and K'iche’ version he subtitled a Literal Poetic Version.23The embrace of the Popol Wuj as scripture in Guatemala stands in contrast to its deployment for primarily historical purposes by scholars of the Book of Mormon from the United States. Their approaches to this sacred narrative more closely resembled folklorization by evangelical Protestants than the sacralization of inculturation theologians described below. The prioritization of the historical claims of the Book of Mormon potentially undercuts the scripture's theological impact. Mormon scholarship on the Popol Wuj embodies settler colonial abuses of Indigenous traditions decried by Dakota historian Elise Boxer: “When the Book of Mormon is read and used as a literal history of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, tribal creation stories and histories become mythological stories that are seen as quaint or mythical and dismissed as fictional.” “When the Book of Mormon is branded as American Indian history,” she explains, “these creation stories are not just silenced, but are erased and replaced with stories that support the theory of recent migration to this continent.”24 Twentieth-century settler scholars of the Book of Mormon have exploited the Popol Wuj for what it can contribute to their historical claims, but do not ascribe to it a scriptural status comparable to that of the Bible.Brigham H. Roberts, a member of the LDS First Council of the Seventy from 1888–1933, was among the first Latter-day Saint scholars to turn to the Popol Wuj in his second volume of New Witnesses for God in 1903. His expressed intent was to “take up the most important facts and historical events of the Book of Mormon, and seek confirmation of them in American traditions and myths.” He called the Popol Wuj “the book of the Quiches of Gautemala [sic]” and “one of the most important of the native American books translated into modern languages.” He expressed his belief that it “exhibits the fact that the ancient Americans held in their traditions conceptions of creation found in Jewish scriptures.” Roberts favorably quotes Bancroft's summary of “the richest mythological legacy” whose “description of the creation . . . is in its rude, strange eloquence and poetic originality, one of the rarest relics of aboriginal thought.” After a lengthy quote from Bancroft's abridgment, Roberts concludes, “Notwithstanding some incongruities in the foregoing passage a comparison of it with the account of creation in Genesis will not fail to convince the thoughtful reader that the Quiche story of the creation, and that of Genesis doubtless had the same origin.”25 In this approach, the Book of Mormon serves as the standard of truth and Indigenous traditions serve as neocolonial validation of settler colonial history rather than standing holistically on their own cultural merit.Louis E. Hills from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ), writing between 1917 and 1924, was an early advocate of a limited geographic setting for the Book of Mormon in Mexico and Central America. Hills presumed the historical validity of the Book of Mormon and then molded Indigenous and Mestizo histories to fit his view of the past. Among those he consulted was Bancroft's abridged translation of the Popol Wuj. Hills stated, “Indian traditions and legends, handed down for about 2,000 years, would probably become distorted.” In response, he “condensed many quotations for the sake of brevity, and to better gather out facts from the mass of fables, thus getting a clearer picture of the true history by brushing away the cobwebs and dust of fiction, which have been accumulating for many centuries.”26 His approach epitomizes the settler colonial dismemberment of the integrity of Indigenous narratives in pursuit of the advancement of colonial authority.Another illustrative example of the use of the Popol Wuj from the early twentieth century comes from James W. LeSueur who interpreted the Book of Mormon events from a hemispheric perspective. LeSueur would play a critical role in the melding of Indigenous architectural models into the construction of the Mesa, Arizona, LDS temple in the 1920s. In 1934 he led a junior gospel doctrine class into Hieroglyphic Canyon where they listened to “Indian stories of the distant past” and then removed an 8,860 pound rock covered in petroglyphs from the vicinity of an “Indian shrine” and relocated it to the grounds of the recently dedicated temple.27 His 1928 book Indian Legends patronizes Indigenous people as “children” who pass “down through the ages a fairly accurate account of the dim past, hazy and misty with changes and additions, but with enough of the original history to give them a faint idea of the great early lives and doings of their forefathers.” He claims settler propriety over “Indian folklore” and draws from Bancroft to describe the “traditions of savages” as “valueless by themselves for a time more remote than one or two generations” unless they can be “ascertained by the records of some contemporary nation.” LeSueur removed both petroglyphs and the Popol Wuj from their Indigenous context and reframed them to legitimate the Book of Mormon's history and, in his own words, to learn “many good lessons . . . from our red-skin brethren.”28Milton R. Hunter, First Council of the Seventy from 1945–75, exemplifies LDS approaches from mid-century. He describes the Popol Wuj as “the Lamanite account of their history and religion” to complement the Book of Mormon as “the Nephite account.” “In this book,” Hunter writes, “the Quiché Maya Indians of Guatemala gave an account of the creation of the world, the origin of man, of the flood, of the confusion of tongues, and the coming of their ancestors from across the sea from the East.” He also likens the sanctified stone of the “Pizom-Gagal” from the Popol Wuj to the “Nephite Liahona,” a sacred directional device. He equates “Gucumatz” and “Tohil” from the Popol Wuj with “Quetzalcoatl,” the plumed serpent of Mexican tradition, and “Jesus Christ.” He racializes this divinity as a “White and Bearded God.” He concludes ethnocentrically, “Thus the Popol Vuh in many items sustains the teachings of the more beautiful and complete account of the history and religion of early Americans found in the Book of Mormon.”29Thomas Stuart Ferguson, a lawyer and founder of the New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF), published One Fold and One Shepherd in 1958. Ferguson drew from two English translations of K'iche’ texts by Delia Goetz, The Title of the Lords of Totonicapán and Popol Vuh, to construct the argument that the Book of Mormon was the “original and long-lost ‘Book of the Community’—the original Popol Vuh of the ancient colonizers.”30 He claims that these K'iche’ texts describe a “voyage of Israelites to America” in 587 B.C. He, too, finds a Liahona and a “Fair God” in these texts and quotes extended passages from creation and migration accounts to argue that ancient Maya had knowledge of the Old Testament.31A paradigm shift among professionally trained scholars of the Book of Mormon would occur over the next couple of decades. Important catalysts for these shifts include the publication of a series of articles on archaeology and historical problems with the Book of Mormon that appeared in Courage and Dialogue in the late 1960s and early 70s. LDS archaeologist Dee F. Green critiqued Hunter's scholarship as “well intentioned” but “inadequate, from a professional archaeologist's point of view” for its neglect of time and space and its distortions and misinterpretations of archaeological evidence.32 RLDS scholar Wayne Ham challenged scriptural historicity in a path-breaking article in the journal Courage. Expressing concerns about lack of archaeological support for the Book of Mormon, its nineteenth-century content, reliance on the King James Bible, and questionable morality linking curses to skin color and justifying murder and wars, Ham advocated treating the scripture as “a nonhistorical treatise in much the same manner as modern critics view the books of Jonah, Ruth, Job, and Daniel in the Old Testament.”33Preeminent anthropologist Michael Coe published a friendly but critical analysis of Book of Mormon archaeology in Dialogue. Coe states “not one professionally trained archaeologist, who is not a Mormon” accepts “the Book of Mormon as an accurate, historical account of the New World peoples between about 2,000 B.C. and A.D. 421.” He adds “quite a few Mormon archaeologists” likewise reject Book of Mormon historicity. He notes the lack of the flora, fauna, technology, and languages described in the Book of Mormon in an ancient American setting. He urged Mormons to “Forget the so-far fruitless quest for the Jaredites, Nephites, and Mulekites, and the lands of Zarahemla and Bountiful: there is no more chance of finding them than of discovering the bottomless pit described in the book of Revelations.”34Apparent disillusionment of Roberts and Ferguson contributed to this maelstrom. Knowledge spread that these prominent advocates for connections with the Popol Wuj had privately harbored more skepticism about the historical claims of Latter-day Saint scripture than their public positions indicated. Jerald and Sandra Tanner, through their Christian ministry, published copies of these controversial private manuscripts in 1980 and 1988.35 Historian Brigham D. Madsen edited two editions of Roberts's manuscripts as Studies of the Book of Mormon, published in 1985 and 1992.36 Stan Larson, an archivist at the University of Utah, analyzed and published Ferguson's discussion of archaeological problems with the Book of Mormon in 1996.37New Latter-day Saint approaches to the Popol Wuj emerged in the 1980s through an anthropologist and an art historian from BYU: John Sorenson and Allen J. Christenson. These scholars subtly rejected many of the parallels with the Popol Wuj proposed by previous generations and offered alternative ways of appropriating the narrative. Sorenson proposed a limited geographical setting in the vicinity of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with the Popol Wuj as a model for interpreting the Book of Mormon as a “lineage history.” In a series of articles for the Ensign magazine in 1984, he described the Popol Wuj as “the sacred book of the Quiche Maya,” a later version of older Mayan books, “most likely being a transliteration of a hieroglyphic original.” He alludes to its “ideas of death, resurrection, creation, and fate” without claiming specific parallels given their disjuncture in time and place. Sorenson acknowledges “limits of archaeology” and identifies the Popol Wuj as “a lineage history from highland Guatemala, [which] reports the invasion of a smallish body of warriors with Mexican cultural patterns who came to rule the land about six hundred years ago.”38 In a subsequent book, Sorenson presents Nahua-speaking lineages as colonizers subduing “the numerically superior Mayan locals” and eventually being “swallowed up by the basic population whom they had conquered.” In this reading, the Book of Mormon becomes “a partial record of events” in a small location that leaves little evidence of the cultures, ecologies, genes, technologies, and languages of a colonizing lineage eventually subsumed by a larger population.39 Sorenson represents the Indigenous Popol Wuj as a comparative colonialist example for legitimating this new interpretive model of the Book of Mormon.Sorenson and Christenson shifted attention away from historical correlations and toward parallel poetic structures, with particular attention to chiasmus. Sorenson described chiasmus as “an inverted type of parallelism” found “in the Book of Mormon and in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean texts.” He suggests that parallelism in the Popol Wuj is “reminiscent of the Hebrew language's forms, semantics, and textual style.”40 Christenson identifies sixteen different forms of parallelism within the Popol Wuj, one of which he calls “Chiasmus, or Reverse Parallelism.”41 In an article in the Ensign magazine from 1988, Christenson notes, “The initial section of the Popol Vuh, dealing with creation, is arranged as a single, large chiasmus.” Christenson concludes more cautiously than Sorenson: “At this point, one cannot establish a clear connection between Near Eastern use of chiasmus, its use in the Book of Mormon, and Mayan use of chiasmus. The presence of chiasmus in Mayan texts may only disclose that the rhetorical device can emerge independently in the writings of an isolated ancient culture.”42 Significant shifts in Mormon approaches to the Popol Wuj in the United States were already underway when I began my research in Guatemala.The advocacy of the Popol Wuj as an “other scripture” by a Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical authority in 1993 that opens this essay, needs to be understood within a larger ethnographic and historical context. To reiterate, this leader pointed to the story of the resurrected Christ's criticism of Nephites for neglecting to record “other scriptures” spoken of by Samuel the Lamanite. This passage from the Book of Mormon emphasizes the incompleteness and cultural bias of the Nephite record and by implication, the Christian canon more generally. He viewed the Popol Wuj as a necessary complement to the Christian Bible and drew from the extracanonical Book of Mormon to legitimate this position.This leader was the first of twenty-one interviewees with whom I was piloting and seeking constructive feedback on an oral survey about health attitudes related to interpretations of the Word of Wisdom.43 The local authority, as well as other members of an LDS ward, were much more interested in talking about the Popol Wuj than the Word of Wisdom. At his recommendation I added a couple of questions about the Popol Wuj to a survey otherwise focused on health. At that time in my own intellectual development I was more interested in the historical relationship between the Popol Wuj and the Book of Mormon and thus overlooked, at least in the development of my questions, the significance of his claim of its scriptural status.The twenty-one interviewees included twelve adult members who regularly attended church meetings, one who occasionally attended, and eight who attended no meetings over a period of four months that summer but were baptized members of record. Seven of the eight “inactive” interviewees still identified as Mormon, one as Catholic (noting she had only attended church once, for her baptism). The majority of interviewees had not completed the equivalent of high school, most having between six and twelve years of education. A couple had earned college degrees (including one from BYU) and had devoted considerable time to studying the Popol Wuj alongside the interpretations articulated by Latter-day Saint scholars from the United States. A third of the interviewees reported having read the Popol Wuj. All expressed familiarity with it and responded affirmatively to my question about whether there were similarities between the Popol Wuj and the Book of Mormon. Various interviewees specifically identified the presence of gods, creation, tower of Babel, wars, and chiasmus as historical connections between the two sacred texts. They pointed to similarities between Q'ukumatz (Quetzal Serpent) and Jesus, Juraqan (Hurricane or Heart of Sky) and the Trinity, and Wuqub’ Kaqix (Seven Macaw) and Satan; yet they readily acknowledged that the names varied between the accounts.44The local convergence of interest in the Popol Wuj reflected recent developments in Guatemala, as well as influence from setter Mormon interpretations. In 1971 the Guatemalan government officially declared the Popol Wuj a national book.45 Despite this embrace of Mayan literature, Guatemala was suffering through a thirty-six-year war (1961–96) in which the vast majority of casualties were Mayan. At the time of my ethnographic field work, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) and the military government were in the midst of peace talks in Oslo, Norway, that would culminate three years later in a set of final peace accords. References to the Popol Wuj, and/or the stories it contains, appeared prominently in highlan