This myth originates from the K'iche' manuscript the Popol Vuh, which recounts the Mayan creation myth. It is simply being retold here with the utmost respect in hopes that more people can experience this wonderful story.

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Once upon a time, there was a man called Hun Hunahpu, which means head spirit one, and he had a brother Vucub Hunahpu, which translates to head spirit seven. I do not really understand Mayan naming conventions but suffice to say that perhaps you ought to keep in mind that they are both called head spirit. Not trying to spoil anything, just suggesting that perhaps you ought to keep that in mind. 

 

Anyway, the crucial thing to remember about Hun and Vucub Hunahpu is that they loved gambling, loved shooting the hoops, and generally being annoying. They were semi-divine, so they could get away with it. Their parents, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane were very important beings and had been brought on in a consulting capacity in the creation of mankind. Huracon and Gucumatz, gods of the skies and seas respectively, had made a couple of prototypes, but there was naturally some bumps in the road: sometimes they didn’t have souls, sometime they were too sassy, sometimes they were animals. Truth be told they were a bit lost at this point, so they went to Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, beings older than the world, for help. 

 

‘Oh yeah,’ they said to Huracon and Gucumatz. ‘Well, you obviously gotta make the women out of reeds and the men out of wood.’ 

 

‘Thanks,’ said the other two gods, and to be fair, this did work, but again, these specimens displeased the gods, so they sent a flood to dispose of them and went back to the drawing boards. But nonetheless, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane still commanded a huge deal of respect and this probably allowed Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu quite a lot of leeway in terms of their bad behaviour. 

 

So one day they were playing ball somewhere, making an absolute racket. We should consider that necessarily the world is not as it seems, and also much like an onion it has layers. So the boys were on the middle layer, there was a top layer (the sky), and then a layer underneath the two of them called Xibalba. Xibalba was the place where all of the lords of death lived, and held their court, and was essentially just rather unpleasant. but you have to feel for them, because with the sheer amount of ball that Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu were playing, it was a bit like when your upstairs neighbours have got a new dance mat or a new girlfriend. Like you can constantly hear skuffling and it’s incredibly annoying. 

 

So the Lords of Xibalba sent a messenger to summon the boys. ‘Since you like playing ball so much, why don’t you come play at our court?’ they asked. 

 

The boys agreed that this was a good idea, and not a passive aggressive move on the parts of the Lord of Xibalba at all, and also, may I just mentioned that the Lords of Xibalba were death gods, concerning themselves personally with the furthering of the main two death god’s (Hun-Came and Vucub-Came, which respectively mean one death and seven death) personal agenda, and they all had off-putting names like Xiquiripat (‘flying scab’) and Cuhuamquic (‘gathering blood’) and Ahalpuh (‘pus demon.’)

 

So this went as about as well as you might expect when its inhabitants had named liked this. 

 

“Ha! Now you have to do a bunch of challenges which are obviously designed for you not to win.’ said one of the death lords. 

 

‘Oh fuck,’ said the brothers. and this is how their heads ended up on the calabash tree. 
𓁶

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Not much time later, Xquic, daughter of one of the Lords of Xibalba, which my computer keeps autocorrecting to squid, but does not mean squid, and in fact means blood maiden, noticed that a tree near her house was growing a curious, bulbous sort of fruit. 

 

Upon arrival at the tree, she saw that the fruit growing off of its otherwise barren branches were shaped liked a human skull. 

 

‘That’s creepy,’ she said, but she wasn’t altogether surprised, as she did live in the underworld.

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‘You should try one,’ said a voice. ‘They’re pretty okay.’

 

Xquic jumped, and looked up to the source of the noise. Wedged between the skeletal branches was a severed head of a man. His neck was still scraggy where it had been sliced from his body, but his face was still animate. he was very handsome, for a severed head - he would have been even more handsome if he had a body, and admittedly perhaps the bar was lower for severed heads. But Xquic caught herself staring. Again, this might have been partly due to the fact that he was a severed head, and she didn’t have much experience with talking severed heads, despite the environs she hailed from.

 

‘Oh, really?’ she said, in an incredibly high, quiet voice, because this whole situation was weird. 

 

‘Well, no, you can’t eat them, they’re poisonous’ 

 

Then why did you say they weren’t, thought Xquic in frustration, but quickly dismissed it as he was a severed head who lived up a tree and probably couldn’t be held to the same moral standards as everyone else. Like, you probably were going to be a bit of a dick if someone had cut your head off and put it in a tree. It’s fair enough. You WOULD be tetchy.

 

‘Hm,’ she said, not really bothered to make any more conversation. She reached out to take one of the skull shaped fruits, wanting to get a closer look. As her hand approached, the severed head began to laugh. Indeed, he was laughing with so much verve that a bit of spit went on her hand. 

 

‘What the fuck!’ Xquic said, quickly withdrawing her hand, and running away. That was quite enough of severed head shenanigans for today. 

 

‘By the way,’ the severed head shouted at her as she left, ‘my name’s Hun Hunahpu, and if you ever find yourself in trouble, you should go and see my mother Xmucane.’

 

Fat chance of that, she thought - what possible trouble could she get into?

 

𓁶

 

Well, that became clear about six months later, when the virgin Xquic found herself pregnant. She went through all of the options - had someone been putting spunk in her food, had she sleepwalked onto a cock, had she just forgotten? She narrowed them down one by one and came to the conclusion that the only thing that could have caused this mysterious pregnancy was when that wretched severed head spat on her hand. 

 

She went back to the tree to go and check, and the conversation went a bit like this:

 

‘Did you do this? is this yours?”

 

“Oh, yeah, haha, that was me”

 

“Why?” and then she stopped and thought that that was a silly question, ‘okay, yeah, it was probably a revenge thing, right?”

 

‘Haha, yeah, it was a revenge thing,’

 

And that was the end of that.

 

And then it all got a bit worse, as she got like, really big, like, oh, shit, this might be twins, big, and then she couldn’t hide it anymore, and she got exiled (for being a slut) and not just exiled but it was decreed that she must be sacrificed. All around a very bad, and very upsetting day for Xquic.

 

So out of Xibalba they led her. but they felt terribly bad about sacrificing the pregnant girl, because she was so young, and if you took her account on it, it wasn’t her fault. And also sacrificing anyone in the Mayan fashion is like, a massive faff, because you gotta cut out the heart and that takes forever and a day and is super messy. So they let her go and fashioned a heart out of tree sap to present to the Lords of Xibalba instead.

 

And on her way went Xquic, to find Xmucane. 

 

When she found her, she found a very grumpy woman. 

 

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I am your son’s … wife.’

 

‘Right, sure you are,’ said the old woman. ‘Prove it. Go and fill this bag with corn.’

 

‘Okay,’ said Xquic, not really seeing the link between the quest and the task. She was even more confused when she went into the garden, and it wasn’t full of corn. There was only one stalk of corn, and that is obviously not enough to go and fill a bag.

 

Xquic resorted to using magic, and to be quite honest, it said on the wiki page that she invoked two daybearers to do this, and I don’t really know what that is, and I couldn’t find any other sources for this part of the tale, or any explanation on the internet as to what a daybearer is, but suffice to say, it/they helped her fill the bag with corn (I think with magic) and Xmucane welcomed her, and she gave birth to twins, who would themselves become very important, and would avenge their father, and also become the moon and the sun. The end!