Xibalba

Also Known As: K’iche’ Xib’alb’a, Place of Fear, from the root meaning to frighten; the underworld of the Popol Vuh, ruled by twelve lords of death and disease; the Yucatec Maya equivalent is Metnal
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It is a court rather than a punishment, and everything in it, including the six houses of trial and the ballcourt, exists to make visitors lose.
Role in Mythos: It is the underworld the Hero Twins go down into, and the only place in Maya myth that is comprehensively defeated and demoted in the course of a story.
Relation to Humans: Before the twins it could take anyone it wanted, by disease or by summons. After they finished with it, it was told that it would receive only sap instead of blood, worn-out pots instead of offerings, and only the guilty instead of anyone.

The road goes down by steps, steep ones, and comes out on the banks of two canyons named Trembling and Murmuring. After those there is a river full of scorpions, and then a river of blood, and then a river that is nothing but pus. None of these is meant to stop anyone; the first travellers walk through all three without being touched, because the trick is simply not to drink. They are there so that a person arrives already unnerved, and the first real test is the one nobody notices: four roads meeting, red and white and yellow and black, and the black one speaks up and says take me, I am the lord’s road.

Everyone takes it. Black is the colour of the west, the direction the sun goes when it goes under.

Xibalba is the underworld of the K’iche’ Maya, written down in the Popol Vuh in highland Guatemala in the middle of the sixteenth century by men who had already watched the Spanish arrive. The name means Place of Fear, built on the root for fright, and modern K’iche’ speakers still use the word for a hell full of the demons that make people ill. Painted pots from six centuries earlier and hundreds of miles away show the same scenes, so the place was not invented by the writers of the book.

What arrives first about it, reading the text, is how bureaucratic it is. Xibalba has a roster. At the head sit One Death and Seven Death. Under them, in named pairs with defined portfolios, come Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon, whose business is to make men swell and go yellow. Bone Staff and Skull Staff, the staff bearers, who reduce people to bones bloated with starvation. Flying Scab and Gathered Blood. Sweepings Demon and Stabbings Demon, who deal in sudden death behind the house and in the rubbish. Wing and Packstrap, who kill men on the road. Bloody Teeth and Bloody Claws. Twelve lords, each with a department, running what amounts to a public health service in reverse.

The court has a joke waiting at the door. Seated among the living lords are effigies carved in wood, dressed and arranged to look exactly like them, and visitors are expected to greet the whole row politely and thereby humiliate themselves in front of everybody. The next courtesy is an invitation to sit down on the bench, which turns out to be a very hot stone. After that comes the Dark House, and the torch and the two cigars, which must burn all night and be handed back in the morning unused.

The houses of trial are listed and named and there are six of them. The House of Darkness, which contains nothing but darkness. The Shivering House, thick with frost, where a wind laden with hail rattles through the interior. The House of Jaguars, full of captive jaguars snapping and crowding each other. The House of Bats, where the bats shriek and cannot get out. The House of Blades, with rows of alternating blades that clash and clatter against each other. The Popol Vuh notes that the first generation of visitors never even got as far as these; the houses are simply names to them, because they were finished at the crossroads.

Underneath all of it is a ballcourt, and it is the ballcourt that gives the whole place its motive. The lords do not hunt. They listen. Two brothers playing ball too noisily on the road above are heard through the floor of the world, and the summons goes up because the noise is taken as disrespect. The messengers who carry it are four owls: Arrow Owl, who is piercing like an arrow, One Leg Owl, Macaw Owl with his red back, and Skull Owl, who is a skull with wings and no legs at all. What Xibalba wants from the living is a game it can win.

It is very good at winning. The first pair of brothers to come down are defeated at the crossroads, defeated by the hot bench, defeated by the torch and the cigars, sacrificed and buried at a court called Crushing Ballcourt, and one of their heads is hung in a tree as an ornament. The tree bears fruit for the first time in its life, and the head becomes indistinguishable from the calabashes, and the lords order that nobody go near it. Their own trophy is what eventually ruins them, because a daughter of one of the lords disobeys and comes to look.

Two generations later the sons of that head come down the same road, take the place apart, and hand down a sentence. The Popol Vuh has them speak it in full and it reads like a demotion notice. No more clean blood; croton sap instead. No more proper offerings; worn-out griddles and pots, brittle things, things of no importance. Only the creatures of the grass and the wastelands to eat. Never again the children of the light. From now on you may have the sinner, the wretch, the malevolent, the one who has clearly done something, and nobody else, and you will no longer be able to seize just any person suddenly.

Then the book says the thing that makes this underworld unlike almost any other. Their glory was never great, it says. They were not true gods. Their names merely inspired fear.

The powers of the place are precisely those of a court with unlimited jurisdiction and a rigged procedure. It can summon anyone. It can kill by disease, by starvation, by sudden violence on the road, and it has staff assigned to each method. Its tests do not have to be fair, and for most of the book they are not. Its geography works on visitors before its lords do.

Its weaknesses are the ones any institution has. It relies on the visitor not knowing the rules, so a mosquito that makes the lords say their own names out loud costs it half its advantage. It relies on being feared, so two performers who are already dead have nothing left to threaten. And it wants entertainment badly enough that its two highest lords ask to be killed in front of an audience. After that the vassals pack themselves into a ravine, ants pour in after them, and the whole court kneels down and asks for pity, which the book records without any sympathy at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Xibalba?

Xibalba is the underworld of the K’iche’ Maya as described in the Popol Vuh. The name means Place of Fear, and it is ruled by twelve lords of death and disease, headed by One Death and Seven Death. It contains a ballcourt and a set of named houses of trial, and it is reached by a road through rivers of blood and pus.

Who rules Xibalba?

Twelve lords, working in pairs with assigned specialities. One Death and Seven Death lead them. Below are Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon, Bone Staff and Skull Staff, Flying Scab and Gathered Blood, Sweepings Demon and Stabbings Demon, Wing and Packstrap, and Bloody Teeth and Bloody Claws, between them covering swelling, wasting, sudden death and death on the road.

What are the houses of Xibalba?

Six named trials: the House of Darkness, the Shivering House full of frost and howling wind, the House of Jaguars, the House of Bats, and the House of Blades, along with the Dark House where visitors must keep a torch and cigars burning all night and return them unused. Not every visitor reaches them.

How is Xibalba defeated?

The Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque survive the tests by preparation and trickery, then have themselves killed and return in disguise as performers with an act in which one revives the other. When One Death and Seven Death ask for the same treatment, the twins kill them without reviving them, and the rest of Xibalba surrenders.

Is Xibalba the same as the Aztec Mictlan?

They are separate underworlds from separate traditions, though they are often compared. The Yucatec Maya equivalent of Xibalba is called Metnal, a name generally taken to come from the Aztec Mictlan. Xibalba itself is specifically the K’iche’ underworld of the Popol Vuh, with its own named lords, houses and ballcourt.