Vucub Came and Hun Came

Also Known As: K’iche’ Wuqub’ Kame’ and Jun Kame’, “Seven Death” and “One Death”; Hun-Camé and Vucub-Camé in Recinos, One Death and Seven Death in Christenson
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: They preside over the twelve-lord council of Xibalba and every sickness it deals out, and their paired calendar names stand for all thirteen days that carry the sign of Death.
Role in Mythos: They summon the living down into the underworld, break them in the six trial houses and the ball court, and are finally killed by the Hero Twins, which ends the absolute rule of death over the world.
Relation to Humans: They once received human blood and hearts, and sent owl messengers up through the earth to fetch whoever they wanted. After their defeat their offerings were cut down to burnt croton resin and small creatures, and their reach was limited to the guilty and the already broken.

The noise came down through the floor of the world. Two brothers were playing ball on a court above the roots, and the slap of rubber on packed earth carried into a cavern where twelve lords sat in council and were not accustomed to interruption. One Death and Seven Death did not go up to see who it was. They sent owls.

That was how business was done in Xibalba. The road there dropped down flights of steep steps to a river running fast between ravines, then through water crawling with scorpions, then across a river of blood and a river of pus, neither of which could be tasted. At the bottom four roads met, red and white and yellow and black, and it was the black one that carried a visitor into the council chamber. Anyone who arrived had already been worked on by the journey. That was the point.

Inside, the lords kept a small humiliation ready for arrivals. Two figures sat at the head of the stone bench, dressed and ornamented exactly like rulers, and a guest who had come all that way would greet them properly by name and get nothing back, because they were carved wood. The council enjoyed that. Then came the offer of a seat, on a bench heated until it scorched, and then a night in the House of Darkness with a burning pine torch and a lit cigar and instructions to hand both back at dawn in the condition they were given.

Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, the ballplayers, failed that first test in the most ordinary way possible. The torch burned down. The cigar went to ash. They were sacrificed and buried together in the court, and Hun Hunahpu’s head was cut off and set in the fork of a calabash tree that had never carried fruit in its life. It fruited immediately, and the head became one gourd among hundreds, which was the closest thing to mercy anyone got out of that chamber.

A young woman named Blood Moon, daughter of the lord Gathered Blood, went to look at the tree. The skull spoke to her, told her that a face is only a skull with flesh on it, and spat into her open palm, and she was pregnant. Her father brought the matter to the council, and the lords ordered her heart cut out and brought to them in a bowl. The four owl messengers took her out with a white flint blade and could not do it. She showed them the red sap bleeding from a croton tree, and they let it clot into a knot the size and colour of what was wanted, and carried it back. The lords set it over the coals and leaned in over the sweetness coming off it, pleased with themselves. They had just been handed the exact terms of their own future, and they breathed them in.

Her sons were Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and the summons reached them in time. Before entering the chamber Hunahpu plucked a hair from his own leg, made a mosquito of it, and sent it ahead down the black road. The mosquito bit the two wooden lords, which did not so much as twitch. Then it bit One Death, who yelped, and the lord beside him used his name asking what was wrong. It went down the bench that way until every one of the twelve had been named aloud by a neighbour. The twins walked in, ignored the manikins, refused the hot bench, and greeted all twelve lords correctly by name. A god who can be named is a god who can be handled.

The houses came next and did nothing. The blades in the House of Knives were talked into stillness with a promise of animal flesh. The jaguars were given bones to chew. The cold and the fire were survived. In the House of Bats, Camazotz took Hunahpu’s head off at the neck and it was hung up over the court to be used as the ball, and the twins swapped in a carved squash and got the real head back before the game ended, which is the sort of thing that happens once and never again.

Then the twins did something the lords could not follow. They allowed themselves to be burned alive in a stone pit, and their bones were ground fine as maize flour and poured into the river, and they came back out of it. They returned as two ragged dancers nobody recognised, performing miracles for small coins: burning a house that did not burn, killing each other and standing up again. Word of it reached the chamber, and the chamber wanted a show.

The dance was performed. One Death and Seven Death watched a man opened and emptied and put back together, and it was not enough to watch. Do it to us, One Death said. So they laid him on the floor, took out his heart, and left him there. Seven Death was next, and by then he was pleading instead of ordering, and it made no difference. Neither of them got up.

The Popol Vuh never says what they looked like. It gives their court, their messengers, their sound effects and their two wooden stand-ins, which makes for a strange sort of portrait: the only likeness of One Death and Seven Death in the entire book is a forgery. Their names are not descriptions either. They are dates. Kame is a day in the K’iche’ count, sharing its root with the word for a dead person, and Dennis Tedlock notes that combining the numbers one and seven with a day name is a conventional way of indicating all thirteen days that bear it, so the two of them together stand for the whole of Death as the calendar keeps it. The K’iche’ linguist Sam Colop reads the same pair as beginning and end. In the story they sit, speak, give orders and lose their tempers like anyone else. Underneath that they are a unit of time.

Their power was never muscle. It was administration. Under them worked ten lords whose specialities were the mechanics of dying: Pus Maker and Jaundice Maker to swell a body and rot it, Bone Staff and Skull Staff to waste it down to a skeleton, Flying Scab and Gathered Blood to spoil the blood, Hawk and Tumpline to squeeze a throat and a heart until both burst. They owned the roads, the six houses, the court where the ball was not rubber but a blade of bone, and the right to call anyone down at any hour. They ate blood.

What they lacked was any defence against being read. A rigged trial is still a trial, and rules can be answered by anyone patient enough to learn them. They needed to be greeted, needed the manikins to work, needed their names kept quiet, needed an audience. A hair off a boy’s leg took the names. And when the surviving lords finally lay face down on the floor of their own chamber and surrendered, the terms were the ones already set by that knot of resin years earlier: no more human hearts, only croton smoke and small creatures, and from then on they could have the guilty and the weak and nobody else. One Death and Seven Death did not hear it. They had asked to see the trick done on themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Vucub Came and Hun Came?

Vucub Came and Hun Came, Seven Death and One Death, are the two supreme lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld described in the K’iche’ Popol Vuh. They head a council of twelve death lords, ten of whom hold specific portfolios of disease and injury. Their names come from the K’iche’ calendar day Kame, meaning death.

How did Hunahpu and Xbalanque defeat One Death and Seven Death?

The Hero Twins beat them by preparation rather than force. They sent a mosquito made from a hair off Hunahpu’s leg to bite each lord and learn all twelve names, survived the six trial houses, then let themselves be burned and ground to powder so they could return in disguise as dancers who could kill a man and revive him. One Death and Seven Death demanded the trick be performed on them, and the twins killed them and simply left them dead.

What happened to Xibalba after the death lords were killed?

The surviving lords surrendered and their offerings were cut down permanently. Instead of human blood and hearts they received burnt croton resin, other resins and small creatures, and their power over people was restricted to the guilty and the weak. Death continued, but it no longer ruled without limit.

What did Vucub Came and Hun Came look like?

No source describes them. The Popol Vuh details their council chamber, their owl messengers and the pair of carved wooden manikins dressed as lords that sat beside them to fool visitors, but it never gives their faces or bodies, so any depiction of them is invention rather than record.

Why are their names numbers?

Kame is one of the twenty day names in the K’iche’ calendar and is tied to the word for a dead person. Pairing the numbers one and seven with a day name is a standard K’iche’ way of indicating all thirteen days that carry that name, so One Death and Seven Death together represent the day Death in its entirety rather than two individuals in the ordinary sense.