Xecotcovach

Also Known As: also Xecotcowach, Xekotkowach; rendered by Dennis Tedlock as “Gouger of Faces”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Xecotcovach takes the eyes, and that single act is the whole of his recorded power.
Role in Mythos: He is the first of four destroyers sent against the wooden people when the K’iche’ gods dismantled their second attempt at humanity.
Relation to Humans: He does not bargain, tempt, or test; he arrives inside a divine sentence of destruction and carries out one part of it. The people he unmakes are not our ancestors but a discarded draft of us, so his violence falls on a humanity that failed before ours began.

The rain that ended the second world was not water. A heavy resin came down out of a sky gone the colour of ash, thick and clinging, and afterwards the light failed so completely that a black rain went on falling through what should have been morning. The wooden people stood in it with their faces turned up. They had hands and children, dogs and cooking fires, houses with thatch on them, and behind their eyes there was nothing at all. Then something came down through the resin and took the eyes anyway.

Xecotcovach gets one clause in the *Popol Vuh*. He came, he gouged out their eyes, and the sentence moves straight on to the next of the four without pausing. Camalotz took the heads. Cotzbalam ate the flesh. Tucumbalam broke the bones and the sinews and ground what was left to crumbs. Four arrivals, four verbs, one short paragraph, and the second attempt at humanity is finished.

The K’iche’ creation account is a record of failed drafts, and the wooden people were the one that lasted longest. Mud had come first and would not hold its shape; it softened and slumped and went back into the ground. So the makers tried wood. The men were carved from tz’ite, the coral tree; the women were shaped from rushes. This time the material held. The figures walked, married, filled the earth with sons and daughters. What they could not do was remember. They never lifted their faces to the ones who had made them, never spoke to Heart of Heaven, never kept a single day in his name. For that, and only that, they were unmade, and Xecotcovach is one of the four instruments of the unmaking.

Nobody knows what he looked like. The manuscript gives a name and an action and stops, which has left three centuries of readers working backwards from the word itself. Francisco Ximenez, the Dominican friar who copied the K’iche’ text at Chichicastenango around 1701 and whose transcription is the only reason any of this survives, thought there was a bird buried in the name, an eagle or a sparrow hawk, on the strength of *cot*. Dennis Tedlock, translating three centuries later, gave the name as Gouger of Faces, which tells you what the thing does and nothing about what it is. Allen Christenson, who produced the most literal English version available, says plainly that these four enemies are difficult to identify. Eduard Seler looked at four monstrous figures on folio forty-four of the Codex Borgia and thought he recognised the set. That is the whole file.

The other three help a little, in the way that neighbours help. Camalotz is transparently the death bat, the great creature that will later take Hunahpu’s head off his shoulders in the second part of the book, so that name at least sits on solid ground. Cotzbalam reads as a jaguar lying in wait for prey. Tucumbalam has been taken for the tapir, and by Seler for something closer to a shark or a crocodile. Beside them Xecotcovach stays the vaguest of the set, which is an odd fate for the one who goes first.

If Ximenez had the bird right, the work would have looked a great deal like feeding. A body pinned in the wet resin, wings braced wide for balance, the head coming down twice with the neat economy of a bird stripping seed from a husk, then the lift and the beat of air and the next one.

What followed was worse, and it needed none of the four. The wooden people’s own belongings turned on them. The grinding stones came up off the floor complaining about the noise they had been made to make, holi holi, huqui huqui, every dawn and every night for years. The griddles and the pots came off the fire still black with soot and announced that they would do the burning now. The dogs, who had been kicked away from the table and struck with sticks while their owners ate, asked why they had never been fed, and then stopped asking. The hearthstones threw themselves straight out of the embers at the heads of the people who had heaped them there.

They ran. They climbed for the rooftops and the houses came down under them, went for the treetops and the branches threw them off, made for the caves and the caves shut their mouths against them. The ones who survived that night are said to be the monkeys in the forest, which is why a monkey looks so much like a person and is not one.

Xecotcovach’s power is narrow and absolute. He takes sight, and he takes it first, before the head and the flesh and the bone are dealt with. The wooden people’s entire failure had been a failure to see who made them.

His limits are the limits of an instrument. He has no will of his own and no story of his own. Nothing is offered to him, no day in the calendar carries his name, no lineage claims him, and he never appears again in the book after the paragraph that summons him. He cannot arrive unless Heart of Heaven sends the flood, and when the resin stops falling he stops with it. He has no purchase at all on the humanity that came next. The people of maize opened their eyes and saw to the four corners of the earth, and it was the gods themselves, not any of the four destroyers, who breathed mist across that sight like breath on a mirror and drew the horizon in close. Sight was taken twice in this book. Only once did it need a beak.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xecotcovach in the Popol Vuh?

Xecotcovach is one of four destroyers the K’iche’ Maya gods sent to annihilate the wooden people, the failed second creation described in the Popol Vuh. He gouged out their eyes. He appears in a single sentence alongside Camalotz, Cotzbalam and Tucumbalam, and never returns to the narrative.

What did Xecotcovach do to the wooden people?

Xecotcovach tore out the eyes of the wooden people during the flood of resin that ended their world. He acted first among the four destroyers, before Camalotz cut off their heads, Cotzbalam devoured their flesh, and Tucumbalam ground their bones to crumbs.

Is Xecotcovach a bird?

The Popol Vuh never says what Xecotcovach looked like. The bird identification comes from Francisco Ximenez, the Dominican friar who copied the manuscript around 1701, who thought the name contained the K’iche’ word for eagle and guessed at an eagle or sparrow hawk. Later scholars have not settled the question, and Allen Christenson notes that all four destroyers are difficult to identify.

Why were the wooden people destroyed?

The wooden people were destroyed because they had no memory of their makers. They walked, married and multiplied, but never spoke to Heart of Heaven or kept any day in his name, so the gods sent a flood, a rain of resin and the four destroyers to erase them. Their surviving descendants are said to be the monkeys of the forest.

Who were the other three destroyers in the Popol Vuh?

The other three were Camalotz, who cut off the heads of the wooden people and is generally identified with the death bat; Cotzbalam, read as a jaguar that lies in wait for prey; and Tucumbalam, taken variously for a tapir or, in Eduard Seler’s reading, a shark or crocodile. All four are named only in this one passage of the destruction.