Zipacna

The ants came up out of the pit in a long bright column, and what they carried was hair. Behind them came others with fingernail parings. Four hundred young men leaned over the lip of the hole in the dusk and watched the procession climb, and told one another that the thing was finished, that the smell would follow within a day, that they could start the chicha now with clear consciences. Twenty feet below, in a side tunnel he had cut while pretending to dig his own grave, Zipacna sat trimming his nails with his teeth and feeding the ants.

He was the elder son of Vucub Caquix, the metal-toothed false sun who sat in the nance tree and announced himself as the light of the world, and of Chimalmat. His younger brother was Cabrakan, who made the mountains tremble. Zipacna made the mountains. All this happened before the first true dawn, in the long grey stretch when the world had been assembled but not yet lit, and most of what lived in it was noise. The father said, I am the sun. The younger brother said, I am the one who shakes the sky and makes the earth quake. Zipacna said, I am the one who made the earth, and his boast came with a list attached: Chigag, Hunahpú, Pecul, Yaxcanul, Macamob, Huliznab. They are volcanoes of the Guatemalan highlands. He raised them in one night and then played ball with them.

Nobody recorded what he looked like. The K’iche’ book that carries his story gives him no hide, no jaw, no tail, no size; he lifts a ridgepole four hundred men cannot shift, and later he squeezes into a cave mouth with only the soles of his feet showing, which are the closest thing to a physical measurement anyone ever wrote down about him. The crocodile came later, and sideways. His name looks like the Nahuatl word cipactli, the great scaled thing whose back is the surface of the world, and Maya art is full of that creature: the earth as a caiman floating in water, mountains standing on its ridged spine. Set the name beside the iconography and a shape suggests itself. It is a good guess. It is still a guess, and the text is silent.

By day he waded the river shallows for crabs and small fish, which were the whole of his diet. By night he carried mountains on his back. That was the shape of his life, and it went on undisturbed until an afternoon when he was bathing at the river’s edge and four hundred youths came past, sweating, dragging a felled tree meant to be the ridgepole of the house they were building. He asked what they were doing. They said they could not lift it. He put it on one shoulder and carried it to their door.

They talked it over that night and decided he could not be allowed to live. It is not good, they said, that one man should be able to do this. So they dug a pit, very deep, and told him kindly that they liked him very much and needed him to go down and dig out the last of the earth, since they could not reach the bottom. He went down. He also understood exactly what they intended, and while he dug he opened a second shaft off to the side and slipped into it. When he called up that the work was done, they threw the log in. It landed with a thud. He screamed once, convincingly, and then went quiet, and they crouched over the hole with their hands over their mouths, waiting for a second scream that never came.

Three days of brewing followed, and then the drinking. When the last of them had passed out on the floor of their new house, Zipacna came up out of the ground and pulled it down on top of them. Not one of the four hundred survived. They went into the sky and became the cluster the K’iche’ call Motz, the Handful, which the rest of the world knows as the Pleiades, though the Popol Vuh reports even this with a shrug and adds that it may not be true.

Hunahpú and Xbalanqué took the deaths personally. They had already shot Vucub Caquix out of his fruit tree and would deal with Cabrakan afterwards, but Zipacna was the one who had murdered four hundred at a stroke, and they went at him through the only opening he had. They made a crab. The belly they built from the broad leaf of the ec plant, the claws from pahac, and for the shell they used a stone, and they set the thing at the back of a cave at the foot of a hill called Meauan and left it there showing its red back. Then they wandered down to the river and found him.

He had not eaten in two days. They mentioned, with elaborate reluctance, an enormous crab in a ravine nearby, and said they would not go near it again because it had bitten them. He begged them to show him. He reached in headfirst and could not get at it. He backed out, thought about it, and went in again from above, on his back, and when only his feet were still showing the hill came down slowly onto his chest. He never came out. He was changed into stone.

His powers all ran the same direction: outward and downward, into the earth. He could raise ground, move ground, hide inside ground, and bring a building down by removing the one thing holding it up. His cunning was real and specific, the cunning of somebody who has spent his life underneath things, which is why the pit trap failed and why the ants worked so beautifully. What he could not manage was the surface. He needed to be admired, so he carried the log; he needed to eat, so he crawled into a hole two strangers pointed him at without once asking why they had been near it. He died hungry, in the dark, at the invitation of children. The mountains he made are still there, and the hill that fell on him has his weight in it somewhere, and the four hundred come up over the ridge of them every year in their season.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zipacna in Maya mythology?

Zipacna is a monstrous earth being from the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala. He is the elder son of the false sun Vucub Caquix and of Chimalmat, and the older brother of the earthquake-maker Cabrakan. He claimed to have created the earth itself and named six mountains he raised in a single night.

How did Zipacna kill the Four Hundred Boys?

Four hundred youths tried to murder Zipacna by luring him into a deep pit and dropping a huge log on him, but he had secretly dug a side tunnel and hid in it. He faked his own death by crying out once and letting ants carry his cut hair and fingernails up to the surface as evidence. Three days later, while the boys lay drunk celebrating, he emerged and collapsed their new house on top of them, killing all four hundred.

How was Zipacna defeated?

The Hero Twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué killed Zipacna by exploiting his hunger. They built a fake crab from the leaf of the ec plant, pahac for the claws and a stone for the shell, hid it in a cave at the foot of a mountain called Meauan, then told the starving Zipacna about an enormous crab in the ravine. When he crawled in after it, the mountain settled onto his chest and he was turned to stone.

Was Zipacna really a giant crocodile?

The Popol Vuh never describes Zipacna’s appearance, so the popular image of him as a huge caiman is an inference rather than a description. It rests on his name, which is usually traced to the Nahuatl word cipactli for the crocodilian earth monster, and on the widespread Maya conception of the earth as a great crocodile with mountains along its back. The connection is plausible, but the K’iche’ text itself says nothing about how he looked.

What happened to the Four Hundred Boys after they died?

According to the Popol Vuh, the four hundred youths killed by Zipacna rose into the sky and became the star cluster the K’iche’ call Motz, identified with the Pleiades. The text is unusually cautious about this detail and adds that it may not be true. Their deaths are the reason the Hero Twins hunted Zipacna down.

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Vucub Caquix, Camazotz, Huracán, Vucub Came and Hun Came, Camulatz, Xecotcovach, Tecumbalam, Itzamna, Kukulkan, Vision Serpent, Chac, Cipactli, Atlas, Typhon, Pleiades