Four Creations: An Epic Story of the Chiapas Mayas

Four Creations is a collection of seventy-four stories told to Gary H. Gossen by Tzotzil Maya storytellers in San Juan Chamula, Mexico. Spanning four cycles of creations, destructions, and restorations from the dawn of cosmic order to the present era, this epic history reveals a distinctly Maya vision of the universe, grand in scope yet leavened with local humor, irony, and the Tzotzil narrators' own critical commentaries.This story -- like all classic epics -- is hardly a pristine relic of the past. It relates events from ancient times with the goal of illuminating the present. Four Creations includes mythic accounts of modern history, such as the Wars of Independence, the Mexican Revolution, and the current Protestant evangelical movement. Presented in both transcribed Tzotzil and English translations, the texts are enlivened by more than one hundred Maya Indian drawings and by Gossen's extensive ethnographic and historical notes based on his conversations with the narrators. The result of five years of field research and more than thirty-five years of study, this volume matches the epic scope of the sixteenth-century K'iche' Maya epic, the Popol Vuh.Miguel Leon-Portilla's Foreword situates Four Creations within the broader context of Mesoamerican culture and traditions, while the Afterword by Jan Rus relates this work to recent events in modern-day Chamula.