What It Means to be Human Theme Analysis

Because one of the primary problems the gods face is the question of how to create humans, the Popol Vuh is necessarily concerned with discovering what makes humans humanlike, gods godlike, and what makes either humans or gods into the best version of themselves. At the beginning of the Popol Vuh, after the gods draw land out of the ocean, they decide that they must next create humans to take care of the land, multiply, and worship them. These qualities become the defining qualities of humanity, and beings' success in completing those tasks offers the gods a way to decide if the beings they've created are appropriately human or not.

The gods first create animals as stewards of the land. Though the text implies that the animals will be able to care for the land, they fail miserably when the gods ask them to speak and praise their creators: all they can do is chatter and squawk. After this failure to praise the gods, the gods relegate the animals to being food for the humans they'll later create. Next, the gods create a human out of mud, which is a failure on all fronts, and then carve reasonably successful humans out of wood. The wood humans are able to both care for the land and multiply, but like the animals, they fail to worship their creators and acknowledge their origins when asked. The way that both the wood people and the animals are considered failures at humanity illustrates just how important worship is to the Mayan conception of what it means to be human: per the logic of the text, the wood people in particular are human in every way except in their inability to worship, which automatically categorizes them as not-human. This also suggests that per the gods' list of appropriately human attributes, the state of being human is a state of service. The gods desire human beings to perform acts of service for the land, for each other, and for the gods themselves. With this firmly established as an absolute necessity, the gods abandon their quest for a period of time while they go about shaping more of the world.

When the gods finally create the first four humans, the humans are described as perfect: they talk, they listen, they work and walk around. They're handsome and are able to see the entire world, and when asked, the humans thank their creators for making them. However, the gods quickly find a problem with these first four humans: unlike their other creations, these people are too perfect because they understand everything. To the gods, this suggests that these humans have the capacity to become divine themselves, which would therefore keep the humans from being properly devout. To fix this flaw, the gods blind them "as the face of a mirror is breathed upon," limiting the humans' sight and understanding. This means that the humans will need to spend their lives searching for meaning and understanding through their devotion to their creators, and by extension, through the study of the Popol Vuh itself. With this, the text declares that to be human is to not know, and to consequently strive towards understanding.

Through the gods' quest to create humans, the Popol Vuh doesn't just offer a simple recipe for humanity. Because the gods spend much of the book trying and failing to create humans in addition to their other trials and tribulations, the Popol Vuh also humanizes the very creators of humanity. In this way, though the Popol Vuh maintains that humans must be devout, care for the land, and multiply, it also makes it abundantly clear that to be human is to search, to try, and to ask questions about the world and one's role in it.