2024-08-04 18:00:10
In the beginning was the ball. In the Popol Vuhthe great Mayan mythological text, one of the most important stories features two brothers bouncing a ball. Playful but noisy, this activity disturbs the tenants below, the lords of Xibalba, the underworld, realm of the dead in Mesoamerican cosmology. Summoned to Xibalba to play a game, the two brothers are subjected to a series of trials from which they emerge losers and are executed. One of their heads is placed in a tree, which is covered with fruit. This phenomenon worries the kings, who forbid anyone from walking under the tree.
But, as in every myth, a ban is made to be broken, so a young Xibalbian princess goes under the tree – any resemblance to another fruit tree and another disobedient mythical woman is purely coincidental – and receives spit from the severed head in her hand. She becomes pregnant, is banished and gives birth to twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanqué. Now grown up, they too play ball and are summoned underground, but they triumph over the trials, win two games of ball and, after many ups and downs, end up killing the kings of Xibalba. Hunahpu and Xbalanqué then retrieve the remains of their father and uncle, who ascend to heaven for an apotheosis: One becomes the Sun and the other, the Moon.
This story involves several chapters of the Popol Vuh and highlights the symbolism surrounding the ball game: “The playing field is a membrane separating the world of humans from that of the gods,” said Steve Bourget, head of the Americas collections at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques-Chirac in Paris. It can also be seen as a symbol of the subterranean world itself, as much a place of death as of renewal since it is from here that seeds germinate. At the time of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica – formerly known by the misnomer of Aztecs, which became Mexico City after the Spanish conquest – the playing field was located within the city’s sacred precincts, next to the Templo Mayor (Main Temple), the most important religious building. At its summit, in the evening, the sun could be seen setting, burying itself in the axis of the field.
The game itself was a means of conversing with the gods, and the death – or sacrifice – of the losers resulted from a divine choice. Without this powerful symbolic apparatus, it’s impossible to understand an activity that spanned three millennia, several cultural shifts and a vast territory. “The oldest known playing field dates back to 1500 BC, at the Paso de la Amada site in Chiapas,” pointed out Eric Taladoire, professor emeritus of archaeology at Université Paris-I. “This was the era of the pre-Olmec Mokaya group. They would have been the inventors of the game.”
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