Seven Macaw Declares Himself the Sun

Seven Macaw lives before the sun exists.

In the era when the world is still being prepared for the current age, when the first failed creations have already been cleared away and the corn-people have not yet been made, Seven Macaw sits in his nanche tree and surveys everything and decides that he is the sun. His feathers are metallic. His eyes are silver, catching whatever light there is in the grey pre-dawn world. His teeth are of jade and turquoise. When he moves, he glitters.

I am the sun and the moon, he says. All people see my silver eyes, they see my face shining. Therefore, I am the light to the days and the light to the nights.

This is pride so complete it has become a form of self-delusion. The Popol Vuh does not say he knows he is lying. He seems to believe it. He has so thoroughly identified himself with what he resembles — brightness, elevated position, conspicuousness — that he cannot distinguish between the attribute and the thing itself.

But the true sun does not yet exist, and in the absence of the true sun, Seven Macaw’s pretension fills a vacuum. People, in the vague era before the corn-people, orient themselves toward his glitter. This is the problem. A false light that people navigate by is more dangerous than darkness, because it sends them in the wrong direction with the confidence of those who think they can see.

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Hunahpú and Xbalanqué are young.

They are not yet the figures who will descend to Xibalbá and defeat the lords of death. They are still learning. But they know that Seven Macaw must be brought down — the Popol Vuh says their task is to remove him, to clear the false light before the true sun can rise.

They shoot him from his tree with a blowgun.

The pellet hits Seven Macaw in the jaw. He falls from the nanche tree but he is not killed — he grabs Hunahpú as he falls and wrenches the arm off at the shoulder, pulling the arm with him to his house while the twins scatter. Hunahpú sits in the forest with one arm and they have to think about how to get it back.

They come to Seven Macaw’s house disguised as old people, an elderly healer couple. Seven Macaw is in enormous pain — his jaw is shattered, his tooth hurts, he can barely eat. The old couple offer to heal him. They say they are tooth-pullers, dentists, healers of jaw injuries.

Seven Macaw opens his mouth.

They take out his jeweled teeth and replace them with white corn — just corn, plain white kernels, the same material from which the true people will eventually be made. They take out his silver eyes. With the jewels and the silver gone, Seven Macaw’s magnificence drains away. He grows pale. He diminishes.

He dies.

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Chimalmat, his wife, dies with him. Their sons — Zipacná and Cabrakan — still threaten the world, but Seven Macaw himself is finished. The false sun goes out.

What the twins have done is precise. They have not destroyed Seven Macaw’s beauty by force — they have restored it to its proper material. His teeth were always just teeth; they were beautiful because he was alive, not because of the jade embedded in them. His eyes were always just eyes; they could see but they were not the source of light. The jewels and the silver were impositions on the natural thing, additions that his vanity had accumulated until they replaced the original.

The corn-kernel teeth are not a punishment. They are a restoration. Seven Macaw, in his last hours, has teeth made of the same material as the people who will inherit the world he falsely claimed to illuminate.

The nanche tree stands empty.

The slot where the false sun sat is now vacant, and into that vacancy the true sun will eventually rise — the sun that is not a glittering bird perched in a tree claiming to be the light but the actual light itself, moving, burning, indifferent to praise, rising because it is the nature of light to rise.

Seven Macaw was beautiful. He was not the sun.

The twins put down their blowguns and went back to their grandmother’s house, and the world waited for what was actually coming.