Zipacná Holds Up the Mountains Then Shakes Them

Zipacná drags mountains by night.

He is the son of Seven Macaw and Chimalmat, and he has inherited his father’s pride along with his father’s vast size. He moves through the world before the current age arranging the mountains the way you might arrange stones across a stream, taking up great peaks and carrying them to new positions in the night, placing them where they will be most impressive, most inescapable. When the sun rises and people see where the mountains have moved, they know Zipacná has been at work.

I am the maker of the mountains, he says.

He says this to the four hundred boys — young men who are trying to build a house, dragging a great log to serve as the ridgepole. Zipacná helps them with the log, carrying it easily on his shoulder, and they invite him to stay for the drinking. But the four hundred boys plan to kill him. They dig a great pit and tell him to go down inside to start the foundation, and while he is in the pit they drop the log on him.

Zipacná survives in a hollow of the pit.

He waits in the darkness while the boys celebrate his death above, drinking and singing and toasting themselves. He can hear them. He waits until they are deeply asleep, and then he brings the house down.

The Popol Vuh says all four hundred boys died under the collapsed house. They became the Pleiades — the star cluster that rises before planting season, visible each year in the night sky. Their deaths are not forgotten, because they are written into the sky.

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The Hero Twins decide that Zipacná must be stopped.

He is a problem not just because he is violent but because his violence is structural — he makes and breaks mountains, he disrupts the order that the current age requires. The world that the corn-people will inherit needs stable geography. You cannot plant a milpa on a mountain that moves.

The twins know that Zipacná has one weakness: he loves crab.

He is always hungry and always willing to crawl into dark places to find the crab he craves, the large land crabs that live in the crevices of rocks. The twins make an artificial crab. They take the petals of a flower — a bromeliaceous plant with the shape of a crab’s body — and they weave together something that looks and smells like a crab: the claws from the trunk of a vine, the color from rock, the shell from the broad flat flower, and they put it in a crevice at the base of a mountain.

They bring Zipacná to the mountain. They tell him there is a crab in the crevice, a great crab, the biggest crab he has ever seen.

He goes in face-first.

He crawls deep into the crevice reaching for the crab, going further and further into the narrowing dark, pulling himself forward on his hands toward the thing that smells so perfectly like what he wants, and the twins hold still outside and when he is far enough in they trigger the mountain.

The mountain comes down.

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Zipacná is turned to stone.

The Popol Vuh says he was petrified — literally turned into rock — and this is the theological explanation for the geology of the region. The mountains of the Maya highlands are full of ancient earthquakes, old movements, layers of volcanic and tectonic violence that predate human memory. The myth says: this is where Zipacná went in. This is where he is still.

When the earth shakes, he is not dead. He is only restrained.

The crab that lured him was not real. The hunger was real. This is what the myth understands about destructive forces: they cannot be appealed to on the basis of reason or mercy — they can only be redirected toward what they already desire. The earthquake-force wants what it wants, and the only way to stop it is to give it what it wants in a confined enough space that the desire becomes its own trap.

Zipacná went in craving a crab.

He is still in there, pressed down by the weight of a mountain, in the dark of the crevice, reaching for what he can no longer quite touch.