Episode 151E – Power Play – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 151E Show Notes

Source: Mayan Mythology

This week on MYTH, Xbalanque is going to have to face the lords of death without his brother. You know, because he’s dead. Well, mostly dead. You’ll learn that decapitated heads make good balls, that it’s easy to confuse a skull ball with a rabbit, and that the best way to win a ball game is to destroy the ball. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll discover that a magical goat man only has one weakness, and it’s both very obvious and very weird. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 151E, “Power Play”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
This is the fifth part of the Mayan story of the Hero Twins. When we last left the story, twin brothers Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu (1-Hunter and 7-Hunter) had annoyed the lords of Xibalba, the gods of death with their constant ball playing. Thus, the two mortal men were summoned by the lords of Xibalba to a fatal game of Pok Ta Pok, a traditional Mayan ball game. The severed head of the dead Hun Hunahpu managed to spit on the hand of Lady Blood, herself a lord of the underworld, and get her pregnant. She escaped to the surface and gave birth to twins, taking them to live with their grandmother after completing an impossible task to prove her claim. The infant twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque were tormented by their older half-brothers, who tried to murder them as infants and bullied them as they got older. The younger twins got the last laugh by turning their tormenters into monkeys and tricking their grandmother into driving them away from human civilization.
They tried their hand at farming, by which I mean they used magical tools to do all the actual hard work of farming for them, but their attempts were foiled by the local wildlife. They trapped a rat who was part of the scheme against them and forced it to talk. The terrified rodent revealed the existence of the hidden Pok Ta Pok equipment left by Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu back in Episode 151A. Using trickery and the help of their new buddy the rat, Hunahpu and Xbalanque recovered the hidden ball gear and began to play. This of course annoyed Hun Kame and Vucub Kame almost immediately, and the lords of Xibalba sent another summons to a ball game in the underworld. The twins each left an unripe maize ear planted inside the house to let their mother and grandmother know if they lived or died before beginning their own descent into the underworld like their father’s before them.
The twins made it safely to Xibalba and avoided the pitfalls that had doomed their father. Thus, they actually had the chance to play Pok Ta Pok with Hun Kame and Vucub Kame. After a little attempted cheating slash murder, it turned out that the death gods were actually serious ballers. The Xibalbans won the first game, but Hunahpu and Xbalanque managed to squeak out a tie on every subsequent game. Each night, after a long day of playing ball, the twins would retire to a new chamber of horrors to sleep but managed to outwit the death trap in each one. That is until the night they slept in the House of Bats. Camazotz, the death bat god, decapitated a very surprised Hunahpu leaving Xbalanque alone in the underworld.
Camazotz’s death dive had been so silent that it took Xbalanque a minute to realize that his brother was dead. Only when his brother didn’t answer his desperate questions did he realize what had happened. Alone in the darkness of the House of Bats, he mourned the loss of his beloved twin brother. Outside in the royal court of Xibalba, Hun Kame and Vucub Kame were celebrating. They had finally managed to outwit the annoyingly clever and resilient mortals (well, one of them at least) and brought down the hammer of doom upon his head. Camazotz had carried his grisly prize to the death gods, who ordered it placed atop the Crushing Ballcourt as proof of their victory. All the gruesome lords of the underworld turned out to celebrate this great and terrible achievement.
He might be alone in incredibly hostile territory, but Xbalanque wasn’t one to simply give up and accept his inevitable death. He summoned all of the animals that had come out in Episode 151C to undo their magical work at clearing the maize fields to come to Xibalba, and they answered. It was still very early in the morning, before the sun had risen, so only the palest of false dawn light was in the sky. “Thank you all for coming. I need you to go and bring me back the food that belongs to your kind.” As we established before, the animals have some secret knowledge of the great destiny of Xbalanque and the dead Hunahpu, and so they readily agreed to this request.
They each brought back the food that their species liked to eat. As you might guess, a lot of this doesn’t exactly qualify as ‘food’ in the human sense. Some brought back rotting carcasses; some brought back freshly cut leaves; some brought stones and dirt; but many did in fact bring recognizable fruits and vegetables. Last of all came the coati bringing a chilacayote squash, also known as the fig-leaf gourd. As an aside, the coati is always described as female much as the peccary is always described as male. In part, this is because these two animals are associated with the grandmother and grandfather deities.
Coati came rolling the squash along with her nose, making Xbalanque smile. It wasn’t that he was particularly hungry – he had a clever scheme percolating in his brain. Taking the squash, he began to carve and shape it into the semblance of a human head. Xbalanque started with the eyes before moving on to the mouth. It was unbelievably skillful work, drawing the attention and presence of numerous spirits and sages from the heavens far above. Huracan, the Heart of the Sky and creator deity of wind, storm, and fire, was the most important of these to come and look on as Xbalanque worked.
He carved as fast as he possibly could, which was superhumanly fast, but it still wasn’t enough. As the sky began to redden with the coming dawn, only part of the head was finished. It was already starting to look like the missing head of dead Hunahpu and its cunningly fashioned tongue even had the ability to speak, but it wasn’t done. Xbalanque called over the possum, who is associated with old age because of his gray coat, awkward rolling gait, and mismatched teeth. “Blacken the sky with soot, old man possum.” Grandfather possum nodded and did so. The light of the rising sun was snuffed out and the world fell back into night.
Xbalanque kept working through this magically extended night, but it still wasn’t enough. Hey, carving a magical decapitated squash head is complex work. Four times the sun tried to rise and four times Grandfather possum darkened it once more. Finally, the fake head was done. It looked exactly like Hunahpu, which had to be a bit disturbing. I mean, his brother was decapitated that very night and his lifeless body is still lying in his blowgun that he was using as a tent mere feet away.
On the plus side, this head didn’t seem to need a body. As Xbalanque held it in his lap, it looked back up at him. “Are you ready for this?” “Yes, I’m ready.” And so the living twin began to plan and scheme with this magical carved false head exactly as he would have with his living brother. Together, they came up with a very clever trick. A rabbit was summoned to help out with their stratagem. “When we start playing next, be waiting in the tomato patch at the head of the ballcourt. When the rubber ball comes your way, hop around distractingly until I finish my task.” And so the young man and the squash head greeted the dawn ready for the new day.
Xbalanque reported to Crushing Ballcourt for the daily game of Pok Ta Pok with Hun Kame and Vucub Kame. Of course, with his twin brother and teammate dead, he would be at a severe disadvantage in the game and almost sure to lose. If he weren’t planning to cheat, that is. The death gods laughed as they entered the court to find Xbalanque waiting for them. They tossed the rubber ball into the court with a sneer. “Why are you dragging this out? We’ve already won. You failed the challenge last night and now you’ll lose the game today.” The dead body of Hunahpu was propped up in the ballcourt as his twin’s theoretical teammate. It called out “why use the rubber ball? Let’s make it interesting and use the severed head for this game.” The death gods saw no reason not to agree with the corpse and so the head was dropped into play.
Xbalanque knew that he had no chance to win in a two-on-one power play, so he took the first opportunity to knock the decapitated head sailing out of play and into the tomato patch where rabbit was waiting. As soon as it vanished in the greenery, rabbit hopped out and moved along the way the “ball” had been going. From a distance, this fooled the lords of the dead into thinking the rabbit was actually the dead head bouncing far away from the court. Cursing, they gave chase. Xbalanque pretended to run after them but quickly turned aside to where he had hidden the carved squash head. With the Xibalbans distracted, the young man was able to swap the real head for the fake one. The true head was placed on the body again, and the two miraculously reconnected. It’s not clear to me if this is something intrinsic to them and their half-Xibalban heritage or something to do with the fact that they are living mortals in the underworld.
Either way, Hunahpu was officially revived and back in the game. Laughing and high fiving, the twins hurried over to the tomato patch where the fake head was now sitting. “Hey, come back! We found the ball over here – you’re chasing shadows. Come on, game time!” Hun Kame and Vucub Kame, who had by now completely lost the “ball” (which had gone back to just being a rabbit), gave each other a look. “If the head was all the way back there, then what the hell were we both chasing this whole time?” Something was clearly afoot but they had no idea what treachery the lone surviving mortal had in mind.
Of course, when they returned to Crushing Ballcourt to find not one but two living mortals geared up and ready to play Pok Ta Pok, they had some inkling as to what they had missed. The game started up again, and again the two teams were evenly matched. Finally, Hunahpu managed to get the ball to his brother and Xbalanque fired a rocket that scored before smashing the carved squash that was supposedly the severed head of Hunahpu into the wall. The vegetable exploded at the impact, scattering pulp and seeds everywhere and ending the game in a spectacular and embarrassing way. Hunahpu and Xbalanque had not only won, they had dominated the lords of the dead.
Having survived the trials of Xibalba and the dangers of the deadly beasts that dwelt there (well, Hunahpu died a little, but he got better), the twins were victorious. They knew though that Hun Kame and Vucub Kame were vicious and implacable (what with being death gods and all that), so it was only a matter of time before they tried some new lethal scheme. Being very clever, Hunahpu and Xbalanque had a pretty good idea of what that next tripwire would be and so they summoned the great sages and seers Descended and Ascended. Their names are a reference to the idea that they peer both down and up and, by extension, can see everywhere. You know – seers.
“Thanks for coming Ascended, Descended. Listen, we’re pretty sure that the lords of Xibalba are going to be coming to you two soon to ask about our deaths. They’re super pissed off that we haven’t died yet. It makes them look bad. You can’t have mortals out here defeating death, it sets a bad precedent. They’re planning to burn us alive with heated stones, which feels like a lazy rehashing of their failed trick with the hot bench, but whatever. After we’re dead, the lords of Xibalba will be gathered together and will probably want to talk to you.
“They probably won’t be satisfied with us just being dead. Hunahpu here already died and came back once, so they’ll want to make sure that doesn’t happen again. That’s where you two come in. If they suggest scattering our bones in the canyons, then you need to say ‘This would not be good, for they would simply arise again to new life.’ If they suggest hanging our bones in a tree like they did our father, then you say ‘Certainly that would not be good either, for you would surely see their faces again.’ If they suggest dumping our bones in the river, you say ‘It is good that they should die; it would be good if their bones were ground to dust upon the stones like maize flower. Each of them should be ground up separately and then these individual piles of dust should be scattered on the river. Sprinkle their finely ground bones onto the river that winds among the mountains great and small.’ Did you get all that? Do this, and we can stay on track with our plans.”
Ascended and Descended agreed to do this and went back to wherever it was that seers hung out when they weren’t needed for the plot. I kind of want to make a Sears Roebuck joke here, but it feels like more of a visual pun. Anyway, sure enough Hunahpu and Xbalanque were soon summoned to an audience with Hun Kame and Vucub Kame. The messenger had a big, fake smile on its face as it approached. “My lords say ‘Bring Hunahpu and Xbalanque to see us! Bring them so that they may see what we have cooked up for them.’ This is the word of my lords delivered unto you.” And yes, the ‘cooked up’ pun is very deliberate. In the original text, the word chojij means ‘to cook, broil, or set fire to something’ but it also is used to mean ‘to straighten out, take a direct route, or rectify something.’ Thus, the death gods are making a grim joke, pretending to be offering to clear the air while actually telling them exactly how they plan to murder the mortal men.
Of course, since the twins already knew that fire was their fated death, they caught the double meaning. “Very well. Tell them we will be there shortly.” They arrived at the courtyard of Xibalba to find that a great pit had been dug in the ground. “Thanks for coming, boys. How about another little game, just for funsies. Each of us will jump over this pit of fermenting alcohol four times. Whoever falls in, loses.” The twins sighed at this obvious attempt at subterfuge. “Seriously, guys? You think we can’t feel the hellish heat coming off this pit? It’s clearly an oven. You haven’t tricked us. You haven’t tricked anyone. We know the means of our death, oh lords of Xibalba, and you’re about to see it.” Turning to face each other, Hunahpu and Xbalanque spread out their arms and, as one, deliberately fell into the pit. The searing heat burned their flesh to ash and it was done. The Hero Twins were dead.
And that’s where we’re going to leave it. The twins are dead, fallen in Xibalba like their fathers before them, but the story isn’t over – not quite. There’s one episode left in the saga of the Hero Twins but, for now, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s shapeshifting trickster is the huay chivo.
The Mayan story of the huay chivo is closely related to the Aztec tales of the nahuales. In many Mesoamerican cultures, it is believed that every person has an animal counterpart to which their life force is linked. Each day was linked to a specific animal, and so the day you were born governed what animal counterpart you became connected to. Those who mastered this connection could tap into it and shapeshift into their animal other. In pre-European Olmec and Toltec depictions, this power seems to have been neutral, with each individual using this power for good or for evil depending on their own personal beliefs and morals. In modern times, possibly due to the influence of European ideas about witches and werewolves, a nahual or a huay chivo is always an evil brujo, or sorcerer.
To quote Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of the fantastic Gods of Jade and Shadow (which you should definitely check out), “the nahual is always a creature of evil. It drinks the blood of people, often children, and spreads disease. Nahuales, when they transform into predators, such as coyotes, may also threaten a farmer’s livelihood. My great-grandmother told me you had to watch out to make sure the nahuales didn’t eat the chickens.” The huay chivo is a variation on this. Huay comes from the Yucatec Maya word for sorcerer, spirit, or animal familiar, and chivo is the spanish word for goat. Thus, huay chivo is literally a goat sorcerer. Sometimes referred to as a chivo brujo (an entirely spanish phrase meaning the same thing), these powerful magic users were always men though they do not seem to always be limited to turning into goats. There are tales of women who can turn into other types of animals, but not goats for whatever reason.
Modern depictions of huay chivo describe a half-man, half-goat creature with glowing red eyes and covered in thick, shaggy black fur. Much like the Greek satyrs, he stands on two goat or horse legs but has the torso of a man and the head of a goat and can be anywhere from four to six feet tall. It is a creature of darkness, using the cover of nighttime to hide its evil deeds. You will know that this dark beast is near when you feel a sudden draft of cold air bringing with it a foul, terrible odor. If a huay chivo is nearby, you must take care not to look it in the eyes lest you fall ill with a deadly fever.
Although it runs around as a half-goat, it can transform into many animals, often dogs, coyotes, or jaguars, to stalk the countryside. The exact way that one obtains this dark power varies from story to story, but most agree that they have to spin nine times and then remove their head. Sometimes there are black candles, a sacrificed goat whose hot blood must be drunk fresh, or incantations.
The type of animal the sorcerer turns into seems to align with the powers and predilections of that particular huay chivo. Transformed pigs like to scare people and kill local animals. Cat sorcerers sneak into the bedrooms of young women, licking their faces so that they fall ill and waste away. The OG goats do a bit of everything: eating children, tormenting farmers, and haunting cemeteries.
There are several stories of how the first huay chivo came to be. The details vary, but the overall story is remarkably consistent. There was once a handsome young man who fell in love with a beautiful young woman. Though he was intelligent and hard working, he was also quite poor and thus was not seen as a proper match for the highborn woman. She loved him back, but her parents forbade the marriage and that was that. In theory, anyway. The young man wasn’t quite ready to call it quits so, desperate, he ran into the jungle and called upon Cizin, the flatulent one and god of death and earthquakes and counterpart to Hun Kame and Vucub Kame of the main tale.
The young man begged the god to make it so he could be with the young woman no matter what the cost. As we’ve seen in our last few episodes, the gods can be cruel and capricious when answering these sorts of prayers and so it was in this case. The Xibalban god smiled and said it would be done. There was a spark of power and an awful, painful shifting of skin and bone. When it was over, the young man had been turned into a goat. Or, more accurately, the half-goat creature we know today but with the power to turn into a full goat. The young man raged that this wasn’t what he meant! She would never love him in this awful form, and she would certainly never be able to marry him. Cizin shook his head. “You said you wanted to be with her. As a goat, you can join her goat herd and live with her family in their hacienda. You will be with her all the time, exactly as you asked.”
The goat man raged and screamed, but one cannot intimidate death. There was no changing the Xibalban’s mind and no undoing this curse. He had become the first huay chivo, and he is still furious about being so cursed. To vent his rage, he runs around in the nighttime shadows killing the farm animals he was told to live amongst. Lore says that these beastmen can be warded off with salt. You can sprinkle it around you or you can take a more expeditious route and rub a salty cross on a bullet to make it lethal to the huay chivo. And just about everything else. Alternatively, you can ward them off with a pair of open scissors kept beneath the bed.
Maybe the wildest story about these shapeshifting sorcerers is one about a man who fought a nahual. The vile creature had snuck into the man’s house one night and devoured all six of his children. Horrified and enraged, the man decided to hunt the nahual down and damn the consequences. He followed it out to the jungle and found the path it had worn between the trees. The man lay down across this path and waited.
In time, the nahual came along its usual route and saw the man lying motionless in the underbrush. It crept up to him and licked his face, trying to determine in a horrible way whether this man was alive or dead. The man remained utterly motionless, not even daring to breathe. Satisfied, it took what it presumed to be a free corpse and carried the man away, lugging him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. This path was too exposed to have a comfortable meal, so the nahual was looking for a nice secluded spot to crunch into the tasty man flesh.
This was what the man had been waiting for. He pulled out a sharpened stick from under his arm and, stealthily, began to grope around down the thing’s back and to its ass. This surprised the nahual, who wasn’t expecting ass play from a fucking corpse. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Leave my ass alone!” The man ignored the nahual, his fingers finding what he’d been looking for – the creature’s asshole. No, really. “Stop that! Bad touch! Bad touch!”
The man jammed his sharpened stick as deep as he could into the soft, tender flesh of the creature’s asshole, eliciting a horrible scream of agony. The nahual dropped its prize and tried to pull out the stick rammed inside it, but it tripped and began to roll down the hill it was walking along. All the way down it rolled, the stick getting rammed deeper and deeper with each bounce until it pierced clear through the evil monster, killing it. And maybe the weirdest part of the whole thing? After it was dead, the man brought its corpse back to the village as proof that it was dead. They were surprised at his victory. Many brave warriors had tried to fight this creature, and all had failed. The nahual was simply too deadly a fighter and its hide was too thick for weapons to pierce. The man shrugged. “Its hide may be like armor, but its asshole is its weak point.” You know, like the exhaust port on the Death Star. And so they celebrated by skinning the nahual and eating it, apparently as a way to make sure any other nahuals would be too scared to venture into the village. So if you see the fiery red eyes of the huay chivo watching you from the darkness and you don’t have any salt handy, consider grabbing a sharp stick and shoving it where the sun don’t shine.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on TuneIn, on Vurbl, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Instagram as MythsYourTeacherHatedPod, on Tumblr as MythsYourTeacherHated, on Bluesky as MythsPodcast, and on Mastodon as MythsYourTeacherHated. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff.
Next time, we’ll see how this whole thing finally wraps up. You’ll discover that dancers are an untrustworthy lot, that a horde of demons are no match for a swarm of ants, and that you should never make an open-ended promise. Then, in Gods and Monsters, a whistling, cigar-smoking goblin is coming for your thumbs. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.