... and that should be remembered by anyone studying Choltal Classic texts where they deal with the underworld. Those texts would be the writings on funerary vases as summarised Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Which admittedly is a 1993 text itself; it's been well over a vigintuple since then.
Coe, like Schele and Freidel a couple years prior, related the Mayanists' observation that, in vases found in tombs, motifs of the grave abounded (Coe, 221). This induced Mayanists to look at whatever records of the Maya underworld survived for later Maya to record through Christendom. The best record, all agree, is that of the Popul Vuh. In it is a cycle of several sets of twins, who enter Maya Sheol.
Let's evaluate, here, to what degree the Popol Vuh - which is I concede a great text - is also a useful text, in the narrow context of the Choltal Classic mythology.
The Popol Vuh is in a language closely related to Classical Choltal (so to Tzeltal also: chart in Coe, 48). It is, however, not descended from Choltal or Tzeltal. It is Kʼicheʼ. (Their circumlocution for the underworld is The Dread Land, Xibalba.) The Popol Vuh also was not written in a codex of 9.18.10.0.0 / 13 August AD 800. It perhaps was done from a codex but if so, from one of the 1400s (11.9.x.x.x).
The Kʼicheʼ myth starts with two twin ballplayers who play ball with the devil, so to speak. The demons duly drag them down to Xibalba. There, 1 Ahau (well, the disembodied head of this rex primus, because Maya) impregnates one of the local demonesses. There are rules to this particular ballgame: the land of the dead is no place to give birth to life. So she must flee back up here. Her children are, also, twins. These demi-demons grow to become great tricksters; they are able to defeat Xibalba directly where their father and uncle must settle for posthumous revenge (Coe, 220).
They were all Maya here and the old hieroglyphic script, non unlike our Chinese, could be adapted across "dialect" borders. The lords of Palenque had no problem taking on Yucatec Maya names for themselves whilst they wrote their genealogies in Choltal (Coe, 286 n.14). On the other side of the Peten the Kʼicheʼs own brothers the Qʼeqchiʼ borrowed many neolithic terms from old Choltal and perhaps chalcolithic terms from their Chʼolʼti offspring (pdf). So Choltal cast a shadow up the hills to the south - if I may twist that metaphor.
The Popol Vuh populates The Dread Land with many dreadful horrors. For the Choltal, hell is ruled by twins of its own. One such is named: Pauahtun. His aspect survived among the Yucatec Maya (God N in the Dresden Codex: Coe, 222) as presiding over the five unlucky days at the end of their 360-day calendar. I don't know that Pauahtun entered the Popol Vuh.
The Choltal on the other hand didn't talk much about the demi-demon "hero twins", that second generation. They did, however, portray much about the first generation. Rex Primus was the maize god (Coe, 222). Here is the god who dies, and by dying gives life. We Catholics experience such a figure at the Mass every Sunday.
I wonder if the Kʼicheʼ, barbarian successor-race to their Choltal cousins, composed the Popol Vuh as a counter-story to the Choltal Official Narrative.
If I am right, the Kʼicheʼ heard all about Pauahtun and left him where he belongs, in hell. The twins' foil is rather The Dread Land itself, which the Kʼicheʼ cautiously refused to name directly. The first twins, like Rex Primus, remained important; but they weren't worth worshipping as Maize Gods. And why would the Kʼicheʼ care; milpa / chol was drudgework for the cityfolk, the elder ones whose cities were left to ruin. The Kʼicheʼ chose instead to foist their trickster stories upon Rex Primus' children up here on Earth. The Popol Vuh comes from the Maya world's "culture of critique" ASSMANN 2/23/24 - as its "normative inversion".
So - again, if I am right - for direct parallels to Choltal worship, I'd look to the also-civilised Yucatec Maya first. If the Classic Choltal are Canaan, and the Kʼicheʼ their Israel; the Yucatec are Ugarit.
This vast revisionist epic, like our Old World revisionist Iliad, and Prager would argue like the Bible, had the literary merit, and the relevance to Postclassic Maya life, that it survived. It survived even the Inquisition. Perhaps the Inquisition saw in the Popol Vuh something they could use against the still-surviving Cholti.
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