Xquic- Maya GodDeity"Blood Moon"

The Forbidden Tree

Xquic, "Blood Woman" in K'iche' Maya, first appears in the Popol Vuh as a maiden who heard rumors of a strange tree beside the road to Xibalba. A calabash tree had burst into sudden fruit after the Lords of Xibalba placed the severed head of Hun Hunahpu among its branches. The lords forbade anyone to approach. But Xquic, daughter of the lord Cuchumaquic, went to look.

The skull hung among the gourds, indistinguishable from the fruit around it. Xquic spoke aloud, wondering whether she might taste one, and the skull of Hun Hunahpu answered.

The Skull's Seed

The dead god asked Xquic to extend her hand. When she did, the skull spat into her palm. She looked at her hand, but the spittle had already vanished. "In my saliva I have given you my posterity," the skull told her. From this, Xquic conceived the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The skull spoke once more before falling silent: its head would cease to bear fruit now that its seed had passed to a living body. The calabash tree, which had borne gourds only because of the skull's presence among its branches, went bare.

The Sentence and the Substitute

When Xquic's pregnancy became apparent, her father Cuchumaquic demanded to know who had fathered the child. She truthfully denied having been with any man. He refused to believe her and reported her to the supreme lords Hun Came and Vucub Came. They ordered her sacrificed, her heart brought back in a gourd as proof.

Four owl messengers led Xquic into the forest with their sacrificial instruments. She pleaded with them, swearing she was innocent and that what grew within her was something extraordinary. She proposed an alternative.

Xquic directed the owls to gather the red sap of the croton tree. In K'iche' it is called kik'che', "blood tree," and its deep crimson latex thickens on exposure to air, hardening into a mass that mimics both the color and texture of a living heart. The owls placed the coagulated sap in the gourd. Hun Came and Vucub Came accepted the false heart and burned it over a fire, where it gave off a fragrant smoke that pleased them. They bent low to inhale its sweetness. Xquic was already climbing toward the surface world.

The Corn Test

Xmucane, grandmother of the Hero Twins and mother of their slain father, gave Xquic a hostile reception. She had lost both her sons to Xibalba, and now a strange woman appeared from the very underworld that killed her family, claiming to carry her grandchildren. Xmucane set her an impossible test: go to the cornfield and bring back a full netful of corn, though the field contains only a single plant.

Xquic found the field exactly as described. One plant with one ear of corn. She called upon the spirits of corn and fertility: Ixtoh, Ixcacao, Ixcauan. When she gathered the corn silk from the single ear, it multiplied into a full harvest that filled her net to overflowing. She carried the net back. Xmucane went to the field herself, saw the single stalk still standing with its ear intact, and accepted the truth of the divine pregnancy.

Blood Carried Upward

Xquic gave birth to the Hero Twins on a mountainside. They grew into the heroes who would descend to Xibalba, defeat the death lords at their own ballgame, and resurrect their father the Maize God from beneath the ballcourt floor. From the Maize God's restored body came the corn dough that formed the first true humans.

None of it could have happened without the woman who reached for the forbidden fruit, tricked her executioners with tree sap, and carried divine seed out of the land of the dead.