After the Conquest many of the natives who had acquired the alphabet adapted it to their own tongue and recorded their histories in the new characters. Numbers of such books were known to the Spanish writers of the sixteenth century, and it is from these that the _Popul Vuh_ and the Cakchiquel _Annals_ have survived.
The _Popul Vuh_ is the most striking and instructive of the myth-records of primitive America. Other legends are as comprehensive in scope, as varied in material, and as dramatic in form; but no other, in anything like the measure of this document, combines with these qualities the element of critical consciousness, giving the flavour of philosophic reflection which lifts the narrative from the level of mere tale-telling into that of literature. Something of this character is clearly due to the fact that it was written down after the introduction of Christianity by an author, or authors, professing the new faith; yet it is equally clear to a reader of our day that this is not the whole cause, that there is in the aboriginal material itself such an element of deliberate reflection as appears in the Aztec rituals recorded by Sahagun and in some of the Incaic fragments, though scarcely to be found elsewhere in the New World, at least in the myths as they have been preserved to us.
The work is divided into four parts, consciously literary in arrangement. The first recounts the creation of the earth and of the First Peoples, together with the conflicts of the Hero Brothers with Titan-like Earth-giants. The second part depicts the duel of the upper-world heroes with the nether-world demonic powers: an elder pair of Hero Brothers are defeated, later to be avenged by the younger Hero Brothers--the slayers of the Earth-giants--who overcome Death in his own lair and by his own wile. This incident of "the harrowing of Hell" belongs in mythic chronology to a cycle of events earlier in part than the gigantomachy, and it is obviously for dramatic reasons that the longest book of the _Popul Vuh_ is devoted to it. With the third part the original narrative is resumed, narrating the creation of the ancestors of the present race of men and the rise of the Sun which now rules the world; while the fourth and last part continues the tale, giving myths of cult origins, tribal wars, and finally records of historic rulers, thus satisfying the feeling for consecutiveness and completeness.