[1] “We tend to think of myth and history as being in conflict with each other, but the authors of the inscriptions at Palenque and the alphabetic text of the Popol Vuh treated the mythic and the historical parts of their narratives as belonging to a single, balanced whole….

To this day the Quiché Maya think of dualities in general as complementary rather than opposed, interpenetrating rather than mutually exclusive. Instead of being logical opposition to one another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a mutual attraction. If we had an English word that fully expressed the Mayan sense of narrative time, it would have to embrace the duality of the divine and the human in the same way the Quiché term kajulew or ‘sky-earth’ preserves the duality of what we call the ‘world.’ In fact, we already have a word that comes close to doing the job: mythistory, taken into English from Greek by way of Latin. For the ancient Greeks… this term became a negative one, designating narratives that should have been properly historical but contained mythic impurities. For the Mayans, the presence pf a divine dimension in narratives of human affairs is not imperfection but a necessity, and it is balanced by a necessary human dimension in narratives of divine affairs.” Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh, pp. 58-59