After defeating the lords of Xibalba, the twins honor their father and uncle by transforming them into celestial bodies, and they themselves ascend to become the sun and the moon, establishing the current cosmic order.

The narrative’s themes of descent, death, transformation, and rebirth — of the relationship between the underworld and the celestial order, and of the role of twins as the agents of that transformation — resonate with the evidence from the chultún in ways that are more than coincidental.

But the resonance between a sixteenth-century K’iche’ text and a ninth- or tenth-century Chichén Itzá ritual context requires careful handling.

The Popol Vuh represents one strand of a broadly shared Mesoamerican mythological tradition, not a direct account of the specific ritual beliefs at one specific site.