This book offers an in-depth look at two Indigenous colonial texts that need no introduction, the Popul Vuh (c. 1555-58) and the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598-1609). Boldly, it does so from a comparative perspective. It argues that the two epics stemmed from the rebellious attitude of their creators, the Kʼicheʼ Maya and Yawyu peoples of highland Guatemala and central Peru, towards centralized, theocratic government, symbolized in human sacrifice. The author traces this attitude in common motifs, themes, and tropes where the challenging, subverting, and especially the mocking of authority—divine, human, imperial, patriarchal, Indigenous, or European—seems prominent. This rejection of despotic power and divine authority contrasted with the attitudes of the regions’ Inka and Mexica conquerors, whose penchant for sacrifice, fatalism, resignation, tragic vision, and even servility would have facilitated the Spanish conquest and the imposition of Catholicism in old Cuzco or Tenochtitlan. “In their insistence that gods are not all powerful, all knowing, or all good, the Popul Vuh and Huarochirí share nothing with Old World faith. By lauding disobedience towards the gods, they had little in common with Aztec fatalism and Inca absolutism” (142).

This novel but problematic reading rests on three axioms. First, that the Popul Vuh and the Huarochirí Manuscript “can be studied and admired as literature and philosophy, beyond the original circumstances of their production” (245). Second, that, although both works “underwent idiomatic surgery in all manner of translations,” even “the worst examples” of such translations “did not alter one iota the subversion of their message” (55). Third, that “we will never know who actually wrote” these texts (208). This type of analysis turns its back on two prevalent approaches. The first involves situating the message of the texts within a specific historical context, which has demanded painstaking archival work to identify the specific individuals behind the texts. The second approach emphasizes detailed analysis in the original language, which has enabled scholars to detect editorial interventions and address critical—seemingly microscopical—issues of authorship, tone, perspective, and lexicon. Cristóbal Choquecasa, very likely the author of the Huarochirí Manuscript, is not mentioned in the book. Nor are his Maya counterparts, the principales of the Nim Ch’okoj lineage. In that sense, An Unholy Rebellion offers a reading against the grain, bypassing analysis of how competing lineages, kinship groups, political factions, and individuals within colonial Maya and Yauyo polities in transition shaped the Popul Vuh and the Huarochirí Manuscript. Instead, it frames these texts as the original expression of a centuries-old “Mayan and Andean thought” or “the philosophy of Amerindian shamanism.” For the Andean case at least, this perspective calls for a level of abstraction that can risk generalization and reliance on dubious or outdated sources.

Moreover, this type of reading carries additional risks, which other scholars deeply familiar with these sources would have likely preferred to avoid. It is difficult to reconcile the claim that these texts are “a critique against the dominant elites of their own societies” (162) with recent findings that clearly point at these being self-legitimizing elite creations. The rebellious, “sarcastic and frequently burlesque tone” (67) that the author finds applied to, or projected onto, the old gods and their sacrificial demands in Huarochirí would have to be framed within a more thorough exploration of the impact of Catholic doctrine and its proponents among the local lineages, ayllus, and communities, whose shifting identities and social relations were reflected in the manuscript’s main characters. The multiple challenges and paradoxes of religious conversion, along with the ongoing tensions between Christian and non-Christian factions in late-sixteenth-century Yauyos were also important in shaping how the author of the text presented sacred entities, their mythical cycles, and traditions from his own perspective and that of others. These tensions are depicted in one of the most famous chapters, that of Choquecasa’s dreams, which nevertheless is not discussed. While it is undoubtedly valuable to situate the Popul Vuh and the Huarochirí Manuscript within a centuries-old continuum of social practices, religious and philosophical ideas, ethical imperatives, and artistic motifs with real or purported correlates in the distant past and the near present—and to do so in a comparative vein—this scholarly quest is inextricably linked to the equally complex journey, perhaps as perilous and heroic as that of the Maya twins, into the turbulent and contradictory first century of colonial rule in which Kʼicheʼ and Yawyu elites produced these wonderful texts.