In the Popol Vuh, the gods' second attempt to make humans produces beings carved from wood who walk and talk but lack minds, memory, and gratitude toward their makers. They are destroyed in a flood and a revolt in which their own dogs, grinding stones, and cooking pots rise up to beat them, punishing them for how they were used.
The narrative asserts that the gods repeatedly remake humanity until they get a being capable of speech, counting, and above all keeping the gods in memory through praise and sacrifice. The explicit criterion for a successful creation is not strength or beauty but the capacity to name and remember one's origins.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque descend to the underworld (Xibalba) and overcome its lords not through superior force but by surviving rigged tests and staging a deceptive self-sacrifice: they dismember and revive themselves, luring the lords to demand the same and then killing them permanently.
Tedlock reads the Popol Vuh not as detached cosmology but as a document that grounds specific K'iche' noble houses, tracing their line from the first true humans and their gods down to named historical lords. The mythic past functions as title deed, legitimizing present political authority by anchoring it in creation itself.