The only surviving original manuscript of the K'iche' Maya creation epic sits not in a Guatemalan temple but in a vault at the Newberry Library in Chicago. This episode follows the biography of the Popol Vuh, the Book of the Community, from its life as a memorized oral tradition symbolized by a woven mat, through Friar Francisco Ximenez's parallel-column transcription in Chichicastenango around 1701, to its seizure in 1829, copying by Karl Scherzer in 1854, theft by the French abbot Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1855, and arrival in Chicago in 1911.

It then opens the text itself: a creation that reads like iterative software development, with animals, mud people, and wooden people each failing before humans are finally made from white and yellow maize. The hosts unpack the hero twins saga in Xibalba, the ballgame as a portal between worlds, the  ...