Maya cosmology held that the world had been created and destroyed multiple times before the current age — a genuinely different structure from most creation mythology, which typically treats the present world as the first and only one. This film covers that mythological system on its own terms, separate from Maya political history, which has its own dedicated film.

It opens with the Popol Vuh, the primary surviving source for Maya creation mythology, covering the earlier failed attempts at human creation — beings of mud, beings of wood — that preceded the successful creation of people from maize, a material choice that reflects maize's genuinely central role in Maya subsistence and identity.

The Hero Twins narrative anchors the film's central section: Hunahpu and Xbalanque's confrontation with the death gods of Xibalba, covered in real narrative detail rather than summarised, since the story's internal logic and repeated trickery motifs are themselves revealing about Maya values around cleverness, resilience, and respect owed to death.

The film covers the Maya pantheon's genuine complexity — deities associated with rain, maize, the sun, and the underworld specifically, each tied to particular calendar cycles and ritual practices rather than existing as static, isolated figures.

The closing section covers how thoroughly this mythology was embedded in the Maya calendar system and in royal political legitimacy, and — carefully and specifically — what survived colonial-era suppression through community oral tradition, distinct from what was preserved in surviving written texts like the Popol Vuh itself.