The Maya Hero Twins defeated the Lords of Death by cleverness, not force.

Evidence

In Xibalba, the Lords of Death set the Twins a series of murderous trials — houses of darkness, of cold, of jaguars, of fire, of razor-blades and shrieking bats — and deadly games of the Mesoamerican ballgame, all designed to destroy them as their father had been destroyed. But the Hero Twins, unlike their father, won through by CLEVERNESS — outwitting the death-lords at every turn, surviving each deadly house by trickery and wit, seeing through the lords’ deceptions, and even using their own apparent deaths as a trick. In the end, the Twins defeated and humbled the Lords of Death themselves, limiting death’s power over humankind, and then rose up out of the underworld and into the sky, becoming (the Maya said) the sun and the moon. — , A Year of World Stories, 15141

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gilgamesh’s failed quest against death and to every descent-to-the-underworld myth (Orpheus, Persephone) drawn elsewhere in this book and in the reader’s broader myth corpus.