Trying to determine the relations between sacred space and time in the Popol Vuh is a complex and difficult matter. For rather than a simple identity governing between them, a close study of their specific qualities shows their differentiation within a scheme of interdependency as a single four-dimensional continuum–just as Einstein would have it.  Given their inextricable interrelation, León-Portilla also wonders whether one may simply identify sacred space with sacred time in a leveling of the difference between the two:

“Does this mean that space and time basically constitute a homogenous entity? Or, which is the same, were space and time, more than being related, a perfect identity in the core of Maya thought? So far, present analysis does not permit the formulation of a definitive reply. What can be affirmed, however, is that if space exists as the handiwork of the gods and has in itself divine meaning, all deities present and acting in space are the changing countenances of time. Isolated from time, space becomes inconceivable. In the absence of cycles, there is no life, nothing happens, not even death.” (Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya 85-6)

As George Santayana also wrote about “Pictorial Space,” anticipating insights of later phenomenologists: “Even in rational human experience, the living intuition of space is endlessly qualified” (Realms of Being 250) as it is temporally pervaded at the same time with the soul of our experience. Certainly for the archaic mind, as we have seen, time is conceived as a kind of substantiality which dispenses with the necessity of a transcendent “beyond” behind the stars. Just as Santayana also said of the ancient Greek: “It was in this way that the ancients conceived a round heaven divided into concentric layers, without thinking of the infinity beyond; for the empyrean, when that was invented, was rather an ocean of light than an abyss of nothingness” (ibid.).