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Re-Creating Primordial Time
Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices
By Gabrielle Vail, Christine Hernández University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-221-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the Maya Codices
Studies of prehispanic Maya culture focus primarily on sites in the Classic period heartland — places such as Tikal, Calakmul, Copán, Palenque, and Yaxchilán, which reached their apogee during the sixth through ninth centuries. The northern Maya lowlands are less well known, with the exception of sites such as Chichén Itzá and those in the Puuc region. The time period after the depopulation of the great Maya cities, whether located in the northern or southern regions, has only recently been the focus of extensive research projects. This "Postclassic" period is a time of significant change in virtually all aspects of society. As our study shows, however, this time period is characterized by a continuation of mythological traditions from the Classic period, along with the introduction of new mythologies as a result of extensive cultural contact between populations in the northern Maya lowlands, the Gulf Coast region, and highland central and southern Mexico.
The Maya codices provide the primary source of textual and iconographic information for studies of Postclassic Maya culture. Where and when the three manuscripts now residing in European collections were painted remains a source of conjecture, although few codical scholars would dispute a general provenience in the northern lowlands. Moreover, given the fragile nature of the material of which they are made, it seems likely that they were painted within a couple of generations of initial contact with Europeans in 1519. This is not to say, however, that the underlying content of the codices dates to this time period. Rather, as the work of recent scholars has demonstrated, many of the codical almanacs and tables reference astronomical and meteorological events dating from the Classic period, with the earliest dates corresponding to the fifth century (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011: 359; V. Bricker and H. Bricker 1992; Vail and Hernández 2011). Some of these texts appear to have been intended solely as records of past events, whereas others were used for predictions in later centuries. Still other texts were newly made by the Postclassic scribes who drafted the extant versions of the manuscripts known as the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices (V. Bricker and H. Bricker 1992).
DOI: 10.5876/9781607322214.c01
Many of the almanacs in the Maya codices lack dates that would associate them with absolute time. Rather, they record rituals and prognostications that were related to various cycles occurring in nature, including periods of 260 days, 584 days, and 52 years. Historical dates in the Maya codices relate specifically to celestial events such as eclipses or the appearance of deities that embody different planetary cycles. History in the sense that we think of it, as events in the lives of individuals, is not recorded in these texts. In its place, mythical events in the lives of deities are given considerable weight and are viewed in terms of their relationship to human concerns such as the success or failure of the maize crop and the amount of rain received during the time period when the scribe was composing the record of these events.
Ties between the historical present and the mythological past were made in various ways in the Maya codices. The scribes responsible for the Dresden Codex made explicit reference to dates in mythic time, calculated from the base date of the current era, which corresponds to 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u, or August 11, 3114 B.C. In the codices, primordial time could also be referenced by specific iconographic elements, usually in combination with a short hieroglyphic caption. The Madrid scribes favored 4 Ahaw as the beginning date of almanacs with ties to creation episodes or to schedule ceremonies that were dedicated to renewing the world (see Chapter 9). In the Paris Codex, one means of linking historical and mythic time involved the depiction of bound crocodilians that formed "skyband thrones" to highlight parallels between the figures seated on the thrones and the act of subduing the earth crocodilian by mythic figures, such as the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh.
The Dresden was the earliest of the three Maya codices to come to light in Europe. It was purchased by the head of the Royal Library in Dresden in 1739 from an unknown source in Vienna. How and when the codex reached Vienna remains a matter of conjecture. Michael Coe (1989b) has suggested that it was one of the screenfold books described in a 1520 account of indigenous material sent by Hernán Cortés and his party to the Spanish court of Charles V. Cortés is said to have acquired "native books" from a visit to Cozumel in February 1519. More recently, John Chuchiak (2012) has put forth a different scenario to account for its presence in Vienna.
In an earlier study, Merideth Paxton (1991) concluded, on the basis of an iconographic analysis, that the codex was painted at some point during the Late Postclassic period and that this may have taken place at any one of a number of sites, including Chichén Itzá, Mayapán, Santa Rita Corozal, or Tulum. Analysis of the astronomical content of the Dresden Codex suggests that its pages contain copies of earlier almanacs and texts that date from the sixth through the twelfth centuries (V. Bricker and H. Bricker 1992:82, table 2.8;Vail and Hernández 2011). Victoria and Harvey Bricker (1992:83) suggest that the physical manuscript was most likely painted in the thirteenth century, although an early sixteenth-century date cannot be ruled out.
All but four of the Dresden's 78 pages (39 on each side) were painted. The codex includes a combination of what researchers term almanacs and tables, the former being distinguished from the latter in not including dates in absolute time. Of particular interest to our study are several almanacs that concern the yearbearer ceremonies (those that mark the transition from one year to the next), as well as astronomical tables, which include a Venus table (on pages 24 and 46–50), an eclipse table (on pages 51–58), a seasonal table (on pages 61–69), paired "water" tables (on pages 69–74), and a Mars table (on pages 43–45). Early research on the Dresden Codex was undertaken by Ernst Förstemann (1901, 1904, 1906), a librarian at the Royal Library in the late nineteenth century.
The Madrid Codex has a very different history. It is first mentioned in the literature by the French scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg (1869–70). At the time, it was separated into two parts; Brasseur de Bourbourg named the first of these the "Manuscrit Troano" after its owner, Don Juan de Tro y Ortolano. The second part was purchased by the Museo Arqueológico de Madrid in 1875; little is known of its history before this, except that it originally belonged to someone from Extremadura, in southwestern Spain. Because this is where Cortés was originally from, the museum director named the codex fragment the "Codex Cortesianus" (Glass and Robertson 1975:153–154).
In the early 1880s, Léon de Rosny (1882) recognized that the Troano and Cortesianus codices were actually part of the same manuscript. The Troano was acquired by the Museo Arqueológico in 1888, and the two parts were reunited. Combined, the codex consists of 56 leaves, which are painted on both sides, for a total of 112 pages (Lee 1985:81). One of these pages includes an anomaly that has led to the possibility of tracing the early history of the codex. This consists of a fragment of European paper with a Latin text that is attached to the bottom of page 56 (Coe and Kerr 1997; Vail, Bricker et al. 2003; Vail and Aveni 2004:chap. 1).
Ethnohistorian John Chuchiak (2004) has identified the text on the patch as corresponding to a papal bull de la Santa Cruzada that was written in longhand. The style of the handwriting on the page indicates that it was written between 1575 and 1610. The content of the codex itself, however, is without doubt prehispanic (Graff 1997). It was likely painted at the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011:25).
Chuchiak (2004:70–71) was able to identify the handwriting on the patch as being that of the notary Gregorio de Aguilar. His cousin, Pedro Sánchez de Aguilar, was the commissioner of the Santa Cruzada and an ecclesiastical judge in the Chancenote region of Yucatán. In that role, he confiscated four hieroglyphic codices from this region between 1603 and 1608; several others were confiscated by other Catholic priests and extirpators between 1591 and 1608. The four seized by Sánchez de Aguilar, rather than being destroyed, were taken to Europe when Sánchez de Aguilar returned to Spain(Chuchiak 2004:72–74). One of these is very likely the manuscript now identified as the Madrid Codex.
What this reconstruction suggests is that a prehispanic manuscript was used in secret by indigenous Maya ah k'in 'daykeepers' in Chancenote for nearly a century without coming to the attention of the Spanish authorities. Shortly before it was confiscated, the newly acquired papal bull was attached to the codex, presumably because of its sacred status in the "new" religion (Chuchiak 2004:78). What happened to the codex from the time of its arrival in Spain in the early part of the seventeenth century until its two parts were first documented in the 1860s remains uncertain.
The Madrid Codex differs from the Dresden in a number of ways, including the fact that it does not contain any astronomical tables as scholars have defined them. Nevertheless, a number of its almanacs do record astronomical events that can be dated in real time (see, e.g., Aveni 2004; H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011; V. Bricker 1997; V. Bricker and H. Bricker 1988; Vail 2006). In addition, several sections of the Madrid Codex have almanacs that are "cognate" with those in the Dresden Codex. Even more surprising is the fact that the Madrid and Borgia Group of codices have structural similarities that cannot be explained except by positing that some type of contact existed among the scribes of the two regions (Boone 2003; Hernández and V. Bricker 2004; Vail and Aveni 2004:chap. 1; Vail and Hernández 2010).
The Paris Codex is in very fragmentary condition; not only have the edges of each page eroded, but it is clear that it was originally a much longer manuscript. Only 22 painted leaves survive. Although it has several almanacs in a format similar to those in the Dresden and Madrid codices, it is the only extant codex in the Maya tradition that includes almanacs dedicated to tun and k'atun prophecies (detailed later in the chapter), and it also includes the only known table depicting astronomical constellations (what some scholars have called the "zodiacal almanac").
The codex was acquired by the Bibliothèque Royal (now the Bibliothèque Nationale) in 1832, along with several other Mexican manuscripts (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011:13). It was copied, several years later (in 1835) by Agostino Aglio, as part of Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico(Gates 1932; G. Stuart 1994), but it remained unpublished due to Kingsborough's death.
Because of these circumstances, the codex was not officially made known to the wider world until its publication by Léon de Rosny in the 1870s. As George Stuart (1994) and the Brickers (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011:13–14) point out, however, a description of the codex, along with a drawing of one of its pages, had been published in 1859. Nevertheless, it remains the least well known of the Maya codices, despite several full or partial commentaries (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 1992; Love 1994; Severin 1981; Treiber 1987). Its astronomical content has recently been the subject of a comprehensive analysis (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011:chap. 9, 12) that highlights its importance within the Maya manuscript tradition.
Sources for Interpreting the Mythological Content of the Maya Codices
It has been suggested that the scribes who drafted the Maya codices were part of a larger world system that linked the northern Maya lowlands to highland Mexico via a substantial trade network through the Gulf Coast region (Boone and Smith 2003; Vail and Hernández 2010:chap. 1). There are a number of explicit ties between the codex tradition characterizing highland Mexico represented by the Borgia Group codices (see chap. 2) and the Maya codices (Boone 2003; Vail and Hernández 2010). These ties may also be seen in mural programs from the Postclassic northern lowlands (Boone and Smith 2003; Masson 2003; Paxton 1986;Quirarte 1982; Taube 2010), including those at Mayapán, Santa Rita, and Tulum discussed in the following chapters. We have had the good fortune of being able to examine the Mayapán murals in person, but those from Santa Rita are no longer extant (Gann 1900), and the Tulum murals are best preserved in the photographs and paintings done by Felipe Dávalos as part of Arthur Miller's excavations at the site in the 1970s (Miller 1982). These are housed at Dumbarton Oaks and were viewed by Vail during a recent visit.
In considering the influences on the Dresden and Madrid scribes, it is incumbent on us to remember the Classic period context in which the earliest versions of a number of the tables and almanacs were composed. During the Classic period, there is evidence that Maya populations from far-distant sites throughout the lowlands shared a widespread mythological tradition that incorporated a common set of deities and events, including a mythological flood that destroyed a previous creation; the death of the maize god in the Underworld, followed by his resurrection at a mythological place named Na Ho' Chan; the establishment of a celestial hearth to mark the home of the creator deities; and the formation of humans from maize dough (detailed in Chapter 3).
Breakthroughs in our understanding of these mythological episodes in the 1990s revealed that they are referenced in monumental texts from sites in the southern lowlands (such as Quirigua), the western area (Palenque), and the northern lowlands (including Chichén Itzá and Cobá), and on pottery vessels from throughout the southern lowlands (Grube et al. 2003; Looper 1995;Schele 1992; D. Stuart 2005). Different regions likely had their own variants of these creation stories, but they focused on similar themes and would therefore most likely have been known to the scribes who drafted earlier versions of the almanacs and tables that were later modified and copied into the manuscripts known today as the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices.
The longevity of this mythological tradition can be documented by common elements found at the Late Preclassic site of San Bartolo in the Petén (Taube et al. 2010), Classic period Palenque, the Dresden Codex, and the colonial period Books of Chilam Balam. Similarly, a variant of this tradition — the setting up of trees in the world quarters to support the sky — is also known to us from two of the highland Mexican codices belonging to the Borgia Group: the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer and the Codex Borgia.
It has long been held that the Maya codices contain little information of a mythological nature, being concerned instead with divination and prophecy (Taube 1993a:18). In the pages that follow, we show that this supposition can no longer be supported. Instead, we believe that the Maya codices serve, in a sense, as a bridge between Classic mythological traditions and the cosmogonic episodes and creation stories contained in colonial period indigenous manuscripts. Following in the tradition of earlier studies (including Knowlton [2010] and Taube [1988]), we document connections between narratives related in the codices (through a combination of textual and iconographic referents) and those contained in the Yucatecan Books of Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh from the K'iche' culture of highland Guatemala.
The Books of Chilam Balam date to the late colonial period; each of the extant manuscripts is named for the community where it was first encountered by Western scholars (including Chumayel, Ixil, Kaua, Maní, and Tizimín, among others). The designation "Chilam Balam" refers to a specific chilan 'prophet', named Balam 'Jaguar', from the town of Maní who is said to have foretold the arrival of the Spaniards and of Christianity. The Chilam Balam texts are written in a modified version of the Latin alphabet, primarily in Classical Yucatec, although there are occasional words or sections in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin (V. Bricker 2000). There is compelling evidence in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel that suggests that portions of it were copied from an earlier (likely prehispanic) manuscript (Knowlton 2010:68–69).
The Books of Chilam Balam treat a variety of topics, including history, divination, calendrics, cosmology, mythology, religious doctrine, and others, which can be traced to a number of different traditions — Yucatec, Nahuatl, and European (Bricker and Miram 2002; Knowlton 2010:2). As Victoria Bricker (2000) has noted, this is similar to the Maya codices, which likewise incorporate material from more than one Mesoamerican tradition.
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