The Dresden Codex: The Maya Book of Venus

In 1739 Johann Christian Götze, director of the Royal Library in Dresden, bought from a private owner in Vienna a folded strip of painted bark-paper, covered in pictures and signs no one in Europe could read. Nobody knows how it reached Vienna, though a gift sent to the Habsburg court after the conquest of Mexico is one guess. In February 1945, in the firebombing of Dresden, the vault where it was kept was flooded, and some pages were water-damaged. It survived. It is the finest of the four Maya books known to have outlasted the Spanish conquest, when friars burned such books as works of idolatry.

The book

• A screenfold: a long strip of fig-bark paper (huun) coated with fine lime plaster, folded like a fan into 39 leaves painted on both sides. It is about 3.5 metres long when unfolded.
• Painted in red, black, blue and other colours by several scribes, in Maya hieroglyphs with bar-and-dot numerals and pictures of the gods.
• Usually dated between the 11th and 14th centuries. It may be a copy of older material, and its date is debated.
• The other three: the Madrid and Paris codices, and the Maya Codex of Mexico (formerly the Grolier Codex), whose authenticity was long disputed and was confirmed by Mexican authorities in 2018.

What is in it

• Almanacs for the 260-day ritual count (tzolkʼin), giving the gods and omens for days, in fields such as medicine, farming, weaving and marriage.
• The Venus table (pages 24 and 46–50). It follows the 584-day cycle of Venus through five appearances, which add up to eight 365-day years. It repeats until the three counts, of Venus, the 260-day count and the 365-day year, all come back into step after 104 years. The table divides each cycle into 236 days as morning star, 90 hidden, 250 as evening star and 8 hidden. These are canonical numbers, chosen to make the calendar work, not direct observations.
• The eclipse table (pages 51–58). It lists 405 lunar months, about 33 years, grouped to mark the seasons when eclipses were possible.
• Rain and the Chaak gods, new-year ceremonies, and a closing page showing a flood pouring from the sky and from the mouth of a celestial caiman. It has been read as a world-destruction scene, and that reading is debated.

The German librarian Ernst Förstemann worked out in the 1880s how the codex's numbers and calendars ran, and identified the Venus table, decades before the glyphs themselves could be read. The decipherment of Maya writing as a logo-syllabic script, largely after the 1950s, now lets most of its texts be read.

The fear in the table

The Venus pages do more than count. Each first rising of Venus as morning star is paired with a picture of an armed god spearing a victim, such as a jaguar or the maize god. Maya belief held that the planet's heliacal rising was dangerous, and the table told priests when to expect the danger and whom it would strike. It is astronomy in the service of divination, as it was across the ancient world.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Bar, dot and shell. Maya numbers are written with dots for one, bars for five and a shell for zero, stacked in places of increasing value. In calendar counts the third place is worth 360 instead of 400, to approach the solar year. The Maya had a true positional zero centuries before it reached Europe. The interactive object uses this notation.

Colour as meaning. The scribes wrote in red and black. Among the Aztecs the phrase in tlilli, in tlapalli, "the black, the red", meant writing and wisdom, and the Maya pairing of the two inks is often compared with it. Blue-green, the colour of water, jade and maize, marks the rain gods.

Day-signs and gods. Each day of the 260-day count combines a number (1–13) with one of 20 named day-signs, and each carries its patron gods. The almanacs are grids of these combinations.

Connections

The Maya (ch29), the Aztec (ch43), Creation & the First Order (ch46), and The End of Days (ch50). Compare the Popol Vuh manuscript (V32), a K'iche' Maya text written in the Latin alphabet after the conquest.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/dresden-codex.html