Divinity Atlas

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Screenfold Codices

3 of 33 entries in Textual Witnesses. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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A single long strip folded back and forth like a concertina, so the whole book can be opened flat at once or read a panel at a time. Mesoamerican scribes made them from bark paper felted out of fig fibre or from deerskin, coated the surface with a fine white lime or gesso ground, and painted on both faces. This is not a variant of the bound book but a different answer to the same problem, and it suits a text meant to be laid out and read across several panels together, such as a divinatory almanac or a table of movements in the sky. Very few survived the burnings of the sixteenth century, which is why each one that did carries so much weight.

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Three Painted Divinatory Books From the Pre-Conquest Americas

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Screenfold Codices gathers three pre-conquest divinatory manuscripts from the Americas, painted books folded concertina fashion rather than bound, two Maya and one from central Mexico, all organized around a ritual calendar rather than a narrative.

Codex Borgia, painted on deerskin coated with white gesso, unfolds to a strip over ten metres long across 39 leaves. It is the finest member of the small Borgia Group of religious manuscripts that takes its name from it, organized around the tonalpohualli, the 260 day divinatory count, and the gods, offerings and omens attached to each of its days. Its origin before the eighteenth century is unknown, disputed between the Puebla-Tlaxcala region and Tenochtitlan, and it survives today in the Vatican Library.

The Dresden Codex is the finest of the very few Maya books to survive the Spanish conquest, 39 bark-paper leaves painted on both sides and probably itself a copy of an older work made in Yucatan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Its contents are astronomical and ritual, a remarkably accurate Venus table, eclipse and multiplication tables, and day-count almanacs for planting, hunting and disease, closing with a scene of world flood.

The Madrid Codex, one of the few other surviving Maya screenfolds, sets the days of the same 260 day count against the deities and offerings proper to them, reading as a working reference for a priest rather than a narrative; it survives in two portions long catalogued separately before being recognized as one manuscript.

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