Identifier: mexicancentralamer00bowd (find matches)
Title: Mexican and Central American antiquities, calendar systems, and history;
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Bowditch, Charles P. (Charles Pickering), 1842-1921 Seler, Eduard, 1849-1922 Förstemann, Ernst Wilhelm, 1822-1906 Schellhas, Paul, b. 1859 Sapper, Karl, 1866-1945 Dieseldorff, Erwin Paul, 1868-1940 Wesselhoeft, Selma Parker, Alberta M Thomas, Cyrus, 1825-1910
Subjects: Mayas Maya calendar Calendar, Mexican
Publisher: Washington, Govt. print. off.
Contributing Library: Getty Research Institute
Digitizing Sponsor: Getty Research Institute

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Text Appearing Before Image:
. Pages 66 to 63 of the Borgian codex have in the center a tree whichis growing from the body of a person and on which a bird is sitting.Above this there is a deity offering sacrifice. On the left is a ball-player, a pair in copulation, and a throne, upon which lies the headornament of a deity, always that of the deity of the succeeding page.To the right, at the top, we have the felling or killing of an animal orof a mythologic figure; below are Tzitzimime, figures plunging downfrom heaven, and a god producing fire by friction. Dates of yearsand days are also given, the sum total of w^hich is 52 years and 260days, that is, an entire cycle and a tonalamatl, divided into four equalparts. The principal deity, the one offering sacrifice, on the first page igthe sun god. This page may, therefore, correspond to the east.The god of the second page is the god of the earth, or of stone.He must correspond to the north. The chief deity on the third page 236 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY (bull. 28
Text Appearing After Image:
Fig. 49. Mexican figures of the bat god. selek) THE MAYA BAT GOD 237 is the maize god. He corresponds to the west. The one on thelast page is the death god, who corresponds to the south. Among the figures on the first page at the right of the chief deity,in some degree expressive of the fatal qualities of the latter, andcorresponding to the east, is the bat god beside the sun god. I repro-duce the pictures of the god in a to figure 49, where c is taken fromthe encyclopedic representation in the Borgian codex, page 66, while aand 1) belong to separate series which have been copied out of it. Thefact that we are dealing with the bat god is here expressed by the wing-membrane stretched between the legs and arms, the claws on theextremities, the sharp teeth, and particularly by the membranousnose leaf, which only in a is converted into a stone knife. The darkpainting of the wing membrane and the deaths-head upon it in a(instead of the crossbones of the Dieseldorff picture) especiallyremin

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