The Bishop of Yucatan

This week I focussed on editing, gadgeting, adding blogs to follow and so forth. I moved my Clustermap to the left hand panel, added some fish and discovered that one of the restrictions of gadgets is that they can go in the top, bottom and left hand pane only. I would have preferred to have the fish halfway through each post. One of the problems I have encountered with this particular template is that alot of its elements cannot be changed, such as the background colour; moving the whole page over to the right or moving the titles down one or two lines.

I added Catalogablog as a blog to follow as I find David Bigwood really interesting and I love his list of personal interests: Folk Dance, Morris Dance, Contra Dance etc. At some stage I intend to browse his recommended blogs and articles.

I found three reference books in the Boroondara Libraries catalogue for my next posting on Witch Hunting, which are as follows:
Whores of the Devil: Witch-Hunts and Witch-Trials, by Erik Durschmied
The Witch Hunts: A history of the witch persecutions in Europe and North America, by Robert Thurston
Witches and Witch-hunts: A History of Persecution, by Milton Meltzer
Therefore I decided to spend my time delving into these and to spend less time on the destruction of the Mayan Codices, however there is a tale to tell and a brief outline runs along the following lines:

Many books were burnt by priests in pre Hispanic South America ie. Modern day Mexico and Central America, (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Belize). The main objective of the priests was to indoctrinate them with their Christian belief system. The missionaries believed that everything in the books of the indigenous peoples was magic art, charms and superstition. In fact, these books contained information on their knowledge of plants and animals, their understanding of the seasons - the secrets if their land - and their ancient past. They had two calendars, one solar and one ritual, their writing consisted of glyphs and their books were codices - folding books written on the inner bark of certain trees.

In 1562 AD Bishop Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, happened upon the discovery of idols in a cave. He perceived this as an act of treachery as he had been led to believe that he had converted the indigenous peoples of Yucatan to Christianity. The Bishop had gained the trust of the people and by doing so had gained access to their sacred texts - many of which were written on deerskin. Bishop de Landa reacted to the findings of the idols in a vicious manner, holding an Inquisition at a place called Mani where he burnt many, many codices. The bloodshed continued and apparently the Franciscan monks whipped themselves into a frenzy killing, crucifying, burning idols and books and so forth. The Spanish continued the destruction and burnings, into the 1600's, in spite of the civilisation being in obvious decline, as they were also convinced that the codices contained superstitions. Enormous amounts of information were lost, in particular that which was considered to be sacred, which led to a tradition of oral recitation of texts by the wise men.

Only three of the codices remain in the modern day world and they are named as follows: the Dresden Codex, which is held in the Dresden State Library in Germany (this is the most elaborate of the surviving codices); the Madrid Codex held in the Museo de America in Madrid, Spain and the Paris Codex held in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. The Grolier Codex surfaced in the 1970's, however its authenticity has never been satisfactorily established.


Maya civilization- image from the Dresden Codex (page 9). Adapted from the 1880 edition by Förstemann.

Click here for further information on the Codice
Copyright for this image has expired.

A related website, however not a reference for this research blog, is this one about Maya ruins, the link has been included more so out of interest as the photographs relate to the story above.