Birth

FIGURE 2.  Lord 9 Lizard's birth, from page 11 of the Codex Selden.

FIGURE 2. Lord 9 Lizard’s birth, from page 11 of the Codex Selden.

FIGURE 3. Lady 3 Flint gives birth, from page 16 of the Codex Nuttall.

FIGURE 3. Lady 3 Flint gives birth, from page 16 of the Codex Nuttall.

FIGURE 4. Marriage and the birth of a son, from page 31 of the Codex Nuttall.  Read from right to left, the detail shows Lord 12 Wind and Lady 11 Crocodile seated on jaguar-skin thrones and a yellow mat. To the left of Lady 11 Crocodile stands the couple’s son, Lord 12 Dog.

FIGURE 4. Marriage and the birth of a son, from page 31 of the Codex Nuttall. Read from right to left, the detail shows Lord 12 Wind and Lady 11 Crocodile seated on jaguar-skin thrones and a yellow mat. To the left of Lady 11 Crocodile stands the couple’s son, Lord 12 Dog.

In Figure 2 you can see Lord 9 Lizard as he first appears in the Codex Selden. Although he is fully dressed and sized as an adult, he squats over a red umbilical cord and round gold placenta. These indicate “birth.” Actual birth scenes showing mother and infant are very rare in the codices. Figure 3 shows one of the two examples that occur in the Codex Nuttall. The use of the umbilical cord and placenta to indicate birth is most frequently found in the Codex Selden and the Codex Bodley.1

A second convention for indicating the birth of individuals was simply to draw children after the seating of their mother and father on the marriage mat (see below for marriage conventions). The example in Figure 4, which reads from right to left, is taken from the Codex Nuttall. Marriage scene is shown first (on the right), followed by the birth of a son (on the left).

Marriage >
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1 Herbert Spinden was the first to identify the use of the umbilical cord to indicate birth in his 1933 “Indian Manuscripts of Southern Mexico.”