bees

Bees in the Codices

In my notes, I have various notes on "bees." An interesting paper by a Ph.D. hopeful explained the dates found in the bee pages (109-112) of the Madrid Codex.¹ I tried various ways to contact him, including the e-mail address he had as Nikolai's student, but to no avail. However, his information is important enough to include here.

The author covered a lot of territory in a few pages. There are seventeen pages of important calendric components; the clearest exposition of the most important aspects of the calendar I have ever read. The problem was he did not know just how important it was.

For his study, it must have been frustrating to him that the numbers rounded out, but the Day Names did not fit (p. 30) no matter what he did. As Sid Hollander proved to me, Mr. Bézy also discovered that numbers are always possible to reconstruct. Nevertheless, he had difficulties when the Day Names did not match the numeric sequence. They were "separated by 5 days [even though] the Madrid indicated there was a 4 day Wheel during the time it was written [or drawn out, if you prefer to be more accurate, since there are no "romanized words"]. The Distance numbers, from 3 Manik went to 3 Kawak, and it did not fit the Day Name wheel of 4."²

Mr. Bézy then to work on the Introduction. He compiled a thorough overview of various types of Maya bees, their names and their individually styled hives and how their honey was used. This is a typical reaction when viewing a familiar animal or insect form in the codices: one must run down all the components of the earth creature; however, the houses (not hives) of the bees found in the Madrid, as will be seen later, are marked clearly with "sky bands." (see M-106a below)

By the same token, the image of the lowly bee also became an essential image to tell future generations what it was like when the comet passed overhead and dropped huge chunks of stone into the ocean. For those unfortunate people who have been stung by bees, you know exactly what the ancients were describing. But for those who have never been stung by a bee, or even the more insignificant fire-ant, we have no idea what the ancients wanted to convey to future generations.

So, let us look at the few records about bees that are available:

Nuttall Codex: N-3Atlatl and N-5 Kalli

The first appears in the Nuttall Codex . During the A-O year Three Atlatl when people went underground. (p. 3-Right-Bottom) Later, during the A-O year Five Kalli, the flying (avian) Quetzalcoatl serpent-in-the-mouth dragon/man hovers over a stone man. [Middle and Top] This stone man is (one of a group of three; two are below him in R-B) being attacked by [stinger-beaked] bee, as his freinds and relatives flee into the earth caves, a positive symbolic glyph that informs us that this "bee" had no equal among the flowers on earth. Earth bees wear their stingers in their back ends, not the front.

Bodley Lamina 8 Bottom

Since the bee image is so prominent at the end of this strip shown above (8 Bottom/Middle) I assumed that both dates were present in the Bodley Codex.) Nevertheless, the Bodley does have a similar bee event at 3 Reed. However, unless there is an extra dot under the four obvious dots under A-O year Four Kalli, in this strip of information, there is no match.³ Alfonso Caso verified that there is another dot under 4 Kalli [House]). One notices then, that in the Bodley the tip of the reed of the figure Three Reed is not square but slightly askew and the headdress of the entity "Smoking Eyes" just below that tip, has a rounded segment taken out of it. I will assume that an erasure has been done to the atlatl tip. The images of reeds used for dates and names tend to have a clear squared tip when it is visible. Caso mentions nothing about this segment, except to say that the entity comes from the town of "insect."⁴

This insect in the Nuttall version has the paws of a Jaguar [of the Night Sky] and the wings of a bee. The Nuttall above, shows the same paws, but no Jaguar markings. Since the Quetzalcoatl [serpent-in-the-mouth] comet is above the bee glyph one can assume an night event with a colorful iridescent display similar to the quetzal feathers of an avian/serpent image ias discussed by Karl Taube at the Maya Meetings in 2008.

M-106a

Previously, I thought this would be a simple explanation of meteorite dust that fell (dead) from the skies, and, but still hot as it reached the ground, burned people that were not in their homes, or if their roofs were of straw or palm fronds, burned their homes also. That would explain "sacrificial" deaths that were said to be in the thousands in one day. Not done by priests wearing the vestments of their gods, thereby, being "transformed," but instead being a historical, painted event of the sky/sun god himself with a proper humanistic (or animal) headdress doing the damage. In short, the "god" is acting out, or being transformed as human avatars, because "gods" do not like to be honored in their true form as "bad" entities.

M-111-b

The bees in the Madrid, on page 111 have an interesting story to tell. This page of the Madrid shows the same 'serpent-in-the-mouth' man shown above, as in the Nuttall Codex, only the serpent is not in the mouth, but similar enough for a Mixtec artist to assume the there was a connection to the mouth. The pages from 103 to 112 do not read well at all. The dead bees falling out of the sky are found on page 104b and 106b-c, but the active sky bees come after that event. How and why would death come previous to activities?

If these pages actually begin on M-112, because many of the pages have figures where all are turned toward the left; some even found sliced apart and found on preceeding pages; i.e., 90c, the body and an arm, to page 89c where the hand is located; or 84, the tail of the scorpion, black legs and arm, goes to page 83 for the head, headdress, spear and captive; etc. The death of the bees on M-106b-c, etc. makes much more sense. This back reading process appears to end at the double paged calendar.

It even makes more sense that if the pages are read right to left, then the "god" on the right side of the page arrived from the west with his fiery serpent (as suggested in the Popol Vuh) and went to the east where he seems to have requested his sky bee population to help him out.

The Popol Vuh also has a strange comment to verify the west to east journey. The whole text is best read written in full:

The sun was like a person when he revealed himself. His face was hot, so he dried out the face of the earth. Before the sun came up, it was soggy, and the face of the earth was muddy before the sun came up. And when the sun had risen just a short distance he was like a person, and his heat was unbearable. Since he revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that now remains. [As they put it in the ancient text, "The visible sun is not the real one."]
(Tedlock 1996:161,n304)⁵

Dennis Tedlock (p. 304) then referred to

a Mopán Maya tale collected by Eric Thompson, iin which Lord K'in (the sun) goes from his home in the east to the center of the sky and then back to the east again. It appears that he goes clear across the sky because he had placed a mirror at the center. (Thompson 1930:132)⁶

The above quotes were badly translated, When the portion of the transferred text is read, (from page 128) it appears to actually refer to a huge comet that was close enough to the earth to dry out the land. To say "when the sun had risen just a short distance, his head had real bones," is to say there was a great comet as a huge flaming ball of light, coming over the horizon from the west, and it had a long tail that was colored black that seemed to covere the whole horizon until the presence of the comet changed to stripes of yellow and black, them to red. It had not yet cleared the horizon. The true sun was in process of rising in the east (So here there should have been more text, but it became truncated over the years. or better said, it was partially transferred to page 128 with notes on page 277.)

By noon they met in the middle of the sky but since they were not at the same level of the sky, there was no collision, the real sun continued on its normal journey to the west while the comet flew on towards the east. The illusion in the second quote was that the real sun coming from the east "placed a mirror in the sky at noon and returned to the east" (as the comet). The real or true sun just ambled across the sky as usual into the west 'and went to bed.' The original translation then verifies that "the sun we see is not the true sun," implying that the true sun (the comet) had a real head with bones when it was born in the west.

The dates in the Madrid M-111b (shown previously), are now of the Maya calendar, different from the style and names of the Aztec/Mixtec calendar system. I decided that there could be someone out there who could decipher the misinformation Mr. Bézy discovered. I believe that the data, he found is the source of the zero year: that year when the stars that had revolved around our earth for 360 days a year for centuries were changed by the Earth's new tilted orbit and now include a new year length of five extra days. This was a very uncommon occurence in the sky. It is one that has been calculated backwards and called a pregression of .05 secs per year.⁶

The image at the beginning of this article, is a bee carved out of mother-of-pearl as a pendant. The artisan may be showing us where the bee came from. Three circles on his forehead appear to indicate the Summer Triangle, but on a different "leg" of the Milky Way, half a sky over from Orion. With the 360 day year, Orion was once the most prominent constellation in the sky as the protector of deer and other animals. Therefore, this bee iconographic image sports a deer ear and the three dots of the Summer Triangle. It may indicate his early origin (Orion) and his later new location (Summer Triangle) after the Milky Way (Cosmic Tree) split into two segments. (This will be up soon. The Broken Cosmic Tree: The Milky Way)

¹ Bézy, Phiippe (2002) The Bee Pages: An Overview, Books in Mesoamerica, For Nikolai Grube Professor ARH 390 Spring Semester. Several attempts to locate this author has failed. pp.27-43.

² Bézy, p. 31.

³Bodley Codex p. 8, Middle Bottom.

⁴Caso, Alfonso, (1960). Interpetation of the Bodley Codex, 2858 México, DF, México: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología. México, Translated by Ruth Morales Revised by John Paddock. 8-V, p. 38.

⁵Tedlock, Dennis (1996) Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 161 and note on p.304, regarding the mirror image of the sun in the middle of the sky found in the text, and p. 128 Note on p. 277, [My Note: a possible mis-placed translation as a real head with real bones in the sky, rising with a thick possum-like tail of yellow and black strips, that turns red and black stripes, then finally only the red of the "sun."
It is supposed to be an ordinary sunrise for the dry season, but it may be a partial description of the "ball game" in the sky as the comet came across the horizon in the West, then meets the true sun at noon. Both continuing on their way, the comet to the east and the true sun to the west as normal.]

⁶ Thompson, J. Eric (1930) Ethnology of the Mayas of Southern and Central British Honduras. Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Series 17, no 2. Chicago: Field Museum Press.

⁷Nuttall, Zelia The Zouche-Nuttall Codex, New York: Dover Publications, p. 3.

Codices: Knorozou, |. V. (1963) Writing Indian Maya / Uzdatelbstvo Akademia Hayk, CCCP Edition Nzdatelbctvo Akademnn Nayk, CCCR;. section on Madrid/Dresden/Paris Codices and _____ (no name or date.) Digital color copy of originals