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Show office as Bishop of Bath and Wells, or through his friends at Court (after James I had examined Dr. Dee's history and refused him all help). Dee himself has some possible connection with Mexican antiquities through his travels in central Europe, particularly on his visit to the Emperor Maximilian II at Pressburg, where he presented the Emperor with his book MONAS HIEROGLYPHIC^. Other possibilities for Dr. Dee to get in contact with things of this kind were his travels with the clairvoyant Edward Kelly who was with him from 1583 to 1589, when they visited several places, staying for six months at Siradz in Bohemia and three years at Tribau, also in Bohemia, where they were engaged in alchemy and divination, and so may have attracted a gift of a strange book from one of their patrons. For their work they used a black scrying mirror, which may have been brought by Edward Kelly to Dee. However at the sale at Strawberry Hill in 1842 the mirror was sold as a highly polished disc of cannel coal. Since this material was used in ancient Mexican masks it is probably a hollow ground Mexican mirror. It is barely possible, and certainly not impossible, that the Codex, like the mirror, had come to England from some part of the central European region of the Habsburg dominions rather than from Spain. The Mexican history of the document is of course completely unrecorded. It is pre-Columbian without a doubt. The deities shown are all members of the Aztec-Toltec pantheon. The day names are all painted in the traditional Mexican style. The counts of days are normally arranged in series of dots representing suns; but when dealing with the numbers of things selected for offerings the count is made in a bar and dot system akin to that used by the Maya. Seler attributed the Codex to the region south of Mexico City, perhaps to the Cuicatec or Mazatec; but it has more recenly been pointed out that the Codex may well have had a different origin, and have come from one of the tribes loosly described as Olmec in the 16th century, who lived along the Gulf Coast. Certainly the oldest page in the manuscript, dedicated to Tlaloc, shows affinities with the earlier art styles of Tajin in the Totonac country. This taken in conjunction with the southern tradition of bar and dot numeration would lend weight to the idea of an Olmec origin. Probably not directly involved is the fact that this |
