Lord 9 Wind

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On the first painted page of the great Mixtec book now kept in Vienna, a figure stands naked in the sky. Above him runs the band of the heavens, and the world below is not yet made. Two aged gods lean in on either side, and into his hands they give the things that will make him what he is: the buccal mask of the wind, the pointed cap, the ornaments and the staff. Only when he is dressed does the story move. He takes hold of a rope let down out of the sky-place, and he lowers himself along it, out of heaven and toward the unfinished earth. The date-sign fixed beside him reads 9 Wind, and it is his name. He was not born in the ordinary way; the painters set him against the sign of a flint knife, struck rather than begotten. He is the wind that goes before the rain, and he has come down to open the world.

The names, and the book that carries them

The Mixtec — the Ñuu Savi, the People of the Rain, a living nation still in the highlands of Oaxaca — name this god several ways, and each name holds part of him. The first is a date. In the two-hundred-and-sixty-day sacred count that ordered all of Mesoamerican time, the day that fell as the ninth position of the sign Wind was his birthday, and by the custom in which a person carries the day of their birth, that day became his name: Lord 9 Wind. The Codex Vindobonensis, the screenfold in which he acts, names its central personage plainly as the form of the wind god known as 9 Wind, “after the date of his birth.”

The second name is his deity-name, and it is not shut in a book. In the town the Mixtec call Nuu Ndeya — Chalcatongo, in the Mixteca Alta — the living speakers of the language still know him as Koo Sau, the “Rain Serpent,” the serpent of the water on which everything grows. When the Dominican Fray Francisco de Alvarado compiled his vocabulary of Mixtec in the sixteenth century, he wrote the same name in the older spelling as Coo Dzavui, and the reading holds: Koo Sau and Coo Dzavui are one word across four centuries, the serpent and the rain bound into a single sound. A related epithet, Koo Yoso, names him the Plumed Serpent, the quetzal-feathered snake whose passage brings the savi-tatyi, the rain-and-wind together. When Koo Yoso shifts his dwelling, the storm comes with him.

To name him fully is to say what the neighboring peoples also knew. Lord 9 Wind is the Ñuu Savi form of the power that the Nahua of central Mexico worshiped as Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl — the wind and the feathered serpent, the whirlwind whose breath sweeps the road before the rain-gods come. He is not that god under a borrowed mask; he is the same office held in another tongue, the Mixtec face of a power recognized across Mesoamerica. The buccal mask his aged sponsors hand him on the first page is the wind god’s mask, the beak-like mouthpiece through which the divine breath blows. Where the Nahua painters gave the wind a duck-billed muzzle, the Mixtec gave 9 Wind the same, and the resemblance is a fact of the record, not a guess.

He reaches that record above all through the peoples’ own book. The manuscript scholarship long called the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I is a pre-conquest screenfold, painted on a long strip of prepared deerskin, dated to the fourteenth century. It runs to fifty-two pages, each about 26.5 by 22 centimeters, and unfolds to some 13.5 meters in length, accordion-folded into roughly ten sections — one of the very few Mixtec books to survive the conquest at all, and among the deepest indigenous documentary records anywhere in the Americas. Its two faces do different work. The obverse, where 9 Wind acts, recounts the sacred origins of the Ñuu Savi and the coming-into-being of the first lords; the reverse carries the dynastic genealogies, the lists of rulers and priests reckoned in the same book. Maarten Jansen and Aurora Pérez Jiménez, reading it from within the Mixtec language rather than as a European curiosity, restored its own name — Codex Yuta Tnoho, after the sacred origin-place — and it is under that name that the god is best read.

Opening page of the pre-conquest Mixtec screenfold known as the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (Codex Yuta Tnoho), painted on deerskin in the fourteenth century and now held at the Austrian National Library, Vienna. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A caution belongs with the book, and it is the caution the codex itself demands. A painted page is not a caption; it is a score for a performance that a knowing reader once sang aloud, and every modern rendering of it is an interpretation, however well founded. The physical facts — the deerskin, the dating, the fifty-two pages, the two faces, the shelf in Vienna — rest on the archaeology and are firm. The narrative read off the pictures is another register, reconstructed by scholars from the images and from what the living tradition and the colonial vocabularies preserve. Alfonso Caso pioneered the modern decipherment of the Mixtec books early in the twentieth century, showing that their painted scenes were history and genealogy and not mere ornament; Jansen and Pérez Jiménez carried that reading into the Mixtec voice. The account that follows is theirs, and it is a reading.

What he did at the beginning

In the story the codex paints, Koo Sau belongs first to the top of the world. He is born of the flint, struck into being in the celestial region above the sky-band, and the opening pages show him there before he has any of his marks — the naked figure whom two old gods attire. What they hand him is not decoration. It is his office: the wind mask, the priestly regalia, the insignia by which a god is known and a rite is worked. On the reading of the codex most widely followed, once he is thus dressed 9 Wind descends from the heavens, takes counsel with the assembled gods, and then lifts the band of the sky and the band of the water apart, drawing them away from each other so that the space between them — the Mixtec earth — is opened and made fit to live in. The rope by which he comes down is doubled in meaning: it is the cord of the sky, and it is also the birthing-rope hung in a Mixtec house, so that the god’s descent is at once a lowering and a being-born. The world is delivered as a child is delivered.

He does not arrive to a finished place; he finishes it. He kindles the New Fire — the ritual drilling of flame that opens an age — and the codex marks him as the one who lights that fire for the first time, before there was any age to open. The whole book is built around the ceremony: it falls into some ten great chapters, and each turns on a New Fire that begins a mythic or historic era. The first of them is his. He carries the heavenly waters down to the places of the Mixteca and hands them out, town by town and mountain by mountain, so that the rain has somewhere to fall and the land has water; the scenes that later scholars read on the codex show Lord 9 Wind bringing the waters of the sky to the region and distributing them. He sets the offices and the cult in motion — the priesthoods, the calendar-keeping, the order by which a world can be inhabited rather than merely occupied. He is a priest-god and a culture-hero in one act: the power that made the world, and the first celebrant of the rite that keeps it.

Behind him stand his parents. The codex opens with aged couples in the sky, and on the reconstruction the creator-pair from whom the divine and human lineages spring both carry the same calendar-name, One Deer — Lord 1 Deer and Lady 1 Deer, the primordial couple of the Ñuu Savi. From that couple 9 Wind comes, and after him the world’s first noble houses. The place where those houses begin has a name the Mixtec still use: Yuta Tnoho, “River of the Lineages,” the origin-valley the Nahuatl called Apoala and the maps call Santiago Apoala — a canyon of white cliffs and falling water in the northern Oaxacan highlands. There, on the interpretive reading of the codical corpus, stands the sacred tree from which the first lords and ladies of the Mixteca were born, split from its trunk into being; and Lord 9 Wind is cited as the great progenitor behind them all, the founder from whom the dynasties reckon their descent. He is the wind before the rain and the serpent whose breath is the storm, and his name, Koo Sau, ties him for good to the water the People of the Rain live by. To the Ñuu Savi he came down from heaven and made the earth an ordered, ruled, and watered place — which is as much as a god can do.

The tree-birth, the descent, the flint-struck nativity: these are read from pictures, not from a decoded text, and the honest reader marks the seam between what the codex shows and what a scholar reconstructs from it. That reconstruction is careful and it is contested at its edges — how much of the obverse is cosmic myth and how much is the charter-story of real dynasties dressing their origins in the sacred is a live question among the people who read these books. What is not in doubt is that the Ñuu Savi painted 9 Wind as the hinge on which their world turned from unmade to made.

Down the generations, and out of the fire

From the founder the codices run downhill into history. The same books that show 9 Wind lowering himself from the sky trace, page after page, the lines of descent that lead to the great historical lords of the Mixteca — and the greatest of them, the warrior-king Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw,” Iya Nacuaa in his own tongue, is heir to the order the culture-hero founded. His career the screenfolds set out in detail: a lord of Tilantongo in the highlands who reached the coast and made himself ruler of Tututepec, the only Mixtec king to bind the three Mixtec regions under one hand. The historian John Pohl has dated his life, from the codical chronology, to roughly 1063 to 1115 CE, ending in his capture and sacrifice by a rival house. The absolute dates are argued over — the codices count in their own cycles, and pinning those cycles to the Christian calendar is exactly the kind of thing scholars debate — but the shape of the history is not in question, and its far end is 9 Wind. The man who united the kingdoms held a throne whose legitimacy ran back, in the books, to the god who came down the rope.

That the god was known beyond the Mixteca is written into the shared iconography. The descent from heaven, the wind mask, the feathered serpent whose breath is the storm — these belonged also to the Nahua wind god of the later central-Mexican world, so that a traveler between the peoples would have recognized the office if not the name. The recognition ran both ways and long predates the Aztec empire; it is one of the deep continuities of the Mesoamerican sacred world, and 9 Wind is its Oaxacan expression.

The book that carries him nearly did not survive. Most of the Mixtec screenfolds were destroyed — in the wars of conquest, and then in the long colonial campaign the friars called the extirpation of idolatry, which reached its grim maturity in the eighteenth-century idolatry trials of the Zapotec and Mixtec sierra and the burning of the painted books and the objects the priests called idols. The vocabulary of that campaign — idolatry, superstition — is a distortion to be named and refused, not a description of what the books were: they were a literate people’s own record of their own sky and their own descent, and calling them idols was the instrument of their burning. The fuller account of that persecution belongs with the history of the Mixtec people themselves; here it is enough to say that the Codex Yuta Tnoho escaped it only by an accident of empire. Carried across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century — sent, on one account, among the first treasures shipped to Charles V in 1519 — it passed from hand to hand through the courts and libraries of Europe and came at last to the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where it is held today under the shelf-mark that gave it its European name. It survived because it left.

Its recovery as history undid part of the damage. Where the colonial eye had seen a heathen curiosity, Caso’s decipherments and then Jansen and Pérez Jiménez’s reading of the book in the Mixtec voice showed a coherent account of creation and dynasty, painted by a literate civilization about itself. In that reading 9 Wind stopped being a strange figure in a picture-book and became again what the Ñuu Savi had always held him to be: their own founder, the god who opened the world. Modern scholarship has kept working the same seam — the Descent of the Plumed Serpent that Jansen and Pérez Jiménez trace through the codex, the pictographic study of the first dawn that reads the origin scenes page by page, the reappraisal of the feathered serpent’s Oaxacan career — each returning the god to the frame that made him.

And he did not stay on the page. In Nuu Ndeya they still speak of Koo Sau, and across the Mixteca of Koo Yoso, the rain-serpent whose moving is the storm; the deity the sixteenth-century friar wrote down as Coo Dzavui is spoken aloud in the twenty-first, in oral tradition and in the reckoning of the weather. The People of the Rain still keep, in their own mouths, the name of the wind that goes before it. Whatever the book in Vienna preserves in paint, the living tongue preserves in breath — which is, for a wind god, the fitter monument of the two.

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