Calendar Structures for Venus in Mesoamerican Divinatory Books: Common Approaches to Commensuration and Correction

Abstract

Long-recognized similarities in representations of Venus, its movements, and associated supernatural forces in pre-Columbian books from central Mexico and the Maya lowlands point strongly to the value of a comparative approach. A new analysis of Venus records in the western Mesoamerican Borgia group shows that their calendar structures relate the periodicity of Venus to other calendar cycles in much the same way as the Venus table in the Maya Dresden Codex. Conversely, proposals for ways in which users of the central Mexican books may have corrected for discrepancies between canonical cycles of the calendar framework and what was actually observable in the sky reveal a novel way in which correction could have been effected in the Dresden Codex. These insights show that shared structural principles go deeper than related iconography and metaphors.