9 Wind and 1 Deer: The Mixtec First Couple

The first thing is water.

The Mixtec creation narrative, preserved in the screenfold books that the Mixtec scribes called codices — painted on deerskin, folded like an accordion, each panel a visual sentence in the complex language of Mixtec iconography — begins with a world covered by dark water. Above the water, nothing. Below the water, nothing. The world is water and darkness.

Then two trees rise from the water.

The trees are enormous: not forest trees but world-trees, trees whose branches hold the sky. From one of the trees — from a special place where the branches meet, from a knot in the wood or a hollow in the trunk, from the place where the tree’s own body creates a sheltered enclosure — emerge the first divine pair.

They are named by their calendar day-signs.

Lord 1 Deer. Lady 1 Deer. Named for the first day of the deer sign in the Mixtec calendar, born on the same day, the twin principles of the first existence. They are depicted in the codices as small figures in elaborate royal dress — headdresses, jewelry, the full regalia of Postclassic Mixtec aristocracy — because they are simultaneously the first people and the prototypes of all subsequent aristocracy.

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The Valley of Apoala is their place.

Apoala — a specific place in the Oaxacan highlands, a valley carved between dramatic limestone cliffs where the Rio Apoala springs from the rock — is identified in the Mixtec traditions as the place of origin, the valley where the sacred trees grew, the geographical point from which the ruling lineages dispersed across the Mixtec world.

This specificity matters.

The Mixtec codices are not abstract mythology. They are dynastic genealogies in mythological form — records of specific lineages, specific marriages, specific wars, specific successions, framed by a cosmological beginning that establishes the divine right of those lineages. Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw, the most powerful and best-documented Mixtec ruler (who died in 1063 CE), appears in multiple codices; his ancestry traces back, through documented generations, toward the first couple at Apoala.

The sacred tree is the family tree.

The creation myth is the genealogy.

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The codices that contain this history are among the most important and most vulnerable of all pre-Columbian documents.

Fourteen Mixtec codices survive, all but one of which were produced before the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century. The Codex Vindobonensis (Vienna), the Codex Nuttall, the Codex Bodley — these are the primary sources for the Mixtec creation and dynastic narratives. They are in museum collections in Europe, where they arrived as gifts or seizures in the colonial period, separated by an ocean from the communities whose history they record.

The Mixtec people of Oaxaca are engaged in ongoing efforts to recover access to their own historical documents — to read, study, and teach from the codices that belong to their tradition, currently housed in Vienna and London and Oxford and Washington.

Lord 1 Deer and Lady 1 Deer are in Vienna.

Their descendants are in Oaxaca, still making the connection.

The tree at Apoala still grows — or a tree grows there, in the valley with the spring, and the people who know the story know which tree it is, or which tree it was, and the connection between the sky-high first tree and the specific limestone valley where the water comes out of the rock is the same connection the Mixtec codices were always making: between the cosmic and the local, between the first couple and the current one, between the origin and the place where you are standing.