ABSTRACT
The cosmogony that is recorded in the Florentine and Ferjevrary Mayer codices, mainly indicates that the life of the ancients revolved around the wonderful nature. The four cardinal points in which they supported the sky, according to the Ferjevrary Codex, were the 4 cosmic trees that will be mentioned throughout the following article.
The four projected parts are the columns. Pars pro toto, symbolically highlights the tree at the top, for which the columns that support the weight of the celestial vault are represented as four trees. Among the Mayans, the ceiba is the privileged symbol. The green ceiba occupies the central place; the red, white, yellow and black ceibas remain at the ends. The Mexicas represented them as four tree species, and for the Mixtec-Poblano tradition they were trees loaded with symbols. The tree is the figure par excellence to conceptualize, with the veins of sap, the paths of the divine flows coming from the sky and the world of the dead that communicate the cosmos and bring movement to the world of creatures, the mouths of meteors, the sites of the astral sunrises and sunsets.
Already in New Spain, in the Diocesan Constitutions of the Bishopric of Chiapa, published in 1702, Fray Francisco Núñez de la Vega says that the ceiba “is a tree that [the Indians] have in all the plazas of their towns in view of the house of the Cabildo, and under it they hold their elections for mayors, and they sahúman them with braziers, and they are well established that their lineage comes from the roots of that ceiba tree.”
