One of Only Four Books That Survived

The Madrid Codex is one of only four pre-conquest Maya hieroglyphic codices known to survive anywhere in the world, a survival rate discussed in its historical context elsewhere in this atlas in relation to the mass destruction of Maya books ordered by Bishop Diego de Landa in 1562, making this rain address and the divinatory almanac material surrounding it in the codex an unusually precious and irreplaceable direct link to pre-conquest Maya religious practice, unfiltered through the colonial-era Spanish transcription that mediates most other surviving Maya and wider Mesoamerican religious material discussed in this atlas. The codex organizes its content around detailed divinatory almanacs concerning agricultural timing, and this rain address specifically connects to the Chaacs, the Maya rain deities whose favor governed the success of the maize harvest central to Maya subsistence, situating the prayer within a broader Maya religious concern for correctly timing agricultural and ritual activity according to a sophisticated calendrical system that the codex's divinatory content directly reflects.

The Madrid Codex is now held in the Museo de America in Madrid, having reached Spain during the colonial period through a transmission history that, unlike the alphabetic Popol Vuh, involved the physical object itself crossing the Atlantic rather than a locally produced alphabetic transcription of oral or hieroglyphic content remaining in the Americas.