The bound book of standards — and the Council seat of taxonomy, structure, and knowledge. A codex is where scattered pages become one authoritative volume.
Latin codex, an alternate spelling of caudex (the trunk of a tree, a block of wood); Roman writing tablets of wood, and later bound sheets of parchment, kept the name of the material they began as.
Binding is the whole act — loose pages carry the same words as a codex but not the same authority, because a codex asserts that everything inside its covers belongs together and nothing outside them is part of the standard it keeps.