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3 The Symbolic Vocabulary of the Almanacs When the calendar priest opened the stiff pages of his tonalamatl to seek a fate, he was confronted not with a phonetically referenced text that provided a single answer but with a diverse array of figures and symbols organized in complex and intricate arrangements. These figures and symbols, as well as their configuration , encoded the knowledge he sought, and it was his task to pull it out. Years of study in the calmecac had trained him to do this, for there he learned from the masters the graphic vocabulary, visual metaphors , and structural syntax of the tonalamatls. The process of identifying a fate was not merely an act of reading and voicing a message. It required the diviner to recognize the discrete elements that compose an almanac and to note how they were spatially associated with each other. The diviner had to recall the range of their meanings and choose the correct meaning within each specific context. Having achieved this in one almanac, he had to consult the other, complementary ones, ultimately weighing each meaning against all the other meanings similarly gathered. By this complex process of recognizing, sifting, and judging , the daykeeper achieved a richly textured and carefully crafted reading that fit the situation before him. Writing in central and southern Mexico—as represented by the historical and religious codices—was fundamentally pictorial. Although to the east the Maya had developed a hieroglyphic script to represent words logographically and syllabically and to reproduce phrases and sentences, the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and their neighbors did not. Instead, their writing consisted of images that are spatiallyorganized in various ways to create visual messages that sometimes parallel spoken language but do not usually record it.The goal was not to fix a spoken text by providing phonetic details but to formulate and store complex information through conventional images (Jansen 1988a:89). The process of interpreting these images can create a verbal text that coincides in content, but not in form,with the pictorial message. The system’s vocabulary is graphic. Its elements appear as figural representations (‘‘motivated’’ elements that look like what they represent) and abstract symbols (‘‘arbitrary’’ elements that do not resemble their referents). In Peircean terms they are icons and symbols (Peirce 1931–1958, 1:369).The icon ‘‘exhibits a similarity or analogy to the subject of discourse’’; the association of an image with its meaning is visually transparent within the culture in which it operates. The symbol ‘‘signifies its object by means of an association of ideas or habitual connection’’; here meaning is even more culturally governed by the knowledge and ex- 34 t h e s y m b o l i c v o c a b u l a r y o f t h e a l m a n a c s periences shared by the viewing population. Bridging these classes of images are indexical elements, which refer to what they signify (by metonymy, synecdoche, or instrumentality), where a single element or attribute points to the whole. In Mexican pictography, these categories very often overlap, for an icon can carry a surface meaning that situationallycalls up indexical and symbolic associations. In such cases, the context ultimately determines meaning. The syntax that brings order to these elements and that helps to define them by shaping their context is a grammar of space. Meaning is crafted by organizational structures that govern the spatial arrangement of the elements. The placement of the icons, indexes, and symbols matters. Not only does it record the systematic relationships between the parts, but it can also determine how the images themselves are to be read. It establishes which elements are linked to which other elements, which are categorically independent, and the quality of such linkages. Like so many systems of communication —spoken language and algebraic notation, for example—the identity of an element (be it a word or an image) is both culturally grounded and governed by the principles of the discourse in which it operates. Brian Rotman (1993:26) makes this argument in his study of mathematical writing and analysis. He points out that ‘‘an ideogram—‘1,’ say—can be spoken and named in speech—‘one,’ ‘un,’ ‘eins’ . . .—but its manner of functioning in mathematical discourse, the meaning it creates, the forms of significant mathematical content it facilitates and gives rise to, is configured internally . It operates not in terms of all these different spoken names but...

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