Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

9. A Mexican Divinatory System

9 A Mexican Divinatory System Variations and Commonalities The exact provenience of the divinatory codices has been so hard to determine because they contain very little that is local. In contrast to the historical documents , which tend to reflect the politics and perspectives of their particular towns, the books of fate are largely silent about their own origins. They include no named humans, no named polities, no concrete historical events (except possible celestial phenomena), and no specific place signs other than the cardinal directions . Even when the cardinal directions are represented by individual place signs, as they are in Aubin No. 20 and the Codex Porfirio Díaz Reverse, these signs refer not to political entities governed by known families but to sacred locations relevant to many peoples. The divinatory codices do not seem to present local or regional realities; rather they participate in a broadly shared ideological system that concerns the cycles of time and the gods and forces linked to these cycles. In the multilingual and multicultural world that was Late Postclassic Mesoamerica, one might assume there to have been great variation within religious and divinatory beliefs. This was the intellectual area that was most closely guarded by the temple priests and daykeepers , and this was the realm that required the most training and the most esoteric knowledge to master. Since most priests and daykeepers probably did not travel widely, their knowledge would have been acquired locallyand disseminated within the community. Thus, we would expect that the temples and calmecac of each ethnic group, and perhaps even each polity,would have developed their own secrets and emphases over the years. We do, of course, find considerable variation in religious practices and almanac production. Some gods are more relevant to the Mixtec rather than the Nahua sphere, for example, and vice versa; Mixtec and Aztec versions of many major gods (e.g., 9 Wind/Quetzalcoatl ) belong to separate narrative traditions. Additionally , patron gods can vary from city to city in the same region. The Aztec divinatory books look and feel rather different from the Borgia Group ones, and this is not simply because the Aztec books are made of paper whereas the Borgia Group books are made of hide. The extant Aztec manuscripts stand out because most of them present a single, abundant presentation of the trecenas and the various patrons of their days, instead of the many and varied almanacs of the Borgia 232 a m e x i c a n d i v i n a t o r y s y s t e m Group. This fully elaborated trecena almanac is packed with multiple layers of mantic content, which in the Borgia Group is scattered over several different almanacs . The Aztec versions include not only the trecena days and patrons but also the Lords of the Night and sometimes the Lords of the Day and Volatiles as well. The Tonalamatl Aubin and the Codex Borbonicus— the most indigenous in style of the Aztec tonalamatls— are the fullest in their treatment, but the TellerianoRemensis and Vaticanus A/Ríos also include the Night Lords. The variant tonalamatl in the Codex Tudela includes both the Night Lords and the Volatiles. We might wonder whether this tendency to pack the trecena almanacs with an abundance of mantic content is a colonial feature, because all these manuscripts are arguably postconquest. It could represent a colonial painter’s attempt to present all the potentially related elements in a single almanac, to create, in essence, an epitome for his Spanish patron. I think this scenario is unlikely, however, because the Tonalamatl Aubin and Codex Borbonicus were created in very different places and environments (one in provincial Tlaxcala and the other in metropolitan Culhuacan) but have virtually the same iconographic content and structure. If the packing and layering of mantic elements were a colonial innovation, we would expect more varied results. This fully elaborated trecena almanac does seem to re- flect an Aztec preference. The original corpus of Aztec almanacs may once have been more varied, however, than is the existing pictorial sample. Aztec divinatory books, like their Borgia Group counterparts, may once have contained a wide variety of almanacs, including those that employ spacers. The Borbonicus includes, in addition to its great trecena almanac, two others that focus on the Lords of the Night (21–22). The Vaticanus A/Ríos reproduces a corporeal almanac of the twenty day signs (Fig. 61), and one...