Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

2. Time, the Ritual Calendar, and Divination

2 Time, the Ritual Calendar, and Divination Cycles of Time In Mesoamerica everything that happened and everything that mattered was bound togetherand controlled by time. Time, as it was organized and codified in the pan-Mesoamerican calendrical system, characterized and qualified all actions and happenings, just as it ordered and linked the present to the past and future. Supernatural, natural, mythical, and historical events —whether important or trivial—were all shaped by this calendar. Supernatural beings came under its influence ; the lives of humans were governed by it too. The calendrical system was an armature for securing human beings and events within time: everyone and everything had its particular point of attachment and thus its place. Multiple, ongoing, and intermeshing cycles of the calendar created reoccurring junctures in time, so that each action and every human took its place in multiple cycles. As the cycles advanced, new junctures continually came to the fore until the cycles completed their span.Thereafter the same previous junctures reoccurred, already occupied by remembered past events but remaining open to present and future actions. These junctures tied those old events to the current ones and to those still to be. This calendrical armature, far from being bare, was heavily fleshed with associations and qualities. All the temporal units bore multiple and layered associations with supernatural beings and with natural forces, entities , colors, areas of the cosmos, and understood truths. The units also received extra meanings shed continually by the events and beings linked to them. For example , because of the devastating and widespread famine of theyear 1 Rabbit (1454) in central Mexico, 1 Rabbit years thereaftercarried the taint of famine.The gods not only functioned within the structure of time: they were themselves attached to different units of time as ‘‘patrons’’ or governing forces and in this capacity actively influenced their units; in turn their own festivals were governed by those periods. Time was even joined with space, largely through the cardinal directions but also with intercardinal areas and the realms of the heavens and the underworld. Thus, the calendar was padded with meaning from the full range of Mesoamerican experience; it interconnected all aspects of cultural and natural life.1 This conception of the calendar as a fundamental essence that underlies all being and doing is reflected in the Mesoamerican cosmogonies, which consistently say that the calendar was born near the beginning of creation. For the Maya, the Chilam Balam of Chu- 14 t i m e , t h e r i t u a l c a l e n d a r , a n d d i v i n a t i o n Fig. 1. The twenty nights and twenty days appear as the second couplet in the cosmogony of the Codex Vienna (52), following the initial couplet representing sacred speech or song and the offering of powdered tobacco. In the calendrical pair, the nights appear as ‘‘night eyes’’ or stars and the days as tiny circular faces embellished with disks. The sky band locates this in the heavens. Drawing by Heather Hurst. mayel records that time, in the form of the day and the twenty-day period, was born ‘‘before the awakening of the world occurred,’’ before sky, earth, and water.2 The painted cosmogony of the Codex Vienna, from Oaxaca, locates the creation of the twenty-day period second in the series of visual couplets that open the world. Still in the heavens at the dawn of creation, the first couplet represents ritual voice and offering. Next appear the twenty nights and twenty days of the day count, which come before the primordial couples and subsequent gods and before the land is laid down and water brought forth (Fig. 1).This same priority obtains generally in the Aztec realm. There the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas places the creation of the day count after the birth of the four primordial gods, children of the creator lord Tonacatecuhtli, but before the appearance of the lords of the underworld Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl, and before the creation of the heavens, the great water, and the Cipactli crocodile from which the earth was fashioned.When the twentyday count came into being, the world was still in half light before the final sun was born (Garibay 1979:25– 27). In the pictorial cosmogony in the Codex Borgia, explained in Chapter 7, the day count is activated immediately after the first explosion of power...