Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

4. Structures of Prophetic Knowledge

4 Structures of Prophetic Knowledge The tonalamatl is a graphic discourse for conceptualizing time. It allowed the daykeepers literally to see time: to know it as being composed of discrete, concrete units that participate in interlocking cycles and to recognize these units and cycles through their visual manifestations. Even more important for the daykeepers , the tonalamatl allowed them to inspect and thereby comprehend, if only imperfectly, the unseeable but potent forces that surround and accompany these units and cycles of time. The almanacs manifest time, giving it concrete expression, by organizing and manipulating symbols and space. Individual units of time are depicted by the symbols of the day signs and coefficients (signifying days, trecenas, and other calendrical periods ), but they are embedded in space that integrates them with all the other units. This space is abstract, neither topographic nor experiential, but a universal, topological space that is filled byand thus comes to represent measurable units of time.Time then is embodied and visualized by both symbol and space.The daykeepers mastered time, in all its uncertainties, by transforming it into readable and knowable images, spaces, and locations. The almanacs accomplished this with a graphic syntax that defined the relationships between the different components as unequivocally as possible to yield what Manfred Porkert (1974) has called systems of correspondence . As Porkert (1974:2) explains in his analysis of the theoretical foundations of Chinese medicine —which similarly concerns itself with relationships— ‘‘No effective position may be defined by itself; its definition calls for comparative reference to some other position. [When] systematic inductive links are established between data defined in accordancewith conventional standards of value, the result is a system of correspondences .’’ The Mexican almanacs compose such a system. They link time to its prophetic forces by materializing units of time and their mantic influences, systematizing their direct linkages, and locating them within a structure that relates them to all the other units under consideration. This structured materialization was achieved by joining data and exegesis from a multiplicity of almanacs, each with its own temporal and mantic focus and its own internal structure. Because time and its prophetic properties are inherently unrepresentable—there is no single way to present such a multidimensional omnipresence with any accuracy—the creators of the almanacs developed a variety of graphic strategies to approach it. Each strategy focuses on only a few aspects and explains only a few properties; but in combination with understandings from all the other strategies, they 66 s t r u c t u r e s o f p r o p h e t i c k n o w l e d g e reach a much fuller approximation of reality. Together the multiple almanacs madevisible and palpable the unrepresentable character of prophetic time. General Principles Governing Structure Although these multiple almanacs operate independently and have their own internal structures, some general principles nevertheless govern the way all the material is presented in the divinatory books.The page, the two-page spread, the register, and the cell all participate in organizing material. These features are depicted in the diagrams in the Appendix. Fundamental to the divinatory books is the page format . The page, created by the folds in the screenfold, causes information to expand and compress in order to fit within its edges and at the same time achieve either a balanced composition or a uniformly dense patterning . The page exerts its authority by creating natural beginning and ending points for almanacs, protocols, and other presentations. Although almanacs often extend over several pages, they usually span the entire width of a page rather than beginning and ending in the middle (Fig. 34).1 Likewise, the protocols almost always respect the edges of the page and spread their data to cover the page’s width.2 The narrative section in the Borgia usually also adjusts its scenes to fit a single page except when compositions must extend over two pages. Beyond the page, the two-page spread (two pages that face each other across an internal fold) also exerts a unifying influence on the material it contains. Nearly a dozen almanacs are organized to span facing pages; and other, longeralmanacs use facing pages to present complementary or related information.3 For example, the great in extenso almanacs that open the Borgia, Cospi, and Vaticanus B (discussed below) run the thirteen days of the trecenas across facing pages.The two-page scenes in the...