Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

Preface

Preface The painted books and manuscripts of Mesoamerica are increasingly the focus of scholarly and popular interest . Those who see the manuscripts for the first time are both astonished at the gorgeous and complex imagery in the books and intrigued by the reality of a system of graphic communication that was fully figural. As Western culture increasingly moves beyond alphabetic writing to embrace other graphic systems that convey information, scholars from a number of disciplines are beginning to look more closely at the painted books of Mesoamerica. Literary theorists, linguists , and specialists in cultural studies are joining anthropologists, art historians, and historians in their efforts to understand the special features of the indigenous codices. Two inexpensive paperback facsimiles of ancient Mexican codices, The Codex Nuttall and The Codex Borgia, as well as several overviews of the manuscript tradition have brought Mesoamerican manuscript painting to the general public. Despite this interest, however, the world of the divinatory codices (the books of fate) has remained a particularly impenetrable one for nonspecialists. The very features that allow these books to hold their specialized knowledge—the complexity of the imagery, the multiple calendrical system in many different permutations , their particular graphic structure, and their esoteric content—impede an easy understanding. There are detailed commentaries on individual codices, to be sure, but what has been needed is a larger synthetic treatment that can introduce and draw people into the field. The present study is intended to help fill this lacuna by providing an overview of the genre, one that explains the esoteric world of Mesoamerican fortunetelling , the canons that governed the creation of the painted books, their content, and the rules by which they were read. In the process it explains how most of the almanacs operate and offers new interpretations of several passages. My goal is to open up and provide an entrance into the world of codical divination. In this way, the book stands as a complement to Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs, which similarly treats the historical genre. This book has been long in gestation. The idea for it grew out of a Summer Research Seminar that H. B. Nicholson and I organized in 1982 at Dumbarton Oaks. That seminar brought together Nicholson, Ferdinand Anders, Carlos Arostegui, John Carlson, Maarten Jansen , Edward Sisson, Peter van der Loo, and me to focus our attention for the summer on the codices of the Borgia Group.We were a raucous and agreeably argumentative group, and we learned much from each other. The diagrams of the Borgia Group codices that appear in the Appendix to this book draw their inspiration from the brilliant diagrams that Anders developed for the seminar.The seminarculminated in a two-day symposium that brought an additional fifteen scholars into xxvi p r e fa c e the effort at Dumbarton Oaks, and it was followed by a session on the Borgia Group at the Manchester International Congress of Americanists. As Sisson (1983) noted in his summary article recapping the Summer Research Seminar, the core participants agreed on a list of recommendations for further study. Importantly, two have come to fruition. The need for an inexpensive publication series on the codices has been admirably filled by the Códices Mexicanos series of the Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt and the Fondo de Cultura Económica (1991– 1996), coordinated and largely edited and written by Anders and Jansen. The need for a translation of Karl Anton Nowotny’s Tlacuilolli has been met by George Everett and Edward Sisson’s (2005) fine translation. My project for the seminar was the manuscripts’ painting style, but my long-term goal was to conceptualize the Borgia Group codices, within the entire corpus of Mesoamerican manuscripts, as a single study. Over time, however, that larger project has split into several separate efforts. Initially my research focused on comparing the codical canons and almanac structure in the Maya and Mexican codices. I am thankful for a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1986–1987, where I composed an early treatment of the divinatory codices. At the institute, Irvin Lavin, Marilyn Lavin, and John Elliott were especially insightful and helpful colleagues. This eventually led to a two-day seminar on the Mexican divinatory codices that I organized at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1991, which drew in a broader...