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1 Containers of the Knowledge of the World The year was 1541.Tenochtitlan had fallen twenty years earlier; and the Franciscan friar Motolinia (Toribio de Benavente) had already been evangelizing in Mexico for seventeen years when he sat down to write to his friend and patron, Lord Don Antonio Pimentel, sixth count of Benavente. The letter would introduce and accompany Motolinia’s History of the Indians of New Spain (an account of Aztec religious beliefs and customs as well as the subsequent conversion efforts of his fellow mendicants), on which the Franciscan had labored for many years. Reflecting on his understanding of ideas and events once so foreign to him, he reveals that his knowledge came, at least in part, from the painted books of the Mexicans themselves. These books looked very different from the European books in his library or the manuscript he had just completed, because they were fashioned of long strips of native paper or hide, which were rolled as a scroll or folded back and forth into pages as a screenfold. Moreover , their messages were painted in images rather than written in letters and words. But for Motolinia, as for the Aztecs, they were containers of knowledge, and books nonetheless. I shall treat of this land of Anáhuac or New Spain . . . according to the ancient books which the natives had or possessed. These books were written in symbols and pictures.This was their way of writing, supplying their lack of an alphabet by the use of symbols . Moreover, the memory of man being weak and feeble, the elders in the land disagree in expounding the antiquities and the noteworthy things of this land, although some things . . . have been gathered and explained by their figures. . . . These natives had five books which, as I said, were written in pictures and symbols. The first book dealt with years and calculations of time; the second, with the days and with the feasts which the Indians observed during the year; the third, with dreams, illusions, superstitions and omens in which the Indians believed; the fourth, with baptism and with names that were bestowed upon children; the fifth, with the rites, ceremonies and omens relating to marriage. (Motolinia 1951:74) Motolinia then declared: ‘‘Only one of all these books, namely the first, can be trusted because it recounts the truth.’’ This truthful book, which Motolinia called ‘‘the book of the count of the years’’ and explained in some detail, was the annals history, the book that recorded such secular events as conquests, the succession of rulers, and other noteworthy events that Motolinia understood to be rational facts. Intel- 2 c o n t a i n e r s o f t h e k n o w l e d g e o f t h e w o r l d lectually Motolinia could recognize and accept the validity of this book as a historical record, not unlike the annals and histories written in Europe, even though related ‘‘in signs and figures’’ rather than in letters and words. As for the other books he so neatly listed, however, their content was implicitly idolatrous and thereby false. These other books, the ones Motolinia described but then so quickly—and, we might imagine, warily— passed over, were the dangerous books. They were the books that contained the tenets of religious ideology, against which Motolinia and his colleagues had been battling so arduously for many years. They told about the invisible world: not the secular world of rulers, dynasties , armies, and tribute but the world of divine or spirit beings, supernaturals, and cosmic forces. Among other things, these were books of fate. As Motolinia described them, these books treated divination, feasts and rituals, ‘‘dreams and illusions,’’ and spiritual preparations accompanying birth and marriage. Although he divided the books topically into four separate genres, we know from existing versions that the different topics could be, and were, intermixed and gathered in single volumes. These dangerous books were first and foremost about cycles of time and the spiritual meanings that adhere to time. For the Aztecs and their neighbors, time created the nexus that connected humans to their fates and the gods. And time was particularly understood in terms first of days and then of larger sets and cycles of days.These books segmented the flow of time into the days and theircycles and explained which mantic forces were at work there. These were the books that articulated the sacred...

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