By Elizabeth Hill Boone

ISBN-10: 0292795289

ISBN-13: 9780292795280

In groups all through precontact Mesoamerica, calendar monks and diviners depended on pictographic almanacs to foretell the destiny of newborns, to lead humans in deciding on marriage companions and auspicious marriage ceremony dates, to understand while to plant and harvest plants, and to achieve success in lots of of life's actions. because the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica within the 16th century, they made a made up our minds attempt to wreck those books, within which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their realizing of the invisible international of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. this present day, just a couple of of those divinatory codices live to tell the tale. Visually complicated, esoteric, and strikingly appealing, painted books reminiscent of the recognized Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus nonetheless function portals into the traditional Mexican calendrical platforms and the cycles of time and which means they encode.

In this finished examine, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the total extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and gives a masterful clarification of the style as a complete. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar clergymen and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the photograph vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing rules that constitution the codices. She exhibits how they shape almanacs that both supply normal function assistance or concentration topically on particular points of existence, equivalent to delivery, marriage, agriculture and rain, trip, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone additionally tackles significant parts of controversy—the nice narrative passage within the Codex Borgia, which she freshly translates as a cosmic narrative of production, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a unmarried spiritual and divinatory approach.