The Codex Borgia: A Painted Book of Days

In 1805 the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, in Rome, examined the collections of the late Cardinal Stefano Borgia, a passionate collector of antiquities from every continent. Among them was a long strip of deerskin, folded like a screen and painted on both sides with gods, day-signs, numbers and brilliantly coloured scenes. How it came to Italy from Mexico is unknown. Humboldt published pages from it. When the cardinal's collection went to the Vatican, the book went with it and took his name. It is one of the very few religious books from central Mexico to survive the Spanish conquest.

The book

• A screenfold of fourteen pieces of deerskin joined into a strip over 10 metres long, coated with white gesso and folded into 39 leaves. It is painted on both sides, making 76 pages (the end panels are unpainted).
• Painted with mineral and plant colours in the Mixteca-Puebla style, probably in the Puebla–Tlaxcala region.
• Dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, most likely just before the conquest.
• It belongs to the Borgia Group, a set of related divinatory books that also includes the Codex Vaticanus B, the Codex Cospi, the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer and the Codex Laud.

A manual of the days

The book is built on the tonalpohualli, "the count of days": 260 days, made by combining the numbers 1 to 13 with twenty named day-signs, from Crocodile to Flower. Priest-diviners (tonalpouhque) used books like this to read a person's fate from their birth-day, and to choose good days for marriages, journeys, planting and war. The Borgia sets out the count in many ways:

• The twenty trecenas (thirteen-day periods), each with its presiding gods.
• The days divided among the four directions and the world-trees.
• The nine Lords of the Night and the thirteen birds.
• A Venus almanac (pages 53–54) on the dangerous first appearance of the morning star, the same concern as the Dresden Codex (V31).

The central section

Pages 29–46 break the pattern. They show a continuous series of scenes that are not a calendar table: dark, night-time spaces, the wind god Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, deities emerging from a body of night, fire, sacrifice and rebirth. Interpretations include:

• a ritual journey of a priest or a god through the underworld and the night sky;
• an account of Venus in its hidden phase;
• a sequence of temple ceremonies in the order they were performed.

These are serious proposals, and none is proven. The section is often called the most enigmatic group of pages in Mesoamerican art.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Signs as beings. Each day-sign (Crocodile, Wind, House, Lizard, Serpent, Death and the rest) is a living power with its own gods, directions and colours. A day's name is its character.

The body and the calendar. One page sets the twenty day-signs on the body of a god, each sign tied to a part of the body. It shows that time, the cosmos and the person were read as one system.

Colour and direction. Red, black, yellow, blue-green and white are tied to the four directions and the centre, a cosmic map painted in pigment.

Connections

The Aztec (ch43), the Maya (ch29), Creation & the First Order (ch46) and Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51). Compare the Dresden Codex (V31) for the Maya version of the same calendar.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/codex-borgia.html