The Codex Boturini: A Migration Told in Footprints

It begins with an island. A man and a woman sit in a house on a small island surrounded by water; beside it, a pyramid, a date sign, and a man paddling a canoe to the shore. From the shore a line of black footprints sets out across the paper, and the footprints keep walking, page after page, for more than five metres. This is the Tira de la Peregrinación, the "Strip of the Pilgrimage", better known as the Codex Boturini: the story of how the Mexica (the people we call Aztecs) left their homeland of Aztlan and wandered for generations before coming to the Valley of Mexico.

The object

• A single strip of amate (bark paper), about 5.5 metres long, folded like a screen into 21 or 22 panels. Accounts differ on the count, depending on how the folds are read.
• Drawn in black ink and left uncoloured: it may never have been finished. The story also breaks off in mid-episode.
• Its date is unknown: most scholars place it shortly before or shortly after the conquest (1519–21), in a style close to pre-Hispanic painting.
• It passed through the hands of the scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Jesuits, and was taken by the Italian collector Lorenzo Boturini in the 1730s–40s, whose name it now bears. It is held by Mexico's National Library of Anthropology and History.

The story it tells

1. Aztlan. The departure from the island, dated with the year sign 1 Flint (ce Tecpatl).
2. Colhuacan. The people come to a curved hill, where their god Huitzilopochtli speaks to them from a cave.
3. The tribes. They travel with eight other peoples, each shown by a name glyph.
4. The broken tree. A tree splits, a sign that the Mexica must separate from the other tribes and go on alone.
5. The first sacrifice. Huitzilopochtli gives them their mission, and the Mexica perform their first sacrifices.
6. The long walk. Footprints link place-glyph after place-glyph, and year counts show how long they stayed at each: years of wandering, building, leaving.
7. Colhuacan and war. In the Valley of Mexico they serve the lord of Colhuacan in a war against Xochimilco, bringing back their enemies' ears as proof. Here the strip stops.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Footprints. In Aztec painting a line of footprints means a road or a journey; the book is read by following them, left to right.

Year signs. The migration is dated in the 52-year calendar round: four year-bearers (Reed, Flint, House, Rabbit) with numbers 1 to 13, drawn as small boxes strung together to count the years spent at each stop.

Place glyphs. Places are written by pictures of their names: a curved hill for Colhuacan ("place of the curved hill"), a serpent on a hill for Coatepec ("serpent hill").

Destiny. The whole strip turns a history into a sacred itinerary, guided by a god toward a promised place, the island city of Tenochtitlan that the codex never reaches.

Connections

The Aztec (ch43), with The Maya (ch29) for Mesoamerican writing. Compare the Codex Mendoza (V51), which begins with the founding of Tenochtitlan where this strip leaves off, and the Codex Borgia (V41) for the ritual calendar.

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