The yearly seasons and skies in the Borgia and related codices.

Gordon Brotherston

Professor Gordon Brotherston is a Research Professor at the University of Essex, where he helped establish the Latin American programme in 1965. He is also Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington and the author of numerous books and papers on native texts from Mesoamerica including Book of the Fourth World (1992) and Painted Books from Mexico (1995).

Turning the pages of a Mexican screenfold book, the reader may move from right or left, up or down, or may move one way in order to return the other in another register, all of which puts great premium on the principle which directs the reading. In texts in surviving ancient screenfolds, this principle can only ever be one of two kinds, year-dates or number cycles, which are formally quite unambiguous, mutually exclusive and therefore diagnostic of literary genres. The year dates signpost the linear or boustrophedon path of the migrations, municipal histories and biographies that make up the annals genre (xiuhtlapoualli), examples of which stem from the Huaxteca, the Highland Basin, Tlapa, Cholula, the Upper Papaloapan (Coixtlahuaca-Cuicatlan) and the Mixteca. The number cycles define and give shape to the theme chapters that characterise texts in the ritual genre, of which nine are known, from a similar array of locations [Fig.1].

The nine texts in the ritual genre feature thirty or so thematic chapters, most of which, differently developed, appear in most of the texts; and they cover 357 pages. Of this total, about four-fifths (284 pages) are devoted to the tonalamatl,1 that is, the cycle of 260 nights and days that corresponds to human gestation and which complements the year as the basis of the Mesoamerican calendar. In his 1961 catalogue, Nowotny demonstrated how all the chapters allotted to these 284 pages belong to the tonalamatl by depending on its ever-present sets of numbers and signs (9; 13, 20 etc) for their reading order and direction. In some cases he also intimated how these chapters relate to the tonalamatl thematically - to the notions of birth, coupling, funeral, behaviour and labour, and other aspects of human time proper to that gestation cycle -, and to the cycles of sun and Venus years named by particular sets of tonalpoualli signs and numbers.

The non-tonalamatl chapters which occupy the remaining 73 pages in the ritual texts are found in Borbonicus, Borgia, Féjérváry, Laud, and Cospi [Fig.2a]. These are less satisfactorily described in Nowotny's catalogue except, that is, for the 18-page chapter in Borbonicus, which all scholars agree pertains to the 18 twenty-day Feasts of the year. Because of their opener and less regular format, and because for him none appeared to have an overarching numerical definition, Nowotny left these non-tonalamatl chapters to the end, off-loading them into the all-purpose categories 'Tempelkult' (Borgia) and 'Rituale mit Bündeln abgezählter Gegenstände' (Cospi, Féjérváry, Laud; 1961:244-75).

The aim of this enquiry is to reconsider the magnificent Borgia chapter. The method involves drawing on Nowotny’s catalogue, the only comprehensive one published to date (yet accessible only in German), and at the same time directly relating the screenfold texts to each other, and to the corpus of post-Cortesian texts which derive from them. These are chiefly the five mixed-genre compendia and clusters of copies, transcriptions and adaptations identified here by the names Mendoza, Magliabechiano, Mexicanus, Rios and Tepepulco [Fig.2]. Throughout, structure is considered no less important than imagery and evidence in native script is always preferred to alphabetic transcription or commentary. Since Nowotny's day several excellent facsimiles and analyses have appeared which make this task easier than it was for him.2

The Eighteen Feasts: sequence and structure

The Mesoamerican calendar is well known for its division of the year into eighteen Feasts of 20 days (in ilhuiuh), a system which articulates tribute with quarters, planting with seasons, dance with measure, cosmic with political time. The names and practices proper to the Feasts varied over time and according to region. Yet from the start, overall arithmetic, structure and conception remain firmly the same [Fig.3].
Besides appearing in Borbonicus, now expertly read by Reyes (1992), the Feasts are featured in all the post-Cortesian compendia and provide the whole delivery mechanism for commodity tribute in Mendoza; they are also the subject of the various calendar wheels of Texcoco and Tlaxcala (Boban, Veytia, etc.), as well as sundry texts associated with the names Ixtlilxochitl, Tovar, Durán and Serna. At the same time, representations can be found in other tribute documents, and occasionally in the annals, where they mark out significant moments and periods within a given year; stone inscriptions are also known. Kubler and Gibson's survey (1951) remains the most authoritative.

Within a given sequence, individual Feasts may be identified by as little as a single emblem, like the tree-moss of Pachtli; or even a phoneme, like the parrot which being toz-nene in Nahuatl denotes the root tozoa in Tozoztli, which relates to penance. More substantial versions, called theomorphic by Kubler and Gibson, will present a series of presiding figures, in full regalia, sometimes with supplementary figures or emblems. More elaborately again, there may be a full page scene, replete with choreography and architecture.

Concise, the emblems expose most readily the lack of standardization, over time and space, among the images and names used to identify individual Feasts. In part this reflects what were clearly different regional industries, climates and schedules; in part, it simply reflects the fact that different ceremonial highpoints from any one twenty-day Feast could be chosen to represent it. This last notion is made clear in the multiple images recorded in Borbonicus, the Florentine Codex and Durán, and in the alphabetic glosses added to several other texts. Even so, the iconography of certain Feasts shows remarkable constancy, like the feathered warrior of Toxcatl, Tlaloc's pozole stew pot in Etzalcualiztli, the woman's cotton thread and broom in Ochpaniztli, the bird hunting gear and nose-bone adornment (yacamitl) of Quecholli, Tlaloc's falling water in Atemoztli, and Xipe's knotted conical hat in Tlacaxipehualiztli. The consistency displayed by these emblems in all major cases makes of them a template for the cycle as a whole.

The emblem sequences tend to identify the Feasts serially one to one, as do the full-figure sequences, despite the extra information and page space allotted to certain of them. With the scene sequences however, things are different. In the 18-page chapter in Borbonicus (pp.23-40), only 15 pages are actually dedicated to the Feasts, and those at the start recur cyclically at the end (Izcalli; pp.23, 37). After the first eleven Feasts, enormous attention is paid to Ochpaniztli, whose scene intrudes on to scenes before and after (pp.29-30) and announces a far more spacious arrangement of scenes, one per page or more compared with the two per page or less before. Just this formatting effect recurs in the Tepepulco Ms where, as Baird has keenly shown, the presiding figure of Ochpaniztli appears before and after as well as in her own scene, since her presence was felt to be threaded into the preceding and subsequent Feast, in what may once have been a parallel vertical format (Baird 1993:116). The Florentine Codex records several cases of overlapping Feasts, like the wild-flower gathering that began two days before the actual beginning of the flowery Tlaxochimaco, or the mock fights of Panquetzaliztli which ran on into Atemoztli. For all that, the Feasts always add up to eighteen and they always follow the same sequence.
In all known native-script texts, the Feasts group themselves in pairs. Several contiguous Feasts are paired as lesser (-tontli, - tzintli) and greater (Huey- ), complementary parts (here called A and B) of the same concept or 40-day event. Tozoztli, Tecuilhuitl, Miccailhuitl and Pachtli are obvious cases. In Matlatzinca and Tlaxcalan texts (Serna; Veytia), Atemoztli and Tititl are similarly paired. This grouping in pairs is even more intense in the Maya hieroglyphic cycle and affects a majority of the Feasts.

By contrast, since it falls between the double Feasts of Miccailhuitl and Pachtli, Ochpaniztli always remains irremediably single, and this alerts us to the further fact that the cycle of 18 also falls structurally into halves. For, in the tribute literature, the autumn Feast Ochpaniztli is characteristically cross-linked with its vernal counterpart Tlacaxipehualiztli, in order to mark the equinoxes, at which woven goods were due, at the end of the upper and lower halves of the sun's annual course (Mendoza f.47). In a footprint motif that echoes the actual collection of tribute by pochteca travellers, several sources highlight Teotleco as the first along a road through the winter half of the year (Tepepulco Ms, Tovar 2). Following these indications closely, we are then justified in numerically characterizing the two halves of the year as four double Feasts followed by a single equinoctial Feast (Ochpaniztli, Tlacaxipehualiztli): F1.1 - F1.9, F2.1 - F2.9. Even in the otherwise distant hieroglyphic model of the lowland Maya, where the Feasts were detached from the seasons upon being perennially meshed into the 360-day tun calendar [Fig.3], exactly the same structure is visible.

Within these two halves of the year, the annals and tribute lists go on to specify certain intermediary Feasts for quarterly payments, principally of metals, determining intervals of twice 80+100 days between solstice and equinox Feasts (F1.4, F1.9; F2.4, F2.9). Texts from Tlapa and Tlaquiltenango make this system amply clear.3 The same arrangement is mirrored in the quartered gold disks and the round markers that denote the very concept of year [Fig.4a,b]; and it is consonant with the four sides of the commoner square and diamond year markers [Fig.4c,d], as well as the quartered ballcourt and quatrefoil designs found at the solstices in Borbonicus (pp.27,34). Besides helping to reveal the structure of halves and quarters implicit in the cycle of 18 Feasts, recalling the importance of tribute practice shows how the notion of paying hard commodity items is continuous with that of making ritual offerings. In its chapter on the subject, the Florentine Codex (Book 2) equates 'debt-paying' (nextlaoaliztli) with Feast (ilhuitl).

When reflecting climate and seasons, the Feast cycle may likewise respect the equinoxes; yet in doing so it tends to reflect an arithmetic not just of halves and quarters but of thirds and sixths. In its exquisite weather chapter (much traduced by Sahagún), the Tepepulco Ms embodies a series of meteorological seasons in the figures of Eecatl (wind), Tlaloc (rain and water), and Itztlacoliuhqui (frost). The successive reigns of these deities are counted out in Feasts, expressed as disks on their hats, which when read from top to bottom come to 3 (Eecatl), 5 (Tlaloc), and 6 (Itztlacoliuhqui), 14 Feasts or 280 days. Completing the cycle, we read back up to the middle figure so that the cycle may begin again at the top with Eecatl; and in so doing we notice that the middle figure, Tlaloc, has an additional set of (slightly larger) disks on his hat, four in all, which appropriately brings the overall total to the 18 Feasts of the year. This hitherto unnoticed division of the year - 3+5+6+4 Feasts - is of enormous interest with respect both to Mesoamerican agricultural practice and to the question of properly understanding the logic and format of the Feast cycle chapters in the ritual codices.

In the accompanying Nahuatl gloss in theTepepulco chapter, Itztlacoliuhqui's 6-Feast season is said to begin in Ochpaniztli, and this enables us to know exactly which Feasts belong to which of the three deities over the year as a whole and hence to which kind of weather. These types of weather are in fact categorized in a matching set of eight images. The first four of these images stand beside to Eecatl and Tlaloc and are coloured, like the deities themselves, and they run from the red lightning of the former's hot dusty Feasts (Tozoztli A - Toxcatl; F1.1-F1.3) that announce the latter's monsoon to the rainbow that ends it (Etzalcualiztli - Miccailhuitl B; F1.4-F1.8). By contrast, the second set of four images are black-and-white, like Itztlacoliuhqui himself, and detail the clouds, cyclonic rain, frost, snow and hail that may be expected during his third of the year (Ochpaniztli - Atemoztli; F1.9-F2.5). Returning to the start of the cycle, we then re-enter the colourful second reign of Tlaloc that ends with the spring equinox (Tititl - Tlacaxipehualiztli; F2.6-F2.9).

With great economy and ingenuity, the Tepepulco Feasts chapter tells us even more about the Mesoamerican year. For closely observed, the disks on the hats of the three dieties are of two kinds, either open circles or simple black dots. The former cover two thirds of the year, from Tititl to Miccailhuitl B (F2.6-F1.8), while the latter cover one third, from Ochpaniztli to Atemoztli (F1.9-F2.5), that is, the reign of Itztlacoliuhqui when, as the Nahuatl gloss reminds us, young plants are threatened in the highlands by frost and wintery weather. In other texts, this division of the year is reflected in year markers that show either rains, or the falling leaves of Itztlacoliuhqui’s pre-planting reign (Fig.4e,f]. Precisely when Itztlacoliuqui's reign ends does planting begin in earnest, in the Feast Tititl, also specified in the Nahuatl gloss, when land was measured in literal geometry, a squaring-off seen in the distinctive right-angle of this deity's chest [Fig.4i-k].

In terms of human activity as opposed to just weather, Tititl becomes, then, the hinge of agronomy and the agricultural year, the time when a great range of vulnerable crops (chiles, beans, amaranth and the finer cereals) were and are seeded and planted. In this model, the key concept is not so much the monsoon (which in fact often proves too much for vulnerable crops when newly planted), but Tititl’s opening of the solid black dot into an open disk that is legible as a seed-hole, immediately after the end of Itztlacoliuhqui's reign, without risk of frost, in chinampas (a Borbonicus gloss refers to the 'laguna'; cf Broda 1983;1991) or fields wet from the winter rains of Atemoztli. Preceding and following on from Eecatl’s windy Feasts, the two main planting periods are watered respectively by irrigation and monsoon, the larger 'seed-hole' disks of the former suggesting its greater importance.

In Tititl, the Magliabechiano and Florentine sources commemorate the goddess Citlalinicue or Star-skirt, as does Borbonicus, showing her presiding over the distribution of seeds during the Feast (Fig.5a,b). In a remarkable self-referential motif, this Borbonicus page confirms the Tepepulco model of 6 non-planting and 12 planting Feasts by showing the 12-Feast planting season to begin and end with Star-skirt; for this goddess appears a second time in Miccailhuitl, immediately before the start of Itztlacoliuhqui's reign in Ochpaniztli. There is yet another confirmation in the Aubin Ms 20 where the year is shown as twelve moons, four of which, starting with the equinoctial Ochpaniztli, are marked by frost-withered falling leaves [Fig.4l].

Pivotal, Tititl was known as the Feast when things were stretched and measured, the emblem here being raised forearms and the tzotzopaztli, the weaving batten, or ruler sticks in cloth (Fig.5c.d). Calendrically, this equipment was linked to the intercalating of the 5 or 6 epagomenal days in order to make up the full solar year of 365 or 366 days, after which a new year or Feast cycle would begin. In a key announcement on the same Tititl page, Borbonicus shows this measuring equipment being actually transported from Tititl to the next Feast Izcalli, with which its cycle indeed begins. As we have seen, the Tepepulco Ms starts one Feast later again, the Mexica norm, in Atlcahualo.

This measuring of the year went hand in hand with the naming of it and of its constituent days by means of the signs and numbers of the tonalpoualli, which produced the round of 52 years (the 13 numbers with 4 year-bearer signs). This round of named years was inaugurated at the New Fire ceremony, which was timed by reference not to the seasons but to the night sky, the Mexica observing the midnight passage of the Pleiades at the winter solstice. The correlation of the Feasts with the tonalpoualli is dealt with in all the main native sources, which also explain the New Fire ceremony and the 'binding' of named years at 52-year intervals (the xiuhmolpilli). The corresponding type of year-marker is the knot or tie around a solar ray [Fig.4g,h]. In Tovar 1, the day count is correlated with Tecuilhuitl A, and the year count with Atlcahualo, here shown as Xilomaniztli, when the scaly fisherfolk let the waters rest.4

The combined effect of intercalating epagomenal days, identifying year ‘bearers’ with tonalpoualli numbers and signs, and using the stars to time the New Fire ceremony appears to have been a steady shift forward in the start of the cycle, from Tititl to Atlcahualo, as well as a yet further structuring of the 18 Feasts, this time into sets of 11 and 7. In the Tepepulco Ms, just these proportions are determined by stars in the constellations Fire-Drill (close to the Pleiades) and Scorpion (Ursa Minor, the Septentrion), in the prelude to its account of weather, planting and the binding of named years; indeed, in a range of sources eleven emerges as the generic cipher of the night sky, the prime star number [Fig.6].

At the same time, in the Tepepulco Feasts chapter Atlacahualo is followed at the eleventh Feast by a switch in format and by a secondary start after the autumn equinox, marked by the footprints of Teotleco, as we noted above (3+3+3+2, 3+2+2 Feasts per page). This 11+7 arrangement now comes to seem especially significant when we recall that it also defined by format in the Borbonicus year, even though here it occurs one Feast earlier, between Izcalli and Miccailhuitl B or Xocotl huetzi. The eleven Feasts in question are further highlighted by the eleven figures who at the end of the span (Xocotl huetzi) dance around a tree draped with the distinctive 'butterfly' paper streamers that appear at the start in Izcalli and nowhere else (pp.23,28); in Tovar 2, these dancers climb the tree to gather sky-given bounty in the form of an eleven-fold image Kubler and Gibson identified with the night sky.

Going back to the Borbonicus version of Tititl, the same 11 Feast span is found yet again, restated within the 12-Feast planting period explicitly related to the night sky through the figure of Star-skirt, the Milky Way whose brightest, broadest and most colourful stretch reigns over this period (from near the South Pole it arches across Sagitarius to Antinous and the Great Rift). Closely observed, the Star-skirt in Miccailhuitl can be seen still to be moving from its first to its second part (A to B), from the eleventh to the last of the planting Feasts [Fig.5b]. As a Feast, Miccailhuitl A is identical with Tlaxochimaco, the brilliant flower and seed festival in July:5 and this seed motif is abundantly present at the start of the sequence, when there were races up the temple steps to the grain bin (cuexcomatl) out of which the year's seeds and seed corn (teosuchil) were distributed. In the Borbonicus scene for Tititl, the steps number eleven (in the format of Rios’s eleven hued skies between the planted earth below and the food source above; Fig.6g-i), as do the dancers who snake colourfully between the first and second Star-skirt, enlivening the corresponding eleven Feasts at the expense of the twelfth and final one. Elsewhere, this 11/12 proportion is made explicit on the body of Star-skirt herself, in her final and deadly form as a tzitzimitl monster, claws horribly enlarged, blood now the only colour in her normally rainbow skirt, and on her skull her eleven spent Feasts, shown as eleven flags (pantli), victims and arithmetically the twenty days of each preceding Feast [Fig.6j].

The persistence of these year-start elevens and their firm link with the night sky prompts awareness of yet another instance of them, one related, however, more to pulque drinking than to fire drilling. Starting in Pachtli, the Tepepulco Ms specifies a set of ‘Two Rabbit’ Feasts which runs through to Tozoztli B, at which different types of pulque were drunk, and in Magliabechiano these drinkers process as eleven, carrying axes and wearing the new-moon lip adornment (yacameztli) that identifies them with the western night sky. The story that connects them, as axe bearers, house-builders and pulque drinkers, with the sky and the very origin of the Pleiades can be found in the Popol vuh.6

When attention is paid primarily to the native script sources rather than the alphabetic commentaries later produced by writers who had little understanding of or sympathy with the system, then the eighteen Feasts of the Mesoamerican year shed much of their proverbial confusion, revealing a set of clear if multiple identities, and firm structures that correspond to tribute, weather, planting, the naming of years, and the night sky.

The Feasts Chapter in Borgia

The chapter in Borgia left unassigned by Nowotny has 18 pages (pp.29-46). It is read vertically downward, unlike the tonalamatl chapters in the rest of the screenfold that are read right to left, and it actually runs through the upending between the obverse and the reverse side (pp.38 to 39). It forms the core of the middle segment in the text, which includes year dates and starts and ends with deerskin icons [Fig.7]. It consists of very complex and populated page scenes, many obviously paired, especially the first and the final four, and all in plan, except for the journey past profiled buildings on pages 33-38.

To date the most fundamental analyses of this chapter are those of Nowotny (1961:245-55), and before him, Eduard Seler (1904-9). In his celebrated commentary, drawn on still today (for example in Patricia Amlin’s film The Five Suns, 1996), Seler characterizes it as the cyclic journey through the underworld made by Quetzalcoatl in the guise of Venus. This reading works relatively well for the road that runs down physically to the lower edge of the screenfold, and not so well for the rest of the chapter. Yet even during the journey proper Quetzalcoatl is not the only traveller and has Tezcatlipoca as a constant 'twin' with whom he exchanges characteristics (wind-snout, mirror-foot etc.). This, plus the appearances of the canine Xolotl, the bearer of the sun through the underworld at night, suggest a notion of passage less exclusively linked to Venus and more in line with that of the year cycle itself with its turning point at the winter solstice. It is curious to note that interpreters of the analogous epic journey of the twins narrated in the Popol vuh have similarly wished to identify them exclusively with Venus despite the fact that the text clearly says that they become sun and moon. Above all, Seler’s account leaves a great deal of structure at odds or unaccounted for.

Nowotny concurs with Seler that the chapter is cyclic but eschews what for him are astronomical and idealist excesses. Instead, he concentrates on the material and sociological data, seeing the whole as the elaborate ceremonies of a vanished priesthood, performed in temple precincts at the heart of a major city. On internal evidence - iconography, scale of architecture -, he opts for the Olmeca-Xicalanca cult of Quetzalcoatl which made of Cholula the Rome of its day, and the heart of ancient Mexican book culture. He excels at formally enumerating the boney female and the caiman earth bodies that edge and frame pages, and at suggesting how the rituals shown re-enact major events of cosmogony and even of history. Comparing the final four pages and the Toltec-Chichimec annals of nearby Cuauhtinchan, he shows how particular historical events could be incorporated into ceremonial cycles. He even links the ceremonial cycle with the idea of the year and its seasons (‘Jahresabschnitte’) by referring to the native practice of reserving certain buildings for use only on certain Feasts.

Yet he stops short of a complete identification between the 18 pages and the 18 Feasts, blinded by his view of the priestly elite, his aversion to astronomy, his schematizing and his preference in this for the tonalpoualli over the Feasts as a taxonomic principle. For these pages are populated by not just priest impersonators but hunters, warriors, midwives, planters, drinkers, ball-players, musicians, women and children as well as men, all active in spaces that are not always cloistered but open to either side or all around. They invoke the sky as well as the earth, initially depicting polyp and primal life-forms which could never be ‘impersonated’. They have an intricate structure, upon which Nowotny imposes one of his own, disrespecting the format of the original, sectioning integral pages and even ignoring the turn of the screenfold [Fig.8]. And they invoke tonalpoualli-named days and years only in two subsequences that culminate at quarter points, in fire-drillings, the first of which he amazingly fails to notice.

On close inspection, the iconography and structure of this Borgia chapter reveal it is no less bound up with the eighteen Feasts than its counterpart in Borbonicus. Its extreme richness means that acknowledging this serves not so much to refute Seler and Nowotny as to incorporate and reconcile their separate readings within the larger and necessary ritual frame [Fig.9].

At precisely the right intervals, there is clear evidence of the six Feasts we identified as a template for the cycle as whole. Threads and broom, albeit rudimentary, mark Ochpaniztli (F1.9; pp.33-4); the birds, the arrow, the bag and even the nose-bone of the hunter in Quecholli (F2.3) emerge on page 36 and are carried down the left margin to page 38; falling water poured by Tlaloc at Atemoztli (F2.5) runs off the very bottom of the following page, the last of the obverse (p.38); the conical cap is worn at Tlacaxipehualiztli (F2.9; p.42); Tezcatlipoca and the feathered warriors of Toxcatl (F1.3) dominate page 45; and on the next and final page, the sequence culminates in the pozole pot of Etzalcualiztli (F1.4), at the summer solstice (p.46).

In structural terms, these iconographic parallels conform overwhelmingly to the pairing principle, and to the inner proportions of the year established above with respect to tribute (equinoctial halves, solstitial quarters), planting (one third and two thirds, before and after Tititl), and calendrics proper (eleven inset into eighteen, no earlier than Tititl and no later Atlcahualo; Fig.3). For the cycle opens after the summer solstice with the double Feasts Tecuilhuitl and Miccailhuitl (confirmed at the start as two double twenties - flags), showing their respective quincunx and flint-knife motifs, and indicating by means of the inset Signs the calendrical meshing with tonalpoualli that begins with Tecuilhuitl in Tovar 1. At the fall equinox, Ochpaniztli and the first firedrilling are identified with paired images of sun and moon (equal day and night), plus the mace-wielding man and the weaving thread woman (exactly as in Magliabechiano and Durán); then just as in the usual depiction of Teotleco, the journey through the winter half of the year begins with footprints. These lead down past the winter solstice and the quartrefoil motif at Panquetzaliztli, and then up to the spring equinox, dividing firmly into upper and lower roads that end respectively in a celestial ballcourt and a square-sided pit. Over the final four pages which correspond to the first summer quarter, the pairing principle is most neat and in Tozoztli includes appropriate maize-cob and penance imagery, before Toxcatl and then the second and final grand fire-drilling at the summer solstice.

Meanwhile, the start of the planting year in Tititl is specified in the fact the second part of the chapter, on the reverse side of the screenfold, opens with a clear representation of caiman earth, measured and seeded [Fig.10]. The 12-Feast fieldwork span from Tititl to Miccailhuitl B coincides with the appearance of Star-skirt in strip or full body form, just as Itztlacoliuhqui's 6-Feast reign of cold is defined by her absence, as well as by a far more open and wandering format. Star-fringed and bare-boned, Star-skirt appears page after page in profile, full face and again in profile, displaying on her hued skirt eyes and lattices, skull and crossbones, hearts and gold disks that are brought together in the matching Magliabechiano figure for Tititl7 [Fig.5a]. Under her aegis, the correlation with tonalpoualli-named years begins in Tititl and carries on through Izcalli to Tozoztli B, in the second inset tonalpoualli sequence, which like the first one is incremental.

Besides tribute quarters and planting thirds, the Borgia chapter also specifies the sequence of 11 Feasts inset into Borbonicus, and by similar means. For the Star-skirts that appear above in the sky over the eleven Feasts from here to Miccailhuitl A are rainbow hued and culminate in the images of wild flowers, cross-fertilization and coupling proper to Tlaxochimaco (Miccailhuitl A), before the abrupt switch, in the twelfth and final Feast (Miccailhuitl B), to a headless body with no colour bands in her skirt. Noting how Star-skirt presides over seed distribution in Tititl, the Florentine Codex gives a glorious account of the counterpart flower and seed ceremonies in Tlaxochimaco, and the intense 'living' of this Feast (ilhuinemoa) in all night wakefulness under a sky dominated in fact by the Milky Way full and breathtaking at the galactic hub, right before the Great Rift.

Generalizing the link in principle between the number eleven and the nights as opposed to the days of the year, Borgia further alludes to the new-moon elevens of the western night sky, childbearing women, and the Two Rabbit or pulque drinkers. Atlcahualo features these latter, men, women and children, as they are described for this Feast in the Tepepulco Ms; they wear the new-moon adornment typical of the Magliabechiano pulque eleven and they emerge from a night-sky of eleven stars (at the inception of the whole cycle, the newborn that descend from the sky in Tecuilhuitl A and B are adorned respectively with 18 and 11 stars [Fig.6b,e]). The childbearers are celebrated in Tititl, with the first of the Star-skirts, where a male emerges open-mouthed to touch a circle of twelve women below. Adorned with lunar devices, these women leave eleven footprints and nine of them become pregnant (see detail in Fig.10), in a process of gestation that issues directly, in Izcalli, into the birth of nine suns, hearts and bloods from the starred body of the Night-Lord Youallitecutli, eleventh of the Heroes. Though intricate, the network of the lunar women in Tititl confirms eleven as a night-sky number, yet again. It also confirms that, whatever was later made of it by the male-oriented Maya aristocracy, the 260-unit tonalamatl, whose count begins precisely here in Tititl, indeed had its origins in the nine moons of human gestation, specificially in those commemorated in the Youallitecutin that name both them and the nights of the 29 novenas.8

These identifications of the Borgia Feasts, through structure and imagery, effectively cover the cycle, and none requires special pleading, so that on this basis the Borgia chapter must properly be put into the same category as its counterpart in Borbonicus. More regular, Borgia even assigns a page per Feast, top to bottom, although Ochpaniztli (as usual) is given extra space and up to Atemoztli is followed by vertical overlap (pp.33-38). Lying as it does at the heart of the middle ‘deerskin’ segment of the screenfold, it details a year that falls between the year-date sequences in that segment. For it starts in Tecuilhuitl, after the onset of the monsoon rains depicted before its opening (pp.27-8) and finishes with the solstitial New Fire at Etzalcualiztli, before the New Fire ceremonies repeated after its end, in the tribute quarters (pp.49-53; Fig.7].

Seasons and the Successive Births of New Fire

The Feasts chapter in Borgia lies at the heart of a core segment of a text that is the surviving core of a genre - the ritual books - generally acknowledged to be the most densely written of Mesoamerican literature; or, as Nowotny foresaw, it is the best available key to that literature (‘Es handelt sich um nichts Geringeres als um den Schlüssel zum Verständnis des gesamten Tempelkultes des alten Mexiko’; 1961:246). Once its basic identity and mechanics are recognized, it illustrates even better than Borbonicus the multiple structures of the Mesoamerican year and serves as an indispensable term of comparison for hitherto difficult chapters in Féjérváry, Laud and Cospi. It also strongly develops the principle of multiple reading characteristic of the ritual texts, which incorporates diachronic into synchronic time, at more than one time depth.

Closely considered, Nowotny's historical and Seler's cosmogonical readings far from going against the idea of the year cycle reinforce it insofar as the Feasts are explicitly designed for the purposes of re-enacting and re-living past events, so that they may continue to signify in the present, much like Bastile Day or Christmas. Exactly this kind of multiple reading is demanded, without doubt, by the Texcoco and Tlaxcala calendar wheels, which having the cycle of 18 Feasts around their rims, report on Chichimec history within, tracing a footprint trail through both the Feasts of the year and the threshholds of the past [Fig.11]. In the same Chichimec tradition, the Cuauhtitlan Annals tell how in Quecholli 1348 the Chichimec ancestors of that town specifically recalled what the deity Itzpapalotl had taught them about hunting, at the start of their pilgrimage from Chicomoztoc in the seventh century; similar comments are made about Izcalli in 1058 and 1431 (Bierhorst 1992). In the Mexica tradition, the Borbonicus Feasts chapter operates in a similar way: at the first and obvious level, it deals with the cycle as such, repeating at the end the Feast with which it begins, and which could be expected to go on beginning again, year after year. At a deeper level, however, the reader realizes that certain Feasts in the cycle attach to particular moments in time and space, which by definition could not fully repeat. The fire-drilling performed at Panquetzaliztli, the winter solstice, is dated to the year 2 Reed, in the round of 52 year dates that also runs through the chapter; at the same time, it is tied to Huitzilopochtli's temple at Huizachtepec, newly built in the year 2 Reed 1507 [Fig.12]. In other words, in all these cases the Feasts function both within the cycle of 18 and as sites for particular events. The same is true even after the European invasion. Birds migrating from the chillier north always arrive in Quecholli (November), yet when the migrant Cortes also arrived in that Feast in 1519, he was seen as a 'rare' and special species. Dusty hot wind always led to bellicosity in Toxcatl (May), yet when the Spaniards were driven actually to massacre their Mexican hosts in that Feast in 1520, it was noted as special in the Tlaxcala Lienzo. Shaping the history to come, Cuauhtemoc and his advisers, besieged in Tlatelolco in August 1521, waited for the exact moment to surrender to Cortes, at the start of greater Miccailhuitl, the Feast of destruction and death (Rios f.87v).

Several sources show that the principle of setting diachronic thresholds within the cycle could be extended back and down to deeper time levels, as in the case of Seler’s underworld epic that heralded this world age, and the Toltec and Chichimec foundations noted by Nowotny; and before that, to the very first world ages or ‘suns’ and the catastrophes that reduced them. In the Legend of the Suns, Star-skirt looks down on the Flood in Tozoztli (Bierhorst 1992:143), while in Rios the initial creation sequence starts in Tecuilhuitl (f.1v). The extensive and exemplary account of the world ages in the Popol vuh is a similar case insofar as the self-given title points to the solstitial Feast name pop.

In these time dimensions, access to the Borgia chapter is provided by the successive births of New Fire at the autumn equinox (Ochpaniztli) and the summer solstice (Etzalcualiztli), which are each the culmination of sequences inset with tonalpoualli Signs. In both cases, the Signs are incremental and move conceptually from chaos and the random to engendering (I), pregnancy and birth (II,IV), severing and hard-edged containment (V), and finally domestic sustenance and the centering of social order in the New Fire, kindled in a jade set in a woman’s body (a proto-Tlazoteotl; Itzpapalotl).Yet the first sequence starts in the sky-womb, or is rather a prefiguration in the depths of time, just as the second is a conscious human elaboration, after the earth landing at the equinox. Particularly striking is the way the first free-snaking cloud of darkness is then channelled, just as the flint knives and the limbs they cut are later interred in squared architectural design (pp.29,32; 36,44).

Both sequences demand detailed analysis. For now it is enough to note that the overall statement appears ecumenically to combine the versions of genesis typified respectively by the Popol vuh and the Legend of the Suns. The first sequence (pp.29-34) recalls the first world ages and metamorphoses reported in both these sources, when 'soft' and 'hard' races were first shaped in cartilage and bone, ducts contained body liquids and cross-fertilization began - a multiple birthing from Star-skirt's full-body womb (mundus patens) and the galactic clouds of the Milky Way, all before the terrible eclipse when the tzitzimine severed and devoured, and even the domestic dogs and turkeys (shown in the Féjérváry and Laud versions) turned on their masters. The landing of the spider colonizers (who can in fact traverse vast distances hanging in the air by their own thread) occurs at the equinox against the profile of thatched roofs, those of the first house builders, males sustained by liquid from the maguey and females by the flour of grass cereals. Beneath, lies the caiman who will bring them down, just as in the Popol vuh, which tells how the drinkers go back up, as they do here in the form of bees, to become the Pleiades swarm [Fig.13]. Then, in the second sequence (pp.35-46), the road down past ball courts, the pregnant woman’s journey to earth, the heroes boiled in a pot and emergent from a river, all match the Popol vuh accounts of the underworld Xibalba, Blood-woman and the metamorphoses of the Twins.9 At the same time, a second dark migratory road irrupts into the text from the seven-starred sky or septentrion, shoots in four directions east, back north, west and south, streams on down through Quecholli, bearing evidence of definitely northern regions as Nowotny brilliantly shows, like turquoise, the fire cross, four-horizon dry-paintings, types of hunter bag and four-colour textile designs (1961:254-6). All this belongs more with the Chichimec traditions told in the Legend and the Cuauhtitlan Annals, which attach to the epic of Quetzalcoatl who brings up the bones then ground by Quilaztli, and finds sustaining maize at Tamoanchan, at the start of the fifth Sun 4 Ollin set in motion by Nanauatzin at Teotihuacan.

At the start of the Borgia Feasts cycle (p.29) we pass beyond the years of Tlaloc’s monsoon (p.27-8) out to the star clouds and into the innermost moist hollow of Tecuilhuitl’s bowl. At the finish (p.46), from the Etzalcualiztli’s pozole pot we move to a minimized window (p.47) that confirms the completed Feasts cycle as two pots, one the other’s lid. Iconographically this echoes the bowl at the start of the cycle; physically it appears on the verso of the very page that depicts the opening Feast, inviting us as it were to go back through the screenfold, according to the ‘pierced deerskin’ logic of the whole middle segment [Fig.7], and start all over again. Hot and nutritious (-cualli), Etzalcualiztli thus refers us Tecuilhuitl’s turquoise bowl, now dark, yet alive with left-overs that stir and snake over the rim, within Star-skirt’s womb. In the progressive reading, however, we return to the tonalpoualli chapters also on p.47, carried on by the energy that spills from the pots and leads to the next New Fire, this time the grand fire-drilling linked to four Series III years and four trees and horizons (pp.47-53). The geography here entails moving through east, north, west and south and their corresponding toponyms and year Signs (XIII, XVIII, III, VIII), to arrive home at last in Cholula,.the place of the man with forearms raised and the measured stepped pyramid (Tlachihualtepetl; cf. Brotherston 1999).

That such a reading of the Borgia Feasts could be at all thinkable has important theoretical implications, in refining crude western dichotomies between 'cyclic' and 'linear' time, and in the question of genre. Precisely because the ritual texts may have diachronic echoes (just as conversely the annals may give ritual shape to history), do we need at all times to respect the primary concept of genre, the sheer formalities of reading order and logic on which all further interpretation must rely. Moreover, with an ingenuity of which this is the merest hint, the Borgia Feasts chapter even goes so far as to date itself in the spirit and human times of the New Fire sequences, in units produced by the slippage between seasons and night sky, whose proportions are constantly checked by embedded period markers and by the very structure of the cycle. This chronometry is echoed in Féjérváry and Laud, and in certain ‘cosmic’ dates in Olmec and Maya texts; some of the detail is actually spelt out, in four hundred-year multiples, in such sources as the creation chapter in Rios, which eventually closes in Cholula. Less remote stretches of time are corroborated by year dates in annals from towns around Cholula. But that is another story.

Endnotes.

1 Here the term tonalamatl is preferred to the commoner tonalpoualli when its nights (9x29) are being considered no less integral than its days (13x20); footprints in the opening chapter in Borgia and Cospi specify a parallel count of 2(72+92) = 260 nights. This enquiry forms part of a larger study, Models of the Year in Mesoamerican Texts. The Timing of Genesis and History, to be published as a British Museum Occasional Paper.

2 A superb facsimile of Sahagún’s Primeros memoriales, published in 1993 by the University of Oklahoma Press, makes good several errors and omissions in Paso y Troncoso’s ‘copy’ (1905; cf.Baird 1993). The Palacio Real part of this text is referred to here as the ‘Tepepulco Ms’ since scribes from that town were the first to work on it. The transcription by Schultze Jena (1950) remains indispensable, as do his German translation and commentaries; they are based on fieldwork in Zitlala (Guerrero) and remain as absurdly neglected as Nowotny’s catalogue. Except where divergence matters, ‘Mendoza’ (Berdan & Anawalt 1992) includes the Matrícula de tributos (Berdan & Durand-Forest 1980); ‘Magliabechiano’ (Boone 1982), Tudela and other members of the group (Riese 1986); and ‘Rios’ (Graz: Adeva 1979), Telleriano (Quiñones Keber 1995). Conversely, a distinction is made between the main Tovar calendar (1; Lafaye 1972) and the Appendix (2; Kubler & Gibson 1951). Reyes García’s 1992 Spanish-language edition of the Borbonicus screenfold, for the Fondo de Cultura Económica/Adeva facsimile series run by F.Anders, M.Jansen and himself, sets new standards in scholarship. León-Portilla’s edition of Féjérváry (Mexico: Celanese, 1982) is useful in pointing up pochteca and historical subtext. See also: Glass 1975; Milbrath 1989. Throughout, reading sequences follow Nowotny, and in the case of Laud lead to corrected pagination. The British Museum Occasional Paper referred to in Note 1 relates all remaining unidentified chapters in the ritual genre (Cospi, Féjérváry, Laud) to year cycles.

3 Extra deliveries of cloth, at Tecuilhuitl and Quecholli, are however noted in the Cuautitlan Annals (Bierhorst 1992:130). Here and generally, this analysis bears not on the social practices but on the native texts of Mesoamerica; it also avoids, for the moment, such specialized calendrical questions as the 5 or 6 epagomenal days ingeniously depicted in Telleriano (on which see Tena 1996).

4 Their scales are plain enough here, and in the Magliabechiano version, yet Lafaye (1972), perhaps misled by transposed Feasts in Durán, reads this Feast as Etzalcualiztli. An idea of the complexity of Feast-tonalpoualli correlation is given in Edmonson 1988).

5 Borbonicus and the Florentine Codex concur on how many different seed-flowers were collected (seventeen), a clear example of the need to respect the numeracy embedded in the screenfolds. Further citings of eleven occur in the Florentine Codex, where Tecuilhuitl A is described as the Feast of not just lords but the salt-goddess Uixtociuatl, whose heart was cut out at dawn (yoaltzin) on the eleventh day of the Feast (named by the eleventh sign 1 Monkey in Tovar 1); in Magliabechiano, this Feast is marked uniquely by just the 'heart-sceptre' (yolotopil) which characterizes the 200- and 220-day ceremonies described at the end of the same Feasts chapter (f.46). The Star-skirt of Tititl (‘Citlali icue’, Florentine Codex Book 2:36) was firmly identified with the Milky Way by the generally sceptical and cautious Schultze Jena and his Nahuatl advisers in the ‘star-town’ Zitlala (‘...das Sternen Hüfttuch ist die Milchstrasse’; 1950:263).

6 Brotherston 1992:227, after Edmonson 1971; the Origin of the Pleiades is ‘Myth 1' in C.Lévi-Strauss’s monumental Mythologiques (Paris 1967-71). The Magliabechiano Eleven are noted as ‘Götter der Trunkenheit’ in Riese (1986:99) and are ably related to clusters of locations in central Mexico by Maher (1996), information which is missing in Ana Rita Valero’s recent edition of the Cozcatzin Codex, with regard to its lunar-pulque place-signs. Maher also notes the key link between the Feast name Pachtli and the pulque site Papaztac. In Mendoza (ff.17v-18) two sets of eleven garrisons, upper and lower and starting with the 'star-mountain' Citlaltepec, usher in the tribute payments made according to the Feasts of the year. Eleven-fold sky models, including those in the Tepepulco Ms, Mexicanus, Tovar 2, P.Díaz and the Tepozteco temple-pyramid, are discussed in Brotherston 1998

7 Especially prominent in the Borgia and Cospi images of Star-skirt, the heart-in-skull motif has been superbly elucidated by Nowotny: 'Die Knochen oder Schädel sind...nichts Totes, sondern eine Art von Samenkörnern, aus denen neues Leben entsteht. Das Herz bezeichnet...die den Tod des Körpers überdauernde Lebensenergie' (1961:273; 'The bones or skull are not dead things but a sort of seed corn for new life. The heart denotes the life energy that survives the body's death').

8 On being incorporated into the 360-day Maya tun, the nine Youallitecutin lost their intricate arithmetical link with the tonalamatl (9x29=260+1; cf. Schultze Jena in Furst 1986), just as the 18 Feasts lost all seasonal relevance. The Borgia Tititl-Izcalli sequence echoes pages elsewhere that celebrate the 'birth' of the calendar itself (e.g. Borbonicus pp.21-22, linked in turn with the Yauhtepec Inscription which further interconnects the midwives’ eleven and nine with the Two Rabbit cult).

9 Ixquic or Blood-woman in the Popol vuh is impregnated through her right hand, by spittle from a mouth above her, a configuration also found here in Tititl, and in Féjérváry p.1. The emergence of the Twins from the river as catfish could possibly relate to the fisherfolk custom referred to in note 4. Keenly detecting the northern links in the following Feasts, Nowotny brought up the much-neglected links between the Mexican books and Anasazi dry-painting, also explored in Brotherston 1992:90-101), which even include the strip form of the trellis-adorned Star-skirt or Milky Way. The vivid turquoise disks worn by the northern hunters in Quecholli would have been mined in what is now known as Mount Taylor, New Mexico.The Borgia-Cuauhtinchan Annals link between Tozoztli and Chichimec initiation, illustrated by Nowotny, is made through the notion of food being brought by the wild animals, to the deserving brave, a theme strongly developed in texts from Anasazi and former Chichimec territory to the north.

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