The Codex Borgia: Sacred Art of the Aztec Gods
The Codex Borgia is the most important pre-Columbian manuscript in existence — a screenfold book of 76 pages, made from animal skin, painted before the Spanish Conquest in vivid mineral pigments, and preserved today in the Vatican Library. Its content is entirely ritual and divinatory: a complete guide to the Aztec sacred calendar (the 260-day tonalpohualli), the gods who preside over each of its twenty day-signs and thirteen numbers, the fate of those born under each combination, and the ritual practices appropriate to each temporal node. The images are among the most extraordinary in the history of world art: dense, multilayered, precisely encoded in a visual language that served simultaneously as religious text, astronomical almanac, and cosmic calendar. To read the Codex Borgia is to enter a sacred universe in which time itself is divine, in which every day has a face and a name, and in which the maintenance of cosmic order requires constant human attention, ritual, and sacrifice. ...