Divination by image: The Borgia Group of pre-Hispanic Mexican manuscripts

The five pre-Hispanic ritual calendars that survived the European invasion of Mesoamerica and now reside in European collections have been the object of a continuous stream of scholarly interpretive efforts beginning with Father Jose Lino Fábrega's late 18th century study. Following Fábrega, scholars have mastered a sprawling body of pre-Hispanic and colonial evidence to perform comparative iconographic analysis in order to identify deities, motifs, and calendar counts. This comparative procedure has led scholars away from a recognition of what is unique about the Borgia Group calendars. Although the group's members bear many superficial resemblances to other surviving pre-Hispanic manuscripts and works of art from Late Postclassic Mesoamerica, they were produced by and productive of a distinctive practice that must be understood in order to evaluate the Borgia Group manuscripts.; The aim of this study is twofold. First, to describe the context in which the Borgia Group manuscripts originated. It is argued here that they were painted by 260-day count specialists who worked in small, independent workshops that were unconnected with the major temples. Against the prevailing scholarly view, it is argued that the Borgia Group manuscripts were not owned and used by priests, but by 260-day count specialists who formed a group different from the priestly class.; The second part of this argument builds upon the first, and maintains that the Borgia Group manuscripts use imagery in a qualitatively different way from the way that other extant pre-Hispanic manuscripts use imagery. The term “picture writing”, famously applied by Eduard Seler to the images in the Borgia Group calendars, is appropriately applied to the surviving central Mexican pre-Hispanic histories, but not to the calendars. The calendars are designed to present a destabilized meaning. That is, they are designed to be viewed repeatedly with a different outcome at each viewing. This system is analogous to the Western tradition of high art, in which works are designed, in the words of Lessing, “not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated—contemplated repeatedly and at length.”...