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Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain: Book 7- Sun, Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the Years
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Seven tells the origin stories of the sun, the moon, and the stars—which gods created them, what powers they each embody, and how they are related to Aztec astrology. This book also discusses the meaning and cause behind hail, lightning, rainbows, wind, and different types of weather.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Seven tells the origin stories of the sun, the moon, and the stars—which gods created them, what powers they each embody, and how they are related to Aztec astrology. This book also discusses the meaning and cause behind hail, lightning, rainbows, wind, and different types of weather.
90 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1953
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August 20, 2025
The Doomsday Clock, like everything else, generates criticism. Who moves its hands and why? Do those people have an agenda? What’s their methodology and who made them prophets? We’re comfortable arguing about the clock partly because we know it’s just conjecture, and partly because it’s safely “over there,” a thing external to us. The Aztecs had neither of these luxuries: their Doomsday Clock was as real to them as the stroke of midnight, and they lived inside it.
By the time the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún wrote the seventh book of his “General History of the Things of New Spain,” Aztec ritual calendars were fading from memory: “It should be noted that they disagree a great deal, in various places, as to the beginning of the year….In Tlatlulco I gathered together many old men, the most able ones I could secure, and along with the most able of the college students…they all concluded that the year began on the second day of February.”
Though the recollection of such finer points may have dimmed in the shadow of an alien calendar and its alien saints, Aztecs remembered with clockwork precision the annihilation that hunted them through their years. We, of course, fear annihilation just as they did, but in an imprecise and open-ended way. Our Doomsday Clock hovers between any number of disasters that may or may not happen, while theirs guaranteed an exact and terrifying Judgment Day if they failed the gods.
To understand this, we have to return to a time before light: “It is said that when yet [all] was in darkness, when yet no sun had shone and no dawn broken—it is said—the gods gathered themselves together and took counsel among themselves there at Teotihuacan.” At the council fire, two gods volunteered to immolate themselves, becoming the sun and moon. Even this was not enough, for their sacrificial bodies rose into the sky and stopped: “So once again the gods spoke: ‘How shall we live? The sun cannot move….[Let] this be, that through us the sun may be revived. Let all of us die.”
Just as we gaze on Hiroshima and Chernobyl, Aztecs could gaze on the ruined pyramids of Teotihuacan, a city already fallen for a thousand years. There the Aztecs could meditate on the light by which the gods (with an assist from the Wind) drove back darkness at the cost of their lives, a darkness that would return with horrifying finality if the Aztecs failed to renew the divine sacrifice with rivers of human blood.
Thus we return to the Aztec version of the Doomsday Clock, a ritual calendar that ticked through four cycles of 13 years. At the binding of each bundle of 52 years, the Aztecs extinguished all their fires. At midnight, the fire priests lit a new fire in the chest cavity of a sacrificial victim to avert Mesoamerican nuclear winter: “Thus was it said: it was claimed that if fire could not be drawn, then [the sun] would be destroyed forever; all would be ended; there would evermore be night. Nevermore would the sun come forth. Night would prevail forever, and the demons of darkness would descend, to eat men.”
My first instinct is to wonder what it does to the psychology of a society to know it exists in a bubble of light surrounded by a ravenous darkness. But then I remember the existential dread of the Cold War, and the speed with which plagues and invasions and famines have eaten through whole generations, and our own shifting patterns of danger from technology accelerating so fast it’s redshifting. Maybe every society deforms against different edges of the same cold and brutal night. At least the Aztecs knew their threat vector and had a plan. If their apocalypse came in ships they couldn’t anticipate from a place they couldn’t imagine, that wasn’t their fault. We can take comfort in this thought when our own demons of darkness descend from a direction no one was looking.
By the time the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún wrote the seventh book of his “General History of the Things of New Spain,” Aztec ritual calendars were fading from memory: “It should be noted that they disagree a great deal, in various places, as to the beginning of the year….In Tlatlulco I gathered together many old men, the most able ones I could secure, and along with the most able of the college students…they all concluded that the year began on the second day of February.”
Though the recollection of such finer points may have dimmed in the shadow of an alien calendar and its alien saints, Aztecs remembered with clockwork precision the annihilation that hunted them through their years. We, of course, fear annihilation just as they did, but in an imprecise and open-ended way. Our Doomsday Clock hovers between any number of disasters that may or may not happen, while theirs guaranteed an exact and terrifying Judgment Day if they failed the gods.
To understand this, we have to return to a time before light: “It is said that when yet [all] was in darkness, when yet no sun had shone and no dawn broken—it is said—the gods gathered themselves together and took counsel among themselves there at Teotihuacan.” At the council fire, two gods volunteered to immolate themselves, becoming the sun and moon. Even this was not enough, for their sacrificial bodies rose into the sky and stopped: “So once again the gods spoke: ‘How shall we live? The sun cannot move….[Let] this be, that through us the sun may be revived. Let all of us die.”
Just as we gaze on Hiroshima and Chernobyl, Aztecs could gaze on the ruined pyramids of Teotihuacan, a city already fallen for a thousand years. There the Aztecs could meditate on the light by which the gods (with an assist from the Wind) drove back darkness at the cost of their lives, a darkness that would return with horrifying finality if the Aztecs failed to renew the divine sacrifice with rivers of human blood.
Thus we return to the Aztec version of the Doomsday Clock, a ritual calendar that ticked through four cycles of 13 years. At the binding of each bundle of 52 years, the Aztecs extinguished all their fires. At midnight, the fire priests lit a new fire in the chest cavity of a sacrificial victim to avert Mesoamerican nuclear winter: “Thus was it said: it was claimed that if fire could not be drawn, then [the sun] would be destroyed forever; all would be ended; there would evermore be night. Nevermore would the sun come forth. Night would prevail forever, and the demons of darkness would descend, to eat men.”
My first instinct is to wonder what it does to the psychology of a society to know it exists in a bubble of light surrounded by a ravenous darkness. But then I remember the existential dread of the Cold War, and the speed with which plagues and invasions and famines have eaten through whole generations, and our own shifting patterns of danger from technology accelerating so fast it’s redshifting. Maybe every society deforms against different edges of the same cold and brutal night. At least the Aztecs knew their threat vector and had a plan. If their apocalypse came in ships they couldn’t anticipate from a place they couldn’t imagine, that wasn’t their fault. We can take comfort in this thought when our own demons of darkness descend from a direction no one was looking.
February 6, 2024
Las similitudes entre la cultura azteca y otras como la griega, se pueden observar en este libro a través de las estrellas.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews