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Florentine Codex: Books 4 and 5: Book 4 and 5: The Soothsayers, the Omens (Volume 4)
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 Four delves into the Aztec’s complex astrological beliefs. The date of birth was so significant that it ultimately determined one’s personality and future; for example, almost all born on the second day sign—called One Ocelot—became slaves.
Book Five explains the meaning of the many evil omens Aztecs believed in, which usually took the form of animals and insects. It describes the consequences of each omen and the remedies, if any, that will reverse these effects.
214 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1957
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July 3, 2025
Every 52 years, the Aztecs descended into darkness. At sunset, not a fire burned anywhere in the realm. Holy men atop their pyramid peered into the night, hoping to track the movement of the Pleiades as a sign to light the fires and signal that life would continue for another 52 years. However, the close of one xiuhmolpilli (“bundle of years”) and the opening of another was only a reprieve. Eventually, the constellations would stop and the world would end; but if you were lucky, maybe it wouldn’t end today.
For the 16th-century Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún, this cycle of New Fire rituals was just another work of the devil. In the fourth and fifth volumes of his “General History of the Things of New Spain,” he stridently rebuts contemporary Spaniards who admire the Aztec “soothsaying” calendar for its astronomical precision. Sahagún sees it as the devil’s tool for binding Indian souls in idolatry. He therefore documents it with utmost precision only so that others “may know that it is something very pernicious to our holy Catholic Faith; and it may be destroyed and burned.”
Equally negative is Sahagún’s assessment of the omens, from what it means when a mouse chews holes in a household’s clothes (someone committed adultery) to what it means when you sneeze (someone somewhere is talking about you) to what you should do when you see the Night Axe, a headless apparition with the front of its body ripped open. The good father has one interpretation for every omen: “Seek them out, in order to understand them in confessions and to preach against them; for they are like a mange with sickeneth the Faith.”
Polemics notwithstanding, these volumes on the soothsayers and the omens continue Father Sahagún’s witness to a world at once exotic and familiar. The Aztecs were exotic in that, though we may dabble in astrology, they bent to the will of the heavens in a way we usually don’t. The day sign of your birth governed you comprehensively. For example, the one born under Nine Wind was “wholly and entirely evil....nothing could be made of his life; he could hold nothing; nothing would be kept; nothing would appear; he could do nothing; he was incapable on earth….He might wish to be something, to be someone: be became only nothing.” Happy birthday, kid.
And yet the Aztecs are familiar in their human struggle against the heavy hand of heaven. Not every day sign was watertight. Some “fell in two ways, they said: perhaps good, perhaps evil; if good, also perhaps evil, or only indifferent.” A man born under a certain good day sign who “followed not the way of righteousness…entirely by his own acts brought himself to ruin.” A man born under a certain bad day sign could succeed “if he deliberated well, and was attentive, not resentful of criticism, nor lazy.”
Also, the day you washed your newborn infant mattered — a lot. Your baby might emerge under the worst of all possible signs; but if you could delay her washing a few days, you could limit the damage or even reverse it: “If it was a good time, they then bathed the one born at this time. But if not, they still sought one of the day signs on which he was to be bathed. So the old men sought to make it good.” This passion to rise above fate, and to secure a better future for one’s children, brings the Aztecs closer into our own experience than their submission to the stars might at first suggest.
Taken as a whole, the subject raises an interesting psychological question. In our enlightened scientific age, we’re even quicker to dismiss Aztec astrology than Father Sahagún, who soberly adjudges European astrology as superior due to its better foundations. But suppose everyone in a given society believes that your day sign governs your fate. When a belief is a whole-of-society belief, however implausible to an outsider, does it become true? For instance, if everyone knows that Cuauhtémoc was born under Nine Wind and treats him as a worthless man doomed to fail, will he not become a worthless failure? Wouldn’t his death in a gutter reinforce the power of the calendar? In short, if everyone believes something is true and acts like it, is it true for all practical purposes?
I hope so. I cross-checked a couple of Aztec calendar calculators, and I was supposedly born under Eight Vulture. In one entry of the Florentine Codex, the sign of the vulture is noted as “lucky and that it was the sign of older people. They said that those born under this sign would live a long life, become prosperous, and live happily in this world.” If you all, dear readers, collectively believe that I’m destined for long life and prosperity, then maybe we can all work together to make this happen.
For the 16th-century Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún, this cycle of New Fire rituals was just another work of the devil. In the fourth and fifth volumes of his “General History of the Things of New Spain,” he stridently rebuts contemporary Spaniards who admire the Aztec “soothsaying” calendar for its astronomical precision. Sahagún sees it as the devil’s tool for binding Indian souls in idolatry. He therefore documents it with utmost precision only so that others “may know that it is something very pernicious to our holy Catholic Faith; and it may be destroyed and burned.”
Equally negative is Sahagún’s assessment of the omens, from what it means when a mouse chews holes in a household’s clothes (someone committed adultery) to what it means when you sneeze (someone somewhere is talking about you) to what you should do when you see the Night Axe, a headless apparition with the front of its body ripped open. The good father has one interpretation for every omen: “Seek them out, in order to understand them in confessions and to preach against them; for they are like a mange with sickeneth the Faith.”
Polemics notwithstanding, these volumes on the soothsayers and the omens continue Father Sahagún’s witness to a world at once exotic and familiar. The Aztecs were exotic in that, though we may dabble in astrology, they bent to the will of the heavens in a way we usually don’t. The day sign of your birth governed you comprehensively. For example, the one born under Nine Wind was “wholly and entirely evil....nothing could be made of his life; he could hold nothing; nothing would be kept; nothing would appear; he could do nothing; he was incapable on earth….He might wish to be something, to be someone: be became only nothing.” Happy birthday, kid.
And yet the Aztecs are familiar in their human struggle against the heavy hand of heaven. Not every day sign was watertight. Some “fell in two ways, they said: perhaps good, perhaps evil; if good, also perhaps evil, or only indifferent.” A man born under a certain good day sign who “followed not the way of righteousness…entirely by his own acts brought himself to ruin.” A man born under a certain bad day sign could succeed “if he deliberated well, and was attentive, not resentful of criticism, nor lazy.”
Also, the day you washed your newborn infant mattered — a lot. Your baby might emerge under the worst of all possible signs; but if you could delay her washing a few days, you could limit the damage or even reverse it: “If it was a good time, they then bathed the one born at this time. But if not, they still sought one of the day signs on which he was to be bathed. So the old men sought to make it good.” This passion to rise above fate, and to secure a better future for one’s children, brings the Aztecs closer into our own experience than their submission to the stars might at first suggest.
Taken as a whole, the subject raises an interesting psychological question. In our enlightened scientific age, we’re even quicker to dismiss Aztec astrology than Father Sahagún, who soberly adjudges European astrology as superior due to its better foundations. But suppose everyone in a given society believes that your day sign governs your fate. When a belief is a whole-of-society belief, however implausible to an outsider, does it become true? For instance, if everyone knows that Cuauhtémoc was born under Nine Wind and treats him as a worthless man doomed to fail, will he not become a worthless failure? Wouldn’t his death in a gutter reinforce the power of the calendar? In short, if everyone believes something is true and acts like it, is it true for all practical purposes?
I hope so. I cross-checked a couple of Aztec calendar calculators, and I was supposedly born under Eight Vulture. In one entry of the Florentine Codex, the sign of the vulture is noted as “lucky and that it was the sign of older people. They said that those born under this sign would live a long life, become prosperous, and live happily in this world.” If you all, dear readers, collectively believe that I’m destined for long life and prosperity, then maybe we can all work together to make this happen.
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