Heaven and Earth in Ancient Mexico: Astronomy and Seasonal Cycles in the Codex Borgia

The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies

by Susan Milbrath

The Codex Borgia, a masterpiece that predates the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, records almanacs used in divination and astronomy. Within its beautifully painted screenfold pages is a section (pages 29–46) that shows a sequence of enigmatic pictures that have been the subject of debate for more than a century. Bringing insights from ethnohistory, anthropology, art history, and archaeoastronomy to bear on this passage, Susan Milbrath presents a convincing new interpretation of Borgia 29–46 as a narrative of noteworthy astronomical events that occurred over the course of the year AD 1495–1496, set in the context of the central Mexican festival calendar. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted Borgia 29–46 as a mythic history of the heavens and the earth, Milbrath demonstrates that the narrative documents ancient Mesoamericans' understanding of real-time astronomy and natural history. Interpreting the screenfold's complex symbols in light of known astronomical events, she finds that Borgia 29–46 records such phenomena as a total solar eclipse in August 1496, a November meteor shower, a comet first sighted in February 1496, and the changing phases of Venus and Mercury. She also shows how the narrative is organized according to the eighteen-month festival calendar and how seasonal cycles in nature are represented in its imagery. This new understanding of the content and purpose of the Codex Borgia reveals this long-misunderstood narrative as the most important historical record of central Mexican astronomy on the eve of the Spanish conquest.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology

174 pages, Hardcover

First published January 30, 2013

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book represents an attempt to map ancient astrological events onto the symbols and images of the Codex Borgia. As such, it requires a sort of triple vision to follow:

1. Understand how dates are sequenced in Precolumbian Mexico.
2. Understand the movement of Venus.
3. Recognize the visual cues used to represent the Mesoamerican pantheon.

After beginning this book, I took some time to get a feel for the calendar, which was a rabbit-hole (no pun intended).

I didn’t try learning the movement of Venus or anything like that, so i had to just accept some of the book’s hypotheses wholesale and move on.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that astronomical events and maybe other real-world events were coded into the calendar and that documents like these were able to interface physical and religious phenemona.

Perhaps the centerpiece of Milbrath’s theory and its implications is the way that a solar eclipse is dramatically represented in the Codex Borgia, as the sun dies in a dramatic full-page tableau, framed in ornate dating features. If the events inspiring this imagery were as rare as postulated, perhaps the reason the Codex Borgia was saved in the first place was its departure from the other texts being destroyed.

This book also comes with some nice prints of original and restored images of the Codex Borgia, which for me still inspire a number of questions that Im really not sure are basic in this field or not.

In short, I jumped into the deep end and barely was able to swim to the ladder.