Counting down the days Moira Garcia’s Mixtec calendar

FOR MOST of us who mark time by the Gregorian calendar, Monday is just another day of the week. We seldom think of its namesake, the moon, in relation to the day itself. Nor do we wake up on a given Thursday thinking about its relation to thunder. But the various indigenous cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica made divinatory calendars that suggest they had a deeper reverence for the meaning of days and for the passage of time. Artist Moira Garcia explores the symbols depicted in these ancient calendars and relates them to designs from indigenous Mexican textiles, many of which have specific meanings.

Using imagery derived from the Codex Borgia, a pre-Columbian divinatory manuscript now believed by most scholars to be of Mixtec origin, Garcia created a series of mixed-media works on paper that commemorates the artistry of the Mixtecs, retaining fidelity to their original designs and merging them with flourishes of her own devising. The series is on view in the exhibit Tonalpohualli: - - Count of Days in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts gift shop’s Lloyd Kiva New Gallery. Garcia gives a talk on

Count of Days at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 16. “The Codex Borgia is one of many calendars that correlates with other calendars to form cycles of time,” she said. The first few pages of the codex depict a calendrical cycle of 20 intervals of 13 days each (trecenas), totaling 260 days. But Garcia’s lithographs are based on the cycles of the veintena festivals that form the bulk of the codex: 13 periods of 20 days. Each of the 20 days of the veintena is assigned its own pictorial glyph — usually a symbol representing a patron deity associated with that particular day. Her - Tonalpohualli: Count of Days is composed of a series of 20 prints, one for each day of the veintena.

Tonalpohualli - - is a combination of the Nahuatl word “tonal” - which, according to Garcia, translates as “day, sun, life essence, or spirit,” and the word “pohualli,” - which stands for count and computation. “Count of days” is, therefore, a literal translation. “The first day is Cipactli or crocodile,” Garcia said, pointing to her own rendition of the figure representing the start of the divinatory count — the head of a crocodile in profile. In Mesoamerican cosmology, the crocodile is associated with a creation myth and is a symbol of earth and water. To her rendition, Garcia added another symbol rendered in colored thread: a chevron, meaning water. “The crocodile represents the first beginning, but it also has a relationship to water and earth. This chevron design does represent water, but it can also represent earth, like a mountain design.” Garcia hand-prints each of the lithographs, remaining faithful to the representations in the codex, and then embellishes them with hand-stitching. “I combine Mexican textile designs — mostly embroidery designs — and I pair them with each of the symbols, basically, in relationship to the symbol itself.”

Garcia is an alumna of IAIA and a former adjunct professor at the institute. She sourced her imagery from a full-color facsimile of the codex. “Its actual place of origin is unknown, but it’s somewhere in the central highlands of Mexico, so that could be in the state of Puebla or Oaxaca,” she said. No definitive date has been given for the creation of the Codex Borgia, which is housed in the Vatican Apostolic Library in Rome. The codex is named for the Italian cardinal Stefano Borgia, who owned it before it came into possession of the Vatican. “It was created on deer hide,” Garcia said. “Most of the codices were created on deer hide, rabbit skin, or amate paper, which is a fig tree paper. Then they were plastered and painted.”

Garcia has been making artwork derived from the ancient iconography of Mexico and Mesoamerica — not just the Codex Borgia, but other codices as well — for at least the past five years. Thousands of preColumbian codices were destroyed by the Spanish after their arrival in the New World, and most of those that are known today are housed in museums throughout the world, primarily in Europe. “It was a really rich literary tradition and bookmaking tradition,” she said of the pre-Columbian manuscripts. “The bulk of them no longer exist but we do have fragments. I’m interested in somehow piecing together those fragments.”

In her Count of Days, the hand-stitched elements are subtle. The main figure in each lithograph is left untouched except for minor embellishments. For instance, Mazatl - (deer), representing the seventh day of the count, has some colored thread outlining part of its eye, ear, and snout. Above the figure, Garcia’s added textile-derived symbol is rendered smaller than the Mixtec glyph, as though in deference to it. This is the basic format of each of the prints, although all of her hand-sewn symbols are as varied as the ancient pictorial elements they’re matched with.

She sourced the designs from ethnographer Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson’s 1976 book Design Motifs on Mexican Indian Textiles. “I’ve been wanting to pair hand-stitching with prints for a long time. I got into book arts, and it’s kind of a progression from that. There’s a lot of sewing that’s involved, usually, in book-making.” Codex Borgia day counts were intended to be read horizontally from right to left, following a series of glyphs, then from left to right on the second horizontal series above the first, so the eye could trace a snaking pattern upward through the calendar. The day counts were arranged in a rectangular grid. At the bottom right, the first day would be a crocodile, followed by Ehecatl - (wind), Calli (house), and Cuetzpalin (lizard), until all 20 days were counted. Then the cycle would repeat again with Cipactli.

In drawing analogies between textile designs, many of which remain in contemporary use, and the ancient symbols of pre-Columbian codices, Garcia’s exhibit underscores the notion that the particular meaning behind the imagery remains an extant part of the folk cultures of the indigenous people of Mexico. She’s drawn to what she sees as a continuum from the visual culture of the Mixtec and contemporary indigenous societies. “Particularly in this work with the calendar representations, I feel like the textile designs are a language, much like the ancient pictorial forms are a language.”

“The Codex Borgia was created on deer hide. Most of the codices were created on deer hide, rabbit skin, or amate paper, which is a fig tree paper.”