Sacred sand in mexican picture-writing and later literature

Resumen

The sand-hill on feet depicted here, page 15 of the Codex Nuttall, has been described by Karl Nowotny as 'der wandernde Sandberg'. The woman facing it in the picture, Lady 3-Flint, is said in the same commentary to be burning incense before it ('Sie räuchert auch vor dem wandernden Sandberg', my italics).' As one of the royal Mixtec pair, she has led her people out of their prehistory ('Vorzeiť) and at this crucial moment is establishing tribal rituals in the area of the temple of the Holy Bundle. Objects and events from their mythical past are here arranged and consecrated for priestly practice, in a manner similar to that shown in the Vienna and related codices. Thus, for example, we find the earth-quake mountain or volcano encountered by the ancestors of the tribe just before this scene standing again, or better, placed here in the temple area (in the top left hand corner). One of Nowotny's main concerns in his analysis of these codices has of course been to show how ancient Mexican myths were expressed in ritual and were integrated into conscious knowledge and cultural patterns: perhaps his most brilliant achievement has in fact been actually to demonstrate how codices like the Nuttall and the Vienna might in this way have functioned as temple scripture, Phenomena like the patolli game, the sweat-bath, the skull house, and other frequent features of Meso-American temple precincts, are catalogued and cross-referenced, so that they can be better related to prior myth, and (more narrowly in a number of tantalizing asides) to similar phenomena known to the tribes of the South West of the United States. It is precisely the care and the leading detail of Nowotny's commentaries generally that have prompted this closer look at Lady 3-Flint's sand-hill.