‘Codex Laud’ or ‘Codex Mictlan’, pictorial screenfold

Aspects of the sequence and interpretation of the images are disputed. The account given here is abbreviated form the content summary in Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (2007), 246-8, which should be consulted for more detail and for a diagrammatic representation. For other interpretations differing in some respects see Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jensen, with a contribution by Alejandra Cruz Ortiz, La pintura de la muerte y de los destinos. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Laud (Mexico City, 1994), and Araceli Rojas, Notes on the Manufacture, Colours, and Biography of Codex Laud. Mexican Pictorial Manuscript at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (University of Warsaw, 2020). Divinatory-calendrical compilation, based on the 260-day calendarial cycle (‘tonalpohualli’), with its division into 20 ‘trecenas’ of 13 days, illustrated with appropriate rituals and offerings used in divination. Scholarship classifies it as part of the ‘Borgia Group’ or ‘Teoamoxtli Group’ of divinatory-ritual books. Pages are counted 1-46 according to modern scholarly convention, with pages 1-24 on the obverse and pages 25-44 on the reverse, the covers of the manuscript, on the reverse, precede 25 and follow 46 and are not numbered. There is an earlier pencil numeration 1-24. The name ‘Codex Mictlan’ or ‘Book of Death’ has been proposed as an alternative to ‘Codex Laud’ on the basis of the representation of death deities in the first section. See Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, ‘Renaming the Mexican Codices’, Ancient Mesoamerica 15, no. 2 (July 2004): 267–71. ‘Codex Laud’ or ‘Codex Mictlan’, pictorial screenfold