Semiotics and visual rhetoric of tocanayo in plate 44 of the Amoxtli Mictlan

Abstract

The Amoxtli Mictlan (Codex Laud) is part of the Mexican amoxtin of wisdom (the socalled Borgia Group). It was painted on leather, probably in the area of the Tehuacán Valley. It is one of the few remaining “codices” from the pre-Quauhtemic era and it has an order based on the tonalpohualli and a theme of death and destinies. It presents one of the most perfect handlings of line and color. On plate 44, in the lower right frame, it contains an image of “tonacayo” (“our flesh”) transiting to death: it is a clear “body image” (Schilder, 1950) of the ancient Mesoamerican world. As in any conception, the point of view creates the image, and here, in an apparent paradox, human carnality is expressed through a red and white semi-discarnate human being on a black background with a white frame, looking straight ahead, as if sitting on the air and with arms extended back and forth; the left arm goes with the corpse. Carnality and various ethereal entities that emerge from it in a serpentine form are represented in the drawing. An offering on the ground can be seen at the left bottom. At the bottom, on a white background with a red rectangular border, three signs of the count of the days are displayed, from eagle to Ollin (movement). The analysis reviews the meaning of this lower right frame of plate 44 from an operational proposal that considers the five schools of codicological studies and integrates the discursive-semiotic and rhetorical analysis proposed from Nuestra América by Julieta Haidar (1998) while considering the semiotics of culture (Lotman, 1996), the visual rhetoric of the Groupe mu from Belgium and the visual semiotic of Fontanille (2008) and Violi (2003). The analysis is complemented with the historical and ethnographic information to reconstruct the Mesoamerican point of view of carnality and the subtle entities that accompany it and come off in death.