Eclipse Records in a Corpus of Colonial Zapotec 260-Day Calendars

Abstract

This paper translates and analyzes references to eclipses in two seventeenth-century Zapotec calendrical booklets.1These booklets are part of a corpus of 106 separate calendrical texts and four collections of ritual songs that were turned over to ecclesiastical authorities in 1704 and 1705 as part of an ambitious campaign against traditional indigenous ritual practices conducted in the province of Villa Alta in northern Oaxaca. Both of these booklets contain a complete day-by-day representation of the Zapotec 260-day divinatory calendar, with annotations in Zapotec alongside many of these entries. Two such annotations in Booklet 81 explicitly record the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses visible in the Sierra Zapoteca in 1691 and 1693. Annotations in Booklet 63 do not mention eclipses but allude to them by recording the names and Gregorian dates of Christian feasts celebrated on the dates of eclipses in 1686 and 1690; such allusions are otherwise found mainly with the Zapotec dates of the beginnings or ends of significant Zapotec calendrical cycles—the 260-day calendar itself or its 65-day subdivisions, and the start of the Zapotec 365-day year—and so reflect a systematic pattern of engagement by at least one Zapotec calendar specialist with indigenous ritual knowledge and practices. Our analysis suggests that colonial Zapotec calendar specialists monitored and perhaps also anticipated the occurrence of eclipses in terms of the patterns of eclipse recurrence in particular parts of the divinatory calendar.

A Cyclic-Time Model for Eclipse Prediction in Mesoamerica and the Structure of the Eclipse Table in the Dresden Codex

“…The data differ from those in my earlier (Justeson 2015) 1,000-year survey, in which lunar eclipses were treated as visible provided they were of magnitude 0.25 or greater. This criterion was used because a colonial Zapotec document suggests that a lunar eclipse of that magnitude was either observed or anticipated (Tavárez and Justeson 2008:77). This criterion was too restrictive, however; all umbral lunar eclipses are observable, whatever their magnitude, as are even some penumbral eclipses (see Appendix).…”

“…I find nothing explicit in the imagery or hieroglyphic captions of the Dresden eclipse table that consistently differentiates the underlying stations, the only straightforward guides to anticipating eclipses, from the contrived stations that fill out the table in sequential time. Without explicit verbal or visual labeling, daykeepers would have to draw on specific knowledge or training to recognize which stations corresponded to potential eclipse dates; such underspecification seems to be characteristic of calendrical tables used by Zapotec daykeepers in the late seventeenth century (Tavárez and Justeson 2008:79).…”

Zapotec Time, Alphabetic Writing, and the Public Sphere

“…The formula was variable, but it often included the clauses niga betapa yaga biyee, "here are the four time counts," which refers to the four 65-day subdivisions of the 260-day calendar, and/or lani que xotao xoçi reo, "the holidays of the ancestors and fathers of us all." In total, about twenty booklets contained a version Ethnohistory of this formula,3 and four booklets contained the first phrases of a cosmological narrative regarding the most recent creation of the world (Tavárez 2008). 4 The fact that this narrative ended with the words "et cetera" in two instances implies that its implied audience was a literate reader who knew or had access to the narrative's full version, perhaps in oral form.…”

“…Aquino declared that, even after having possessed a calendar for twenty years, he employed it for individual practices and would not use it "in public," even though he wished to do so, since "he was afraid of other, more expert maestros. "14 Moreover, several calendar annotations and confessions show that experienced day counters who knew the correlation between the Gregorian calendar and the two Zapotec time counts made it available to nonspecialists by using Christian saints' holidays as a publicly accessible point of reference (Tavárez and Justeson 2008). Between 1689 and 1692, the feast of Saint Matthias (February 24) fell on the first day of the 365-day Zapotec year, and Saint Peter and Saint Paul's (June 29-30) fell at the beginning of a new 260-day count in 1691.…”

“…Although Maldonado's regional focus may bring to mind the persistent extirpations of Francisco de Ávila in Huarochirí in the early seventeenth century (Duviols 1971, Mills 1997, Griffiths 1995, Salomon and Urioste 1991, one element sets this campaign aside from other eradication exercises in colonial Spanish America: the surrender of about 107 separate textual units conZapotec Time, Alphabetic Writing, and the Public Sphere 75 taining alphabetic ritual texts in Bijanos, Cajonos, and Nexitzo Zapotec by officials from forty communities. Among them, one finds four collections of transcribed ritual songs, two of which are devoted to Christian entities (Tavárez 2006), while the remaining two celebrated Zapotec deities and founding ancestors from the standpoint of local cosmological theories (Tavárez 2008). The remaining 103 units are copies of the 260-day Zapotec ritual calendar, bound into ninety-nine cuadernos, or "booklets.…”