Thresholds of Time and Space

Analysis of the iconography in a directional almanac on Codex Borgia pages 49–52 invites comparison with almanacs in a related set of divinatory manuscripts known as the Borgia Group, but one aspect of the Codex Borgia almanac remains unique. It records real-time dates employing the central Mexican system of year dates that help identify the images as year-end rituals. These fifteenth-century dates correlate with the last twenty-day “month” in the year, known as Izcalli in the Valley of Mexico and neighboring Tlaxcala. Izcalli rituals in February involved drilling a new fire, the erection of sacred trees, and animal sacrifice, all of which appear on Borgia 49–52. During Izcalli, human sacrifice was performed only every fourth year, a pattern like that seen in the Codex Borgia and the Codex Cospi, where death imagery and decapitated humans appear prominently on the fourth year-bearer page, associated with the southern direction. Borgia Group codices also depict trees and birds representing the four cardinal directions. These are most prominent on Codex Fejérváry-Mayer page 1 in a cosmogram representing two different calendar formats, like those seen in the Borgia almanac. The 5 × 52-day format was used to measure the solar year and Venus cycle, and a second set of day signs appears in a 4 × 65-day pattern useful in calculating the fifty-two-year cycle and the Venus cycle. This provides a subtext for understanding the dates represented on Borgia 49–52 and the extension of the almanac on page 53, where the Venus almanac begins.

Morir como una mujer en fuga en Anacrón: hipótesis de un producto todo de Augusto Marquet y Gabriel Wolfson

The third volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC3) is home to a Latin American technopoetic that resorts to national death imagery and the location of women in fugue under this subject. Particularly, we refer to the electronic literature work untitled Anacrón: hipótesis de un producto todo by Augusto Marquet and Gabriel Wolfson (Mexico), that combines Mexican death folklore with videogames logic. The work focuses on women death as reality of Mexico nowadays, changing the meaning that it has had traditionally. This paper analyses how women are presented in this Latin American production in global contexts of exclusion and violence in Mexico. The objective is to identify the transformation of traditional national elements related to death into a political denounce of the violence suffered by women in the country that are in fugue.

Cassandra rushes to death: Imagery in Euripides’ Troades and in on attic vase

This paper focuses on a passage from Euripides? tragedy Troades (415 BC) and an imagery from an attic vase (cca 430 BC). In the paper I research in what manner the tragic poet Euripides (for the sake of theatre art) and the painter of one attic vase (for the sake of visual art), in their representation of a mythical episode, both use motifs from ritual practice in order to present their intimate thoughts and thus communicate with those to whom this art comes in an exceptionally refined way. In the aforementioned mythical episode, Trojan prophetess Cassandra knows that what follows is a short life of a personal slave to Greek king Agamemnon and then a violent death by the hand of Agamemnon?s wife Clytemnestra. The tragic poet diverges from the inherited tradition and innovates the myth, so his Cassandra ?praises? her marriage with Agamemnon to whom he is actually a slave, even though she knows that this ?slave marriage? will bring her death. Using motifs from marriage ritual, Euripides gives to his character the personal freedom to want the epilogue that follows, thus making her ?agreement? meaningful. The painter of the represented vase uses the atmosphere of the sacrificial ritual in order to contextualize the relationship between Cassandra and the murderess. This paper puts together perpectives of different academic disciplines that derive from anthropology, classics, gender studies, theatre studies. Its special value and relevance lies in the fact that it situatues the textual analysis within the framework of social and cultural anthropology, considering the current interdisciplinary approach in humanities in general and in classics in particular.