Books
The codex is composed of the following twelve books:
- The Gods. Deals with gods worshiped by the natives of this land, which is New Spain.
- The Ceremonies. Deals with holidays and sacrifices with which these natives honored their gods in times of infidelity.
- The Origin of the Gods. About the creation of the gods.
- The Soothsayers. About Indian judiciary astrology or omens and fortune-telling arts.
- The Omens. Deals with foretelling these natives made from birds, animals, and insects in order to foretell the future.
- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy. About prayers to their gods, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and theology in the same context.
- The Sun, Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the Years. Deals with the sun, the moon, the stars, and the jubilee year.
- Kings and Lords. About kings and lords, and the way they held their elections and governed their reigns.
- The Merchants. About merchants, and officials for gold, precious stones and feathers.
- The People. About general history: it explains vices and virtues, spiritual as well as bodily, of all manner of persons.
- Earthly Things. About properties of animals, birds, fish, trees, herbs, flowers, metals, and stones, and about colors.
- The Conquest. About the conquest of New Spain, which is Mexico City.
Read more about this topic: Florentine Codex
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)