부산대학교 도서관

This paper examines a poorly understood scene in the Codex Vienna and is based on linguistic and ethnographic studies carried out in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Vienna is one of the few Precolumbian manuscripts to survive the conquest, and its extensive treatment of ritual and religious subjects makes it unique among the Mixtec codices. The scene in question is interpreted in terms of a myth current among present-day Mixtec speakers, which recounts the first sacrifice made by humans, and which links this sacrifice, and all subsequent ones, to agriculture and human death.