A New Sun Emerges: the Aztec New Fire Ceremony in word and image

Abstract

This study attends to the historical dimensions of the Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival known as the New Fire Ceremony, a ritual that took place every fifty-two years in pre-Columbian central Mexico. The New Fire Ceremony is most often discussed in terms of cosmic renewal and calendrical cycles. This article seeks to situate its cyclically recurring rites within the web of Mexican history, as represented in early colonial Mexican historical sources, both pictorial and textual. Specifically, it looks to historical genres to examine the cultural memory of the location chosen for the final New Fire Ceremony of 1507, considering the ways in which the Mexica yoked ancient rituals of renewal to contemporary political concerns. That territory had been the site of Mexica military defeat and subjugation during their earlier migration period. Celebrating the New Fire Ceremony here centuries later, at the height of their power, may have functioned as a reversal of that early humiliation. Thus, the Mexica king, as agent of the sun god, embarked on a pilgrimage back through time and space to affirm their contemporary political dominion.