The Fifteenth Month: Aztec History in the Rituals of Panquetzaliztli

Abstract

Recently, the interest in the 18 months of the annual Aztec calendar, also called xihuitl (365-day year) in Nahuatl, has grown significantly. John Schwaller's book The Fifteenth Month offers an example of this increasing interest and proposes an overview of Panquetzaliztli, a festival celebrated over the 20 days of the 15th month of the Aztec calendar. This study covers all available sources and analyses, as well as all social, economic, and religious aspects of Panquetzaliztli. Furthermore, Schwaller deals with certain issues that have not received much attention from scholars, such as the variety of rituals among the Nahuas of central Mexico and their transformations over time.The book is organized into an introduction and six chapters. Chapter 1 discusses several sources that describe aspects of the festival that were carried out outside Tenochtitlan, principally the Memoriales of Fray Toribio de Benavente (known as Motolinía), one of the first Franciscan missionaries to investigate Mexican antiquities; and the Primeros memoriales, the first version of the ethnographic work of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the festival through the two historical sources that contain most of the information about Panquetzaliztli: the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España by the Dominican Diego Durán and the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, which is the last version of Sahagún's work. Chapter 4 compares the rituals of Panquetzaliztli with those of other festivals and analyzes the visual information contained in the New Spain pictographic sources. Chapter 5 pays attention to the celebrations of Panquetzaliztli that other authors have considered of less importance in the context of the festival. Finally, chapter 6 is devoted to the innovations introduced by the Mexicas into the Panquetzaliztli festival.The most interesting aspects of Schwaller's book are two points that have tended to be neglected in the Mesoamerican field: the effort to offer a reconstruction of the historical development of Panquetzaliztli and the attempt to distinguish between the elements that were common among all Aztec or Nahua people and those that were unique to the Mexicas, the inhabitants of Mexico Tenochtitlan. For example, in chapter 5 Schwaller puts forward the hypothesis that Panquetzaliztli was formerly dedicated to Tezcatlipoca rather than to Huitzilopochtli and that the introduction of the latter god was a Mexica innovation. In chapter 6, the author emphasizes the transformation of the Mexicas into an imperial people who subjugated most of Mesoamerica with the imposition of tributes and the establishment of lucrative long-distance trade. In this context, he argues, the performance every 52 years of the New Fire ceremony during Panquetzaliztli can be understood as a change implemented by the Mexicas, who moved this ritual from the first month of the year 1-Rabbit to the fifteenth month of the year 2-Reed.While these hypotheses are fresh and thought-provoking, in particular for those in the field who have tended to focus on only the symbolic meaning of ritual and not the political and historic process of transformation, certain critiques can be leveled against them. In the first case, although Schwaller refers to Michel Graulich's proposal regarding the substitution of Quetzalcoatl by Huitzilopochtli (see pp. 153–54), he prefers to think that the god that Huitzilopochtli replaced was and had always been Tezcatlipoca. Here Schwaller seems not to give too much importance to the fact that, in Nahua myths, the god Quetzalcoatl is born from Coatlicue, as is Huitzilopochtli, who was ritually born of this goddess every year in Panquetzaliztli.In the second case, the hypothesis according to which the Mexicas moved the New Fire ceremony from the first month of the year to the fifteenth month is difficult to trace back to reliable historical sources. This proposal is based on a rather surprising statement by Schwaller: “According to Sahagún and others, five days of preparation (the nemontemi) preceded the New Fire ceremony” (p. 175). However, Schwaller does not quote these sources, and while I found a brief mention in Motolinía's Memoriales, I was not able to find any reference in Sahagún's work to the celebration of the New Fire ceremony on the first day of the year after the last five days, called nemontemi in Nahuatl. This proposition must therefore be considered deeply speculative, because it is based only on one source (Motolinía) that, furthermore, is not completely clear on this specific subject.These two critiques point to the book's potential to spark interesting conversations among specialists of central Mexico Nahuas. This book is also recommended for scholars with a more general interest in the history and religion of Mesoamerican cultures, as it offers a comprehensive view of the main sources and the ritual life of the Aztecs.