It’s almost New Year’s Eve, a time when many people gather for celebrations throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning. Rationally we know that nothing really changes when the clock rolls from 11:59 to midnight – The new calendar year is a human invention, and yet we are conditioned to feel the moment as a boundary with a special transition. This feeling has been paralleled in many other civilizations, such as the Aztecs from the 13th-16th centuries in Central America. Here you see an Aztec glyph signifying the “New Fire Ceremony,” a very special New Year’s Eve celebration that took place once every fifty-two years, when the solar and lunar calendars re-aligned. The Aztec New Year came on February 22 of our calendar year, but that sure wasn’t the only difference. . Aztecs thought that the special 52-year cycles were times when the entire universe could possibly collapse, and this dire threat necessitated strong disaster management from the Aztec leaders. Prior to the date, people throughout the land would perform rituals of cleaning that included dumping hearth stones and other artifacts into ritual trash heaps. Then, on the evening of the New Fire Ceremony, special priests of the fire cult would walk from the capital city to a local sacred volcano, taking with them a human destined to be sacrificed. At the rise of the constellation of Orion, all fires throughout the Empire would be extinguished, and the priests would light a fire on the victim’s chest, slice open the torso, and rip out a heart to be offered to the sun. Once that had occurred, they thought they had averted a potential apocalypse, and ritually carried the fire from the volcano to every other fire throughout the Empire.
There is another aspect to this story. In 2001, Aztec archaeologists Michael Smith and Christina Elson reported on findings from ancient trash heaps that suggested much earlier New Year’s Celebrations that were not organized around violence, terror, and State control. These trash heaps were much likelier to have deposits with more serene components: statues of the Aztec corn goddess on slides two and three, for instance, rather than the Snake-skirt serphant goddess with fangs and human hearts in slide four. That monumental statue was found in the Aztec Central Palace precinct. This is not to suggest that non-elites in the Aztec world were pacifists, but rather that human stories have really different narratives when we change the actors’ lenses.
Source(s): Christina Elson and Michael Smith, “Archaeological deposits from the Aztec New Fire Ceremony,” Cambridge UP, 11 Jan 2002 online. For images, slides 1 and 5 are Wikipedia. Slide 2 is author’s photo from Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. Slide 3 is from the New York Metropolitain Museum of Art @metmuseum.org, public domain.
