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The Aztec New Fire Ceremony

The New Fire Ceremony, also known as the Binding of the Years Ceremony, was a ritual held every 52 years in the month of November on the completion of a full cycle of the Aztec solar year (xiuhmopilli). The purpose of it was none other than to renew the sun and ensure another 52-year cycle. The New Fire Ceremony, or Toxhiuhmolpilia, as the Aztecs themselves called it, was by far the most important event in the religious calendar because, quite simply, if the ceremony failed, then the Aztec civilization would end.

The Solar Calendar

The timing of the ceremony and the number 52 were significant as this was the exact coinciding point of the first days of the two Aztec calendars which were then in simultaneous use: the ancient Mesoamerican and sacred tonalpohualli 260-day cycle and the xiuhpohualli, the Aztec 365-day solar and ceremonial calendar. In addition, every second cycle (104 years) was given even more significance as on that precise date the tonalpohualli coincided with the 52-year cycle. The Aztecs saw such time cycles as a mirror of the ancient cosmic cycles which, in Aztec mythology, had created the world. The historian Jacques Soustelle describes well the reason a ritual like the New Fire Ceremony was of such concern to the Aztecs,

At bottom the ancient Mexicans had no real confidence in the future, their fragile world was perpetually at the mercy of some disaster: there were not only the natural cataclysms and the famines, but more than that, on certain nights the monstrous divinities of the west appeared at the crossroads, and there were the wizards, those dark envoys from a mysterious world, and every fifty-two years there was the great fear that fell upon all the nations of the empire when the sun set on the last day of the 'century' and no man could tell whether it would ever rise again (114).