the arrow maker who gives birth to a new century

The most extraordinary festival of all those celebrated by the Indians of America was surely the Toxiuh molpilia (the binding of the years) which took place at the end of every century, at the end of a cycle of fifty-two solar years. This was the festival of the new fire... It was the most beautiful, the most tragic, and the most meaningful of festivals, since it took place at the time when, according to the Indians' counting of time, all the stars having completed their cycle, the entire cosmos would begin again the revolution which lead it from the year One Rabbit to another year One Rabbit.

...

There was something tragic and dreamlike in that terrifying wait for the end of the world which the Christian Sahagun could not accept, because for him it has the inevitable sense of a damnation: it was, he says, "an invention of the devil so they would renew the pact they had made with him... by plunging them into terror of the end of the world and by making them believe he was prolonging their time and was having mercy on them, by allowing the world to continue."

...

The priests then arrived, each one wearing the insignias of his god, and they began to walk slowly, silently, "and they were then called teonenemi, which means, they walk like gods".

Then, at a given moment, a man was sacrificed, enabling the entire universe to continue on its course. They chose a warrior, captured during combat, chosen from among the most courageos, who had to bear, by the date of his birth, the name of his destiny. Born on the first day of the year, he was called xiuhtlanin, he who arrowed the new year. The high priest placed a stick of wood upon his chest and quickly rubbed the tapered stick between his hands, thus producing a spark. When the fire caught "the captive's chest was immediately opened, his heart ripped out and thrown into the fire, which they kept fanning, and then the whole body was consumed in the flames". And all around the people who were waiting in anguish, seeing the fire rise up, "immediately cut their ears with knives, collected their blood and threw it in the direction where the light had appeared"; fire was taken to all parts of the province by runners carrying torches and, says Sahagun, "it was an admirable sight, that multitude of fire in all the villages, so such a degree it seemed to be daylight." The last ceremony of the new fire took place in 1507, according to Sahagun, "they did it in complete solemnity, for the Spanish had not yet come to that land".

+++


From The Mexican Dream, J.M.G. Le Clezio, p54.

+++