Miccailhuitl

In the solar calendar of the Aztecs (Mexica), the xiuhpohualli, the year was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (veintenas) plus five unlucky days. Two consecutive months, the ninth and tenth, were devoted to honouring the dead. The ninth, usually called Tlaxochimaco ("the offering of flowers"), was also known as Miccailhuitontli, the Little Feast of the Dead; the tenth, Xocotl Huetzi ("the fruit falls"), was also called Hueymiccailhuitl, the Great Feast of the Dead.

Together they fell, in the sixteenth-century correlation, roughly in the late summer, around August and into September. Our knowledge of them comes above all from the great Franciscan ethnographic project of Bernardino de Sahagun, whose Florentine Codex set down in Nahuatl and Spanish the ceremonies of each month, and from the Dominican Diego Duran, though the two friars and their informants do not always agree on names and meanings.

The month of Tlaxochimaco opened with the gathering of great quantities of flowers, which were offered to the gods and used to garland images and celebrants, and with feasting and dancing. The following month, Xocotl Huetzi, centred on a tall stripped tree or pole (the xocotl) set up in the temple precinct, at the top of which was fixed a dough image; young men competed to climb the greased pole and seize it.

Within this period the Mexica honoured their dead, including dead warriors and ancestors, with offerings of food and the memory of those who had gone to the various afterworlds of Aztec belief, among them Mictlan, the deep land of the dead ruled by Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl. The month also carried associations with the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli. As with much of the ritual calendar, the surviving descriptions are filtered through Christian observers, and modern scholars reconstruct the ceremonies with due caution.

It is often said that Mexico's Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) is simply the ancient Aztec feast of the dead surviving under a Christian veneer, but scholars treat this continuity as debated rather than settled. The modern observance falls on 1 and 2 November, and those dates are the medieval Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls, brought from Europe; the pre-Hispanic feasts of the dead fell months earlier, in late summer.

The best-supported view is that today's Day of the Dead is a colonial-era fusion, in which Catholic commemoration of the departed met and absorbed indigenous attitudes to death and offering, and that its now-famous emphasis on an unbroken ancient Aztec origin was strongly shaped by twentieth-century Mexican nationalism and cultural politics. That said, genuine indigenous elements, the ofrenda of food and marigolds, the familiarity with death, the honouring of named ancestors, are real and important. The relationship of Miccailhuitl to the Day of the Dead is thus one of partial inheritance and later reconstruction, not simple survival.