Xiuhtecuhtli

Xiuhtecuhtli is fire itself given a name and a face, one of the oldest deities attested in central Mexico and known also as Huehueteotl, the old god, worshipped at hearths from the humblest household to the temple precinct of Tenochtitlan. His name joins xihuitl, turquoise, fire and year in a single Nahuatl root, so that the stone the Mexica prized above gold, the flame kept alive in every home, and the passage of time itself are read as one idea. Sahagun's informants describe him as the deity who stands at the centre of the four world directions, the fire in the middle of the house around which the family gathers, and depictions in the codices give him a brazier headdress and the xiuhcoatl, the turquoise fire serpent, as a weapon. His cult reached its most public expression in the Toxiuhmolpilia, the Binding of the Years, held once every fifty two years when the ritual calendar and the solar year returned together to their starting point.

Duran describes priests extinguishing every fire in the valley, climbing the Hill of the Star at Iztapalapa to kindle a new flame on the breast of a war captive at the exact turn of midnight, and runners carrying that single fire back to relight every hearth before dawn, an act read as guaranteeing that the sun would rise again and time would continue. Xiuhtecuhtli's standing among nobles and the elderly followed from this: fire and long life were understood as kin, and the turquoise diadem he wears in the codices signals rulership as much as flame.

Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient CalendarDiego Duran; translated by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden

The nine Lords of the Night, the Yohualteuctin, rotate through every date of the tonalpohualli independently of the twenty day signs and the thirteen numbers that make up the 260 day count, and Xiuhtecuhtli's fixed place at the head of that sequence gives the whole night count its starting point. Each date in the calendar carries three simultaneous readings, a numbered day sign such as 1 Cipactli, a diviner's trecena, and one of the nine night lords, and because nine shares no common factor with 260, the full combination of all three does not return to its first arrangement until 2340 days have passed. Xiuhtecuhtli governs day one of the count, 1 Cipactli, and then recurs every ninth day thereafter, so a reader working the tonalamatl, the painted book of days consulted by the calendar priests Sahagun calls tonalpouhque, would count forward from any known Xiuhtecuhtli day to find the next.

The night lords are usually read as colouring the fortune the day sign and trecena already indicate rather than overriding it, a supplementary voice in the same reading, and Xiuhtecuhtli's presence on a date was generally taken as steadying, since fire at the centre of the count was understood the same way fire at the centre of the house was, as the point everything else is arranged around. The sequence he opens has no equivalent break or reset within the 260 days; it simply turns over continuously beneath the two other counts, a plain arithmetic rotation the priesthood tracked by rote rather than by any myth of its own.

Sources Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of FateElizabeth Hill Boone with Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble