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Question for March 2019

Did the Aztecs celebrate gods’ birthdays?? Asked by St. Christopher’s The Hall School. Chosen and answered by Dr. Catherine DiCesare

Yes, the Aztecs did have birthday celebrations for some gods. Among the most important was the birthday of the Aztecs’ great solar deity Huitzilopochtli, on the day 1 Flint in the 260-day calendar. The sixteenth-century chronicle of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún describes elaborate temple offerings to celebrate Huitzilopochtli’s birth. Ritual offerings included burning incense and tobacco. Dishes of prepared food came from the palace kitchens, and wine merchants sent bowls filled with the Mexican alcoholic drink known as pulque, along with special “sucking straws” to drink it. Huitzilopochtli also received an abundance of colorful capes made from the precious feathers of birds that included the tropical quetzal macaw, the blue cotinga, the roseate spoonbill, the white heron, and the hummingbird - the last perhaps the most meaningful for Huitzilopochtli, “Hummingbird of the South (or Left).”

Even the emperor Motecuhzoma II brought gifts, bringing armloads of flowers to the temple. Sahagún describes the king offering a wide array of fragrant flowers; these included magnolia flowers, maize flowers, cacao flowers, and yellow and blue tobacco flowers. The flowers were spread out and carefully arranged as a kind of shield, so that their perfumes would blanket Huitzilopochtli’s temple. All of these gifts were accompanied by feasting and drinking. What is more, Huitzilopochtli’s birthday of 1 Flint was considered to be so special that men who were been born on this day were fated to become great, brave warriors who would gain honor and riches, while women born at this time were destined to be gifted, courageous, and strong.

Images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

Dr. Catherine DiCesare has answered 4 questions altogether.

Did the Aztecs celebrate gods’ birthdays?

Which other foods were sacred apart from maize?

How heavy would one of the skull masks have been?

Did they celebrate a different god every day?

Comments (1)

Shim Hyeong Seop

31st Aug 2020

Very interesting. Then did the Aztecs celebrate their (ordinary people) birthdays? I heard that the Aztecs celebrated their tlatoani’s birthday.

Mexicolore

Good question. For starters, the birth itself of a baby was cause for a HUGE celebration, lasting up to four days! According to Professor Manuel Aguilar-Moreno (in his ‘Handbook to Life in the Aztec World’, p.295), birthdays were generally celebrated, but in a bizarre way:-
’They would seize the individual whose birthday it was and toss the person into the water. When the celebrant came out of the water, he or she was bound and obliged to provide festivities for the day. If the person did not do so in that year, he or she would not be honoured again, because it was said that he or she was still bound and there was no reason to celebrate his or her birthday any more.’ (We will try and find the source for this!)