Article suitable for older students

Question for January 2023

Did they celebrate a different god every day?? Asked by Mill Mead Primary School. Chosen and answered by Dr. Catherine DiCesare

The use of a 260-day calendar was ancient and widespread in Mesoamerica. This calendar was created by combining the numbers 1-13 with twenty day names, which names varied based on culture. The 260-day calendar was probably the most important timekeeping system in Mesoamerica. The Mixtecs of southern Mexico had this calendar. The Maya also used this calendar, which is called the tzolkin. The Aztec version of this calendar is called the tonalpohualli. The Aztecs recorded the tonalpohualli cycle of 260 days in a kind of almanac known as a tonalamatl, or “book of days.” The famous Codex Borbonicus contains an example of this kind of almanac [pic 1]. The days are divided into 20 “weeks” of thirteen days each, called trecenas. On each page of the tonalamatl, the days run from left to right along the bottom row of the page, and then from top to bottom on the inner column.

Scholars still do not fully understand why Mesoamerican cultures first developed a calendar of 260 days. One of the most widely-accepted suggestions (developed by Leonard Schultze Jena) is that it is based on the approximate length of the human gestational cycle. This makes sense, because one of the best-understood functions of the 260-day calendar has to do with birthdays. As the chronicles of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún tell us, the Aztecs believed that each day in the tonalpohualli cycle had a good, bad, or ambivalent fortune or augury, such that one’s “birthday” (in practice, the day on which the newborn was named and bathed) could determine the course of an individual’s life.

Numerous Aztec gods were associated with specific days in the 260-day calendar, and those days were set aside in each 260-day cycle for special ritual feasts celebrating that god. We know quite a lot about the gods tied to those days, especially from the chronicles compiled in the sixteenth century by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. For example, the god known as Tezcatlipoca was commemorated on 2 Reed days, which is depicted in the Codex Borbonicus almanac page seen here [pic 2]. Tezcatlipoca was so closely tied to that day that they sometimes referred to him by the calendar name 2 Reed, “Ome Acatl” or “Omacatl” in Nahuatl. On the day sign 2 Reed, the Aztecs venerated Tezcatlipoca, painting the face of the god’s image and bringing incense and special ornamentation (FC 4:56). The day 1 Reed was specially linked with Quetzalcoatl, the deified priest-king of Tula. Every 260 days, when the day 1 Reed fell, the lords and noblemen brought gifts and adornments to a temple image of Quetzalcoatl. These included perfumes, paper, flowers, tobacco, incense, and food and drink (Florentine Codex, 4:29 and 2:36-37).

The day “7 Serpent,” or “Chicomecoatl” in Nahuatl, was a time for celebrating the maize deity that bore that calendar name [pic 3]. As the seventh day of the seventh week, 7 Serpent was a particularly significant calendrical day. Chicomecoatl embodied the sacred maize plant and encapsulated the concept of agricultural fecundity and bounty. According to Sahagún, the tonalpohualli feast on the day 7 Serpent, Chicomecoatl, “represented our sustenance, which was real wealth” (FC 4:49-50).
There were apparently additional gods that could influence each of the days. For example, the “Nine Lords of the Night” was a sequence of nine gods attached to every day of the tonalpohualli cycle. The famous indigenous manuscript known as the Codex Borbonicus illustrates this. In the Borbonicus, each day sign is accompanied by one of those nine Night Lords, which cycled through the tonalpohualli in a fixed sequence. Each Night Lord appears to the right of the day name. The god’s arms are open to reveal the day sign, suggesting that the deity imparted additional aspects to the character of the tonalpohualli day. For example, the first day of the seventh trecena, 1 Rain, is accompanied by the Night Lord Tlazolteotl, “Divine Filth” [pic 4].

Tlazolteotl then appears again nine days later, on the day 10 Rabbit [pic 5]. The associations of the Nine Lords of the Night are still somewhat obscure, but they seem to have had some kind of influence over the nighttime periods of each day in the tonalpohualli cycle.
We still do not know for sure if there was a different god celebrated on every day of the 260-day cycle. However, given all that we do know, it does seem likely that there were gods and other kinds of sacred entities that had different kinds of influences on every day.

Bibliography:
• Burland, Cottie A. “Codex Borbonicus: Pages 21 and 22 a Critical Assessment,” Journal de La Société des Américanistes 46 (1957): 157–163.
• Furst, Peter T. “Human Biology and the Origin of the 260-day Sacred Almanac: The Contribution of Leonard Schultze Jena (1872-1955).” In Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas, ed. Gary H. Gossen, pp. 69-76. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, The University of Albany, State University of New York, 1986.
• Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex. Trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and University of Utah, 1950.

Pictures supplied by and thanks to the author, taken from the facsimile edition of the Codex Borbonicus, ADEVA, Graz, Austria, 1991, photographed by Gary Huibregtse.

NOTE: Dr. DiCesare’s reply also answers the question from Twydall Primary School - ‘In the moon calendar, were the 260 days all linked to different gods, or did they link to the same gods that kept repeating?’

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?