Article more suitable for mature students

The Aztec Sun Stone - The Turquoise Hearth of 1507

15th Jul 2024

Mexicolore contributor Rubén Mendoza

We are most grateful to Dr. Rubén G. Mendoza for writing specially for us this illuminating and pioneering article on the meaning of the monumental ‘Sunstone’ to the Mexica-Aztecs. Dr. Mendoza is Professor Emeritus, and former Chair of the School of Social, Behavioral & Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay, USA. He has published some 250 articles, chapters, journal contributions, and scores of images spanning a range of topics and media, including Amerindian and Spanish Colonial cultural and architectural histories, art history, social conflict, and science, technology, and medicine. His latest co-edited Springer edition concerns the topic of Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica: Recent Discoveries and Current Perspectives (2024).

Popularly known as the Aztec Calendar Stone, the monumental Sun Stone (weighing 24.589 metric tons and measuring 3.48 m across its raised circular surface) remains the subject of scholarly studies since the basalt monolith was first unearthed in the main plaza of Mexico City in 1790. While many agree on the essential iconography or calendrical symbol sets inherent in the complex creation, the monument has to date largely eluded a singular characterization that accounts for its early 16th century creation. Central to such understandings are its essential iconography, distinct calendrical elements, and those other period monuments and codices identified with both Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin and the Sun Stone’s moment in history. To that end, this essay seeks to make whole what has come to represent the disembodied head and face of what continues to be interpreted as the mid-day sun enveloped in a butterfly-like or quadripartite mantle or cartouche dominated by the specter of the four ill-fated world ages that anticipated the Fifth Sun (picture 1).

How We Know What We Know
If not an Aztec calendar, or for that matter, the presumed embodiment of Tonatiuh in its guise as the Fifth Sun of the present age, what then does the monument represent? In order to answer such a question, we must first interrogate recent revelations about what we do know about the Sun Stone with some measure of certainty.
First, while the creation date for the monument has long remained open to question, we know that the Olivine granite stone was hewn during the reign of Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin, aka: Moctezuma II, and, that fact by virtue of the name glyph of Moteuczoma rendered in the upper central left-hand corner of the framing element or cartouche that holds the disembodied head of the Sun deity. As such, it is safe to assume that the monument was sculpted during the reign of Moteuczoma II (b. 1467, d. 1519/1520), thereby spanning the period following the 1503 CE coronation of the huei tlahtoani, or Great Speaker Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin, through to his death in 1519. Though some scholars contend that Moteuczoma was crowned in 1502, the Stone of the Five Suns, or Coronation Stone housed in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, necessarily anchors the coronation to 15 July 1503 (picture 2).

Second, the Teocalli de la Guerra Sagrada, also known as the Temple Stone, is dated to the year of the New Fire Ceremony celebrated by Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin in 1507 CE. The huei tlahtoani is depicted atop, and to the right flank of a 13-stepped temple platform, and standing to the right side of the Sun Stone, with Huitzilopochtli, or Hummingbird Left, mirroring the posture of Moteuczoma to the left of the circular solar disk separating the two beings. I contend that the Temple Stone was one of a number of monuments commissioned by Moteuczoma to commemorate the Xiuhtlalpilli or New Fire Ceremony of 1507 (picture 3). In addition to the depiction of the Sun Stone atop the Temple Stone, a host of elements from the symbol set and dating of the Temple Stone are similarly represented in the great Sun Stone. Moreover, the design features and stylistic conventions deployed for the creation of both the Sun and Temple stones are remarkably similar.

Third, the Sun Stone incorporates all of the essential elements identified with the iconography of the Xiuhtlalpilli or New Fire Ceremony and its commemorative monument, the Temple Stone (picture 3). In addition, the Codex Borbonicus, which was crafted to commemorate the New Fire Ceremony of 1507, incorporates crucial elements and the pairing of deities represented in both the Sun Stone and its Temple Stone companion.
My 2021 publication titled “The War of Heaven - A Reappraisal of the Aztec Sun Stone in Light of Nahua Cosmogenesis and the New Fire Ceremony of 1507 AD” first delineated a host of correlations and critical observations bearing on the Sun Stone and its place in commemorating the Xiuhtlalpilli or New Fire Ceremony.

These range from the representation of (a) the “Turquoise Hearth” as the centerpiece wherein was kindled the New Fire with its accompany pattern of “fire drill” holes at the left margin of the monument (picture 5), (b) Xiuhcoatl or xiuhcocoah “Fire Serpents” replete with “sacrificial” paper ties at their tails (picture 6), (c) the pairing of Xiuhtecuhtli (Turquoise Lord) with Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli (Lord of Dawn/Venus) emerging from the ophidian maws of the xiuhcocoah “Fire Serpents” at the base of the Sun Stone (picture 7), (d) Nine xihuitl turquoise light (fire) rays, (e) anthropomorphized tecpatl daggers or bolts of lightning, (f) autosacrificial huitzli thorns embedded in the zacatapoyolli or “Grass Ball of Sacrifice” (picture 8), (g) a tecpatl and Venus “eye’’ (stars) or ihuicatl “night sky” band carved about the base or circumference of the Sun Stone proper (picture 9), (h) the conflation of the Nahui Ollin (Four Movement) “framing device” at the epicenter of the Sun Stone with that of Itzpapalotl, or the “Obsidian Butterfly” of Chichimec origins (picture 10), and the iconographic correspondence obtaining between the central figure of the Sun Stone and that depicted in the guise of Sol Nueve or Yohualtecuhtli the “Night Sun” in the pages of the Codex Borgia.

In accounting for the multidimensional character of the central deity or supernatural at the heart of the Sun Stone, it should be noted that Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin is documented in a variety of contexts to have dawned the accoutrements of a host of deities, including that of the “Turquoise Lord’’ Xiuhtecuhtli, in what Patrick Thomas Hajovsky (2015, 146) characterizes as his political power made manifest “through his embodied relationships to the gods.” In “The War of Heaven’’ (Mendoza 2021, 299), I conclude that,
”Given the pertinent iconography, and the name glyph embedded in the upper left portion of the Nahui Ollin framing device at the centre of the Sun Stone, I extend the identification of the central deity depicted to encompass the very personage named on the monument, during whose reign the monument was commissioned and completed, Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin (Moteuczoma the Younger) himself, in his role as the [te]ixiptla or deity impersonator of his patron, the Lord of Night.”

The Sacrifice of Sol Nueve
As to the identity of the disembodied or decapitated head at the epicenter of the Sun Stone, the iconography once again points away from the identification with Tonatiuh, the Shining One, or Day Sun. When examined from across the spectrum of late 15th and early 16th century depictions of the Mexican sun deity, only that of Sol Nueve (Yohualtecuhtli the Lord of Night, or Nine Sun) from the Codex Borgia bears the distinctive facial characteristics and attendant iconography identified with the deity represented on the Sun Stone. Moreover, given that Sol Nueve constitutes the Dark (Night) Sun, and its body is bathed in black in its depiction in the Codex Borgia, I contend that the blackened face of the disembodied head at the center of the Sun Stone necessarily validates its representation as Sol Nueve or Yohualtecuhtli (picture 11).

Significantly, the Borgia Codex (39-40) depicts Rite 3 with the Ninth Sun under assault or sacrifice by nine similarly blackened deities or supernatural beings brandishing bloodied stone knives or tecpatl. Said beings each cut into the limbs, neck, and head of Sol Nueve. From each cut oozes copious quantities of both blood and sunlight, and the ritual in question takes place within a large painted enclosure or walled compound festooned with the day signs of the Tonalpohualli or Sacred Almanac and “Count of Days’’ ordered in counter-clockwise fashion. The reverse ordering is akin to that sculpted into the second ring of the Sun Stone proper. At the feet of the Ninth Sun of the Borgia Codex is situated an elaborate ballcourt replete with two ballcourt rings pierced with “conquest” darts and autosacrificial huitztli thorns, thereby conflating the sacrifice of the Ninth Sun with that of the sacrifices conducted within the ballcourt proper. To that end, “I contend that the very shape and concentric ring geometry of the Sun Stone was intended to emulate the stone ball court ring, through which the Fifth Sun or Nahui Ollin made its transit from darkness into the light” (Mendoza 2021, 300) (picture 12).

The Night of the Ninth Sun
In “The War of Heaven” (Mendoza 2021, p. 307), I elaborate on the identification of the numerology of the number eight within the symbology of the Sun Stone by concluding that,
”I here identify all eight elements as an ensemble of eight solar rays or years. The association of the eight solar rays or years with the ring of 52 ‘quincunx’ or turquoise fire elements [embedded within the third concentric ring of the Sun Stone] is particularly revealing, as the latter are identified with the iconography of fire and the passage of the solar year. Notably, the 52-year count of the Tonalpohualli cycle in turn coincides with the celebration of the xiuhmolpilli [xihuitlalpilli] or New Fire Ceremony.”
Moreover, when the central xihuitl or triangular turquoise “diadem” (or mitre) situated immediately over the disembodied head of the Ninth Sun is taken into account, it constitutes both the turquoise diadem or xiuhuitzolli (royal miter) headdress, and by extension, the ninth xihuitl in the annular constellation of such solar elements.

Similarly, when the base of the decorated huitzli autosacrificial “thorn” or bone perforator positioned just beneath the disembodied head of the Ninth Sun is taken into account, it accounts for the ninth such element in the collection of huitzli perforators ringing the Sun Stone. The constellation of nine bloody “thorn” perforators and nine “rays” of light so represented coincides with the nine supernatural beings or deities that engage in the sacrifice and immolation of the Ninth Sun depicted as Rite 3 in the pages of the Borgia Codex (39-40). In this context, the number nine is identified with the Ninth Sun, and thereby, Night, and the realm of Mictlan, or the underworld, or “other” world of the ancestors and the dead, in turn identified with the number nine (Mikulska 2020, 282-318).

The Metamorphosis of Itzpapalotl
Given the predominance of nocturnal, stellar, sacrificial, underworld, numerically significant, and light and fire themes inherent in the iconographic vocabulary of the Sun Stone, how then do we reconcile the cosmography, or cosmogenesis, represented? To do so, we are left to reappraise the cosmology via an exegesis, or critical interpretation of the textual body, or epicenter of the monument’s iconography. In so doing, I here posit that the central “framing device” or Nahui Ollin (Four Movement) bearing the disembodied head of the Night Sun in effect constitutes Itzpapalotl, the “Obsidian” or “Clawed Butterfly” of Chichimec origins who led the Mexica from the primordial “Seven Caves” of Chicomostoc (pix 13-14). Though the four rectangular panels, “wings”, or “obsidian mirrors” containing the name glyphs of each of the four Suns are readily identifiable; the “framing device” itself echoes the ancient form of the “Clawed Butterfly” Itzpapalotl. Identified as the Queen of the Tzitzimimeh, or the Star Demons of the west, or those stars that appear during the course of a solar eclipse, Itzpapalotl has long been “identified in Mesoamerican lore with war and human sacrifice and has been traced to the pantheon of deities that once dominated Middle Classic (400-600) Teotihuacan, when the earliest New Fire Ceremony has been documented to have taken place” (Mendoza 2021, 303).

Her Epiclassic (ca. 650-950 CE) manifestation takes the form of butterfly pectorals on the breasts of Toltec warriors or atlantean support columns situated atop the Temple of the Morning Star (Tlahuizcalpantecutli; Pyramid B) at Tula, Hidalgo. Each warrior bears a Sun disk on their back, and this pairing thereby situates the Clawed Butterfly within the context of the Sun’s identification with war and sacrifice. According to Klor de Alva (1986, 19), “The open wings of the butterfly have been interpreted as the glyph ollin, “movement,” or creative energy; the obsidian represents the sacred knife used in the ritual sacrifices.” Moreover, current taxonomy linked to the nocturnal “butterfly” identified with Itzpapalotl in fact rests with the identification of a black moth, or Rothschildia Orizaba of the family Saturniidae, or Rothschildia cincta, popularly known as the butterfly of “Four Mirrors’’ or mariposa o polillo Cuatro Espejos. Among the Chichimeca of northern Mexico, “Its fenestrae (transparent windows of the wings) represent the arrowheads and spearheads of obsidian. Its movement symbolizes the planet Venus, which carried the messages of men to the sun” (El Charco del Ingenio 2024). In this instance, I contend that the four mirrors constitute the ethereal portals or windows to the Four Suns of antiquity that alight in the realm of the Lord of Night, or Sol Nueve in his androgynous guise as Itzpapalotl.

New Fire and Burning Water
According to the 16th century Dominican chronicler Fray Diego Durán (ca. 1537 – 1588) (1994, 190–191), a Sun Stone (possibly the Tizoc or Arzobispado Stone) was featured as the centerpiece of a bloody tribute to the Sun that entailed the ritual human sacrifice of eight captives atop the monument. The Sun Stone was thereby bathed in spilt human blood, and hence consecrated as a tribute to the Sun. Interestingly, the sacrifice of the “eight” captives corresponds numerologically with the eight sculpted “offerings” cupules, eight autosacrificial huitzli “agave” thorns, and eight turquoise fire symbols that adorn the Sun Stone of 1507. According to Durán (1994, 190–191), the sacrifice of the eight captives was followed by the ritual kindling of a fire atop the monolith,
’When the sacrifice had ended, the priests took from the shrine of Huitzilopochtli a serpent made of paper coiled about a pole, all made of [red arara] feathers … A priest carried the snake, twisted about the pole. He then set it on fire and walked around the stone, incensing it with smoke. While it was still burning, he climbed to the top of the monolith and threw the still smoldering serpent [xiuhcoatl] upon all the blood that bathed the stone. At this moment a great paper mantel was brought and was cast upon the stone. It burned together with the serpent until there was nothing left of it and the blood was consumed or had dried.’

Given those Spanish accounts available to us to represent such solemn ceremonies most closely identified with the Sun Stone, or other contemporary and related solar monuments, it is no wonder that the face of the disembodied head and face at the center of the Sun Stone is blackened, spalled, and otherwise damaged. The evidence for fire-related damage and the blackening validates the accounts of Fray Diego Durán with respect to the ritual deployment of the paper Fire Serpent used to ignite the face of the monolith. In effect, such fiery and bloody ritual manifestations of the atl tlachinolli or “burning of blood” powerfully signals the imperial aims of the Aztec empire by way of its Holy War, or atl tlachinolli.

The New Fire of 1507
The Xiutlalpilli (aka: Toxiuhmolpilli, “Binding of Our Years’’) or “New Fire’’ Ceremony of 1507 proved particularly auspicious, in that it necessarily coincided with the most solemn celebration of Toxcatl, the 15th month of Panquetzaliztli or the “Raising of Banners’’ – 6-25 December (Duran) or November 9-28 (Sahagun), devoted to the Mexica patron of war and sacrifice, Huitzilopochtli. Significantly, in preparing for the New Fire Ceremony of that year, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis records that Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin changed the date for the celebration of the New Fire Ceremony from 1 Rabbit (1506) to 2 Reed (1507), and made two visits to the site of Huixachtecatl (Hill of the Star) for the inauguration of the new temple devoted to the New Fire Ceremony and recorded in the Codex Borbonicus of 1507 (Quiñonez Keber 1995; Hajovsky 2015, 111). These events coincide with the commissioning of a host of monuments, including the Temple Stone, Hackmack Box, the Dumbarton Oaks Xiuhcoatl, and, as I contend here, the Sun Stone proper. Hence, in this year, Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin presided over the imperial celebrations devoted to the preeminent solar deity who wielded the Turquoise (Fire) Serpent as his instrument of war.

Accordingly, the aforementioned christening of the Sun Stone, in which a flaming xiuhcoatl was deployed to kindle the flames set upon the blood-soaked visage of the Sun, was but a single ritual act in a sequence of actions similarly documented for the momentous Xiuhtlalpilli or New Fire Ceremony of 1507 whose fire was first kindled atop the ancient Toltec monument of Huizachtecatl on the distant Iztapalapa peninsula. There, a group of four fire priests, or Tlenamacque, whose bodies were coated in a ritual soot or teotlacualli (‘’food of the gods’’) ground from scorpions, centipedes, tobacco, and ololiuqui (Rivea corymbosa), excised the heart of a war captive atop the “Turquoise Hearth” and kindled the new fire with a fire drill (Durán 1994, 189). The “fire drill” depressions at the left margin of the Sun Stone are telling indications of said practice. Once ignited, the New Fire priests dispatched torch bearers to the Temple of the Cihuacoatl at the base of the Templo Mayor of Mexico Tenochtitlan, and thenceforth, torches were borne by runners whose task it was to rekindle the fires of all of the temples and residential quarters of the city (pic 16).

Conclusion
In effect, I contend that the Sun Stone constituted the tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle), or that which was “covered in turquoise” and thereby constituted the supernatural bearer of those relics identified with the divinized founder of the community, Huitzilopochtli. According to Aztec scholar Jorge Klor de Alva (1993, pp. 178, 179.), the tlaquimilolli constituted a fundamental “part of the supernatural powers of the universe and therefore functioned as a channel through which flowed the sacred forces that empowered, protected, legitimated, and gave a common identity to the village or town.” I therefore contend that the Sun Stone constituted just such a sacred bundle or “Turquoise Hearth” through which the power of the cosmos was channeled into Mexico Tenochtitlan via the hybrid visage of Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin, the ninth huei tlahtoani or Great Speaker of the Mexica Aztec, and that by virtue of his guise as Sol Nueve or the “Ninth Sun’’ and teixiptla or deity impersonator of Itzpapalotl, the “Clawed Butterfly” that frames the disembodied head of the Great Speaker. In the final analysis, Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin’s ritual oversight of the most auspicious pairing of the Xiuhtlalpilli New Fire Ceremony, and the Panquetzaliztli “Raising of the Banners’’ devoted to the god of war and sacrifice, Huitzilopochtli, portends the Great Speaker’s life from his birth in 1467 (1 Reed) through to his death 52 years later in 1519 (1 Reed).

Bibliography
• Anders, Ferdinand, Maarten Jansen, and Luis Reyes García (1991) Códice Borbónico: El Libro del Ciuacoatl, Homenaje para el año del Fuego Nuevo, libro explicativo del llamado Códice Borbónico. 1a ed. España; Austria; México: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario;
Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt; Fondo De Cultura Económica, Códices Mexicanos 3
• ------ (1993) Códice Borgia: Los Templos del Cielo y de la Oscuridad - Oráculos y Liturgia, libro explicativo del llamado Códice Borgia. 1st. ed. Madrid, España; Austria; México: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario; Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt; Fondo De Cultura Económica, Códices Mexicanos 5
• Beyer, Herman (1921) El llamado “Calendario Azteca”. Descripción e interpretación del cuauhxicalli de la “Casa de las Águilas”. Verband Deutscher Reichssangehöriger, Mexico City
• Durán, Fray Diego (1994) The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated and annotated by Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 190–191
• Hajovsky, Patrick Thomas (2015) On the Lips of Others: Moteuczoma’s Fame in Aztec Monuments and Rituals. Austin: University of Texas Press
• Jardín Botánico el Charco del Ingenio (2022) Four Mirrors Butterfly (Rothschildia cincta). Jardín Botánico el Charco del Ingenio Newsletter, November 1, 2022. Viewed 7.2.2024.
https://elcharco.org.mx/en/boletin/boletin-noviembre-2022
• Klor de Alva, J. Jorge (1986) California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian Motifs: Foil and Fetish. Confluencia 1, no. 2 (1986): 18–26
• ------ (1993) Aztec Spirituality and Nahuatlized Christianity. In South and Meso-American Native Spirituality, ed. Gary H. Gossen in collaboration with Miguel Leon-Portilla. New York: Crossroad, pp. 178, 179
• Mendoza, Rubén G. (2021) The War of Heaven: A Reappraisal of the Aztec Sun Stone in Light of Nahua Cosmogenesis and the New Fire Ceremony of 1507 AD. In Time is Power - Who Makes Time? 13th Archaeological Conference of Central Germany, 2020. Herausgeber Harald Meller, Alfred Reichenberger, und Roberto Risch, Band 24, pp. 293-326. Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte, Halle
• ------ (2022) The Turquoise Corridor: Mesoamerican Trade, Prestige Technologies, and Social Complexity in the Greater Southwest. In Johan Ling, Richard Chacon, and Kristian Kristiansen, editors. Trade Before Civilization: Long Distance Exchange and the Rise of Social Complexity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Mendoza, Rubén G., and Linda Hansen (eds) (2024) Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica: Recent Findings and New Perspectives. Edited by Rubén G. Mendoza and Linda Hansen. Springer Nature’s Conflict, Environment, and Social Complexity Series. New York: Springer Press
• Mikulska, Katarzyna (2020) “The Sky, the Night, and the Number Nine: Considerations of the Nahua Vision of the Universe.” In Reshaping the World: Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies, edited by Ana Díaz, 282–318. University Press of Colorado
• Quiñonez Keber, Eloise (1995) Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press.