Taken together, the cycles functioned as a sacred and a mundane calendar, an astrological chart, an almanac, a basis for divination and a cosmic clock.įire was time, in the Aztec ontology: the central or focal point of all activity, but, being like time, fire was an entity which had no independent existence. These cycles, each essential to life in its own way, divided and enumerated time: – daily time, yearly time, and universal time.
AZTEC GOD OF WAR SERIES
The ceremony, central to Aztec belief and practice, marked the synchronistic completion of a series of distinct, but interwoven, day-counts and astronomical cycles of different lengths. The New Fire Ceremony, literally translated as: ‘The Binding of the Years,’ was a ritual, performed every 52 sun years. No act was more essential and metamorphic to this end than the willing and frequent offering of their own blood, and even life, to their Gods. To maintain this order was a continual act of transformation, and uncompromising sacrifice. They were active participants in the manifestation and maintenance of the sacred order through their architecture, rituals, civic and spiritual lives.
In realization of this axiom, the passionate Aztecs did not merely emulate the cosmic systems and principles in their earthly existence. Upon seeing its vastness and pristine order, the first Europeans arriving to the Aztec Empire thought they were having an otherworldly in a glorious dream The binding of things to other thingsĪs above, so below: was the sacred theorem echoing across the ancient world, on every landmass, spanning uncounted millennia. Stories about true human sacrifices of the aztec empire, the Aztec gods, and the people who worshiped them.