mamalhuaztli (Azca24)
This painted black-line drawing of the iconographic example of a fire drilling (mamalhuaztli) associated with the end of a 52-year calendrical cycle shows a horizontal piece of wood with a vertical arrow coming up from it. The arrow is brown with white highlights and gray and white fletching. Segmentation at the top of the arrow may suggest that the shaft is made from a type of cane that is called carrizo in Spanish. The tip of the arrow seems embedded in the wood, and may have been used for the drilling. Four additional spots on the wood are apparently sites for drilling, and they seem to have small flames coming up from them. Surrounding the entire structure are seven pointy flames in an array that arches overhead. The flames are yellow-orange.
Stephanie Wood
Fire drilling examples abound in this collection, and they largely have this same arrangement with a horizontal wooden board and a vertical arrow. The glyph for the name Mamal delightfully shows how one’s hands could be used to spin the shaft for the drilling. Curls of smoke are employed to suggest fire or burning. In one case, a man wears a bird costume while doing the drilling. Almost all examples show multiple holes, as though the same board could be reused for different ceremonies. While this one suggests perhaps that multiple burns were made at the same ceremony, the artist of this manuscript–if it is late, perhaps seventeenth-century–might not have witnessed such events, but only have imagined them.
post-1550, possibly from the early seventeenth century.
Jeff Haskett-Wood
drills, drilling, fires, ceremonies, reeds, tules, carrizos, plants, arrows, darts, fire, wood, logs, drills, fuego, madera, troncos, taladros, ceremonias, xiuhpohualli, año, turquesa, xihuitl, feathers, plumas
la ceremonia del Fuego Nuevo
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Azcatitlan is also known as the Histoire mexicaine, [Manuscrit] Mexicain 59–64. It is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and hosted on line by the World Digital Library and the Library of Congress, which is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.”
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15280/?sp=24&st=image
The Library of Congress is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.” But please cite Bibliothèque Nationale de France and this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
