mamalhuaztli (Mdz15v)

The colors of this glyph are significant. The "pairing of red and [turquoise] blue" may have had references to the atl tlachinolli (sacred warfare) and imperial expansion according to Andrea Feeser. Feeser also cites Eleanor Wake for noting that turquoise and red combined "as the chromatic metaphor for the source of life." [See: The Materiality of Color, 2017, p. 57.] Mutsumi Izeki identifies fire and the color red as an "extended sense" of xihuitl as exemplified in Xiuhtecuhtli, a divine force often called the "god of fire," the "god of year," and the "god of turquoise." [See: Conceptualization of 'Xihuitl,' 2008, 34–35.]

The fire drill was part of a sacred ceremony acknowledging the passing of the fifty-two year calendrical cycle. That ceremony was called the xiuhmolpilli. The word mamalhuaztli had other meanings, including a carrying frame used on a person's back, a pectoral, and a certain constellation that looked like sticks or wands, possibly the Belt of Orion or the Keys of St. Peter (in European terms). Marc Thouvenot's database of glyph, Tlachia, shows various additional glyphs of the mamalhuaztli, and these have clear indications of how a pole was held vertically and was spun with the hands with the intention of creating friction at the base. Smoke rises from that site as the fire is started. In U.S. culture, this is a practice taught to Boy Scouts. Fire-making instruments are mentioned still in the late seventeenth century in, for example, Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza's Historia cronológica de la Noble Ciudad de Tlaxcala, as shown in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary. One wonders whether the use of an arrow decorated with eagle feathers (implying a possible warrior association) also implied a war dimension to the calendrical ceremony.