mamalhuaztli (Mdz7v)

The fire drill was part of a sacred ceremony acknowledging the passing of the fifty-two year calendrical cycle. 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). Tlachia shows various additional glyphs showing 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 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.