Xiuhtecuhtli

Also Known As: also Xiuhteuctli, Xihuitl Tecuhtli, Xihuit Teuctli; “Turquoise Lord” or “Lord of the Year,” from Nahuatl *xihuitl*, turquoise, year and fire, plus *teuctli*, lord; called in the Florentine Codex *veue teutl*, the old god, and *tota*, our father, and identified with Huehueteotl
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Aztec Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the fire that runs through every hearth, brazier and volcano, and the same Nahuatl word that names him also names turquoise and the year, binding heat to time.
Role in Mythos: He presides over the hearth, the calendar and legitimate rulership, and the fifty-two-year New Fire Ceremony that renewed the world was held in his name.
Relation to Humans: Every household kept him alive daily in the three stones of its cooking fire, and he warmed people, cooked their food, scorched their fields and burned them. In return he received quails, copal, children brought forward for ear-piercing at Izcalli, and captives thrown onto the pyre at Xocotl Huetzi.

Once every fifty-two years the Mexica put out every fire they owned. The hearths in the houses went cold. The braziers on the temples went cold. Old cooking stones and old pots were carried out and thrown away, the images of the gods were washed, the streets were swept, and then the priests walked out of Tenochtitlan in the dark and climbed the slope of Uixachtecatl to wait. Below them the valley lay black and quiet. Nobody was certain the sun was coming back.

What they were waiting for was a star. The ceremony was Toxiuhmolpilia, the Binding of the Years, and it turned on an alignment: the Pleiades reaching the zenith, the star they called Yohualtecuhtli burning at the exact centre of the sky. At that moment a captive was opened and his heart taken out, and a priest set a fire drill spinning in the cavity of his chest. If the flame caught, runners carried it down the mountain and out across the lake to relight every hearth in the city, and the world had another fifty-two years. If it did not catch, the Tzitzimime would come down out of the darkness and eat everybody. That was the arrangement. The god it all belonged to was Xiuhtecuhtli.

His name is a short lesson in how the Nahua thought. *Xihuitl* means turquoise. It also means year, and it carries a charge of fire and flame. *Teuctli* means lord. So he is the Turquoise Lord and the Lord of the Year in one breath, with heat and time folded into a single word, and as Patrick Hajovsky has argued, turquoise held together exactly those notions: fire-heat, the animating *tonalli*, and time. H. B. Nicholson called him the archetype of all rulers. A Mexica king in turquoise was not decorating himself. He was making a claim.

In the painted books and on carved stone he arrives in full Late Postclassic dress. The pointed diadem of a ruler sits on his head. A small turquoise bird, the *xiuhtototl*, hangs at his forehead. A butterfly pectoral, turquoise again, covers his chest, and the fire serpent Xiuhcoatl runs along his back as his animal double. His face is yellow. Sahagún’s informants gave him two names in one line: the yellow-faced one, and the holy flame.

The most famous object attached to him sits in a case in the British Museum, and it deserves a straight description. Am,St.400 is a human face carved from cedro wood, a little under seventeen centimetres tall, skinned in hundreds of hand-cut turquoise tesserae with raised nodules scattered over the cheeks and brow. The eyes are mother-of-pearl, pierced through so that someone could see out of them. The teeth are conch shell. The eyelids were gilded with foil a hundredth of a millimetre thick, and the inside of the wood is painted red with cinnabar. Holes at the temples show it was meant to be worn or tied onto something. The darker blue patches across the cheeks have long been read as a butterfly, which would make the mask his; careful re-examination, including redrawing and colour processing, found that the butterfly is at best a subjective impression. The nodules read as warts, and warts belong to Nanahuatzin, the small scabbed god who threw himself into the fire at the creation and rose out of it as the sun. The museum label says “possibly.” It is being honest.

Where he came from is harder to fix. Long before Tenochtitlan existed, potters in Puebla were making incense burners shaped like a hunched, toothless old man with a brazier balanced on his head, and they were doing it by around 500 BCE. That figure is called Huehueteotl, the Old Old God. Xiuhtecuhtli in the codices is young, hard-faced, a god of warriors with no age on him at all. Yet the Florentine Codex, listing his names, says he was called fire, and the old god, and our father. Whether that makes them one deity carried across two thousand years or two deities the Mexica had begun to blur is a question the sources do not settle. The Mexica themselves used the names together, and that is as far as the evidence goes.

His ordinary work was domestic and relentless. His number was three, for the three stones that ring a cooking fire in a Mesoamerican house, and the Florentine Codex is unsentimental about what he did there: he scorched the fields, he warmed people, he burned people, and he was in the cooking and in the burning of the food. Somewhere in Tenochtitlan a woman feeding sticks between three blackened stones, watching the flame take and the smoke bend toward the doorway, was doing the most common act of worship in the empire. He held the first place among the nine Lords of the Night and the first among the Lords of the Day, governed the day sign Atl and the trecena 1 Coatl, and the Codex seats him in a turquoise enclosure at the centre of the earth and calls him mother and father of the gods. The same Codex also files him among the lesser deities, which sits oddly against the Templo Mayor, where, as Leonardo López Luján has noted, he is anything but minor. Fire has to be fed every day.

His own month was Izcalli, the eighteenth and last, falling across the turn of the year toward February. A frame of wood was built and dressed into an image of him, layered with cloth and feathers and finished with an elaborate mask. Quails were killed in front of it and their blood spilled onto the ground, and copal went up thick and resinous. Then families brought their children forward, godparents were chosen, ears were pierced, and everyone sat down to eat together. The god of burning was also the god families named their godparents in front of.

In August the mood changed. During Xocotl Huetzi, kept for Xiuhtecuhtli and for Xocotl, captives had *yauhtli* powder thrown into their faces before they were carried to the pyre and dropped onto it, and their hearts were taken afterwards.

What he could do followed from what fire is. Wherever a flame burned, in a clay hearth or on a mountain, he was present in it, which made him the one god nobody had to travel to. He carried the count of years, so the calendar itself moved at his pace. He conferred legitimacy on rulers, who wore his stone. Through the fire serpent at his back he touched the war cult, and through the New Fire he stood between the sky and the creatures waiting behind it.

The limits are just as plain, and they are the limits of fire. He goes out. He has to be fed, banked, carried and rebuilt, and every one of those acts is human labour rather than divine will. He could not be rekindled on demand at the great turn of the cycle; the priests had to wait on the Pleiades, which meant the god’s return was scheduled by stars he did not own. And once every fifty-two years the entire apparatus of Mexica life came down to one spark struck in a dead man’s chest, with nobody in the valley knowing anything at all until it caught.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Xiuhtecuhtli?

Xiuhtecuhtli is the Aztec god of fire, time and rulership, whose name means Turquoise Lord or Lord of the Year. The Nahuatl word *xihuitl* means turquoise, year and fire all at once, which is why heat and time belong to the same deity. The Florentine Codex also calls him the old god and our father, and identifies him with the far older fire god Huehueteotl.

What was the New Fire Ceremony?

Toxiuhmolpilia, the Binding of the Years, was held once every fifty-two years to renew the world under Xiuhtecuhtli. Every fire in Tenochtitlan was extinguished, hearthstones and cooking pots were thrown away and the streets swept, then priests climbed Mount Uixachtecatl at midnight and waited for the Pleiades to reach the zenith. A captive’s heart was removed and a new fire drilled in his open chest, and that flame was carried back to relight the whole city.

Are Xiuhtecuhtli and Huehueteotl the same god?

The sources do not settle it. Huehueteotl, the Old Old God, appears on Puebla incense burners by around 500 BCE as a toothless, wrinkled figure with a brazier on his head, while Xiuhtecuhtli in the Aztec codices is young and dressed as a warrior and ruler. The Florentine Codex nonetheless lists “the old god” among Xiuhtecuhtli’s own names, so the Mexica used the two together even though the images differ.

Is the British Museum turquoise mask really Xiuhtecuhtli?

Possibly, but the identification is disputed. The mask, made of cedro wood covered in turquoise mosaic with mother-of-pearl eyes and conch shell teeth, has darker blue patches on the cheeks that were read as the butterfly emblem of Xiuhtecuhtli, though later examination concluded that reading is subjective. The raised turquoise nodules resemble warts, which has led to the alternative suggestion that the mask represents Nanahuatzin.

How was Xiuhtecuhtli worshipped in daily life?

Through the household hearth. His number was three, for the three stones that ring a Mesoamerican cooking fire, and the Florentine Codex describes him warming people, cooking food, scorching fields and burning people. His annual festival fell in Izcalli, the last month of the year, when a wooden image of the god was dressed in cloth and feathers, quails were sacrificed before it, and children had their ears pierced and were given godparents.