Cerro de la Estrella

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The hill is not impressive to look at. It rises only a couple of hundred meters above the valley floor, a dry volcanic mound now half-swallowed by the gridded sprawl of Iztapalapa, its lower slopes packed with cinder-block houses and crossed by a road that climbs to three concrete crosses at the top. A metro line runs past its foot. From the summit, on a clear day, the basin spreads out in haze — and where there is now pavement there was once water, the shallow lakes of the Valley of Mexico, and the hill stood near the shore of them, a dark cone above the reeds. The Nahua called it Huixachtlan, the place of the huizache, the thorn tree, and sometimes Huixachtecatl, the lord of that place. Once in a lifetime, on this hill, the priests of the Mexica empire put out every fire in the world and waited to see whether it would begin again.

The hill at the lake’s edge

In the long view, Huixachtlan was old before the Mexica ever saw it. Archaeologists working the slopes have traced constructions reaching back to the first centuries of the Common Era — terraces and platforms laid down somewhere between roughly 100 and 650 CE, in the orbit of Teotihuacan, the great city whose influence reached across the basin. The hill was never abandoned for long. It sat at a hinge of the southern lakes, near the freshwater that the chinampa gardens needed, on the land bridge of high ground that the later causeways would follow toward the island city.

The people who made the hill a holy place, in the account the colonial chroniclers preserved, were the Culhua of nearby Culhuacán — heirs, they claimed, of the Toltec line out of Tula, and so carriers of the old prestige of toltecayotl, the craft and order of civilized life. It was the Culhua, the record suggests, who first climbed Huixachtlan to bind the years. When the Mexica rose to dominate the basin in the fifteenth century, they did not invent the rite; they inherited it, enlarged it, and made it the great public spectacle of their empire. The hill lay in the territory of Iztapalapa, one of the four lakeside towns that anchored the southern approach to Tenochtitlan, and from the island capital the summit fire would be visible across the dark water — which was the whole point.

What stood on top was modest by the standards of the Templo Mayor: a temple platform, a stairway, the open ground where the priests would work. The hill’s importance was never architectural. It was temporal. Of all the places in the Mexica world, this was the one tied not to a god’s daily home but to a single recurring midnight, the most charged hinge in the turning of time.

Geography did the rest of the work. Huixachtlan sits on the spine of high ground that separated the brackish water of Lake Texcoco from the sweeter southern lakes, and its summit, rising a couple of hundred meters above the basin floor at well over two thousand meters of elevation, commanded a clear line of sight to the island of Tenochtitlan to the north. That visibility was not incidental. A fire lit on a hilltop in the dark, with every other flame in the valley extinguished, would have been the single point of light in the whole basin — a signal legible to a hundred thousand people at once, without a word spoken. The Mexica chose their stage for what it could broadcast. The renewal of the age was to be seen, simultaneously, by everyone whose world was being renewed.

The temple platform on the summit of Cerro de la Estrella, Iztapalapa, Mexico City. Photograph by Thayne Tuason, 2019, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The binding of the years

To understand what happened on the hill one has to hold two counts of days at once. The Mexica, like the Nahua peoples generally, kept the 260-day ritual count, the tonalpohualli, running alongside the 365-day solar year. The two wheels turned at different rates, and only after fifty-two solar years — 18,980 days, the lowest number both counts share — did they return together to the same starting position. That span the Nahua called the xiuhmolpilli, the year-bundle, the bundle of years tied together like a sheaf of reeds. The end of one such bundle and the start of the next was the Toxiuhmolpilli, the binding of our years.

It was not a celebration. It was a danger. In the Mexica account of the world there had been four ages before this one — four Suns, four creations, each ending in catastrophe, swallowed by jaguars, scoured by wind, drowned, burned. The present age was the Fifth Sun, born at Teotihuacan when a god threw himself into a fire to become the sun and the other gods gave their own blood to set him moving. It too was destined to end, in earthquake, and nothing guaranteed how soon. The world was not a given. It was a thing kept going, day by day and round by round, by effort and by debt. And the fifty-two-year hinge was the moment at which that fragility came nearest the surface — the joint where, if the world were going to stop, it would stop.

So the approach to the binding was an unwinding. In the last days of the dying bundle, through the five empty days the Nahua called the nemontemi — days outside the count, unlucky, belonging to no proper name — the ordinary order of life was taken apart. Fires were let die in the temples, the palaces, the workshops, the kilns, and finally in every domestic hearth across the land. Cooking pots were broken. Hearthstones were thrown out, old clothes discarded, household idols cleansed or set aside. Pregnant women were shut away, masked, in case the dark turned them into beasts; children were kept awake and pinched so they would not sleep into mice. The land went cold and quiet and unlit, swept clean and waiting. This stripping-down is not only in the chronicles. At Postclassic sites around the basin, archaeologists have found exactly the kind of deposit the texts describe — large dumps of smashed domestic pottery and discarded hearth gear, the material residue of households putting out their fires and throwing away the old, a pattern documented in the study of archaeological deposits from the Aztec New Fire ceremony.

Then the night itself. The chronicles describe a procession of fire-priests, arrayed as the gods, walking out from the city in the dark toward Huixachtlan — a slow file of impersonators, the ixiptla, moving across the unlit land. They climbed the hill and they watched the sky. The trigger was astronomical and exact: the priests tracked a cluster of stars the Nahua called Tianquiztli, the marketplace or gathering-place — the Pleiades — and waited for it to cross the meridian, the high line of midnight. When the Pleiades passed the zenith of the sky and kept moving, it was the sign that the heavens had not stalled, that the night would turn and the world would go on. (Which stars served as the “fire-drill” itself, the mamalhuaztli after which the rite was named, is less settled; scholars including Anthony Aveni have argued for Orion’s Belt or for stars in Taurus rather than the Pleiades, and the question of the exact asterism remains genuinely open. The Pleiades-at-the-meridian as the timing signal is the firmer point.)

At that moment, on the breast of a sacrificed captive laid open on the hilltop, a fire-priest set the drill and turned it until the friction caught and a flame rose in the wound. This is the load-bearing fact, and it should be held plainly. Within the Mexica frame the new fire could not simply be struck; it had to be drawn through a death, paid for with a life and a heart, because the continuation of the world was understood as a debt — nextlahualli, the repayment — owed by humans to the powers that kept the Fifth Sun moving. The blood was not cruelty for its own sake; it was the price of another fifty-two years. From that single flame on the captive’s chest the fire was built into a great bonfire on the summit, visible for kilometers across the dark basin, and the watching city knew the age had been renewed.

What followed was a relay. Runners with pine torches carried fire down from Huixachtlan and out along the causeways, and from temple to temple and hearth to hearth the flame was passed across the whole land, relighting what had been let die. The first torch went, the chronicles say, to the chief temple of Tenochtitlan, and from that central hearth the fire fanned out across the city and the lakeside towns and on into the provinces, each settlement taking light from the one before it. The world that had been taken apart was put back together, lit from one source. People burned their own flesh in the new flame — drawing blood from the ear and casting it toward the fire — and the days that followed were given over to feasting, to new mats and new clothes and refurbished houses, the ordinary order of life restarted at a single stroke and known to be good for another fifty-two years. The chronicles preserve four such bindings on this hill — in 1351, 1403, 1455, and 1507 — the count running by fifty-two-year strides through the rise of the empire. The last of them, the binding of 1507, fell in the reign of Moctezuma II, twelve years before Spanish ships appeared on the coast.

The New Fire ceremony in the Codex Borbonicus, an early colonial Aztec manuscript: priestly figures around the year-bundle. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What survives, and what is reconstructed

The hill outlasted the world that made it sacred. After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 the rite was not performed again; the lakes were drained over the following centuries, the city expanded, and Iztapalapa grew up around and over the slopes of Huixachtlan. The summit temple stood, weathering, while a new sacred geography settled onto the hill — three crosses at the top, and a Passion play that climbs the slope each Holy Week, one of the largest in the country. The Nahua name for the place softened in Spanish into Cerro de la Estrella, the Hill of the Star, which keeps, perhaps by accident, the memory of the stars the priests once watched from it.

Almost everything that can be said about what was done here comes through the colonial record, and the distance built into that record has to be marked. The fullest account of the binding of the years is in the Florentine Codex, the vast bilingual compilation assembled in the decades after the conquest by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars and elders, who set down in Nahuatl what their parents and grandparents had known. It is an extraordinary document and a complicated one: gathered under the Church, partly to aid the work of conversion, recording a world its compilers were also helping to dismantle. The pictorial codices that show the ceremony — the Codex Borbonicus above all, with its image of fire-priests around the year-bundle — sit on the same fault line between memory and the colonial frame that received it. The rite as it is now described is a reconstruction, careful and well-grounded but a reconstruction, pieced from these sources together with the archaeology of the hill and the basin.

That archaeology has kept pace. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia maintains the summit as the Zona Arqueológica Cerro de la Estrella, with a small museum, the Museo del Fuego Nuevo, set into the hill. Excavations on and around Huixachtlan have turned up fire-drilling implements consistent with the rite, along with a large bundled-arrow effigy recovered in Iztapalapa, inscribed with a calendar date — material that ties the texts to the ground. A separate line of study has looked at the caves in the hill’s volcanic body, arguing that the New Fire ceremony belonged to a wider Mesoamerican pattern linking caves, fire, and world-renewal; the case for the Cerro de la Estrella as a cave-and-fire site sets the hilltop rite within that older landscape of openings into the earth.

The fire itself came back. In 1975, residents of Iztapalapa revived the fuego nuevo as a civic and cultural festival, and it is held on the hill again, on a fifty-two-year reckoning and in smaller annual observances — a procession in feathered and painted regalia up to the summit, drums, copal, a kindled flame at dusk, no captive and no blood, but the same hill and the same gesture of lighting one fire so that a people might go on. For the Nahuatl-speaking communities of the valley and the wider Nahua world, the revival is not antiquarianism. It is a claim on continuity, made on the one piece of ground in the modern city where that continuity is hardest to argue away.

A participant carrying the sacred flame during the modern New Fire ceremony on the hill, 2018. Photograph by Carlos Quiroz, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The arithmetic that governed the hill is what stays with a visitor. The Mexica did not think of time as a river that would carry them whatever they did. They thought of it as something that could stop, and had stopped four times, and would have to be talked across the next threshold by a small group of people standing on a dark hill watching for a particular cluster of stars to keep moving. The whole apparatus of the rite — the cold hearths, the broken pots, the silent country, the single flame fed back outward to every house — was the working-out of that conviction in practice: that the continuation of the world was not owed to anyone, and that on one night in fifty-two years it fell to human beings to see it through. From the summit of Cerro de la Estrella the city they were keeping alight is gone under concrete now, and the lake with it. The hill is still there, and once in a long while, the fire.

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