One night in the year 1507, in the Basin of Mexico surrounding the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, the last pre-columbian New Fire Ceremony was celebrated. Occurring only every fifty-two years, it marks the reset of the xiuhmolpilli (Calendar Round), one of the most important events in Aztec cosmology[1]. The ceremony recreated the originary moment in which light was first created in darkness giving origin to time. The ritual involved the whole city (the largest of Mesoamerica[2]) strict participation, the procedure was: all fire illumination in the city was to be extinguished, letting the night sky submerge the city into its total darkness. Meanwhile, the priests walked up to Huixachtlan to conceive the ceremony with a human sacrifice, at midnight, the offering would take place in a high-ground platform Temple, a fire was lit from the chest of the sacrificed warrior, and from this very flame, the priests would then light up the fire of the Temple’s torch. This fire was to be seen from the far-out, all-obscured city, indicating the successful reset of the calendar. This exercise was neither a simulation nor a commemoration, for them, it was an actual event of cosmic transition (recreation), in which the city, and their whole world, was suspended in a spatio-temporal void[3]–under the all-washing sky of Night, the darkest night, the threshold that opened into an original state of creation

One year later, by the other side of the Atlantic, Michelangelo had begun to paint the ceilings of the Sixtine Chapel to illustrate a story that unfolded from a similar origin: the creation of light out of total darkness. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, the frescos of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling (1508 – 1512) narrate the Biblical creation according to the Book of Genesis. The work is divided into multiple scenes that adhere to the architecture of the vaulted ceiling, yet the architectonic elements that appear to support the structure and its images are painted (virtual architecture). In each scene, a light-blue sky fills the background or hosts the scene (virtual sky). In fact, it is believed that prior to Michelangelo’s work, the Chapel’s ceilings were painted of a blue sky with golden stars[4] (refer to figure 3.); (a paradoxical sky: a sky that is Day and Night at the same time). Under that sky that covers the chapel, another religious event of paramount transition takes place: the papal conclave.

Liminality in religious architecture conveys more than the conception of a ceremonial space of temporal occupation (an inhabitable building which hosts events of spiritual transition guided by the highest-ranked priests); the ceremonial temple, strictly, a space for divine transition and transformation, opens for its participants a threshold into a state of spatio-temporal void, in such dimension, the space is turned negative against the totality of its surrounding environment, defining the spatio-temporal specificity in which the religious event takes place. Happening in a rigorously calculated time and space, upon entering the ceremonial building the participants are allowed into a space charged with divine qualities, in this respect, each temple can be understood as threshold architecture; a space of liminal suspension.

The following analysis opens an investigation into two religious centres of liminal transition, The Temple of Huixachtlan, in which the New Fire Ceremony took place, and the Sistine Chapel, primarily, focusing on the image of “God Separating Light From Darkness” painted by Michelangelo (c. 15012), and the representation of the Last New Fire Ceremony according to the Codex Borbonicus (c. 1507). Fundamental to their religious practices, both civilizations created images that illustrated their relationship with the sky as a divine territory. I explore the religious imagery produced in such devotion, in two ceremonial centres in which that imagery was conceived, finding “contrasting similarities” shared by Catholic and Aztec cosmology and iconography.

The Temple of Huixachtlan was the ceremonial centre where the sacrifice and burning of the New Fire took place, it remains underneath an unknown location at the heights of the Basin of Mexico, yet to be re-discovered. The only evidence we have about its existence and the ceremony is found in the Codex Borbonicus, on which we base our image-architecture analysis.

Description of the space: an upper-front view of an open-air platform standing at a higher height from its ground, accessed by the front up a brief stair. The dimensions are not particularly rectangular but appear to follow an order of 90º angles. In the middle, the burning torch is being lit up by 4 dressed-up priests. The torch is decorated with 3 circles. A rectangular arch suspended above the entrance decorated with 3 icons of the cardinal points (Aztec quincunx) representing space and time. Following the sacrifice–which is not present in the image–the scene depicts the moment in which the light breaks through the darkness and (re)sets the motion of time.

“God Separating Light From Darkness” is the first of the nine panels in the Genesis chronology, it depicts God’s first act of creation: Light. The scene is placed above the viewer’s head, with God floating inside a rectangular image separating light from darkness with his hands, his body breaks a diagonal division between shadows to what appears to be illuminated clouds. At the center, the movement of his clothes traces an undefined circle, found inbetween two well-defined circles outside of the scene. The image of the conception is supported by 4 men who sit at the capital of painted columns. Next to it, the scene of another sacrificial burnt offering: The Binding of Isaac.

Both images share a few iconic similarities, for they represent the same moment, the image of the conception is layered behind a series of layers of ornamented architectural structures and 4 men, and both contain three sequential circles organized in horizontal sequence  Yet, their differences are more insightful to for the purpose of our analysis.

In both, Mesoamerican and Catholic cosmology, darkness is understood as the liminal condition precursive to all being, before time and space: a total state of non-being; and light, its ontological counterpart, as the original force conceived out of this non-state, the first force of formation for all transformation. “God Separating Light From Darkness” illustrates a powerful image, the starting point of Catholic cosmology, the first light, the first day; from the same principle, but in contrasting manner to Aztec cosmology, which finds its origin in the first night. This is an ontological distinction of importance to understand each of these civilizations’ relation to the sky as divine territory.

In the Genesis frescoes, the sky is depicted as present, as the medium of light, while in the New Centre Ceremony illustration, the sky is absent, and light is presented as the interruption of (dark) sky. Conversely, the architecture of both ceremonial centers is covered by an all-washing sky, in the Sistine Chapel, the light of Day is depicted (the sky is virtually present and serves to cover the sacred space from the actual sky), in Huitzilopochtli, the darkness of Night is enacted (the open-air temple only becomes sacred once the sky falls upon it).

A third distinction is that in the Genesis fresco is that the deity is present at the moment of conception, whereas in The New Fire Ceremony depiction, the deity is absent, or rather abstracted; the divine force is represented by fire. This leads us to our next difference, in Genesis, light seems to be more of an abstract force, it precedes the sun and the day, while in the New Fire Ceremony, light had always been a material force, for them, the first material: fire.

Overall, both images contain a narration of their original moment, the first narration, embodied in their ceremonial temples, these images decorate the successful transition of a religious event to future generations, in record, the moment is safeguarded in the collective memory of such civilization (transmission of religious values). Painted during the same period of time–yet apparently, under a different sky, these civilizations had not yet come in contact by the time they created these images, but still contain striking iconographic similarities, to that, one might want to provide an archetypal explanation of the ‘nature’ of human world-making; to me, it is more insightful to explore by difference than by similarity, for studying the difference in the representation of light, deity, and the human figure in each, allows us into a more complex understanding of each culture’s history of cosmovision, the architecture of their world, the architecture of their sky.

Bibliography

Farah, Kirby, and Susan Toby Evans. “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night.” In Night and darkness in ancient Mesoamerica, 238–58. Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv21v2b70.

Miller, Mary Ellen. The art of Mesoamerica: from Olmec to Aztec. 4th ed. World of art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0709/2006900518.html.

Zappella, Christine. “Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” Smarthistory, August 9, 2015. https://smarthistory.org/michelangelo-ceiling-of-the-sistine-chapel/.

[1] Kirby Farah and Susan Toby Evans, “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night,” in Night and darkness in ancient Mesoamerica, 1 online resource (xvii, 351 pages) : color illustrations, maps vols. (Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2021), 238–58, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv21v2b70. p.254

[2] Mary Ellen Miller, The art of Mesoamerica: from Olmec to Aztec, 4th ed, World of art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0709/2006900518.html.

[3] Farah and Toby Evans, “The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Illumination of the Night.” p.254

[4] Christine Zappella, “Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, https://smarthistory.org/michelangelo-ceiling-of-the-sistine-chapel/.