Nemontemi

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Aztec solar calendar, the xiuhpohualli, divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, totaling three hundred and sixty days, with five additional days appended at the end to complete the 365 day solar year. Michael E. Smith's study of Aztec archaeology and ethnohistory describes these five days, the nemontemi, as set apart from the ordinary calendar, unlucky and best passed in as little activity as possible. Colonial era Spanish chroniclers recorded that during the nemontemi people avoided quarrels, refrained from important undertakings and observed a period of fasting and quiet, since anything begun or any misfortune suffered during these days was believed likely to continue in that unlucky pattern through the coming year. David Carrasco's survey of Mesoamerican religion situates the nemontemi within a wider regional pattern of liminal, dangerous time set apart from the ordinary calendar at the year's turning point, a pattern also found among Aztec's Maya neighbors. Because the nemontemi fell outside the eighteen named, patron deity governed months of the regular year, they were widely understood as a time when the ordinary order protecting daily life was suspended, leaving people more exposed to misfortune until the new year properly began.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The nemontemi and the Maya Wayeb are the closest calendrical counterparts in Mesoamerican religion, both a five day remainder appended to an eighteen month, 365 day solar count, and both described in their respective traditions as a liminal, dangerous stretch of time in which ordinary activity gave way to caution and the boundary between the human and supernatural worlds was thought to thin. David Carrasco's survey of Mesoamerican religion treats this shared structure as a genuine point of contact between Aztec and Maya calendrical thought rather than a coincidence of translation, since both systems independently arrived at an eighteen times twenty day count needing a five day supplement to reach the solar year, and both cultures marked that supplement as religiously distinct from the months around it. The two are not identical in every particular, the ceremonies, associated deities and precise prohibitions recorded for the nemontemi in colonial Aztec sources differ in their details from those recorded for Wayeb in Maya sources, and this atlas records them as parallel structures within related but distinct religious systems rather than as a single practice under two names. Their shared position at the calendar's most vulnerable seam is nonetheless one of the clearest instances of common structure across the two neighboring Mesoamerican calendrical traditions.