• Feb 3, 2024

Mexico’s Purepecha Indigenous group welcomes the New Year with ancient ‘New Fire’ ceremony

Guided by their ancestral lunar calendar, members of Mexico’s Purepecha Indigenous group celebrated their own New Year’s Eve — a little differently than the West’s traditional New Year.

The Purepechas, who live in the western state of Michoacán, preserve the pre-Hispanic belief in the “New Fire” ceremony, a version of which was also practiced by their ancient rivals to the east, the Aztecs.

Because the Purepechas’ lunar calendar of 18 months leaves an orphan day that belongs to no month, that day — which this year fell on Thursday — is viewed as a time for both mourning and renewal. That is when a symbolic fire is extinguished. In past generations, no fire was allowed on that day and meals were eaten cold, although the prevalence of gas and electric burners has made that obsolete.

Then at midnight, a new fire is lit and not allowed to go out until the new year.

That ancient ceremony was carried on this week by Antonio Tinoco, 35, who served as the guardian of last year’s New Fire.

For a year, Tinoco tended the symbolic flame in Erongarícuaro, a village on the shore of Pátzcuaro Lake. “You care for it like a child, and you feed it,” he said.

“It is both sad and happy at the same time,” Tinoco said of Thursday’s ceremony in which his old flame was celebrated and then extinguished; a new one was lit in its ashes and will be handed on to a new guardian in another town.

“We are closing a cycle. Last year we lit a flame, and yesterday we handed it over, and putting it out signified the end of this cycle, and today a new cycle begins,” Tinoco said.

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