First, to clear the ground. Historians are wary of ritual, with some reason. Private rituals are private, and tend to remain so: the individual and idiosyncratic are closed to us. We know that public and therefore more observable rituals relate to the societies which produce them variously, always partially, and usually obliquely. And having been taught irony in such matters, studiously disenchanted, we tend to think most easily of ‘religious’ ritual activity in Malinowskian terms, as a form of ‘primitive technology’ in the management of persons or forces, our first and often our last question of any particular ritual being ‘What was it thought to effect?’

That blunt question is notoriously awkward to answer. Precisely how devotees think their acts of worship influence themselves and their gods is always difficult to unravel, especially as these are matters the worshippers typically leave vague, even to themselves. With the Mexica, the disentangling of what we label ‘sympathetic’ from ‘contagious’ magic, and their differentiation from attempts to gain the attention of the deity and to establish a particular kind of relationship, is a complicated, frustrating and finally inconclusive matter. However, an analysis of the crisis occasion of the New Fire Ceremony, already described in an earlier chapter from the perspective of a model of dependence, could shed some light on the question. The ceremony, performed on a hilltop between Culhuacan and Itztlapalapan to mark the close of the old Bundle of Years, and to welcome and possibly to assist in the beginning of the new, offers a reasonably explicit sequence of actions which ought to reveal something of Mexica notions of the reach of human agency in ritual matters.