The nemontemi
The five days left over from the year
What it covers
The five days that close the Mexica solar year outside the eighteen veintenas, and what the sources say was done in them.
The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why
What you have read above is this project's own summary of the nemontemi. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.
In Spanish the entry carries:
- Por qué son cinco
- El nombre
- Qué se hacía
- Nacer en ellos
- El sexto día
- El hueco tiene función
- Y por eso hay cuatro años, no uno
- Preguntas que llegan a esta página
Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «The nemontemi», The sky and the cycles. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/cycle/nemontemi/
Questions that reach this page
What were the nemontemi?
The five days that close the Aztec solar year outside the eighteen twenty-day months. The sources describe them as days with no feast and no appointed work, and Sahagún records that they were held to be ill-omened. They belong to no month, and so they fall outside much of what is said about every other day.