| Sumario: | Introducing a new theoretical category in religious studies, 'ritual practice of time,' this essay constitutes an analysis about rituals of the structure of space and time of the Aztec fifty-two-year calendar in Mesoamerica. Time and space, completed and exhausted at the termination of the fifty-two-year cycle, had to be symbolically renewed and recreated in a fifty-two-year ritual. Challenging the view held by numerous Mesoamericanists, I demonstrate that the ritual practice of time of the related 365-day calendar ('New Year ritual') was not spatio-temporal in a horizontal quadripartite manner. Given that only one world or cardinal direction of the world was ritually observed, a symbolic re-enactment of the creation myth could not be executed since it would take four consecutive 'New Year rituals' of four years to symbolically define the quadripartite earth. Conversely, the fifty-two-year ritual (and the 260-day ritual) could, in principle, have this very significant meaning and function.
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