Reports
The Aztec Tonalpohualli: The 260-Day Count
A birth-chart reading.
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The tonalpohualli is the 260-day divinatory count of the Mexica (Aztec) world: twenty day signs turned against thirteen numbers, each day further accompanied by one of nine Lords of the Night. A reading works from the day sign, the thirteen-day trecena and the night lord a birth date falls on, computed against the correlation anchored to the recorded date of the fall of Tenochtitlan.
History
The count is well documented in surviving pre-conquest and early colonial painted books, the tonalamatl, "book of days", and in colonial era ethnographic accounts, most extensively the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, compiled with Nahua informants in the sixteenth century, which records the day signs, their associated deities and the divinatory judgments attached to particular day and number combinations in considerable detail. Reading the count professionally was the work of trained ritual specialists, the tonalpouhque, whose training and institutional standing were disrupted by the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan and the sustained suppression of Mexica ritual practice that followed it.
This report item presents the historical correspondences the colonial sources preserve rather than a living practice, matching its own product description plainly: the Mexica tonalpohualli tradition, in the specific institutional form the tonalpouhque once carried, is not continuously practiced today in the way the separate Maya Tzolk'in page describes some Maya day-keepers still keeping. A structurally related 260-day count with its own distinct day sign names, the Maya Tzolk'in, is treated on its own report item's page as a still living tradition among some Maya communities, and the two are kept separate here rather than folded together.
The Twenty Day Signs
In order: Crocodile (Cipactli), Wind (Ehecatl), House (Calli), Lizard (Cuetzpalin), Serpent (Coatl), Death (Miquiztli), Deer (Mazatl), Rabbit (Tochtli), Water (Atl), Dog (Itzcuintli), Monkey (Ozomahtli), Grass (Malinalli), Reed (Acatl), Jaguar (Ocelotl), Eagle (Cuauhtli), Vulture (Cozcacuauhtli), Movement (Ollin), Flint (Tecpatl), Rain (Quiahuitl) and Flower (Xochitl).
The Nine Lords Of The Night
Nine deities, Xiuhtecuhtli, Itztli, Piltzintecuhtli, Centeotl, Mictlantecuhtli, Chalchiuhtlicue, Tlazolteotl, Tepeyollotl and Tlaloc, accompany the days of the tonalpohualli in a fixed repeating cycle of their own, running independently alongside the twenty day signs and thirteen numbers.
How A Reading Is Constructed
A reading converts a birth date into its place in the tonalpohualli, the day sign, the number one through thirteen (fixing which thirteen-day trecena the date falls in) and the Lord of the Night for that day, using the correlation colonial and modern scholarship has anchored to the recorded date of the fall of Tenochtitlan. Because the tonalpouhque's own tradition of trained interpretation was interrupted rather than continuously transmitted, the reading presents the correspondences the surviving colonial sources record as historical material rather than instructing a reader in a living ritual role.
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