Trecena 8 opens on 1 Malinalli, twisted grass, under the patronage of Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey plant and mother, in the myth cycle, of the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit gods of pulque and drunkenness, herself remembered as a maguey plant discovered and raised to godhood by Quetzalcoatl in one telling of her origin. Sahagun's informants gave this week's children falls from prosperity, sickness and losses, an unfavourable reading softened only by the grass's own habit of springing back after being torn up, so that a week whose natives were told they must guard closely what they gained still carried, folded into its symbol, the promise of eventual recovery.
The choice of a maguey goddess to patronise a week of reversal fits the plant's own double nature in Mexica life, at once the source of pulque's intoxication and loss of self-control and the source of fibre, thorns for penance, and a sweet sap that sustained households through lean seasons, a single plant read as both danger and provision depending on how it was used. The tonalpouhque's warning to guard what one gains under this trecena reads as an extension of Mayahuel's own myth, in which abundance drawn carelessly from the maguey, as pulque was, could as easily ruin a household as sustain it.