Cipactli, the First Day Sign

Cipactli, the earth caiman, opens the twenty day signs of the tonalpohualli, and Sahagun's informants read the day itself as a fortunate beginning, promising those born under it the chance of prosperity if the observances the sign demanded were kept. Nahua cosmology across central Mexico holds Cipactli as the primordial creature whose body became the floating earth, torn apart by Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl acting together in one version of creation recorded in colonial sources, so the day sign carries the whole world's own origin behind its name rather than only an animal's character. As the sign that opens both the twenty day count and, doubled with the number one, the entire 260 day tonalpohualli at 1 Cipactli, its augury set the tone the tonalpouhque, the calendar readers, used to introduce the count to a new client, a foundation day before the readings that followed grew more varied and more mixed. The caiman's own nature, a creature of the water's edge belonging fully to neither land nor sea, gave later interpreters a natural image for beginnings that have not yet settled into a fixed shape, fitting a sign that stands at the exact threshold of the count rather than within its ordinary run.