Ocelotl, the Jaguar's Courage

Ocelotl, the jaguar, is read as the bravest of the twenty signs and, in the same reading, the most endangered by its own bravery: Sahagun's fourth book opens the jaguar trecena with an augury of capture and death in war, and the readers held that the jaguar born must spend their courage carefully or be spent by it, a warning against reckless valour rather than against courage itself. The jaguar's standing as the most powerful predator known to Mexica experience made it a natural symbol for the warrior elite specifically, most visibly in the jaguar knights, one of the two most prestigious military orders, so a day sign read for bravery and its dangers carried real weight for families whose sons might expect to enter that world.

The sign's difficult augury, one of the more clearly unfavourable in the count alongside Malinalli and Calli's own harder trecena reading, reflects a consistent pattern in the tonalpohualli: the count's most visibly powerful animals, jaguar and eagle both, carry warnings about excess and danger precisely because their power was real and therefore genuinely risky to those who possessed it, unlike gentler signs such as the monkey or the rabbit whose favourable readings needed less qualification.