Acatl, the Reed and Quetzalcoatl's Name

Acatl, the reed, draws its ordinary augury from the plant's hollow stem: the reed is hollow, and the readers made that the day's meaning directly, with Sahagun's informants describing the reed born as empty at heart, unstable and talkative, needing discipline to come to anything worthwhile without it, one of the more frankly unflattering readings the Florentine Codex records for any of the twenty signs. Yet 1 Acatl carries a significance the plain augury does not capture: it is the calendar name of Quetzalcoatl himself, and the day and the year it can open carry his memory specifically, a naming Sahagun and other colonial era sources connect to the feathered serpent's own legendary departure from Tollan and the promise, recorded in chronicles written down decades after the Spanish conquest, that he would return in a year bearing this same name.

Modern scholarship treats the precise relationship between this prophecy tradition and the year 1519, when Spanish forces under Cortes arrived, as considerably more complicated than the colonial narrative suggests, since the surviving accounts of omens and expected return were largely set down after the conquest itself and may reflect Nahua and Spanish narrators making sense of catastrophe together rather than a belief reliably attested before contact, a genuinely debated point among historians rather than a settled one.