Deer (Mazatl)

Mazatl, the deer, belongs to the wild country beyond the town in Nahua thought, and the readers of the count gave its people the animal's own nature directly: Sahagun's informants describe those born under it as inclined to wander, timid before company and most at home on the roads and in the hills rather than settled among neighbours. A day of the hunt, of rain and of instability by the readers' fuller description, Mazatl carries a gentler augury than several signs around it, though one still marked by the deer's characteristic skittishness, a mild fortune joined to an unsteady temperament that made the sign's reading for a birth a matter of tendency rather than fixed destiny.

The deer's association with open country and with the hunt gave it a natural place among the readings the tonalpouhque offered travellers and hunters specifically, much as the serpent sign served merchants and the reed sign served those needing discipline, each of the twenty signs accumulating over generations of practice a body of practical association suited to particular kinds of undertaking beyond the general birth reading every sign carried. Mazatl also names the trecena it opens, Trecena 3, where its own timid, restless character sets the whole thirteen day week's gentler, unsteady tone.

Mazatl's patron in the day sign count is Tlaloc, giver of rain, one of the oldest and most widely attested deities of central Mexico, his cult traceable in the archaeological record to Teotihuacan well before the Mexica themselves rose to prominence, and rain's own unpredictable, life giving and occasionally destructive character matches the deer sign's reading for instability directly. Its direction is west, the third instance of that direction in the count after Calli, standing five places on from the house sign in the four direction rotation shared also with Tochtli and Ocelotl at further intervals. Mazatl is not a year bearer, sitting between Calli at three and Tochtli at eight, neither close enough in the cycle to share their office of naming solar years.

Tlaloc's patronage here as a day sign governor is separate from his standing as the ninth and final Lord of the Night, the two calendrical offices assigning him distinct responsibilities that run alongside rather than merging into a single role, a distribution typical of how the pantheon's most prominent deities, Tlaloc among the most prominent of all, accumulated posts across the tonalpohualli's several independent layers. Tlaloc's command of the tlaloque, the lesser rain spirits stationed at the four directions and on mountain summits, meant a Mazatl day's unsteady fortune was read as one small piece of a much larger weather governing apparatus the rain god directed across the whole of the Basin of Mexico.