Flower (Xochitl)

Xochitl, flower, closes the twenty day signs as the caiman opens them, and it gathers the arts to itself in its reading: the flower born were read as makers, embroiderers, painters and singers, generous with what they make, one of the count's most consistently celebrated signs for artistic gift, matched among the twenty only by Ozomahtli's gentler sociable talent and by the arts favouring augury of its own trecena. Sahagun's augury carries a condition typical of the count's gifted signs: the gift prospers with discipline and fails without it, the same warning against unchecked indulgence that governs Xochitl's own trecena, Trecena 4, where Huehuecoyotl's trickster patronage makes the risk of indulgence especially pointed.

As the sign that closes the twenty day vocabulary, Xochitl carries a symbolic weight beyond its individual augury, standing at the threshold before the count restarts at Cipactli, an ending read across Mesoamerican thought generally as a culmination, flowers and song together forming one of the most persistent images of a life or an age brought to its full, fruitful close in Nahua poetry surviving from the pre conquest and early colonial period. A day of accomplishment and of the arts brought to their finished expression, Xochitl's reading gave the tonalpouhque a genuinely hopeful note to end their explanation of the full twenty sign count on.

Xochitl's patron is Xochiquetzal, goddess of flowers, weaving and female sexuality, patroness of the artisans, embroiderers and weavers the day sign's own augury specifically names, one of the tightest matches between a day sign's reading and its governing deity's domain in the whole count, name and character aligning almost completely. Its direction is south, the fifth and final instance of that direction across the twenty sign sequence, closing the rotation's southern stations that began with Cuetzpalin at four and continued through Tochtli, Malinalli and Cuauhtli.

Xochitl is not a year bearer, standing two places past Tecpatl at eighteen, the nearest year bearer sign, so its role stays within the 260 day tonalpohualli, the count's own closing sign fittingly holding no additional office in the separate solar year calendar. Xochiquetzal's patronage of Xochitl as a day sign is a separate office from her role as trecena patron of Trecena 19, opening on Cuauhtli the eagle, so the flower goddess holds two calendrical posts, one governing the count's own closing day sign and the other governing a trecena of ambition and its price, a pairing that together spans both the finished accomplishment Xochitl represents and the striving that precedes it.