Rabbit (Tochtli)

Tochtli, the rabbit, carried a reading built on the animal's own fertility: the rabbit multiplies readily, and the day carried readings of increase, harvest and plenty that made it broadly favourable for undertakings tied to growth and provision. Yet the sources return repeatedly to the sign's other face, since the rabbit is also the drinker's sign, most sharply in the figure of Ome Tochtli, 2 Rabbit, remembered across the wider tradition as the day of the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit gods of pulque and drunkenness, so a sign of abundance carried within it a specific, named warning against the excess that abundance itself could invite. This double reading, increase paired with a caution against its own overindulgence, gave Tochtli one of the more genuinely balanced auguries in the whole count, neither simply favourable nor simply dangerous but conditional on how the abundance it promised was used. As one of the four year bearer signs, Tochtli also named entire solar years, a civic weight far beyond any single day's reading, and the same tension between increase and excess that marked an individual Tochtli birth would have coloured how the tonalpouhque read a Tochtli year for the whole community it governed.

Tochtli's patron is Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey plant and, in the myth cycle, mother of the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit gods whose feast days scatter through the count and whose namesake sign is this one, a patronage that makes the rabbit sign and its governing deity share the same association with pulque's abundance and danger directly rather than only by coincidence. Its direction is south, and as one of the four year bearer signs Tochtli specifically names the years of the southern quarter across the fifty two year Calendar Round, the point at which the 260 day tonalpohualli and the 365 day solar count return to their shared starting alignment after each has cycled independently, the tonalpohualli twice over and the solar year fifty two times.

A year opening under Tochtli's name carried, per the same logic that shapes an individual Tochtli day, a reading of expected abundance shadowed by the specific risk of excess, and Mayahuel's own myth of transformation from a plant discovered and raised to godhood by Quetzalcoatl gave the tonalpouhque a ready story to draw on when explaining the year's promise and its danger to the community whose year it was. Mayahuel's myth of transformation from a discovered maguey plant into a goddess, credited to Quetzalcoatl in one telling, gave the tonalpouhque a concrete story of raw material made valuable to set beside the rabbit sign's own promise of increase, provided the abundance it offered was handled with the same care the plant itself required.