Water (Atl)

Atl, water, is read as purification and as release, and Nahua thought paired water directly with fire in the compound figure atl tlachinolli, burnt water, the emblem of war carried in codices as a stream of water and a stream of flame crossed together, a striking image that ties this gentle sounding sign to one of Mexica religion's most consequential concerns. The augural readings themselves are unquiet: water takes its own course rather than a fixed one, and Sahagun's informants read the water day's children with that same unpredictability, a fortune that could nourish or could as easily overflow its banks depending on circumstances the reading alone could not fully specify.

The atl tlachinolli emblem's pairing of this sign with fire specifically, rather than with any of the count's other nineteen signs, reflects the day's own patron, a fire deity, a coincidence of patron and symbol that gave Atl a doubled elemental character few other signs carry as explicitly. Water's association with the newborn's ritual bathing elsewhere in Mexica practice, though governed by a different deity than this day sign's own patron, meant Atl's reading touched both the beginning of a life, through purification, and the ending of many lives, through the war emblem its name helped form.

Atl's patron is Xiuhtecuhtli, the turquoise fire lord, a pairing of water and fire in patron and sign together that produces the atl tlachinolli, burnt water, war emblem directly, since the day sign's own name and its governing deity's element combine into precisely the two substances the compound figure crosses. Its direction is east, the third instance of that direction in the twenty sign count after Cipactli and Coatl, each standing five places apart in the four direction rotation.

Atl is not a year bearer, falling between Tochtli at eight and Acatl at thirteen, outside the select spacing that marks the four signs able to open a solar year. Xiuhtecuhtli's patronage of Atl as a day sign is a separate office from his standing as the first of the nine Lords of the Night and from his further role as trecena patron of Trecena 9 and Trecena 20, so the turquoise fire lord holds at least four distinct calendrical posts across the tonalpohualli's several layered registers, a concentration of duties matched by few other deities in the pantheon and reflecting his standing as one of the oldest and most central gods in Mexica religious life. The ritual bathing of Mexica newborns, performed under a different water deity's invocation regardless of the day a child was actually born, meant Atl's own reading touched a rite every family already knew from direct experience, giving the sign's unpredictable augury a domestic, familiar counterpart in ordinary practice.