1 Cuetzpalin

Trecena 12 opens on 1 Cuetzpalin, the lizard, under the patronage of Itztlacoliuhqui, the curved obsidian blade, the frost lord, a hardened and punitive aspect of Tezcatlipoca associated in the sources with self-inflicted blindness, with the killing frost that ends a growing season, and with the punishment of sin. Those born in the lizard week read as hardy, the sources say, able to recover, prosper and endure, keeping their footing where others fall, while the frost patron above the sign tempers this generally favourable reading with severity, a week of endurance rewarded only through hardship rather than given freely.

Itztlacoliuhqui's myth, in the accounts that preserve it, tells of a deity blinded, by his own hand in some versions, as punishment for a transgression, a self-inflicted severity that mirrors frost's own indiscriminate damage to crops regardless of a farmer's effort, and his patronage of a trecena whose sign, the lizard, is elsewhere read for regeneration and survival, sets endurance against punishment as the week's central theme. The lizard's own capacity to regrow a lost tail, a piece of natural history Nahua thought folded directly into Cuetzpalin's symbolism, gave this trecena's hardy, recovering augury a concrete image the readers could point to when explaining the sign to a client.

Trecena 12 runs from 1 Cuetzpalin through 13 Cozcacuauhtli, vulture, its span carrying lizard, serpent, death, deer, rabbit, water, dog, monkey, grass, reed and jaguar before closing on the sign that opens Trecena 16 next in the round. This trecena sits in the count's third quarter, past the midpoint reached at Trecena 10, and the frost lord's severe patronage here continues a run of weightier trecenas that includes the movement sign's extremes in Trecena 13 immediately following, a stretch the tonalpouhque would have flagged to clients as requiring particular care in the timing of undertakings.

The vulture sign that closes this trecena carries, in its own right as a day sign, a reading of long life and patient age, a gentler note to end on after the frost lord's severity governs the week's middle stretch, and a diviner reading the full thirteen days in order would have narrated this movement from hardship toward eventual endurance and longevity as the count approached its close. As with every trecena, the day signs crossed within these thirteen days each carry independent patron deities and readings of their own in the twenty sign count proper, a separate and fuller layer of meaning than their brief appearance here as steps within Cuetzpalin's week.