1 Malinalli

Trecena 8 opens on 1 Malinalli, twisted grass, under the patronage of Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey plant and mother, in the myth cycle, of the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit gods of pulque and drunkenness, herself remembered as a maguey plant discovered and raised to godhood by Quetzalcoatl in one telling of her origin. Sahagun's informants gave this week's children falls from prosperity, sickness and losses, an unfavourable reading softened only by the grass's own habit of springing back after being torn up, so that a week whose natives were told they must guard closely what they gained still carried, folded into its symbol, the promise of eventual recovery.

The choice of a maguey goddess to patronise a week of reversal fits the plant's own double nature in Mexica life, at once the source of pulque's intoxication and loss of self-control and the source of fibre, thorns for penance, and a sweet sap that sustained households through lean seasons, a single plant read as both danger and provision depending on how it was used. The tonalpouhque's warning to guard what one gains under this trecena reads as an extension of Mayahuel's own myth, in which abundance drawn carelessly from the maguey, as pulque was, could as easily ruin a household as sustain it.

Trecena 8 runs from 1 Malinalli through 13 Cuetzpalin, lizard, its thirteen days carrying grass, reed, jaguar, eagle, vulture, movement, flint, rain, flower, crocodile and wind before closing on the sign that opens Trecena 12 next in the round. The trecena sits just past the count's middle third, and its span crosses Acatl, the reed, one of the four year bearers, at its second day, so a diviner reading this week held in mind both the trecena's own reversal theme under Mayahuel and the separate significance a year beginning on that day sign would carry in the 365 day solar count.

Boone's study of the surviving painted books of fate describes the trecena patrons as drawn from across the pantheon without an obvious single organising principle linking one trecena's patron to the next, a pattern this stretch of the count illustrates clearly: a rain god, a maguey goddess and a frost lord govern three consecutive weeks with little thematic connection beyond each colouring its own thirteen days. The lizard sign that closes this trecena carries its own reading of regeneration and survival elsewhere in the count, as the day sign patronised in its own right by Huehuecoyotl, a different register from its role here as merely the closing day of Trecena 8.