Trecena 9, Opening on Coatl

Trecena 9 opens on 1 Coatl, the serpent, under the joint patronage of Xiuhtecuhtli, the turquoise fire lord, with Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, lord of the dawn house, an aspect of Quetzalcoatl as the morning star, standing beside him in the codices, a pairing of fire and Venus that gave this trecena an unusually bright astral character among the twenty. Sahagun reads the serpent week as a travelling week: 1 Coatl was a day the pochteca, the long distance merchants whose expeditions carried goods and intelligence across Mesoamerica, favoured for setting out, and the trecena as a whole reads as fortunate for enterprise and exchange, a week of roads opening and goods in motion.

The serpent sign itself carries associations with renewal across Mesoamerican thought generally, tied to the shedding of skin, and its pairing here with a fire and dawn star patronage reinforced a reading of movement and fresh beginning that merchants setting out on long, dangerous journeys would have wanted behind them. Xiuhtecuhtli's appearance as a trecena patron here is a separate role from his standing as the first of the nine Lords of the Night, the two systems of trecena patrons and night lords assigning him duties that run alongside each other rather than merging into one.