Calli, Shelter and the Hearth

Calli, house, is read by the augural tradition Sahagun gathered as a sign turned inward, toward the household and its keeping rather than outward toward the road or the battlefield that some neighbouring signs favour. The readings lean toward domestic virtue, care for a home and the duties that keep a family provisioned and safe, a quieter augury than the count's more dramatic signs and one that made Calli days generally sought for settling and building rather than for setting out.

As one of the four year bearer signs, Calli carried weight reaching well past its own day: a year could open under its name in the separate 365 day solar calendar, and Calli years belonged to the western quarter of the four year bearer directions, a civic significance layered atop whatever a diviner read for an individual birth falling on an ordinary Calli day within the 260 day count. The house sign's reading as shelter and enclosure recurs elsewhere in the tonalpohualli's trecena system, most notably as the opening sign of Trecena 15, where the same domestic imagery is read far more darkly, under a difficult trecena patron, a contrast that shows how the same day sign's core meaning could be inflected very differently depending on which trecena carried it.