Tochtli, the Rabbit's Two Faces

Tochtli, the rabbit, carried a reading built on the animal's own fertility: the rabbit multiplies readily, and the day carried readings of increase, harvest and plenty that made it broadly favourable for undertakings tied to growth and provision. Yet the sources return repeatedly to the sign's other face, since the rabbit is also the drinker's sign, most sharply in the figure of Ome Tochtli, 2 Rabbit, remembered across the wider tradition as the day of the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit gods of pulque and drunkenness, so a sign of abundance carried within it a specific, named warning against the excess that abundance itself could invite. This double reading, increase paired with a caution against its own overindulgence, gave Tochtli one of the more genuinely balanced auguries in the whole count, neither simply favourable nor simply dangerous but conditional on how the abundance it promised was used. As one of the four year bearer signs, Tochtli also named entire solar years, a civic weight far beyond any single day's reading, and the same tension between increase and excess that marked an individual Tochtli birth would have coloured how the tonalpouhque read a Tochtli year for the whole community it governed.