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What a Lord of the Night Entry Covers

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What a Lord of the Night Entry Covers

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A Lord of the Night entry records one of nine deities who, in the Aztec and wider Mesoamerican calendar, rule successive nights in an unbroken nine day cycle running independently of both the two hundred and sixty day tonalpohualli and the eighteen veintena solar year, as the colonial era Nahuatl annals gathered in the Codex Chimalpopoca record them.

An entry records a lord's documented place in the nine night sequence and the deity's own broader documented character, since the nine night cycle is a separate structural layer of the calendar rather than a subset of either the day sign count or the veintena feast cycle, and conflating the three obscures a genuinely distinct system.

The Codex Chimalpopoca is a scholarly translation by Nahuatl specialist John Bierhorst of an annals compilation written down generations after the conquest by Nahua scribes preserving older oral material, so an entry cites it for what the tradition itself records of this cycle, honestly noting the layered, uneven nature of the underlying compiled text rather than treating it as a single uniform eyewitness source. An entry also records, where Bierhorst's translation allows it, how a given lord's documented character in this nine night role compares with that same deity's broader documented character elsewhere in Aztec religion, since the two are not always identical in emphasis.

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Sources
History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca
John Bierhorst (trans.), University of Arizona Press, 1992View the Source
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