Piltzintecuhtli

Piltzintecuhtli, whose name means young prince or noble child, is the third of the nine Lords of the Night and one of the pantheon's youthful solar figures, distinct from the elder fire god who opens the sequence and from the full strength of Tonatiuh at noon. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan and related colonial sources associate him with the rising sun in its first, most tender light, and pair him in myth with Xochiquetzal, the young goddess of flowers and love, as parents of Centeotl, the maize god who follows him as the fourth night lord, a genealogy that reads the newborn sun and the newborn ear of maize as siblings in one telling and as parent and child in another, since the sources do not agree and this is properly counted debated rather than settled.

Piltzintecuhtli also carries an association with healing and with physicians in some colonial accounts, the youthful vigour of dawn read as curative force, though this thread is thinner in the surviving record than his solar and genealogical roles. He belongs to a cluster of youthful, flower associated deities including Xochipilli, the flower prince, with whom he is sometimes conflated in modern popular writing though the primary sources keep them as distinct figures. As with several of the night lords, Piltzintecuhtli has no major surviving temple or festival cycle of his own; his presence in the record is almost entirely as a night lord and as a figure in the Centeotl parentage myth, a reminder that not every deity in the tonalpohualli's night count carried equal public weight in Mexica religious life.

Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex ChimalpopocaJohn Bierhorst (trans.)

Piltzintecuhtli takes the third turn in the nine night rotation, governing every ninth date beginning from the third day of the 260 day tonalpohualli and recurring on a different day sign and trecena each time the short cycle completes, since nine and 260 share no common factor and only realign after 2340 days. His position immediately follows Itztli, the obsidian blade, and precedes Centeotl, the maize god read in some accounts as his son, so the sequence Xiuhtecuhtli, Itztli, Piltzintecuhtli, Centeotl can be read as fire, the blade, the dawn and the harvest in unbroken order, a progression later interpreters have found suggestive though Sahagun's own text presents the nine simply as a fixed list rather than a narrative.

A date falling under Piltzintecuhtli's night was read, per the general logic Sahagun's informants describe for the tonalpouhque's craft, as tempering whatever the day sign and trecena already indicated with the character of youth and new beginning, gentler than the days governed by the death lord or the blade. The calendar priests worked from painted tonalamatl books that set out the full nine lord sequence beside the twenty day signs so that the correct night lord for any date could be read directly rather than calculated, and it is this practical, tabulated use, rather than any independent festival, that is the best attested feature of Piltzintecuhtli's place in Mexica religious life.

Sources Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of FateElizabeth Hill Boone with Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble