Monkey (Ozomahtli)

Ozomahtli, the monkey, is read as the entertainer among the twenty signs, and the tonalamatl's readers followed that character directly: Sahagun's informants gave those born under it a pleasing, sociable fortune, a gift for song, dance and craft, and the easy friendship of strangers, one of the count's most consistently favourable signs with little of the conditional warning attached to several of its neighbours. A day of skill in the hands and lightness of spirit by the fuller reading, Ozomahtli's association with entertainment and craft made it a sign families might specifically hope a talented child would be born under, its favourable augury requiring less of the discipline other gifted signs, such as Xochitl the flower, explicitly demanded to keep the gift from souring into indulgence.

The monkey's natural playfulness, well attested across Mesoamerican animal symbolism generally, gave Nahua thought a ready image for exactly the sociable, entertaining character the sign's readers described, one of several cases in the tonalpohualli where an animal's directly observable behaviour, rather than any deeper mythological association, supplied the bulk of a day sign's meaning. The strangers' friendship the readers promised a monkey day's child fit a wider Mexica appreciation for the travelling performer and craftsman, figures welcomed at feasts and markets across the valley, so Ozomahtli's favourable augury reflected a genuinely valued social role rather than only an abstract personality trait.

Ozomahtli's patron is Xochipilli, the flower prince, god of music, games, dance and pleasure, a deity whose whole character matches the monkey sign's own reading for entertainment and craft closely, one of the more thematically tight pairings of day sign and patron the count offers. Its direction is west, the fourth instance of that direction in the twenty sign sequence, standing five places on from Calli in the recurring rotation shared also with Mazatl and Cuauhtli.

Ozomahtli is not a year bearer, sitting between Tochtli at eight and Acatl at thirteen, outside the spacing that defines the select four. Xochipilli is closely associated in the wider pantheon with Piltzintecuhtli, the young prince who governs as the third of the nine Lords of the Night, the two youthful, flower connected deities sometimes conflated in later, less careful accounts though the primary sources treat them as distinct figures with separate calendrical posts, Xochipilli here as a day sign patron and Piltzintecuhtli there as a night lord, a distinction worth preserving even where the two gods' domains of music, youth and pleasure overlap closely enough to explain why later writers sometimes merged them in error.