1 Ehecatl

Trecena 18 opens on 1 Ehecatl, wind, under the patronage of Chantico, hearth goddess of Xochimilco, associated with volcanic fire and with precious things such as jewels, whose myth tells of a fast broken, eating roasted food during a fire ritual when abstinence was required, an offence for which the other gods transformed her into a dog, a punishment that gives her an unexpected mythic kinship with Xolotl, the dog headed guide of the dead who patronises Trecena 16 two weeks earlier in the count.

The wind week turns: its children read as changeable, quick of speech and loose of purpose, and Sahagun's informants took its days as unsettled, a reading that fits the wind sign's own restless character, moving everything and settling nowhere, more than it draws on Chantico's specific myth of transformation, though the theme of a rule broken and a consequence following sits comfortably beside a week already read as loose of purpose. A week for care with words and with promises, by the readers' own description, its patron's domestic, household scale of hearth worship, distinct from Xiuhtecuhtli's cosmic fire, gives this trecena a more intimate, personal register than the grander patronages elsewhere in the count.

Trecena 18 runs from 1 Ehecatl through 13 Ocelotl, jaguar, its span carrying wind, house, lizard, serpent, death, deer, rabbit, water, dog, monkey and grass before closing on the very sign that opened Trecena 2 near the count's beginning, now carrying the number thirteen rather than one, a second instance of the day sign vocabulary folding back on itself as the tonalpohualli approaches its final two trecenas. This trecena sits within the count's last quarter, and the changeable, unsettled reading it carries under Chantico's patronage continues a mixed run of favourable and difficult weeks that alternate through the tonalpohualli's later stretch without settling into a single consistent trend as the count moves toward its close.

The house sign crossed early in this trecena's span carries, elsewhere in the count, its own reading of enclosure and caution under Itzpapalotl's patronage at Trecena 15, while the jaguar sign that closes this trecena carries the hard augury Trecena 2 itself opened on, so a diviner reading this week's full thirteen days would have moved through echoes of two of the count's more demanding trecenas within a single unsettled week. The recurrence of an earlier trecena's jaguar close beside this week's own house sign echo gave the tonalpouhque a ready comparison to draw for a client uncertain how seriously to weigh an unsettled reading, pointing back to the fuller augury already on record for the sign's first appearance at the count's opening third.