1 Ocelotl

Trecena 2 opens on 1 Ocelotl, the jaguar, under the patronage of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, god of wind, learning and the priesthood, whose myth cycle traces him from the ruler of Tollan through exile and self-immolation to rebirth as the morning star. Sahagun's fourth book gives this week a hard augury, reading those born in it as at risk of death in captivity, their days inviting misfortune that only penance and careful attention could turn aside, a severity that sits uneasily beside Quetzalcoatl's usual character as a civilising, priestly god, a reminder that a trecena's reading followed the day sign's own nature, here the jaguar's violence, more than the patron's temperament.

The tonalpouhque held real remedial power over such a week: Sahagun records that a reader could move a child's naming day within the trecena to a more favourable number among its thirteen, a practice that mattered most precisely under signs like this one, where the raw augury was unwelcome. Quetzalcoatl's patronage here sits alongside his more famous roles as patron of the calmecac priestly schools and of Tollan's legendary learning, a different face of the same deity than the wind god Ehecatl who patronises the second day sign in the twenty sign count.

Trecena 2 runs from 1 Ocelotl through 13 Miquiztli, death, the thirteenth and closing day sign of its span, thirteen consecutive day signs read against the fixed run of numbers one through thirteen with no repeat of either register within the week. Its position as the second trecena means every day sign within it, jaguar through death by way of eagle, vulture, movement and flint, carries the number appropriate to its place in this particular pass through the cycle rather than any number fixed permanently to that sign, since the same day sign recurs with a different number in most of the other nineteen trecenas across the full 260 day count.

Sahagun's account treats the reading of a date as inseparable from knowing which trecena it falls in, since the trecena patron colours every one of its thirteen days, and a diviner asked to judge a birth or the timing of a journey needed the full tonalamatl table open in front of him rather than the day sign alone. The severity generally read into this trecena meant its later days, as the numbers climbed toward thirteen, were watched particularly closely by the tonalpouhque for signs that the week's difficult opening was intensifying or, more hopefully, beginning to ease as the count approached Trecena 3.