1 Tochtli

Trecena 20, the last of the twenty, opens on 1 Tochtli, the rabbit, under the patronage of Xiuhtecuhtli, the turquoise fire lord, with Itztapaltotec, a lesser attested figure in the codices, standing beside him, a return to the fire god who also patronises Trecena 9 earlier in the count, fittingly closing the tonalpohualli's cycle of trecena patrons with the same deity who helps anchor its opening.

The rabbit week closes the count in plenty: its children read as industrious and provident, farmers and gatherers of abundance, but the rabbit's own shadow falls across the reading, for Ome Tochtli, 2 Rabbit, was remembered as the day of the pulque gods, the Centzon Totochtin whose feasts and drunkenness the wider tradition associated with this sign specifically, so a favourable week for the diligent read as dangerous for the thirsty, a caution embedded directly in the trecena's own second numbered day. Tochtli is one of the four year bearer signs, so this closing trecena's opening day could, in the separate 365 day solar count, name an entire year, giving the tonalpohualli's final week a significance that reached beyond the divinatory count into the civic calendar the Mexica lived their public year by.

Trecena 20 runs from 1 Tochtli through 13 Xochitl, flower, its span carrying rabbit, water, dog, monkey, grass, reed, jaguar, eagle, vulture, movement and flint before closing on Xochitl, the twentieth and final day sign of the whole tonalpohualli vocabulary, a fitting close: the count's last trecena ends on the count's own last named sign before the entire 260 day cycle restarts at 1 Cipactli. This closing coincidence is the plain product of the arithmetic that governs every trecena, thirteen numbers advancing against twenty day signs with no common factor beyond one, but its arrival exactly here, at the sequence's true end, would not have been lost on the tonalpouhque reading the full tonalamatl table in order, the flower sign's own associations with song, nobility and the count's own culmination closing the year's reading on a note of accomplishment.

After Xochitl at 13, the calendar does not pause: the very next day begins the 260 day count over again at 1 Cipactli under Tonacatecuhtli's patronage, the same trecena this survey opened with, so the tonalpohualli is properly understood not as a line with a true ending but as a wheel, each of its twenty trecenas a fixed station a diviner returned to again and again across a lifetime of readings.