Cipactli's importance in Aztec religion extended well past the creation narrative itself into the structure of daily religious life. The 260-day sacred calendar, the tonalpohualli, was built from twenty named day signs cycling against thirteen numbers, and Cipactli stands first among those twenty signs, giving its name and its associated symbolism to the first day of every trecena, the calendar's thirteen-day cycles. A day falling under the sign of Cipactli carried its own specific set of omens and ritual associations in Aztec divinatory practice, recorded in surviving divinatory almanacs such as those preserved in the Florentine Codex, connecting the primordial creature directly to the everyday business of naming children, choosing auspicious dates and reading personal fortune.
This dual role, cosmic monster at the world's origin and the calendar's own opening sign, is characteristic of how Aztec religion tied its creation mythology directly into lived ritual practice rather than keeping the two separate, so that every new 260-day cycle, and every trecena within it, symbolically reenacted the world's own beginning from Cipactli's primeval, floating body. Miller and Taube's standard dictionary of Aztec and Maya gods and symbols treats Cipactli as one of the clearest examples in Mesoamerican religion of a single mythic figure operating simultaneously as cosmology, geography and calendar.