Mazatl, the Deer of Open Country

Mazatl, the deer, belongs to the wild country beyond the town in Nahua thought, and the readers of the count gave its people the animal's own nature directly: Sahagun's informants describe those born under it as inclined to wander, timid before company and most at home on the roads and in the hills rather than settled among neighbours. A day of the hunt, of rain and of instability by the readers' fuller description, Mazatl carries a gentler augury than several signs around it, though one still marked by the deer's characteristic skittishness, a mild fortune joined to an unsteady temperament that made the sign's reading for a birth a matter of tendency rather than fixed destiny.

The deer's association with open country and with the hunt gave it a natural place among the readings the tonalpouhque offered travellers and hunters specifically, much as the serpent sign served merchants and the reed sign served those needing discipline, each of the twenty signs accumulating over generations of practice a body of practical association suited to particular kinds of undertaking beyond the general birth reading every sign carried. Mazatl also names the trecena it opens, Trecena 3, where its own timid, restless character sets the whole thirteen day week's gentler, unsteady tone.