Rain (Quiahuitl)

Quiahuitl, rain, gives with one hand and destroys with the other, and the tonalamatl kept both in view: Sahagun's fourth book makes 1 Quiahuitl a day of sorcerers, on which the nanahualtin, the shape changers of Nahua belief, were said to be born, and the rain days generally read as troubled and touched by illness, an unfavourable augury that draws on storm's genuine capacity for damage rather than only its more usual association with needed water for crops. This darker reading of a sign whose element, rain, is elsewhere in the count treated favourably through its governing deity's more benevolent aspects shows how thoroughly the tonalpohualli's readers separated a sign's raw natural symbol from any single fixed moral valence, since the same rain that nourished fields in Tlaloc's more usual character could, read here through the day sign's own name, also carry storm, flood and the uncanny company of shape changers.

The sign's association with sorcery placed it among the handful of days the tonalpouhque treated with particular caution when advising on the timing of ordinary undertakings, a caution the sign shares with its own trecena, Trecena 7, whose overall augury as the sorcerers' week the day sign's individual reading reinforces directly.

Quiahuitl's patron in the day sign count is Tonatiuh, the sun itself, a notably different patron from Tlaloc, the rain god who might seem the more obvious governor of a storm sign, and this assignment of the sun rather than the rain deity to the rain sign is recorded in the sources as it stands, without an explanation connecting the choice to the sign's difficult, sorcery touched augury. Its direction is west, the sixth instance of that direction across the twenty sign count, standing at the recurring interval the four direction rotation follows through Calli, Mazatl, Ozomahtli and Cuauhtli before reaching Quiahuitl.

Quiahuitl is not a year bearer, sitting between Tecpatl at eighteen and Xochitl at twenty, outside the spacing that marks the select four signs able to open a solar year. Tonatiuh's patronage of Quiahuitl as a day sign sits alongside his separate appearance paired beside Mictlantecuhtli in the patronage of Trecena 10, opening on Tecpatl the flint sign, a hard, war favouring week where the sun's presence reinforces courage and success in battle, a considerably more triumphant register than his quieter governance here over a sign the readers treated with real caution. Tonatiuh's demand for the nourishment of sacrifice to continue his own daily passage across the sky gives his patronage of the storm sign a further register beyond simple contrast with Tlaloc, since both readings, sun and rain alike, ultimately rest on the same Mexica theology of cost matched to survival.