Wind (Ehecatl)

Ehecatl, wind, is read by the tonalamatl as a day of breath, speech and motion, and Sahagun's fourth book records the wind days as changeable and fickle in augury, the sign's restless nature read directly into the fortune of those born beneath it, gifted talkers whose course was as hard to fix as the air itself. Ehecatl is also the name the codices give to Quetzalcoatl in his wind aspect, one of the feathered serpent's several distinct manifestations, so the day sign and a major god's alternate identity share a single word, a coincidence Nahua thought treated as meaningful rather than accidental, since wind and the god who set the sun and moon in motion after their creation at Teotihuacan were understood as expressions of the same restless, animating force.

The sign's association with speech gave it a further reading beyond mere inconstancy: a wind day's child was expected to speak persuasively, a gift as double edged in the readers' judgment as any other, since words that move easily can as readily mislead as convince. Wind's place as the second sign, following the caiman's solid earth, reads across Mesoamerican thought generally as air following ground, motion following the fixed, one of several such pairings the twenty sign sequence carries between neighbouring days.

Ehecatl's patron in the day sign count is Quetzalcoatl himself in his wind aspect, the same deity named as the sign's alternate identity, a doubling that makes this one of the clearest cases in the whole tonalpohualli of a day sign and its governing god sharing a single name and character rather than standing as two separate figures brought together only by the codices' assignment. Its direction is north, the second station in the four direction rotation the twenty signs follow, shared with Miquiztli, Itzcuintli, Ocelotl and Tecpatl, the signs five places on from Ehecatl in either direction around the cycle.

Ehecatl is not a year bearer, standing one place off from Calli at the third position, the nearest year bearer sign in the sequence, so its influence in the civic solar calendar was confined to marking individual days within a year rather than opening one. Quetzalcoatl's patronage of this trecena and day sign together sits alongside his separate appearance as patron of Trecena 2, opening on Ocelotl, where the codices give him a harder augury than the gentler wind reading here, a reminder that one deity's several patronages across the tonalpohualli did not carry a single fixed character throughout.