1 Acatl

Trecena 5 opens on 1 Acatl, the reed, under the patronage of Chalchiuhtlicue, she of the jade skirt, goddess of lakes and rivers and the deity who presides over the ritual bathing of every Mexica newborn regardless of the day it falls on. Sahagun's informants held that those born in the reed week had hearts like the cane itself, empty and unstable, quick with words and slow to finish what they began, an unfavourable reading the sources say plainly could be mended by upbringing, a rare case in the Florentine Codex's treatment of the tonalpohualli where nature and nurture are set explicitly against each other rather than nature alone deciding a child's fate.

The pairing of a water goddess with a hollow reed carries its own irony the sources do not comment on directly: water fills what is empty, and a family consulting the tonalpouhque about a child born under this trecena would have heard both halves of the reading, the sign's native hollowness and the patron's capacity, through the discipline of upbringing she was invoked to support, to fill it. Acatl is also one of the four year bearer signs, so this trecena's opening day could, in the separate 365 day solar count, name an entire year rather than only a single date within the 260 day tonalpohualli.

Trecena 5 runs from 1 Acatl through 13 Coatl, the serpent, its span carrying reed, jaguar, eagle, vulture, movement, flint, rain, flower, crocodile, wind, house and lizard before closing on the sign that opens Trecena 9 later in the count. Sitting at the exact midpoint of the count's first third, this trecena's span crosses more named day signs with independent mythic weight than most, including three of the four year bearers' neighbours, and the tonalpouhque's tonalamatl tables would have shown this week as one of the busier stretches in terms of named associations a diviner needed to hold in mind at once.

The reed sign's own status as a year bearer means that in the separate 365 day xiuhpohualli, the solar year count, years could be named Acatl and rotate through the thirteen numbers over a fifty two year span before the full Calendar Round, the point where the 260 day and 365 day counts realign, was reached, a much longer cycle than the trecena's own short thirteen days but built from the same underlying day sign vocabulary. A reader working this trecena therefore held two calendars in view at once, the short divinatory week and the long solar year it shared a starting sign with.