1 Cuauhtli

Trecena 19 opens on 1 Cuauhtli, the eagle, under the patronage of Xochiquetzal, goddess of flowers and weaving, patroness of female artisans, embroiderers and weavers, whose own myth includes an abduction by Tezcatlipoca that made her, in that telling, goddess also of illicit love, a darker thread running beneath her more usual associations with beauty and craft. The eagle week flies high and lands hard: its children read as brave and open handed, given to boldness that outruns means, and Sahagun's augury warns the eagle born against excess even while promising them honours, a week of ambition and its price that pairs a bird associated with the sun's daily flight and with elite warrior standing to a goddess whose own story includes both great honour and a fall into circumstances not of her choosing.

The pairing of a weaving goddess with the eagle, a sign more usually read for war and solar vigour than for craft, is one of the count's less obviously matched patronages, and the readers' warning against excess may owe as much to the eagle sign's own soaring, ambitious character as to any specific trait of Xochiquetzal's, the trecena patron and the day sign each contributing a distinct thread to the week's full reading.

Trecena 19 runs from 1 Cuauhtli through 13 Mazatl, deer, its span carrying eagle, vulture, movement, flint, rain, flower, crocodile, wind, house, lizard and serpent before closing on the sign that opened Trecena 3 earlier in the count, now carrying the number thirteen, a third instance in the tonalpohualli's final stretch of a day sign returning at the higher number after having opened an earlier trecena at the first. As the second to last trecena in the twenty week sequence, this trecena's ambitious, bold reading under Xochiquetzal's patronage sits just before the count's final week, whose own augury of abundance and warning closes the full 260 day cycle, so the tonalpohualli's last three trecenas, sixteen through twenty setting aside the intervening Trecena 17 and 18, move through patience, penance, unsettled change and finally ambition before the count's last word on plenty shadowed by excess.

A reader working the tonalamatl in full sequence, as the tonalpouhque did when consulted for a comprehensive year reading rather than a single date, would have narrated this closing run of trecenas as building toward the count's final trecena rather than reading each in isolation. A client bringing a birth date from this closing run of trecenas to the tonalpouhque would have heard the reading placed explicitly against the count's approaching end, the diviner's craft treating position within the whole 260 day wheel as part of a date's meaning and not only the trecena and day sign taken alone.