1 Itzcuintli

Trecena 14 opens on 1 Itzcuintli, the dog, under the patronage of Xipe Totec, our flayed lord, god of spring and agricultural renewal, whose great festival, Tlacaxipehualiztli, saw priests don the flayed skins of sacrificial captives, an act the sources present as a deliberate symbol of the earth itself shedding its old covering and putting on new vegetation with the season's turn. Sahagun's informants promised this week's children wealth generously spent, feasts given and hospitality returned, a favourable augury for generosity and for those who feed others, a reading that connects naturally to Xipe Totec's own festival, at which the flayed skin's wearer received gifts and hospitality from the community during the days the rite continued.

Xipe Totec is also remembered as patron of goldsmiths, whose craft of working a base material into something precious echoed, for Mexica thought, the same renewal his flaying rite enacted on a human scale, an association the dog week's generosity theme sits comfortably beside, since both goldsmithing and open handed feasting turn raw material or private wealth into something given outward for others' benefit. The dog sign itself carries, in its own patronage under Mictlantecuhtli in the twenty day sign count, a guiding role for the dead, a different and darker register from its use here as merely the trecena's opening day.

Trecena 14 runs from 1 Itzcuintli through 13 Ehecatl, wind, its span carrying dog, monkey, grass, reed, jaguar, eagle, vulture, movement, flint, rain and flower before closing on the sign that opens Trecena 18 next in the round. Sitting past the count's midpoint in the same stretch as the generally gentler trecenas following the movement week's extremes, this trecena's generosity theme under Xipe Totec continues a run of relatively favourable weeks the tonalpouhque would have pointed to as easier ground than the earlier, harder run through Trecenas 6 to 10.

The wind sign that closes this trecena carries, in its own right, associations with breath, speech and restless motion under its patron Quetzalcoatl in his Ehecatl aspect, a fittingly open ended close to a week whose whole theme concerns wealth and hospitality moving outward from one household to another rather than being hoarded. As with the other nineteen trecenas, the thirteen numbered days here each combine the trecena's general reading, the specific day sign's own character, and the numbered bird patron the Codex Borbonicus records, three layers of meaning a diviner working the tonalamatl had to hold together for any single date a client brought before him.