1 Miquiztli

Trecena 6 opens on 1 Miquiztli, death, under the patronage of Tecciztecatl, the moon lord, paired in the codices with Tonatiuh the sun, and despite its name the week reads well: 1 Miquiztli itself honoured Tezcatlipoca, and Sahagun records that slaves were shown honour on it, their masters mindful that fortune reverses and that a slave's low standing was not permanent.

Tecciztecatl's own myth, told in the account of the Fifth Sun's creation at Teotihuacan, casts him as the wealthy, richly adorned god who hesitated before the sacrificial fire, so that the poor, plain Nanahuatzin leapt first and rose as the sun, while Tecciztecatl followed and became the moon, its lesser light explained in some tellings by a rabbit thrown at his face by the other gods, the origin of the rabbit shape readers of the moon's surface still find there. That myth of hesitation followed by honour recovered fits the trecena's reversal theme neatly: a death sign whose reading turns favourable, governed by a god whose own story is one of a stumble redeemed. Those born in the week took a favourable augury, Sahagun's informants held, provided they kept the devotions owed to Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror god the sign's opening day was consecrated to honour first.

Trecena 6 runs from 1 Miquiztli through 13 Tecpatl, flint, its span carrying death, deer, rabbit, water, dog, monkey, grass, reed, jaguar, eagle and vulture before closing on the flint sign that itself opens Trecena 10 immediately afterward. This trecena sits just past the count's opening quarter, and its closing day sign, Tecpatl, is one of the four year bearers, so the week ends on a date capable of naming a solar year in the separate 365 day xiuhpohualli even as it closes an ordinary week within the 260 day tonalpohualli, a reminder that the two calendars shared a single vocabulary of twenty day signs while running on entirely independent schedules.

The moon lord's patronage of a week that opens on death and closes on the sacrificial flint gives the tonalpouhque's tables a certain thematic unity across these thirteen days even though, as with every trecena, the numbered reading of each individual day layered its own bird patron and its own position in the wider count atop the trecena's general character. Sahagun's account of the calendar priesthood treats this kind of thematic coherence as something readers noticed and used in their explanations to clients rather than as evidence of deliberate design by the count's original compilers, whose reasoning does not survive in the sources.