Aztec Tonalpohualli

The Aztec sacred calendar, the tonalpohualli — the "counting of the days" — is genuine, ancient, and not really the Aztecs' own invention either. It is the same 260-day count as the Maya Tzolk'in: twenty day-signs turning against the numbers one to thirteen, twenty times thirteen making 260. Both peoples inherited it from a far older Mesoamerican tradition, and both took it utterly seriously.

Each day had a number, a sign, a patron god and an omen — 4-Rabbit, 7-Reed, and so on — and the day of your birth was read as your fate. This was no idle horoscope: a trained diviner, the tonalpouhqui, consulted the painted books of days, the tonalamatl, to name a child, choose a wedding day or set the moment for war. The birth day-sign genuinely shaped an Aztec life.

And it is deeply old. The 260-day count reaches back into the first millennium BC, to the Zapotec of Monte Albán and, before them, the Olmec — centuries before the Aztecs themselves came to power in the Valley of Mexico. When the Aztecs kept the tonalpohualli, they were carrying on a calendar already more than a thousand years old, one of the great intellectual achievements of the ancient Americas.

So this one is the real thing. (One caution: the famous carved "Aztec calendar," the great Sun Stone in Mexico City, is a magnificent monument, but it is not itself the day-count — the working calendar lived in the painted books.) The tonalpohualli is authentic, pre-Columbian and genuinely divinatory, built entirely in the Americas with no debt to the Old World. The day-sign we give you here is one the Aztecs would have recognised.