How many veintenas does the Mexica year have?

Eighteen of twenty days, which make 360, plus five added at the end — the nemontemi — to complete 365. That is the solar count, the xiuhpohualli, and it is distinct from the 260-day count that gives the day-signs. Tóxcatl is the 5 of the eighteen.

Is a veintena the same as a trecena?

No, and it is the commonest confusion. A veintena is twenty days of the solar year, of which there are eighteen — Tóxcatl among them. A trecena is thirteen days of the divinatory count, of which there are twenty. Both run at once and do not cross the same way twice for fifty-two years.

Why is the full entry on Tóxcatl only in Spanish?

Because it rests on the accounts of Sahagún and Durán in their own sixteenth-century words. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation. The Spanish entry is linked.

The eighteen veintenas

Veintena 5 of 18

Tóxcatl

Q: What is the veintena of Tóxcatl?

Tóxcatl means «Dry thing». It is veintena 5 of the eighteen twenty-day stretches of the Mexica solar year. It is dedicated to tezcatlipoca.

«Dry thing»

Still from the animated background of the veintena of Tóxcatl — The background of Tóxcatl, held still. In the app it moves through the twenty days of its veintena.

What a veintena is

One of the eighteen twenty-day stretches of the Mexica solar year. Eighteen of them make 360 days; five more — the nemontemi — close the 365. This is a different count from the 260-day one that gives the day-signs, and the two run at the same time.

What this one asks of you

To read the edge: in drought you see what a thing is made of.

The energy it is dedicated to is Tezcatlipoca.

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of the veintena of Tóxcatl. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

Etimología
Energías
Rituales
Sociedad
Simbolismo
Códices
Ecología
Vigencia hoy
Interpretaciones modernas

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.

Ecology

The season

In qualitative terms this is the terminal dry season: the earth at its most arid and the first rains about to break. Everything waits on the edge.

Symbolism

The shadows are gathered in

In the reading of the living tradition, when the sun stands at the centre of the sky the shadows are gathered in, drawn into the body. The shadow is the reflection of the spiritual world: in that instant the world of the nahual and that of the tonal come together again, as at the beginning of creation.

What matters in this veintena is not the fire but the smoke. A recent study makes the point: in Toxcatl the role of smoke is significant. The name of the energy that presides over it says as much — smoking mirror.

How to cite this page

Alma Mexica, «Tóxcatl», The eighteen veintenas. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/veintena/toxcatl/