What is the veintena of Xocotl Huetzi?

Xocotl Huetzi means «The fruit falls». It is veintena 10 of the eighteen twenty-day stretches of the Mexica solar year. It is dedicated to xiuhtecuhtli.

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. Xocotl Huetzi is the 10 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 — Xocotl Huetzi 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 Xocotl Huetzi 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 10 of 18

Xocotl Huetzi

«The fruit falls»

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 let fall what has ripened, and to honour those who left.

The energy it is dedicated to is Xiuhtecuhtli.

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 Xocotl Huetzi. 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 ripening and the falling of fruit, and the start of the season of the dead (some eighty days). The year tips from the flower to the fruit that lets go.

Symbolism

We flower, we fruit, we fall

The veintena completes a movement begun in the previous one: the flowers were fertilised and became fruit; the fruit ripens, and falls.

Rituals

A great **pole (the xocotl) was raised, crowned with a dough image of the Otomi lord Otontecuhtli**. The rite is among the richest of the year: the pole raised and then brought down, the image at the top.

The young men ran to the pole and climbed to seize the xocotl, the image at the summit. A festive, contested ascent: whoever reached it first won honour.

Under the name Huey Miccailhuitl, the veintena was the great feast of the dead: the close of the pair opened at Tlaxochimaco. Those who had gone were honoured while the fruit fell — death as part of the cycle, not as its rupture.

How to cite this page

Alma Mexica, «Xocotl Huetzi», The eighteen veintenas. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/veintena/xocotl-huetzi/