Aztec birth sign calculator

The Aztec Tonalpohualli

The Mexica (Aztecs) of central Mexico shared the Mesoamerican 260-day calendar with the Maya. They called it the tonalpohualli, 'the count of days' or 'of destinies', and kept it in screenfold books painted by specialists called tonalpouhque, who used it to name children, choose days for marriage, trade and war, and foretell a person's fate. Each day combined one of thirteen numbers with one of twenty signs, from Cipactli (crocodile) to Xochitl (flower), so the day signs run in step with the Maya ones: 1 Cipactli corresponds to 1 Imix.

The count was divided into twenty periods of thirteen days, known by the Spanish word trecenas, each ruled by its own patron deity, and every day sign also had a divine patron — although the lists of patrons differ between the surviving codices, such as the Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus.

Alongside it ran the 365-day solar year, the xiuhpohualli, of eighteen twenty-day 'months' and five ill-omened days (nemontemi). The two calendars meshed every 52 years, a cycle completed by the New Fire ceremony, when all fires were extinguished and rekindled on the Hill of the Star to secure another 'bundle of years'. A person's tonalli — their day of birth — was believed to give them a share of a particular kind of heat or vital force, and with it a fortunate or difficult destiny that rituals could modify.