You might be wondering, traveler, why I am bothering you with all this. As I have said I am a dreamer, I know some things of your time. If you spent a long time explaining to me how your month March has 31 days while your November has but 30, I might take the time to catch up on my sleep.

But for us, the importance of the calender lies in our belief that knowing when a thing happens determines in many ways what will happen. In the chart on the last page, you saw that (Oh? Well, you saw if you looked. Hm. If you just went, "Oh, cool little critter pictures" and just skimmed through it, well...) each day is ruled by one of the Teteo. In the same way, each of the weeks is ruled by one of the Teteo (For us, a week is a series of 13 days beginning with a "1"), and so is each "hour" of the day and night (our days consist of 22 "hours," 13 of which are considered to be "day" hours and 9 of which are "night" hours). The rulers are as follows:

Ah, yes, now I can see I truly have your attention. Come, come, you can memorize those charts later. Attractive as that seems, it will wait. For we've come to the point where I can explain why this is of such significance to us.

At any given hour of any day of any week of any month, there are four sacred rulers - four sets of possibly conflicting, possibly conspiring, forces at work. At the seventh hour of the night on a day Nahui Coatl in the month of Toxcatl, the "month" force is Tezcatlipoca, the "week" force is Chantico, the "day" force is Chalchihuitlicue, and the "Hour" force is Tlazolteotl. There is an element of fate, of feminine fire, of flowing water, and of passion. An excellent moment to try to conceive a child of heroic temperment, for example. And it represent a confluence of forces that will occur only once in any fifty-two year period. Next year there won't even be a day Nahui Coatl during Toxcatl.

We use our calendar to give our children their first names; if you were born on a day Ome Malinalli, your name is Ome Malinalli, "Two-Grass." These names are genderless, a fierce warrior might be named Yei Xochitl, "Three flower." Later someone might decide you remind them of a white butterfly (trustfully you're female if you remind them of a white butterfly) and you may then gain the additional name Itzacpapalotl. Or perhaps not, and you may keep the name Ome Malinalli through your life.

We also believe that the events of the world move in regular cycles. Understanding the flow of those cycles, then, is the key to understanding and even predicting events...

If you've found all this interesting, you may want to know how you can translate your calendars and clocks into the Mesoamerican standard. I can help you there too, Traveler. Clicking below will let you download a ZIP file containing a program to translate your calendars and clocks into ours. It's a DOS program, but it runs fine under Win9x.