Ecatl (MH500v)

The gloss, as is so often the case for this manuscript, just says Ecatl. The glossator started to write "he" and then crossed it out. But one might normalize the Ecatl name as Ehecatl, which seems to be the intention. At minimum, ehecatl was a day sign in the calendar, and many children were born under that sign, so it makes sense as a name. The word ecatl exists in our dictionary as "air" or "breath." A great many glyphs in this collection start with Eca- when one might expect Eheca-. We are preserving the proclivity of the gloss for Eca-, while also pointing to the likelihood of an unintentional oral abbreviation of Eheca- to Eca-.

Some glyphs for the name Ehecatl in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco show one curving line on the face, and some show two straight lines. See below. These glyphs all differ considerably from the earlier glyphs for Ehecatl that are found in the Codex Mendoza.

Gabrielle Vail and ‎Christine Hernández (Re-Creating Primordial Time, 2013, ) describe Ehecatl as the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl, and they note that Ehecatl "wears a buccal (duck) mask through which to blow wind." That the "beak" may have been perceived as a blowing device is supported by the glyph for Pitztli (below).