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 Ehecatl is expected, given the iconography. The gloss here gives "Ecatl," but the visuals suggest "Ehecatl." We are recognizing the possibility of an unintentional oral abbreviation of Eheca- to Eca-. But, if the shortening of the name is intentional, it may be a response to the edict of 1540 prohibiting the naming of Nahua children after deities that led to a favoring of Ecatl over Ehecatl, as a kind of disguise. See Norma Angélica Castilla Palma, "Las huellas del oficio y lo sagrado en los nombres nahuas de familias y barrios de Cholula," Dimensión Antropológica v. 65 (sept.-dic. 2015), 186. Castilla also mentions how there were pressures to stop using names from the tonalpohualli, and this led to the dropping of the number that went with the day name. Such a number is absent here. So the whole result is a lessening of the sacred aspects, perhaps for outsiders.

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).