Nauhecatl (MH755v)

The gloss gives “ecatl” instead of “ehecatl” (“wind” or the deity name), which is typical of the renderings of the name across this manuscript and others. We are preserving the use of “ecatl” even as we acknowledge that the calendrical name referred to the deity of the wind. The gloss also omits the number four (nahui, or its stem, nauh-), which is somewhat unusual because the glyph does include the notation. But in this period (1560), after the Spanish colonial clergy were trying for decades to get Nahuas to stop using the pre-contact religious divinatory calendar (tonalpohualli) in their naming practice, irregularities were arising, while the people’s general allegiance to this tradition persisted. Perhaps some of the alterations were meant to disguise its continuing use.