Talk:Aztec calendar

Oh god dear lord why

Yes, I know, page names are supposed to be singular when possible. But we have a few problems here we need to address. First and foremost, yes, obviously, T:NO RW applies, but just so everyone understands the context, let's go over the actual factual Aztec calendar. There is the "calendar round", which exists on a 52 year cycle, and is derived from a 365 day civic/solar calendar, the xiuhpōhualli, and a 260 day religious, ceremonial calendar, the tōnalpōhualli. 365*52 = 18980, 18980/260=73, you can check if you want that there's no earlier common factor.

Currently this page lumps everything together under one banner even though we aren't explicitly told to do so, and, again, I recognize that we don't immediately have reason not to, but we should mention that we're already mixing the two calendars if we bring real world information into this. It's the xiuhpōhualli that has 360+5 days, but as you can see from wiki it does not have "Ehecatl day", that would be the tōnalpōhualli. Again, nothing wrong so far, T:NO RW applies, but we are conflating two different real world concepts here.

Here's the problem. Against Nature exists. It refers a few times to the "tonalpohualli calendar" as distinct from the calendar itself, it explicitly calls the 52 year cycle, the calendar round, "one full cycle of the calendar" (and note here that it very explicitly does not use the term tonalpohualli in relation to this), and it introduces the term "tonalpohualli calendar" early on and continues to use it, doing so immediately, rather than just saying "calendar" thereafter. It also refers to trecenas, which are deeply incompatible with a 360+5 day calendar (though this might technically be a violation of T:NO RW? I'm not sure what the ruling is on "you literally just have to know a single word in another, contemporarily spoken language is to understand the meaning of this"). It does not explicitly at any time refer to the xiuhpōhualli or a 360+5 day calendar, but we're given enough to establish that there are two different calendars, two different cycles at play. Against Nature does not want us to think that the tonalpohualli, which is a Mexica calendar (and the Mexica/Aztec distinction is another can of worms I'm going to have to work on at some point, I know), is the same as their calendar generally. Najawin ☎ 08:13, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Also dear lord I feel like Burton was just trolling me with how many references to the calendar there is and how much I'm going to have to do to integrate it.

Looking into this more though, Against Nature even uses some of the terms from the xiuhpōhualli, "Tozoztontli", "Tepeilhuitl", "Quecholli", and "Tititl" are all used, though it's non trivial from context that "Quecholli" refers to a part of a calendar rather than a season. And obviously "Nemontemi" is used quite a lot, though this is less definitive. But these terms just don't mirror the structure of the terms used in reference to the tonalpohualli in the book, which is always two separate words at minimum, if not two for a day and then two for a trecena. (This is because they're specifying which day of the year it is by saying, say, "Ome Ozmatli‎‎", or "two monkey" [explicitly stated in the book, btw, that this is the translation], but specifying where they are in position to the 52 year count by specifying the trecena as well, which takes on a similar form, "Ce Izcuintli" is "one dog" [not explicitly given as the translation].)

I think it's abundantly clear that Against Nature shows there are two distinct things here. How we handle that might differ from renaming the page, but something should be done. Najawin ☎ 09:55, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Hah! It gets even better. If we take "52 years" literally, that gives us 18980 days, divide out 13 for trecena, and we get 1460. We're given ten of the twenty "symbols" by name, as well as the highest number associated one of them being thirteen. (While they're sometimes shown in the context of years rather than trecenas, they share the same linguistic form.) So if we pick thirteen to just "be our trecena" for purposes of the math, as one of them has to be, we then see that ten divides 1460, with 146 cycles, or a 13*10 religious calendar lining up with the civic calendar every 52 years in 146 cycles. This is off by a factor of 2, but very close. If we then take the statement from Six, of "nine-Ehecatl day", that gives us one more symbol not mentioned in the book, and we can reconstruct the tōnalpōhualli perfectly! (Well, we don't have all the names, nor the specific naming conventions, which are a bit non trivial, but we have the idea of a 13(days)*20(trecenas) calendar that syncs up with a 365 day calendar every 52 years in 73 cycles. Since there are no divisors of 1460 between 10 and 20.)

You can also make a case that the "twenty day month" (veintena) of the xiuhpōhualli is named, but what I'm finding on this actually disagrees with Burton's glossary, and the stuff in the book is vague enough that it's not actually definitive imo. Suffice it to say that in the past 48 hours I have learned more about the Mexica calendar than I have ever wanted to know. Najawin ☎ 05:16, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Scratching my head and flipping madly through my copy of Against Nature. My cursory take is that, especially since you left this talk page note here, the logic of reconstructing the Tonalpohualli is indisputable; the glossary is quite clear that trecena = 13 days, and it's even in the book itself if you squint at a line from Thraenrellis about the Nemontemi. In any case, I don't think this page needs renaming: rather, it can focus on the unnamed xiuhpōhualli (the primary calendar in Against Nature, as you said), with a disambiguation link to Tonalpohualli and an in-article mention that the separate, ceremonial calendar was also referred to as "Aztec calendar" at times by the Doctor.

Regarding veintana, what inconsistency or vagueness are you seeing? Of course when the glossary or the usage in the novel contradicts the real world, we go with the glossary definition and note the inconsistency in a behind-the-scenes note; but in this case, Against Nature explicitly names the twenty-day period as "ilhuitl". – n8 (☎) 17:21, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't think the Thraenrellis comment at all gives us the trecena, it's referring to adding an additional 13 days during the 52 year cycle to make up for the fact that we have leap years and such that they don't account for. (Indeed, literally, 13*4 = 52.) Whether or not they realized the math works out perfectly due to astronomy or whether or not they just chose a number they took to be sacred and it made the math work out is something I'm unaware of, but it's not in itself related to a trecena.

As for renaming vs splitting, I agree, we can do something else, I'm unsure which option is correct, or if there's another choice entirely. But the idea that solar years are explicitly 365 days isn't explicitly found in Against Nature (it does give us 5 extra days, but I don't think it gives us 365 days), I don't think, so while there are two distinct calendars, you need what little we know about the xiuhpōhualli to reconstruct the tōnalpōhualli. Hence why I'm slightly hesitant to do that, even though we can establish that there are two distinct calendars, you need information from the one in order to reconstruct the other from what we have.

Re veintana, the definition of "ilhuitl" calls it a "festival period of twenty days". This doesn't specify that it's a unit on a calendar and could instead just be a long celebration that happens every once in a while. So I don't think it's enough to specify that it's actually what Burton intended it to be. What I've found suggests that while there are festivals that started the veintanas, it wasn't a festival period per se. Obviously Burton has done far more research into this than I, but I don't think we can make this leap given what the book actually says. Najawin ☎ 17:41, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Quite right on all points. Well, in the spirit of collecting all potentially useful information, here are the relevant bits from Nobody's Gift: "There's nothing for sale in the market, not at this time of year. Time has paused in the awkward gap in the Mexica calendar: 18 months of twenty days equals 360 days, five short of a year. For five Nothing days, life stops." And later, Orman says that Tochtli was "born an Aztec month early". – n8 (☎) 22:55, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

That's in one sense deeply helpful and in another deeply unhelpful. Helpful in that it strengthens our understanding of what's going on in-universe even better, giving us basically the entire thing (literally we just need the naming conventions and explicitly to identify the one as a solar calendar or civic calendar rather than it just being an inference and I think we're good). Unhelpful in that it uses the term "Mexica", which is a problem with everything I'm citing from Against Nature as well, but dear lord is that a mess I'm going to have to resolve. (Out of curiosity, does the work also use the term "Aztec"? It would be very very helpful if it did. Because as it stands Against Nature has really only one or two places where you can connect "Mexica" to "Aztec" even if it's absolutely abundantly clear that they're meant to be the same thing as far as the wiki cares about these things.) Najawin ☎ 23:12, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Well, there is that "Aztec month" bit I quoted! Other than that, the words Aztec and Mexica are only used a few times, and the closest proximity is: "Tochtli looks him up and down, and the Doctor sees a suspicion cross the Aztec's face. The merchant skips the usual formal pleasantries of Mexica manners. 'Who are you looking for?' he says." (In those sentences, Tochtli = the Aztec = the merchant.) The words aren't quite used interchangeably, but I think it's pretty clear that Mexica is the culture/race and Aztec is the empire. To the extent that the wiki cares about these things, where Roman culture and Roman people come from the Roman Empire, I'd say that we have a case for the words being synonyms. – n8 (☎) 00:06, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Well that will be a major rewrite to Aztec, and one that some people might object to on the grounds that it's not particularly "average user friendly". But thank you, I'll get to that discussion eventually. Najawin ☎ 00:12, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Also relevant, from The Left-Handed Hummingbird:

• "‘How much do you know about your ancestors?’ ‘The Mexica? Mostly what my grandmother told me. The Aztecs ruled this country for over a century. Then the Spanish came.’"
• "The Aztecs’ greatest temple had been at the centre of their magnificent city: Tenochtitlan, mighty Tenochtitlan. [...] He sighed, remembering the temple in its full glory, remembering Barbara’s futile attempt to change the Mexica." And later, "He would have no more success in making this man understand him than Barbara had in swaying the entire Aztec people."

I'll admit I haven't read The Left-Handed Hummingbird, but flipping through it, it seems to have some overlap with the setting of Against Nature? Not going to blow up the scope of this project too quickly, but let this note serve as a pointer for future editors. – n8 (☎) 00:19, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I full admit to not having read LHH either, but it seems to be in a similar physical location. The time period is different afaik, either one or two calendar cycles later. Najawin ☎ 00:26, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Lots of good gems in there, yeah. Eg I'm pretty sure that second bullet point above confirms for the first time that The Aztecs was set in Tenochtitlan. That could probably be wikified a little better... But what did I say about scope?

Well, here's a more relevant tidbit: Benny reads a textbook that says, "As well as being the god of sun and war, Huitzilopochtli was the personal deity of the Mexica, the denizens of Tenochtitlan." (See above for how Tenochtitlan had been introduced in the novel.) Benny's textbook also ... well, I hate to tell you this ... it also discusses Quetzalcoatl, whom prophesy said "would return in the year One Reed – 1519, the year of Cortés’ arrival in the New World." I, uhh. Huh. Maybe we can just say her textbook got it wrong? – n8 (☎) 00:42, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

If there's no rename or split, User:Najawin/sandbox is a decent first pass at how I'd redo the page. My immediate worry is that the BTS section is a bit large, which could be cut down with either a rename or a split. Najawin ☎ 20:48, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Why the delete tag on Ome Ozmatli, though? I agree the information should be on the page of the deities, but we do have 10 February etc. – n8 (☎) 22:04, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Eh, maybe? It just feels too trivial for me, and ultimately things like, for instance, "One Rabbit" can refer to both a day, a year, and a trecena, so it feels more like at the very least it needs to be DABed. Najawin ☎ 22:10, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough! – n8 (☎) 22:36, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

If anyone would like to add commentary coming back to this, feel free to do so, if there are no complaints/comments in the next week I'm going to port User:Najawin/sandbox to this page. Najawin ☎ 06:37, 12 September 2022 (UTC)