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, and a 260 day religious, ceremonial calendar, the. 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" 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)