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The calendar was not only central to religion in Mesoamerica, it was central to people's lives. Two separate calendars were observed, a solar calendar of 365 days (presumeably adjusted in leap years), and a Sacred Calendar, known as the Tonalpohualli of 260 days. The continuous sequence and the twenty signs are shown below:
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Since there are 20 signs and 13 numbers, any given day sequence will repeat every 13x20=260 days, hence the 260-day Sacred Calendar.
Only four of the signs, Calli, Tochtli, Acatl, and Tecpatl, can be the names of a year - a Solar Year. This is because a year is named for the first day in that year, and, since there is one Sacred Year + 105 days in a Solar Year, the sign of the first day will advance by 5 every year, meaning that only 20/5=4 of the day-signs can be year-names. The numbers are not evenly divisible, so any number can define a year.
The Solar Year is divided into eighteen months, each one twenty days long. Since there are
twenty signs, each month of a given year begins on the same sign as the year. 18x20=360, which means 5 (or 6) days are left over to finish the year; these are known as the Nemotemi, the "Five Useless Days."
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Now, just a little more arithmetic shows that, since only four of the signs can define a year
but since all thirteen of the numbers can, the cycle you see moving above begins to repeat
itself after 13x4=52 years, which was known as a "Bundle of Years." Such a bundle is defined as beginning in a
year whose first day is Ome Acatl (Two Reed), which is why the number two, along with the
year-signs Acatl, Tecpatl, Calli, and Tochtli, are shown in red in the moving graphic. Fifty-two years is also the amount of time it takes for Venus to make one complete cycle of its
phases and positions relative to the earth and sun.
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