Okay, so I wanted to figure out this whole Aztec zodiac sign thing. You know, like, what’s my sign and what does it even mean? I’d seen some stuff online, but it seemed kinda complicated, so I decided to build a simple calculator for myself.
First, I needed to understand how the Aztec calendar works. Turns out, it’s way different from the Gregorian calendar we use every day. It has these things called “day signs” and “trecenas.” It’s all a bit much to explain here, but basically, you have a combination of a day sign (like Crocodile or Wind) and a number (1 to 13) within a 13-day period called a trecena. There are 20 day signs in total.
I started by gathering all the info about the day signs. I made a list of them in order, like this:
- Cipactli (Crocodile)
- Ehecatl (Wind)
- Calli (House)
- Cuetzpalin (Lizard)
- …and so on until I got to the 20th, Xochitl (Flower).
Then, I realized I needed a way to connect a regular date (like, say, March 15th) to the Aztec calendar. That was the tricky part. I did some digging, and it’s complicated as all, because those calendars are not the same, and they have different starting points. So, after a lot of researching I decided to build this, not based on the real thing, but, you know…more like a tribute.
So, I grabbed the module datetime in python, after importing it, I wrote a simply algorithm to convert dates.
Then I wrote a code that transforms any given day into those signs, just like this:
day_signs = [
"Cipactli (Crocodile)",
"Ehecatl (Wind)",
"Calli (House)",
"Cuetzpalin (Lizard)",
#... (the rest of the signs)
"Xochitl (Flower)"
def get_aztec_sign(day, month, year):
#Some date operation here.
#day_number represents the remainder of a division.
return day_signs[day_number]
I played around with my birthdate, my wife’s, my kid’s… It was pretty cool to see the different signs pop up. Crocodile! Wind! Flower! I even added some little descriptions of each sign I found online, just to make it more fun. I’m not sure how truly accurate it is, given how complex the real Aztec calendar system is, but it’s definitely a fun little tool, and a good coding practice anyway!
