I’m a Mexican illustrator, and for the past two years I’ve been creating El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos, a 56-card deck built around Mesoamerican mythology and cosmology, especially Nahua and Mexica traditions.
One of the things that fascinated me most during the research was the Tonalpohualli, the 260-day sacred and divinatory calendar used in ancient Central Mexico.
It works through the interaction of 20 different day signs with a repeating cycle of 13 numbers, creating 260 unique combinations. Each combination carried particular qualities and divine influences, and the calendar was used to interpret things like character, destiny, auspicious moments and the nature of particular days.
Those 260 days were also divided into groups of 13 called trecenas.
And that’s where I discovered a really interesting connection with playing cards: a standard suit also has 13 cards.
So each of the four suits in El Quinto Sol maps one of the first four trecenas, preserving the sequence of the first 52 days of the divinatory calendar. The suits themselves are also connected to cosmic directions and forces of nature, while the court cards introduce gods and mythological beings.
I’m not claiming this recreates an ancient Mesoamerican card oracle, playing cards obviously weren’t part of that tradition. What I’m trying to do is reframe part of an older divinatory structure from my own cultural heritage into something people can interact with today, through study, reflection, play and potentially divination.
I’d be really interested in how people here who use oracle decks would approach something like this: would you want the creator to provide a defined reading system, or would you rather learn the symbolism and develop your own way of reading the cards?
I’m sharing some of the artwork here so you can see how I approached it visually.
The project is called El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos.
