A Priesthood Interrupted, Not Erased

The formal institutional structure Landa describes, an ordained hierarchy of priests attached to specific temples and supported by tribute, did not survive Spanish conquest and colonization intact. But the underlying conviction the Ah K'in served, that time itself carries religious weight and that correctly reading it requires trained specialists, persisted in Maya communities well beyond the institutions that once housed it. Barbara Tedlock's ethnographic study of the K'iche' Maya highlands documents daykeepers, ajq'ijab', who continue today to maintain and consult the 260-day sacred count in ongoing practice, reading days, conducting ceremonies and serving their communities in a role that is recognizably continuous with the calendrical priesthood Landa recorded centuries earlier, even though it descends through Highland K'iche' tradition rather than directly from the Postclassic Yucatec office.

This is a living tradition rather than a historical curiosity, and Maya daykeeping today is practiced, not merely studied or reconstructed from colonial sources. The Ah K'in entry here describes the specific, textually attested Postclassic Yucatec office; it is not a claim that this exact office survives unchanged, and it should be read alongside that broader, genuinely continuous Maya calendrical tradition rather than as evidence that Maya religion ended at the conquest.