Etznab is the eighteenth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, kept by living daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Etznab, it corresponds to the day Tijax in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the flint knife and the obsidian mirror, truth that cuts, the blade that separates right from wrong, and the healing that comes of a clean incision; the K'iche' Tijax is a day of the healer and of sharp resolution. It is associated with truth, reflection, and the courage to face what the mirror shows. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the north and the colour white. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day.
Etznab is the eighteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Tijax, meaning flint or a stone blade, matching the Yucatec sign's own association with flint and the mirror, both cutting and reflective properties of worked stone. In the directional scheme, Etznab belongs to the north and the colour white. Obsidian and flint blades served a documented dual role in Maya practice as both practical cutting tools and instruments of ritual bloodletting, a sanctioned form of self-sacrifice attested in Classic-period art and inscriptions as a means of communicating with ancestors and deities, and Tijax is read by contemporary daykeepers as governing conflict, surgery and the sharp, sometimes painful clarity that comes from confronting a difficult truth.