Manik is the seventh of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Manik, it corresponds to the day Kej, the deer, in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the grasping hand and the deer, the hand that heals and accomplishes, and the deer as a sign of the forest, of stability, and of the four pillars that hold up the world. It is associated with healing, capability, and stewardship. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the west and the colour black. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that tradition understands them.
Manik is the seventh of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Kej, the word for deer in K'iche', matching the Yucatec sign's own association with the deer and, by extension in the daykeeping tradition, with the hand as an instrument of skilled work and healing. In the directional scheme, Manik belongs to the west and the colour black. Contemporary K'iche' daykeepers associate a Kej day with strength, stability and groundedness, qualities linked to the deer's role in Mesoamerican thought as an animal of the forest and the hunt, a reading that also echoes the deer imagery recurring in the Haab month names Sip and, on one proposed but unsettled etymology, Keh in the unrelated 365-day solar calendar.