Living Continuities in Maya Time-Keeping

Wayeb itself is attested from Classic and Postclassic textual and epigraphic sources, and the 365-day Haab civil calendar that produced it fell out of formal use after the Spanish conquest disrupted the institutions that maintained it. Maya calendrical knowledge did not vanish with it. Barbara Tedlock's ethnographic study of highland Guatemala documents a living tradition of Maya daykeepers, ajq'ijab' among the K'iche', who continue to maintain and consult the separate two hundred sixty day sacred count in ongoing ritual practice today, a genuinely unbroken thread of Maya time-keeping rather than a modern reconstruction.

That living daykeeping tradition is a distinct calendar from the Haab that produced Wayeb, and this article does not claim that Wayeb itself is observed today in its Classic or Postclassic form. What can be said honestly is that the deeper Maya conviction Wayeb expressed, that certain stretches of time carry more danger than others and require deliberate ritual attention, is not a belief that belongs only to the past: Maya communities practicing daykeeping today hold and act on comparable convictions about auspicious and dangerous time as a living part of their religious life, not as something reconstructed from dead sources.