Xul, the Month of the Dog

Xul is the sixth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Xul, glossed as the dog and also carrying the sense of an end, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, a Maya date naming the day by its place within the month together with its Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two interlocking cycles of Maya timekeeping: the 365-day Haab and the 260-day Tzolk'in turn together like meshed gears, returning to the same paired position only once every fifty-two years, the span the Maya knew as the Calendar Round.

Xul is the sixth month, and its name is generally translated as end, a reading consistent with its position roughly at the midpoint of the eighteen twenty-day months rather than at the calendar's actual close, which suggests the name may originally have marked the end of a distinct ritual or agricultural sub-cycle rather than the Haab as a whole. Xul's glyph in some Classic inscriptions has been associated by epigraphers with dog imagery, and a dog is one of several animals linked to the month in later ethnographic and colonial sources, though the specific ceremonial content Diego de Landa records for the surrounding months centres on general renewal and purification rather than on a dog cult tied exclusively to Xul. As with the calendar's other months, its seasonal position drifted over centuries because the 365-day vague year carries no leap-day correction.