Mayan Astrology

Mayan astrology rests on the Tzolkin, a 260-day ritual calendar, and its structure is a piece of clean combinatorics.

Twenty named day signs, Imix, Ik, Akbal, Kan, Chicchan, Cimi, Manik, Lamat, Muluc, Oc, Chuen, Eb, Ben, Ix, Men, Cib, Caban, Etznab, Cauac and Ahau in the Yucatec names, run against thirteen numbers or tones. Both cycles advance together each day, so day 1 Imix is followed by 2 Ik and so on; because 13 and 20 share no common factor, every combination occurs once before the pattern repeats, which takes 260 days.

Each day sign carries a character, a patron, a world direction and a colour, and each tone carries a quality of force or intensity. A person born on a given day takes that sign and tone, and daykeepers read the combination for temperament, aptitude and vocation.

The Tzolkin meshes with the 365-day solar year, the Haab, of eighteen months of twenty days plus a five-day remainder. The two calendars return to the same pairing every 18,980 days, which is fifty-two years, the Calendar Round that structured Mesoamerican ritual life. Beyond that the Maya kept the Long Count, an absolute day tally from a base date in 3114 BCE, which is what allowed them to date monuments precisely and is why Maya chronology can be correlated with the Western calendar at all.

Why 260 days is unresolved. Proposals include the approximate human gestation period, the interval between zenith passages of the sun at certain Mesoamerican latitudes, and the cycle of Venus as a morning star; none is established, and the count is attested across Mesoamerica from at least the first millennium BCE, older than the Maya themselves.

This is the discipline on this list where the distinction between the living tradition and the Western product is sharpest, and it should be stated directly.

The Tzolkin is still kept. Daykeepers, ajq'ij, in the Guatemalan highlands among the Kiche, Kaqchikel, Mam and Tzutujil maintain an unbroken day count, conduct ceremonies on appropriate days, and read birth days for the people who consult them. That count is continuous and the practice is a functioning part of Maya religious life, currently undergoing a public revival after decades in which it was practised quietly through the Guatemalan civil war and the violence against indigenous communities that accompanied it.

Alongside it, and not connected to it, sits the Dreamspell or Thirteen Moon calendar devised by Jose Arguelles and published in 1990. It uses the twenty signs and thirteen tones and looks like the Tzolkin, but it runs on a different correlation, adds a leap-day rule the Maya count does not have, and therefore gives a different sign for the same birthday. Its vocabulary, galactic signatures, the Harmonic Convergence, tones of creation, is Arguelles's own synthesis. Guatemalan Maya elders have objected publicly to it being presented as Maya.

The 2012 episode belongs here too. The end of the thirteenth baktun of the Long Count on 21 December 2012 was a calendar rollover, comparable to an odometer, and Maya inscriptions themselves refer to dates far beyond it. The apocalyptic and transformational readings attached to it in the West came from Arguelles, Terence McKenna and a large popular literature, not from Maya sources, and Maya organisations said so at the time.

Anyone approaching this discipline commercially should know which count they are being sold.