Mak

Mak is the thirteenth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Mak, glossed as enclosed or covered, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, built of eighteen twenty-day months and a closing five-day period. Together with the 260-day sacred count it forms the two-cycle system the Maya used to locate every day, the paired Tzolk'in and Haab date repeating only across the fifty-two-year span of the Calendar Round.

Mak, the thirteenth month, is generally translated as enclosed or covered, a reading epigraphers connect to a described rite involving the ceremonial extinguishing and rekindling of fire, recorded by Diego de Landa as taking place around this part of the ritual year and involving elderly participants pouring water on a new fire before it was ceremonially relit, a renewal rite structurally comparable, though not identical in mechanics or meaning, to the much later and unrelated Aztec New Fire Ceremony marking the completion of their own fifty-two-year Calendar Round binding. Whether Mak's name derives specifically from the covering or enclosing of the fire, or from an unrelated sense of the same root, is not settled with certainty from the surviving colonial and epigraphic sources.

Mak is glossed as enclosed or covered, and it is the thirteenth of the eighteen full months. Landa's account associates the month with a ceremony he calls Tuppkak, involving fire, though the details of his description are compressed and have been read in more than one way.

Where a colonial festival notice is thin the responsible course is to report it as thin. The Relacion survives only in an abridgement made after Landa's death, its month notices vary greatly in length and clarity, and several have no counterpart in any other source. That does not make them worthless, but it does mean a modern reconstruction of a Postclassic ceremony built on one such notice is a reconstruction and should say so.

A Maya date does not name a month and a number in the way a European one does. It names a day in the 260-day Tzolk'in, by number and sign, and a position in the 365-day Haab, by day and month, and the two together form the Calendar Round, which repeats only after 18,980 days, a little under fifty-two years. Within the Haab the days of a month are numbered from zero to nineteen, and the zero day is not called first but seated, the seating of the month, a usage the Classic inscriptions write with its own glyph.