Mol

Mol is the eighth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months and a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Mol, glossed as water and carrying the sense of gathering or collecting, 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 great interlocking cycles of Maya timekeeping; a full Maya calendar-round date names both the Tzolk'in day and the Haab position, a combination that does not repeat for fifty-two years and so fixes a day with considerable precision within that span.

Mol, the eighth month, is generally translated as to gather or to collect, and Diego de Landa's account of the Yucatec ritual year places ceremonies concerned with water and with the renewal of ritual implements in this part of the calendar, a reading some scholars connect to the gathering of water from cenotes, the natural sinkholes that were the primary fresh-water source across much of the northern Yucatan Peninsula and were themselves treated as sacred access points to the underworld. As with the calendar's other months, this association rests on colonial-period ethnographic description rather than on an unambiguous Classic-period inscriptional record naming a specific water rite for Mol alone, and the month's glyph does not by itself confirm the connection independently of Landa's text.

Mol is glossed as water and as gathering, and it is the eighth of the eighteen full months. Its glyph is well attested in the Classic inscriptions, where Haab positions are written after the Tzolk'in day in the standard Initial Series formula that opens a dated monument.

That formula is worth describing, because it is how almost everything known about Classic chronology reaches us. A monument opens with a large introductory glyph, then the five Long Count places from baktun down to kin, then the Tzolk'in day, then a run of supplementary glyphs recording the lunar age and other cycles, and finally the Haab position such as a day of Mol. The whole assembly fixes one day absolutely.

Because the Long Count, the Tzolk'in and the Haab are independent counts of different lengths, an Initial Series is heavily redundant, and that redundancy is what allowed the system to be deciphered and what allows a damaged inscription to be reconstructed. A single surviving Haab position can settle which of several possible readings of an eroded Long Count is correct.

A last point about the Haab in the Initial Series. The Haab position is written last in the formula, after the Tzolk'in day and the supplementary series, and the two are separated in the text by material about the Moon. That ordering is consistent across the Classic lowlands and is one of the regularities that allowed the structure of the inscriptions to be worked out long before the language itself could be read.