Sip

Sip is the third of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Sip, with the gloss of the red conjunction, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its Classic glyphic form, from the inscriptions. In Yucatec tradition Sip is associated with a deity of the hunt, and the month carried hunting observances. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, a Maya date naming the day by its place within the month alongside its 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, which together with the 260-day sacred count forms the interlocking system the Calendar Round completes every fifty-two years.

Sip, also transcribed Zip, is the third month and shares its name with Zip, a Yucatec deity or class of deities associated with deer and the hunt, appearing in colonial accounts as a guardian spirit hunters were expected to propitiate before taking game. Diego de Landa records a ceremony conducted around this part of the year in which hunters and physicians honoured their respective patron figures and purified their tools, though as with the other months the precise date and the boundary between one month's rites and the next are better attested in Landa's general description than in a month-by-month inscriptional record. The recurrence of hunting imagery in the month's glyph in some Classic inscriptions is consistent with, though not conclusive proof of, a continuity between the Classic-period and colonial-period associations of the name.

Sip, older spelling Zip, is the red conjunction, the partner of Wo, the black conjunction, that precedes it. In colonial Yucatec sources the word Sip is also a name associated with the deer and with hunting, and hunters are described as observing the month, which is one of the places where a Haab month carries a recognisable occupational association rather than only a name.

That association should not be pressed into a season. Because the Haab has no leap-day correction its 365 days lose ground against the true solar year by about a quarter of a day annually, so the month drifted steadily through the real calendar over the centuries and cannot have marked a fixed hunting season for long. Whatever seasonal fit the name once had was true of a particular era and not of the calendar as such.

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.