Cib

Cib is the sixteenth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, kept by living daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Cib, it corresponds to the day Ajmaq in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the owl and the wax or candle, wisdom, the ancestors, and the forgiveness of faults; the K'iche' Ajmaq is the day of pardon, of acknowledging wrongdoing, and of the debt owed to the forebears. It is associated with conscience, remembrance, and the counsel of the old. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the south and the colour yellow. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that living tradition understands them.

Cib is the sixteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Ajmaq, a name connected in K'iche' to sin, transgression and, by extension, to forgiveness and to the ancestors before whom wrongdoing is acknowledged. The Yucatec sign's own association with the owl and with the ancestors fits this same register, since owls carried an underworld and death association across Mesoamerican tradition generally, linking Cib to communication with those who have died. In the directional scheme, Cib belongs to the south and the colour yellow, closing the fourth of the five four-day directional sets. Contemporary daykeepers read an Ajmaq day as one suited to ceremonies of reconciliation, confession and the resolving of old grievances with the deceased or with the living.

Cib is the Yucatec name of the sixteenth sign, glossed as wax and as candle, and also read as owl in the later lists. The K'iche' name is Ajmaq, which means something closer to sinner or the one who owes, and highland practice reads the day in terms of ancestral debt and forgiveness, a substantially different sense from the Yucatec one.

Central Mexico gives Cozcacuauhtli, the king vulture, in this position. Vulture, owl and wax candle are three quite distinct images, which makes the sixteenth one of the least stable positions in the shared sequence and a standing puzzle for anyone trying to reconstruct an original list behind the surviving ones.

What the traditions do agree on is the connection with the ancestors and with what is owed to them, whether that is expressed through the vulture that consumes the dead, the owl that announces death, or the candle burned at a shrine. Cib opens a trecena once in each round and is not a Year Bearer in either the Classic set, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, or the Postclassic Yucatec set, Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.

That instability has a practical consequence for anyone comparing lists. A table equating the twenty Maya signs with the twenty Nahua ones position by position is accurate as a statement about order and unreliable as a statement about meaning, and the sixteenth position is where it fails most plainly. The count travelled as a structure; the imagery attached to it was local.