Imix

Imix is the first of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya. The count interlocks twenty named day signs with thirteen numbers, and it is not an artifact of the past: it is still kept today by K'iche', Ixil, Mam, and other Maya daykeepers, the ajq'ij of highland Guatemala, alongside the reconstructed Classic-period system known from the inscriptions. This day sign is recorded here by its colonial Yucatec name, Imix; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Imox. Its imagery is the waterlily and the crocodile, the primal waters and the earth that floats upon them, a sign of origin, nurture, and the source. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the east and the colour red, the place of sunrise and beginnings. These are the meanings the tradition carries.

Imix opens not only the twenty-sign cycle recorded here in its colonial Yucatec ordering but, independently, a different conventional starting point in the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition, where the count is customarily described beginning from B'atz', the eleventh sign in the Yucatec ordering used throughout this atlas, reflecting the fact that the Tzolk'in's 260-day cycle has no single privileged starting point built into its own arithmetic; any position can serve as a count's beginning, and different communities and different colonial-era sources fixed their own conventional first day for descriptive purposes. Imix's directional and colour placement, east and red, is nonetheless a fixed structural feature independent of which day a given tradition treats as first, since it follows from Imix's position, one, within the twenty-sign sequence rather than from any claim about where the count itself begins.

The sign written Imix in the colonial Yucatec sources is Imox to the ajq'ijab', the daykeepers of the K'iche' highlands who still run the count today, and the Classic-period inscriptions carry it as the first of the twenty with a glyph of its own rather than any later spelling. Reading the three together is the ordinary condition of Maya calendar study: one sequence, several languages, and a long documentary gap between the carved record and the living practice that survived it.

The 260-day count reached well beyond the Maya area. In central Mexico the same arithmetic of twenty signs against thirteen numbers ran as the tonalpohualli, and the sign standing first there is Cipactli, the crocodile or earth caiman, the same primal reptile afloat in the first waters that Imix carries. Correspondences of this kind hold along the whole list, which is the strongest single reason to think the count older than any one of the peoples who kept it.

Within the count, each of the twenty signs opens a trecena, a run of thirteen consecutively numbered days, exactly once in every 260-day round, so a trecena beginning 1 Imix exists and colours the twelve days after it. Imix is not among the four signs able to carry a year. In the Classic system those are Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban; in the Postclassic Yucatec system Diego de Landa recorded they are Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.