Lamat

Lamat is the eighth 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, Lamat, it corresponds to the day Q'anil in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery joins the star, particularly Venus, whose cycles the Maya tracked with great care, and the rabbit, together with abundance, fertility, and harmony; the K'iche' Q'anil is explicitly the day of the seed and the ripening harvest. 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, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them.

Lamat is the eighth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Q'anil, a name connected to the colour yellow and, by extension, to ripeness, seeds and abundance. Lamat's imagery combines the star, generally identified with the planet Venus given its prominence in Maya astronomy, with the rabbit, a pairing epigraphers connect to the Maya association of a rabbit figure with the moon, visible in the animal shapes some traditions read into the lunar surface. In the directional scheme, Lamat belongs to the south and the colour yellow, closing the second four-day directional set. The Venus association situates Lamat within the wider Maya tradition of tracking Venus's synodic cycle, recorded with particular precision in the Postclassic Dresden Codex's Venus tables.

Lamat in Yucatec is Q'anil in K'iche', a word built on the root for yellow and for ripeness, and it is one of the day names most often connected with maize seed in highland practice. The Classic glyph is generally read as a star sign, and Lamat is widely associated with Venus, the planet whose 584-day cycle the Dresden Codex tabulates against the 260-day count in one of the most sophisticated pieces of astronomy surviving from the pre-Columbian Americas.

The central Mexican eighth sign is Tochtli, rabbit, and the Maya lists also gloss Lamat as rabbit, so the two agree even though the star reading is the one that dominates in the inscriptions. The rabbit is the animal Mesoamerican tradition sees in the face of the Moon, and both associations, the lunar rabbit and the Venus star, belong to the sign at once.

Lamat opens a trecena once in each 260-day round and is not among the four Year Bearers of either system, the Classic Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban or the Postclassic Yucatec Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.

The Venus association gives the eighth sign a place in the most technical Maya astronomy that survives. The Dresden Codex sets out a Venus table running the planet's 584-day synodic cycle against the 260-day count and correcting the accumulated error at intervals, and the day names in that table are part of the apparatus rather than decoration. Lamat sits inside a working piece of mathematics.