Men

Men is the fifteenth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Men, it corresponds to the day Tz'ikin, the bird, in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the eagle, vision, the higher mind, and the far sight of the bird that rises above the land; the K'iche' Tz'ikin is also the day of fortune and money, the messenger between the sacred and the human. It is associated with aspiration, clarity of sight, and good luck. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the west and the colour black. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day.

Men is the fifteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Tz'ikin, the general K'iche' word for bird, matching the Yucatec sign's own association with the eagle and with vision, both literal eyesight and, by extension, foresight or wisdom. In the directional scheme, Men belongs to the west and the colour black. Birds held wide-ranging symbolic importance across Maya religion, from the principal bird deity associated with the Popol Vuh's antagonist Vucub Caquix to the many bird forms taken by deities and ancestral spirits in Classic-period art, and Tz'ikin is read by contemporary daykeepers as governing prosperity, good fortune and clear sight in both a practical and a spiritual sense.

Men in Yucatec is Tz'ikin in K'iche', and the two names diverge in an interesting way: Yucatec Men is generally read as eagle, while K'iche' Tz'ikin means bird in the general sense, and highland daykeepers connect it with fortune and with the messenger between the human world and the divine.

The central Mexican fifteenth sign is Cuauhtli, eagle, agreeing with the Yucatec reading. Between them the three traditions preserve a sign that is unambiguously a bird and probably specifically a raptor, with the highland gloss the broadest of the three.

Men opens a trecena once in each 260-day round and is not a Year Bearer in either Maya set, the Classic Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban or the Yucatec Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak. The bird's association with elevation and with seeing at a distance is the one that recurs across the sources, and it is worth noting that the atlas records the association rather than any claim about what a person born on the day will be like, which is a matter for a daykeeper working with a whole birth count and not for a reference entry.

The fifteenth position is a good place to note what the sources actually are. For the Classic period the evidence is carved and painted inscriptions; for the Postclassic, the four surviving screenfold codices; for the sixteenth century, colonial accounts and the Books of Chilam Balam; and for the present, the practice of daykeepers in highland Guatemala. These are four different kinds of evidence and they do not always agree.