Oc

Oc is the tenth 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, Oc, it corresponds to the day Tz'i' in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the dog, loyalty, guidance, and companionship, and the dog that in Maya belief leads the soul across the waters to the underworld; the K'iche' Tz'i' also carries the sense of authority and law. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the north and the colour white. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them.

Oc is the tenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Tz'i', the word for dog in K'iche', matching the Yucatec sign's own association with the dog and, by extension, with loyalty, guidance and law. Dogs held a documented role in Maya belief as guides for the soul through the underworld, Xibalba, an association attested in Classic-period iconography showing dog figures accompanying the dead, and echoed independently in the unrelated Aztec belief that the dog-headed god Xolotl guided souls to the underworld, a parallel between two distinct Mesoamerican traditions rather than evidence of one borrowing from the other. In the directional scheme, Oc belongs to the north and the colour white.

Yucatec Oc is K'iche' Tz'i', dog, and both traditions read the sign through the dog's role as guide and companion. In the Popol Vuh and in Mesoamerican thought more widely the dog accompanies the dead across water, and the animal is buried with the dead at many sites, so the day carries an association with escort and with the crossing rather than with domestic affection.

The tonalpohualli agrees, placing Itzcuintli, dog, in tenth position, one more of the exact matches that run through the twenty-sign list on both sides of the Isthmus.

Highland daykeepers also connect Tz'i' with law and with the settling of disputes, a meaning with no obvious counterpart in the Yucatec sources and one that shows the living tradition is not simply a survival of what the colonial documents describe. It has kept developing. Oc opens a trecena once in each 260-day round and is not among the four Year Bearers of either the Classic system, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, or the Yucatec one, Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.

The tenth position also illustrates how the count is written. A day is named by its number and sign together with its position in the 365-day Haab, and the pair repeats only after 18,980 days, a little under fifty-two years, which is the Calendar Round. Every day named Oc in the inscriptions carries that fuller address, and it is the Haab half of it that fixes a date within a lifetime.