Overtone

This is the fifth of the thirteen numbers, or tones, that combine with the twenty day signs to form the 260-day Tzolk'in. In living Maya daykeeping the coefficient is simply the number five, job', and five carries the sense of the centre, the point that gathers the four directions around it. The name recorded here, Overtone, and its keyword of empowerment and radiance belong to the modern Dreamspell system of Jose Arguelles, a New Age reinterpretation from the 1980s that is distinct from the Maya count and not part of traditional daykeeping. The daykeepers reckon by the number itself. The authentic element is the coefficient five and its role in the interlocking of thirteen numbers with twenty day signs that produces the 260 unique days of the sacred count still kept in highland Guatemala.

The fifth of the thirteen numbers that combine with the twenty day signs to generate the Tzolk'in's 260-day count, marking the fifth day of its trecena, past the cycle's earlier days and approaching its midpoint. Thirteen numbers is itself a significant structural choice in the Tzolk'in: the count is widely read by scholars as reflecting the number of layers in the Maya conception of the heavens, thirteen levels above the earth paired with nine levels of the underworld in some cosmological schemes recorded in colonial and epigraphic sources, though the precise correspondence between the calendar's arithmetic and this cosmological structure remains a matter of scholarly interpretation rather than an explicit statement in any single surviving text.

Sources Time and the Highland MayaBarbara Tedlock with Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013Jose Arguelles

Five is where the notation changes. One to four are written as dots; five is written as a single bar, and every coefficient above it is built from bars and dots together. The bar-and-dot system is shared across Mesoamerica and appears on monuments from well before the Classic Maya period.

Five also governs the relation between the two calendars. A 365-day Haab year advances the Tzolk'in day sign by five places, because 365 leaves a remainder of five on division by twenty, and that single fact produces the four Year Bearers, the fifty-two-year Calendar Round and the restriction of any given Haab position to four of the twenty signs. Five is doing more work in the Maya calendar than any other small number.

Maya numerals are written with a dot for one and a bar for five, and the coefficient of a day is written in exactly that way in the inscriptions, set beside the day sign in its cartouche. The system is positional and includes a sign for zero, which is why the Long Count can be written as a string of places, but within the 260-day count no number above thirteen ever occurs and the notation stays simple.

Overtone, the name given to this coefficient in modern popular writing, comes from the Dreamspell devised by Jose Arguelles and published in 1987. It has no counterpart in Maya sources, where the coefficient is the number five and is written with one bar.

Sources Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An IntroductionJ. Eric S. Thompson with Dreamspell: The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013Jose Arguelles