Planetary

This is the tenth of the thirteen numbers, or tones, that combine with the twenty day signs to build the 260-day Tzolk'in. In living Maya daykeeping the coefficient is simply the number ten, lajuj, often felt in the rhythm of the trecena as a day of manifestation, when what the period set in motion takes solid shape. The name recorded here, Planetary, and its keyword of manifestation belong to the modern Dreamspell system of Jose Arguelles, a New Age framework from the 1980s distinct from traditional Maya practice; the daykeepers reckon by the number itself. The authentic element is the coefficient ten and its place in the pairing of thirteen numbers with twenty day signs that generates the 260 distinct days of the sacred count kept in highland Guatemala.

The tenth of the thirteen numbers that combine with the twenty day signs to generate the Tzolk'in's 260-day count, marking the tenth day of its trecena, three days from its completion at thirteen. Ten is also, independently of the Tzolk'in, the base of the separate Heavenly Stem cycle used in the unrelated Chinese sexagenary calendar, a coincidence of small round numbers across two entirely independent calendrical traditions rather than evidence of any historical connection between Mesoamerican and East Asian calendar systems, which developed in complete isolation from one another.

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

Ten is written as two bars, the first coefficient to need no dots at all. Ten is the third day from the end of a trecena, and in the graded reading that living daykeepers give the numbers, the coefficients in the upper part of the range are understood as strong, so a day in the tens carries its sign forcefully.

It is worth being precise about what that means. The reading is comparative rather than categorical: a high number intensifies, a low number is gentler, and the sign supplies the content. That is a modest and coherent system, and it is quite different from the assignment of thirteen distinct named qualities found in modern popular sources.

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.

Planetary, the name given to this coefficient in that literature, comes from Jose Arguelles's Dreamspell of 1987. The atlas holds the Dreamspell as its own system, described in its own right, and keeps it separate from the Tzolk'in it borrows from, because conflating the two is the commonest error made about the Maya calendar.

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