Spectral

This is the eleventh 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 eleven, junlajuj, falling among the high numbers of the thirteen, often felt as a day of dissolving and letting go as the trecena nears its close. The name recorded here, Spectral, and its keyword of release and liberation belong to the modern Dreamspell system of Jose Arguelles, a New Age overlay from the 1980s that is distinct from the Maya calendar and not part of traditional daykeeping. The daykeepers reckon by the number itself. The authentic element is the coefficient eleven and its role in the interlocking of thirteen numbers with twenty day signs that produces the 260 unique days of the sacred count.

The eleventh of the thirteen numbers that combine with the twenty day signs to generate the Tzolk'in's 260-day count, marking the eleventh day of its trecena, in the final stretch before the thirteen-day cycle completes and the next trecena begins with the number one again attached to a new day sign five positions further along the twenty-sign sequence. Because twenty and thirteen share no common factor greater than one, every combination of a number and a day sign is unique across the full 260-day count, a property epigraphers regard as central to why the Tzolk'in functioned so effectively as a system for naming individual days without ambiguity across a person's entire lifetime.

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

Eleven is written as two bars and a dot. It falls eleventh in a trecena of thirteen, near the close of the run, and the numbered day it forms with any given sign recurs once in each 260-day round like every other combination.

The regularity is worth restating because it is the whole basis of the count's use. There is no irregularity anywhere in the Tzolk'in, no intercalation, no correction and no leap day; it is a pure product of two cycles turning against each other. That is why it can be run continuously for millennia without accumulating error of any kind, and why the count kept by highland daykeepers today can be matched against Classic inscriptions.

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.

Spectral, the modern name for this coefficient, is from Jose Arguelles's Dreamspell of 1987. The Dreamspell's own count does not track the traditional Tzolk'in day by day, since it handles leap days differently, so the two systems give different answers for the same date, which is a practical as well as a historical distinction.

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