Contents
Second of the twenty. Yucatec Ik'; K'iche' Iq'. Its Classic glyph is the most instantly recognisable sign in the whole script: a squared T, sometimes plain, sometimes doubled or set in a cartouche, with a head variant showing the wind god. The same T is not confined to writing — it is cut as a window in the Palace at Palenque and hung as a pectoral on carved rulers, which is about as clear a demonstration as epigraphy gets that a sign meant something outside its sentence. The word is wind, and by extension breath, and by extension the animating life in a body. The site's tooltip gives it as wind and the breath of life. Direction north, colour white.
One caution worth carrying: in the Ch'olan languages behind the Classic script, ik' "wind" and ihk' "black" are near-homophones written with distinct signs. Popular sources conflate them. The day is the wind one.
Religion and daykeeping
In living highland practice, Iq' is breath and the moving air, and it is not a gentle day. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as governing both the breath that sustains and the wind that damages — the airs that carry sickness, the temper that carries a household into ruin. It is commonly named as a day for asking about disposition and for cleansing anger and ill will, and an ajq'ij born on Iq' is spoken of as quick, forceful and changeable, with the strength of a storm and its liability. Petitions of this kind are made at hearth and lineage altars; the specifics belong to the apprenticeship, not to a public page. Emphasis varies by community.
Iq' is also one of the four year bearers — the Mam — in the Guatemalan highlands today, alongside Kej, E and No'j. A year that opens on Iq' is spoken of as an Iq' year and read accordingly. Year-bearer sets differ by place and period: Landa's Yucatec set was K'an, Muluk, Ix and Kawak, and a third attested set runs Ak'b'al, Lamat, B'en, Etz'nab'.
In the Classic and Postclassic record, wind is an aspect of the rain complex rather than a separate god with a separate cult — the ik' sign marks the breath-scrolls that issue from mouths and from censers, and appears in the names of rain and storm deities. The Dresden Codex almanacs pair days with gods across their columns; the Madrid Codex, overwhelmingly a book of 260-day working almanacs, carries wind and rain augury among its agricultural sections. The colonial Books of Chilam Balam preserve lists of the twenty days with short auguries and associated occupations — European almanac form carrying Maya content, and a fourth kind of source again.
The cognate is unusually exact. Aztec Ehecatl is the wind, and its patron is Quetzalcoatl in his wind aspect — the god whose round temples were built without corners so the wind would not catch. The Zapotec and Mixtec counts, sharing the same twenty signs, name the same day; Mixtec codices are conventionally glossed Wind.
Key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 600–500 BCE (contested) | Earliest 260-day count glyphs, Oaxaca — San José Mogote and Monte Albán. Zapotec, not Maya. |
| 36 / 32 BCE | Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2 and Tres Zapotes Stela C, the earliest dated Long Counts. Both partly reconstructed. |
| c. 250–900 CE | Classic period: the ik' sign in cartouches, in architecture, and worn as regalia. |
| 11th–12th c. CE (debated) | The surviving Dresden Codex copy, with its 260-day almanacs. |
| 1562 / 1566 | Landa burns the books at Maní, then records the twenty day names in his Relación. |
| 1905–1935 | The Goodman–Martínez–Thompson correlation, constant 584283. Mainstream, not unanimous. |
| 11 Aug 3114 BCE | Long Count zero under GMT 584283 (6 Sep 3114 BCE Julian); the 584285 variant gives 13 August. |
| 21 Dec 2012 | 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in — the anchor this site counts from. |
| 1995 / 1996 | Guatemala's Peace Accords recognise Maya spirituality and access to sacred places. |
In the count
Ik' returns every twenty days, each time with a coefficient seven higher than the last — twenty divided by thirteen leaves seven — so the numbers walk 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13 before repeating. Any one pairing returns every 260 days.
Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 12 August (7 Ik'), 1 September (1 Ik'), 21 September (8 Ik').
Related
- Maya Tzolk'in — the system, the count, and what it is not.
- Imix — the day before.
- Ak'b'al — the day after.
- World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar