Contents
First of the twenty. Yucatec Imix, in Landa's sixteenth-century spelling; K'iche' Imox, the name spoken by daykeepers today. The Classic-period main sign is a cartouche filled by a lobed upper element over a band of dots, read in the epigraphic literature either as a waterlily blossom or as the snout and gum-line of the earth-crocodile — the two identifications have coexisted for a century and neither has driven the other out. Its head variant is the crocodilian earth monster itself. Literally the word covers waterlily and crocodile at once, and behind both sits the same image: the earth as a great reptile floating on the primordial sea. The site's tooltip gives it as crocodile, the primordial earth. Direction east, colour red.
Religion and daykeeping
In contemporary highland practice — this is the third of three quite different kinds of source, and worth keeping separate from the other two — Imox is the day of the deep water and of what is submerged. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day for the lakes, the rivers and the sea; for hidden or inherited knowledge; and for matters of the mind, including disturbance of it. An ajq'ij born on Imox is spoken of as carrying unusual imaginative force with unusual difficulty in steering it, and left-handedness is sometimes read into the sign. Petitions on this day are commonly made at water shrines rather than hearth altars. Interpretation is not uniform: it varies by community and by individual daykeeper, and it is taught rather than published.
In the Classic-period record, the earth-crocodile is a genuine and central figure — the Starry Deer Crocodile whose back is the land and whose blood is rain. The Dresden Codex page 74, the flood page, shows a sky-band crocodile disgorging water over the world while an aged goddess empties a jar; whatever else that page is doing, it is the primordial-water complex Imix belongs to. In the Madrid Codex, where the bulk of the content is 260-day divinatory almanacs for farming, hunting and beekeeping, Imix stations turn up throughout, as the first of the twenty must. The Popol Vuh opens on exactly this image without naming the day: the sky alone, and the sea alone pooled beneath it, before the makers speak the earth into rising.
The cognates run right across Mesoamerica. In the Aztec tonalpohualli the first sign is Cipactli, the crocodile, whose patron is Tonacatecuhtli. The Zapotec piyè recorded in Juan de Córdova's 1578 vocabulary opens with the crocodile day chilla. Mixtec codices name the same sign; the literature conventionally glosses it as Crocodile. All three counts are 260 days built from thirteen numbers and these same twenty signs — a shared inheritance, not a borrowing in one direction.
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: day signs carved in cartouches with bar-and-dot coefficients across the lowlands. |
| 11th–12th c. CE (debated) | The surviving Dresden Codex copy, including the page 74 flood scene. |
| 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
Imix returns every twenty days. Each return carries a coefficient seven higher than the last, because twenty leaves a remainder of seven on division by thirteen — so the numbers walk 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13 and only then repeat. Any particular pairing, 1 Imix or 13 Imix, comes back once every 260 days.
Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 11 August (6 Imix), 31 August (13 Imix), 20 September (7 Imix).
Related
- Maya Tzolk'in — the system, the count, and what it is not.
- Ajaw — the day before, closing the previous twenty.
- Ik' — the day after.
- World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar