Contents
Fourth of the twenty. Yucatec K'an; K'iche' K'at. The Classic main sign is a squared element with a lattice or cross-hatched interior; the word k'an in Yucatec covers yellow, ripe and precious, and the sign shades into the maize and foodstuff complex — though the exact relation between the day sign and the tamale sign used for offerings is one of the places epigraphers still argue, and it should not be stated flatly. The site's tooltip gives it as ripe seed and abundance. Direction south, colour yellow.
The two Maya names pull apart here more than anywhere else in the twenty. Yucatec k'an is ripeness and yellow. K'iche' k'at is the net — the carrying net that holds a maize harvest, and equally the tangle you cannot get out of. Both readings are current, in different languages, for the same position in the same count.
Religion and daykeeping
In living highland practice, K'at is the net, and daykeepers work both of its faces. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day for untangling — debts, lawsuits, quarrels, imprisonment, anything a person is caught in — and equally as the day of what the net gathers and holds, the bundled harvest and the accumulation of a household. An ajq'ij born on K'at is spoken of as able to loosen knots in other people's affairs and prone to getting caught in their own. Petitions for release are among the commonest made on this day. Which shrine is used, and in what words, is taught within the initiation lineage and is not published here.
K'an is one of the four year bearers in Landa's sixteenth-century Yucatec set — K'an, Muluk, Ix, Kawak — the set that also governs the new-year pages of the Dresden Codex (pages 25–28), where each bearer is shown with its direction, its colour and the rites proper to the year it opens. K'an holds the south and the colour yellow in that scheme, which is exactly what the four-direction rotation through the twenty predicts. That is a satisfying internal check on a reconstruction that came to us in pieces.
In the Classic record, yellow-and-ripe is bound up with maize and with the Maize God, whose cycle of death in the underworld and resurrection is the single most-illustrated narrative on Classic painted pottery. The Madrid Codex, mostly 260-day working almanacs, devotes substantial sections to agriculture — planting, burning, the cycle of the milpa — and it is in that kind of almanac, rather than in any statement of doctrine, that the practical weight of a ripening day sits.
The Aztec cognate is Cuetzpalin, the lizard, patron Huehuecoyotl — a sign that translates to neither ripeness nor net, a reminder that the twenty positions are shared across Mesoamerica while their names are not. The Zapotec piyè and the Mixtec codices run the same position, conventionally glossed Lizard.
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 in cartouches with bar-and-dot coefficients across the lowlands. |
| 11th–12th c. CE (debated) | The Dresden Codex copy, including the new-year pages with the K'an / Muluk / Ix / Kawak year bearers. |
| 1562 / 1566 | Landa burns the books at Maní, then records the twenty day names and the Yucatec year bearers. |
| 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
K'an returns every twenty days, its coefficient rising by seven each time because twenty leaves seven on division by thirteen — 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13. Thirteen appearances take 260 days, after which the exact pairing recurs.
Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 14 August (9 K'an), 3 September (3 K'an), 23 September (10 K'an).
Related
- Maya Tzolk'in — the system, the count, and what it is not.
- Ak'b'al — the day before.
- Chikchan — the day after.
- World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar