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Sixteenth of the twenty. Yucatec K'ib'; K'iche' Ajmaq. The Classic main sign is usually described as a shell or conch element within the cartouche, and its Classic reading is among the least secure in the inventory — the "wax" or "candle" gloss that gives the day its familiar English name comes from Yucatec kib, wax, and belongs to the colonial and modern layers rather than to anything demonstrated in the inscriptions. The site's tooltip gives it as candle wax and ancestral wisdom. Direction south, colour yellow.

The two Maya names are not translations of each other. K'iche' Ajmaq means fault, offence, and by extension pardon — the day of what was done wrong and what can be forgiven.

Religion and daykeeping

In living highland practice, Ajmaq is the day of forgiveness and of the ancestors, and the two are the same subject. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day for asking pardon — for one's own offences, for a family's, and for those the dead left unsettled — and for the dead themselves, who are understood to remain party to the affairs of the living. Debts of conduct rather than of money belong here. The owl is associated with the day. An ajq'ij born on Ajmaq is spoken of as forgiving and as forgiven, close to the ancestors, sometimes carrying an inherited weight that has to be worked off; the sign is not read as marking someone as sinful. Petitions are made at ancestral and lineage shrines, and the wording belongs to the initiation lineage, not to a page like this one.

The candle is the point where the two layers meet in practice. Wax candles are Spanish; the offering they serve in a highland ceremony is not, and reading the whole complex as either purely Maya or purely Catholic gets it wrong in both directions.

In the Classic and Postclassic record, the ancestors are constantly present — named in royal inscriptions, buried under the floors of the houses their descendants went on living in, and shown emerging from serpent mouths in visions. The Dresden and Madrid codices carry K'ib' as a station among their 260-day almanacs; the Madrid's almanacs for farming, hunting and beekeeping are the fullest surviving record of how such stations were worked in practice. The colonial Books of Chilam Balam assign each of the twenty days a short augury and an occupation, in a European almanac format adapted to Maya use.

The Aztec cognate is Cozcacuauhtli, the vulture, patron Itzpapalotl — a carrion bird for a day about what is left behind. The Zapotec piyè and the Mixtec codices hold the same position, conventionally glossed Vulture.

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: named ancestors on the monuments and burials beneath house floors.
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

K'ib' returns every twenty days. Because twenty leaves a remainder of seven on division by thirteen, each return raises the coefficient by seven — 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13 — so all thirteen numbers are used in thirteen appearances, which is 260 days.

Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 26 August (8 K'ib'), 15 September (2 K'ib'), 5 October (9 K'ib').

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