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In living highland practice, Kej is one of the strongest days in the count. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day of the deer and of the four corners of the world; of the mountain, of authority, and of the strength required to carry a responsibility. It is a day for the mountain shrines, for matters of leadership and public office, and for the staffs and bundles that carry an office's authority. An ajq'ij born on Kej is spoken of as built for burden-bearing — steady, upright, inclined to shoulder other people's weight, and liable to take on too much. Particulars vary by community and are taught inside the initiation lineage rather than published.

Kej is also one of the four year bearers, the Mam, in the Guatemalan highlands today, with E, No'j and Iq'. The bearers are the four day names on which a 365-day year can open, and they must fall five apart because 365 leaves a remainder of five on division by twenty. Landa's Yucatec set was different — K'an, Muluk, Ix, Kawak — and a third set, Ak'b'al, Lamat, B'en, Etz'nab', is also attested. Which set was used is a question of place and period.

In the Classic and Postclassic record, the deer is game, sacrifice and cosmic animal at once. The Madrid Codex contains extended deer-hunting and trapping almanacs — snares, nets, hunters and deer laid out across 260-day sequences — which are among the clearest surviving examples of how a divinatory almanac doubled as a practical working schedule. The Dresden Codex distributes its day stations among gods and auguries in the same way. Tlaloc is given as the patron of the Aztec deer day in the Borgia-group sources, one of a set of associations that the Maya material never lists as cleanly.

The cognate to look at is Mixtec: in the codices, personal names are calendar names, and the most famous lord in the whole Mixtec corpus is 8 Deer, "Jaguar Claw" (Iya Nacuaa), whose campaigns fill the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Colombino. He is named for this position in the count, with the coefficient eight. The Zapotec piyè runs the same twenty signs.

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; the Madrid Codex preserves deer-hunting and trapping 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.

Manik' returns every twenty days, its coefficient rising by seven each time, since twenty leaves seven on division by thirteen: 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13. Thirteen appearances exhaust the numbers and take 260 days.

Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 17 August (12 Manik'), 6 September (6 Manik'), 26 September (13 Manik').

• Maya Tzolk'in — the system, the count, and what it is not.
• Kimi — the day before.
• Lamat — the day after.
• World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar