El Calendario Sagrado Maya

Audelino Sac Coyoy is a K'iche' Maya, a researcher of his culture, and an ajq'ij, a daykeeper. He makes clear from the start that he writes from within: he practices what he describes. Since 2003 he has taught at the Quetzaltenango campus of Universidad Rafael Landívar, which published the book through its research department.

The introduction states what the book is for. Guatemalan schools hid this knowledge for generations, while the calendar was twisted by people who use it to make money. The text aims to serve Maya people who already practice, to support that practice, and those arriving now, so that they arrive with respect.

The book begins with words. An ajq'ij is the one whose office is the day and the sun, the keeper of time, and whose authority is purely moral: it comes from the community's recognition, after a long apprenticeship with elders in the ceremonies. The author even describes what marks the daykeeper in ritual, the cloth on the head and the red sash at the waist, and what each stands for.

The Cholq'ij has 260 days and two uses. It times activities shared by everyone, such as planting and harvest, and it serves each person as a way to know their own nature through the nawal of their day. For the elders, the cycle lasts as long as the moon takes to go around nine times, the length of a pregnancy and, in the highlands, of maize from sowing to harvest.

A nawal, here, is the force or spirit of every being and every element of nature, since everything is alive. Each person has a nawal that binds them to the world around them. The author also shows base-twenty counting, the dots and bars of Maya numerals, the geometry of weaving, and how thirteen numbers are counted against twenty names.

Before the nawales, the author explains the festival of Wajxaqib' B'atz', the day 8 B'atz', when daykeepers gather and renew their commitment. It is the best-known date in the calendar.

Each of the twenty nawales comes with what its name means, what it is the nawal of, what the day is good for, and what people of that day tend to be like. Each entry closes with two short lists of traits, one of strengths and one of flaws. It is the most practical part of the book and the one people consult most.

The second part teaches, in numbered steps, how to find the nawal of any date using a set of tables that covers two centuries. The author follows one example from start to finish, a person born in December 1954, and readers redo the count alongside.

With the birth day in hand, a final table gives the other eight days that accompany the person. They form three groups of three: conception, birth, and destiny or mission, each flanked by two helpers. The author speaks of each person's nine lunations. It is a broader form of the Maya cross, and he explains it with numbers as well as names.

The book ends with words from a K'iche' elder, Estefana Velásquez Chajchalac, and a thank-you in K'iche'.

It is one of the sources for the cross in the Chart. Through the nine-day table, Sac Coyoy arrives at the same jumps as Barrios's diagrams, conception eight days before birth and destiny eight days after, and two independent voices saying the same thing weigh more than one. The 1954 example matches the site's engine day for day.

The traits of each nawal enter as one of the voices in the portrait, rewritten in our own words and weighed against the other sources.

It is short, written in Spanish, and the part on each nawal is brief: a few lines of meaning and two lists of traits. For the real lives of daykeepers you need an ethnography such as Tedlock's.

The worked example has a slip. For two of the birth helpers, the numbers are swapped in the text, while the book's own table gives the right ones. It is worth checking the count against the table.

The explanations of the moon and of the sciences are the author's own reading, stated with a teacher's confidence. Not every scholar would agree with them.