The Tzolkin Calendar

Twenty and thirteen

The twenty day signs run in a fixed order, Red Dragon first and Yellow Sun last. The thirteen tones run 1 to 13 and start again. Each day both move on one step.

Start both wheels together and you get kin 1, Red Dragon with tone 1. The next day is kin 2, White Wind with tone 2. Sign and tone climb together until kin 13, Red Skywalker with tone 13. The next day the tones have run out and start again, but the signs have not, so kin 14 is White Wizard with tone 1.

Keep going. Kin 20 is Yellow Sun, the last sign, with tone 7. The signs now start again while the tones carry on, so kin 21 is Red Dragon with tone 8. The two wheels keep slipping past each other like that until kin 260, Yellow Sun with tone 13, when both reach their end on the same day. The next morning is kin 1 again.

Twenty and thirteen share no common factor, which is why no pairing repeats inside the 260. Every sign meets every tone exactly once. That is also why the tone is never picked on its own. It is always worked out from the kin, and the kin comes from counting days.

The four colour families

The colours of the signs cycle red, white, blue, yellow, five times across the twenty. Red begins, white refines, blue transforms, yellow ripens. That gives you four families of five signs each, and the signs in a family share a kind of work.

The red family begins things: Red Dragon, Red Serpent, Red Moon, Red Skywalker and Red Earth. The white family refines what has begun: White Wind, White Worldbridger, White Dog, White Wizard and White Mirror. The blue family transforms it: Blue Night, Blue Hand, Blue Monkey, Blue Eagle and Blue Storm. The yellow family ripens it: Yellow Seed, Yellow Star, Yellow Human, Yellow Warrior and Yellow Sun.

I find the families a quick way in. If you know someone is a blue sign you already know they are built for change, before you learn which kind of change. The Day Signs page lists all twenty with a line each.

Which count

Here is the part most websites skip. To find the kin for a date you have to line the Tzolkin up with our calendar, and that means choosing a correlation, a fixed point where one day in their count equals one day in ours.

My calculator uses the Goodman Martinez Thompson correlation. It is the one the archaeologists use, because it is the one that makes the dates carved on the monuments agree with the astronomy recorded beside them. Under it, 21 December 2012 was 4 Ahau, the last day of the thirteenth baktun, which is kin 160, Yellow Sun, tone 4 Self Existing.

Other popular systems, the Dreamspell count in particular, use a different correlation. They also skip 29 February, so that the leap day has no kin at all, where the archaeological count gives every day the next kin without exception. The upshot is that the kin you find on another website may differ from mine, and both of us may be doing our sums correctly. My readings use the archaeological count, and so does every page in this section.

No leap day

I want to say the leap day point again because it trips people up. The Tzolkin runs continuously. Every calendar day, 29 February included, gets the next kin. The Maya did not have leap days and they did not need them, because the Tzolkin was never trying to follow the seasons. Their 365 day year did that job and fell slowly out of step with the Sun, and they knew it did.

The long count and 2012

The 260 day round is the smallest of the Maya cycles. Above it sits the long count, which numbers days from a starting point in 3114 BC in units of 20, 360, 7,200 and 144,000 days. A baktun is 144,000 days, a little over 394 years. On 21 December 2012 the thirteenth baktun since that start came to an end and the count rolled over, the way the odometer on a car goes from 99,999 to 100,000.

That is all that happened. The Maya themselves wrote dates far beyond 2012, some of them thousands of years into our future, so they plainly expected the world to carry on. The end of the world story was a modern invention. What the day marked was the end of one very long chapter and the first day of the next, and that is how I read it.

Why you need a calculator

Your kin is found by counting the days from a fixed anchor to your birthday and dividing the total two ways, once by 20 for the sign and once by 13 for the tone. The counting is the hard part. You have to allow for every leap year between the anchor and your birthday, and one slip anywhere gives you the wrong sign and the wrong tone both.

So I am not going to give you a formula here. My calculator does the count, and the Find Your Numbers and Signs page will add the kin so you can do it yourself without arithmetic. What I will give you is some worked examples so you can see the shape of the answer.

Worked examples

Sarah Jane Mitchell, born 14 March 1987, is kin 106, White Worldbridger with tone 2 Lunar. She is the same invented woman who walks through the numerology pages, so if you have met her there you can now set her Mayan layer beside her numbers.

Emma Louise Hart, born 6 August 1992, is kin 258, White Mirror with tone 11 Spectral. Two days short of the end of the round.

1 January 2000, the morning the world's computers were supposed to fall over and did not, is kin 102, White Wind with tone 11 Spectral.

21 December 2012, the other morning the world did not end, is kin 160, Yellow Sun with tone 4 Self Existing.

26 July 1992 is kin 247, Blue Hand with tone 13 Cosmic, and I include it because the tone 13 days are the ones people most often get wrong when they count by hand.

Notice that in every case the tone comes from the kin. Kin 258 divided by 13 leaves 11, so the tone is 11. Kin 247 divides by 13 exactly, which is why its tone is 13 rather than nought. There is no nought in the Tzolkin.

Reading the two together

Once you have your kin, read the sign first on its own page, then the tone in The Thirteen Tones, then put them together. A White Worldbridger with tone 2 is a bridge builder who feels the pull of both banks. A Yellow Sun with tone 4 is light given a frame to shine through. Each sign page has a section on how it reads with a low, a middle and a high tone, and that is the place to go next.

Which of the 260 days were you born on?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

Related pages
The Chinese Calendar and the New Year