Learning Mayan Astrology

Where it comes from

The Maya built cities across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, and they were counting days long before anyone in Europe had a calendar worth the name. Their astronomers tracked Venus to within a day over centuries. Their scribes carved dates on stone that we can still read.

The Tzolkin is the oldest of their counts and the one that never stopped. When the cities emptied and the stone carving ended, the count carried on in the villages. It is kept to this day by day keepers in the highlands of Guatemala, who know which day it is in the count the way you know it is Tuesday. I find that remarkable. Nothing in Western astrology has been handed down in one unbroken line like that.

What the Tzolkin is for

The Tzolkin is a cycle of 260 days. It is a count of days rather than a calendar of seasons. The Maya had a separate 365 day year for planting and harvest and taxes. The Tzolkin was for ceremony, for naming, and for knowing the character of a day, which is exactly what we use it for now.

Why 260? Nobody knows for certain. It is close to the human pregnancy, it is the number of days between the Sun passing overhead twice in the Maya heartland, and it is what you get when twenty and thirteen turn together. I suspect all three mattered to them, and I am happy to leave the argument to the historians.

Sign plus tone equals kin

The 260 days come from two wheels turning at once.

The first wheel holds twenty day signs. The second holds thirteen tones, numbered 1 to 13. Each day both wheels click forward one step, so each day gets a sign and a tone. Twenty and thirteen share no common factor, so the same pairing does not come round again until all 260 have been used.

That pairing is called a kin, and your kin is the sign and tone of the day you were born. The sign is the character of the day. The tone is the pulse behind it, the stage in a thirteen day wave. You read them together, the way you would read a word and the tone of voice it was said in.

The tone is never chosen on its own. It falls out of the kin number, and the kin number comes from counting days. The Tzolkin Calendar page shows the arithmetic with examples.

The four colours

The twenty signs run in a fixed order and their colours cycle red, white, blue, yellow, five times over. The library I work from puts it in four words. Red begins. White refines. Blue transforms. Yellow ripens.

So the first sign, Red Dragon, is a beginning. The second, White Wind, refines what began. The third, Blue Night, takes it somewhere new. The fourth, Yellow Seed, brings it to fruit. Then Red Serpent begins again on a higher turn. Once you have that pattern you can look at any sign's colour and know what kind of work it does before you know anything else about it.

I use the modern colour names on these pages, Red Dragon, White Wind and the rest, because they are the names people arrive with. Each sign's page also gives its old Yucatec name once, Imix, Ik, Akbal, so you can recognise it in older books and on the stones.

The 260 day return

Your kin comes back every 260 days. That is a little under nine months, so you have a personal return a shade more often than once a year, and the two drift against each other. Some years you have two. Day keepers treat the return as a day to take stock. I do too, lightly. It is a good day to look at where you started and where you have got to, and nothing more dramatic than that.

The whole 260 day round also sits inside longer counts, which is where the famous 2012 date comes from. The Tzolkin Calendar page tells that story properly.

Beside the other systems

I do not read the Tzolkin on its own, and I would not advise you to. It is one layer of thirteen in a full portrait. Western astrology gives you the sky at the moment you were born, with its planets, signs and houses. Chinese astrology gives you the animal of your year and its element. Vedic astrology gives you the sidereal view and the nakshatra your Moon sat in. The Tzolkin gives you the character of your day and the stage of its wave.

In my experience they agree far more often than they argue, and the places where they argue are the interesting ones. The Western Astrology, Chinese Astrology and Vedic Astrology pages each open their own section if you want to walk the others.

The two counts

One thing you need to know before you go looking for your kin online. There are two popular ways of lining the Tzolkin up with our calendar, and they give different answers.

My calculator uses the correlation the archaeologists use, the one that reads the dates on the monuments. A good many websites use a modern system released in 1990 that counts differently, and also skips 29 February, which the Maya never did. So the kin you were given somewhere else may not match mine. We are simply using different counts, and the one I read with is the archaeological one. The Tzolkin Calendar page has the detail.

How this section is laid out

The Tzolkin Calendar is next, with the arithmetic of 20 and 13, the four colour families, the correlation question and what happened in 2012. The Thirteen Tones works through each tone in turn and explains the thirteen day wave. The Day Signs gives every one of the twenty signs its own page, from Red Dragon to Yellow Sun.

Where to start

Find your kin. That needs a day count from a fixed anchor, which is a calculator's job, and the Find Your Numbers and Signs page will do it for you. Then read your sign's page and your tone's section and see what fits.

Then look up the kin of the day you are reading this. Every day has one. Does today feel like its sign?

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