The Apocrypha · Tzolkʼin · Aj Qʼij
The Maya did not tell fortunes. They counted days — each one a god shouldering a load. Bring a date. The daykeeper will count it.
The count runs on the real Maya calendar — GMT correlation 584,283. Default is today.
◆ today
The day-god everyone shares, and the load it carries — until the next dawn turns the count. One of two hundred and sixty.
Counting the day…
◆ the day-bearers
Twenty named days turn against thirteen numbers like two gears; it takes 260 days for the same day to come round again. The colonial Yucatec names Landa recorded. Tap to sit with one.
◆ Noh Ekʼ · the great star
The Dresden Codex tracked Venus through its synodic cycle and locked it to the year and the day-count. Not symbols — measurements, checkable against the real sky.
Five Venus cycles draw a five-petalled rose in the sky and close almost exactly on eight years. A drop-4-then-8-day correction held the table accurate to about one day over five centuries.
◆ the oracle
Put a question to the count. The daykeeper answers in the Popol Vuh's own recorded words and the meaning of the day-signs — real text, cited, never paraphrased.
plainly
This is a real calendar, still kept by living K'iche' daykeepers in the Guatemalan highlands. Every date you enter is converted by the actual Maya arithmetic — the Long Count from the creation day of 11 August 3114 BCE, the 260-day Tzolkʼin, the 365-day Haabʼ, and the Dresden Venus figures.
We count. We do not foretell. The sky keeps its own appointments; the Maya only wrote them down.The Popol Vuh passages are the real public-domain translation by Delia Goetz & Sylvanus G. Morley (1950). No score, no fortune — only the count, and the words the day once carried.
And you —
Every life keeps returning to one day. Name it — the daykeeper reads every one we are sent.
— MAGNA