The Aj Q'ij (Day-Keeper)

Primary source

• Government of Guatemala and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 1995, Signed at Mexico City, 31 March 1995; UN document A/49/882–S/1995/256. Section III.C, Spirituality (recognition of the importance and special nature of Mayan spirituality; respect for indigenous spiritual guides; commitment to promote reform of article 66 of the Constitution). Section III.D, Temples, Ceremonial Centres and Holy Places (participation in the administration of sites, regulation permitting spiritual practice at archaeological sites, and a joint commission with indigenous spiritual guides to identify other holy places)The accord's recognition of Maya spirituality and of indigenous spiritual guides, and of access to ceremonial centres - the instrument the brief refers to, here given by its official English title and its two relevant sections. III.C.3 is a commitment to PROMOTE reform of article 66 of the Constitution in Congress, not an enactment: the accord accords recognition, it does not by itself change Guatemalan law.
• Dennis Tedlock (trans.), Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, revised edition, 1996, Simon & Schuster / Touchstone; first edition 1985. Tedlock's note 70 at p. 234 on Xmucane's posture as a daykeeperThe translation Andres Xiloj Peruch checked with Tedlock line by line, in what Tedlock described as a three-way dialogue among Xiloj, the text and himself. No URL is recorded and the field is JSON null, not the string 'null': the publisher's page returned 403 to an automated fetch, which SOURCES.md warns is not a death certificate, but I will not assert a link I did not open.
• Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Guatemala: Memory of Silence — Conclusions and Recommendations, 1999, Paragraphs 1-2 (over 200,000 killed or disappeared; 83 per cent of fully identified victims Mayan); 31-33 (the Mayan population as the collective enemy of the State; racism; 1981-1983); 88 ('The Army destroyed ceremonial centres, sacred places and cultural symbols' and 'the exercise of Mayan spirituality and the Catholic religion was obstructed, prevented or repressed'); 108-111 (acts of genocide, 1981-1983); Recommendations II.6, under 'Measures to Preserve the Memory of the Victims' (that the sacred Mayan sites violated during the armed confrontation be reclaimed)That the 1980s violence specifically targeted the office this entry describes: paragraph 32 names 'executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual guides' as an attempt 'above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities'.
• Allen J. Christenson (trans.), Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, 2003, University of Oklahoma Press; Mesoweb electronic edition 2007. Lines 591-597 (Xpiyacoc 'master of tz'ite'; Xmucane 'Aj Q'ij, Mistress of Days'); note 95 (q'ijixik, 'dayification'); note 98 (aj q'ij still the living title); notes 103-104 (the casting, and tz'ite as the red seed of the coral tree, Erythrina corallodendron); note 106 (married couples as the ideal pair at Momostenango); Introduction, on his work with don Vicente de Leon Abac of MomostenangoThat the sixteenth-century K'iche' text gives the creator-grandmother the title Aj Q'ij and describes divination by a cast handful of tz'ite or maize counted through the days of the ritual calendar; and Christenson's note that aj q'ij is still the title used by K'iche' priests who divine by that counting, and that modern aj q'ij still use the same two materials.
• Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, Interview for 'Breaking the Maya Code', Night Fire Films, filmed in the weaving workshop of Angel Xiloj, Momostenango, 11-12 February 2005, 2005, Transcript, pp. 10-15 (the 260-day count, the day-keeper's role, the 260-day training and Wajxaqib' B'atz'); pp. 24-25 (divination with the baraj of crystals and tz'ite seeds, counted out in fours against the day names); pp. 28-31 (Andres Xiloj's divination for Barbara Tedlock's illness, and his offer to train them); p. 13 (the patrilineage they were trained within); p. 14 (Xiloj as chuchkajaw rech aldaya of Santa Isabelle); p. 42 (2012)The mechanics of the divination, the 260-day apprenticeship closing on Wajxaqib' B'atz' (8 Monkey), the day new ajq'ij are presented at the shrines, and Andres Xiloj as the Tedlocks' teacher - the transcript gives no surname. Also Barbara Tedlock's own explanation of why the count survived - that unlike the Maya 365-day year it never competed with the imposed Gregorian calendar - and her statement, made in 2005, that 2012 was 'just the end of one era; the beginning of another. It is not the end of the world.'

Scholarship

• Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya, 1982, University of New Mexico Press; revised edition 1992The standing ethnography of day-keeping at Momostenango: the ajq'ij's training in counting and interpreting the days of the 260-day calendar, the diviner's seeds and crystals, dream interpretation, and the author's own apprenticeship and initiation as a day-keeper with her husband Dennis in 1976.
• John M. Weeks, Frauke Sachse and Christian M. Prager, Maya Daykeeping: Three Calendars from Highland Guatemala, 2009, University Press of Colorado, Mesoamerican Worlds series. Appendix 2, Prager and Sachse, 'Notes on the Correlation of Maya and Gregorian Calendars', pp. 176-184The three colonial and nineteenth-century divinatory calendars from highland Guatemala - 1685 in Kaqchikel, 1722 in K'iche', 1855 - held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the argument that calendar-round dates paired with Gregorian dates in the 1722 K'iche' calendar support the 584283 correlation. This is the documentary bridge between the modern count and the colonial period.
• Simon Martin and Joel Skidmore, 'Exploring the 584286 Correlation between the Maya and European Calendars', The PARI Journal 13(2): 3-16, 2012, Pp. 4 and 11-12: Thompson's route through 584284 and 584285 to 584283 at Thompson 1950:304, resting on data from twentieth-century highland day-keepers published by J. Steward Lincoln ('The Maya Calendar of the Ixil of Guatemala', Carnegie Institution of Washington, Contributions to American Anthropology and History 7(38), 1942) and Oliver La Farge (Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatán Indian Town, University of Chicago Press, 1947); p. 12 on 21 December 2012 as the 584283 date against 23 and 24 DecemberThat Thompson, lacking astronomical confirmation, 'sought corroboration by aligning the correlation to the count of days kept into modern times in the Guatemalan highlands', and that 584283 is 'popular with many scholars today, particularly those who hold that the count kept by day keepers in the Guatemalan highlands is part of an unbroken tradition' - the circularity this entry's attestation names. Also the authors' own case for 584286, which would place the thirteenth Bak'tun's end on 24 December 2012 and put the living count two days off the inscriptions. Lincoln 1942 and La Farge 1947 reach this entry through this paper, which gives them as publication dates, not fieldwork dates; I have read neither.
• David Stuart, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltrán and William Saturno, 'An early Maya calendar record from San Bartolo, Guatemala', Science Advances 8(15), 2022, Published 13 April 2022The '7 Deer' day sign on mural fragments from the Las Pinturas pyramid at San Bartolo, anchored by calibrated radiocarbon dates to 300-200 BCE - the earliest securely dated example of the Maya 260-day calendar, and the paper's own statement that the count has persisted in the Maya region over at least 23 centuries.
• Ivan Šprajc, Takeshi Inomata and Anthony F. Aveni, 'Origins of Mesoamerican astronomy and calendar: Evidence from the Olmec and Maya regions', Science Advances 9(1), 2023, Published 6 January 2023That lidar-measured orientations of ceremonial complexes built between 1100 and 750 BCE are the earliest evidence for use of the 260-day calendar, centuries earlier than any textual record - and the paper's own statement that before this the earliest unequivocal epigraphic evidence was the San Bartolo 7-Deer sign. Cited for architectural inference, which is not a day record.
• Alejandro J. Garay Herrera, 'The Repression of Maya Spiritual Practices in Guatemala: Cultural Continuity and the Challenge of Fighting Against Discrimination and Racism', in Mesoamerican Narratives at the British Museum: Ancient Writing, Contemporary Voices, 2025, De Gruyter, chapter DOI 10.1515/9783110792287-003That Maya spiritual practice in Guatemala continues to be labelled witchcraft and named with derogatory terms by various sectors of society, and that discrimination manifests in the destruction of indigenous religious sites and the persecution and murder of practitioners of ancestral spirituality - after the 1995 Agreement, not before it. I have read the abstract and publisher page only.

Linked entries

• Transmitted intoThe Popol VuhAttested

  The Popol Vuh titles the creator-grandmother Xmucane Aj Q'ij, Mistress of Days, and describes divination by a cast handful of tz'ite counted through the days; Andrés Xiloj was still doing both when he read the manuscript line by line for Dennis Tedlock, so the living practice made the text legible rather than the reverse.

• Set againstIfá DivinationA modern connection

  Both are living initiated systems carried in people rather than in books, but Ifá's authority is a memorised corpus a babaláwo can recite back into existence, while the aj q'ij's is a position in a count — lose a single day and nothing recovers it, which is why the question of continuity means something different in each.

• Set againstJohn DeeA modern connection

  Dee's angelic system survives only as manuscripts, reconstructed by readers who learned it from nobody; the day-keepers' survives only as people, and it was they who made the surviving manuscript readable — two opposite answers to what happens when a practice and its records are separated.

• Set againstThe World TreeA modern connection

  The shaman's path of Maya Cosmos (1993) reached Maya studies exactly as the world tree did — Klein and colleagues traced it in 2002 to Freidel's student reading of Eliade — which is why a living Maya calendar office is better described from its own practice than from a comparative type.