Your Maya calendar date
The Tzolkʼin sacred count gives you a nawal — the day-sign and tone you were born under. Beside it sits the Haabʼ solar year and the Long Count, the way the Maya carved a full date. Not a fate; the energy you carry.
The Tzolkʼin sacred count gives you a nawal — the day-sign and tone you were born under. Beside it sits the Haabʼ solar year and the Long Count, the way the Maya carved a full date. Not a fate; the energy you carry.
Your Tzolk'in day-sign and tone (the 260-day sacred count), your Haab' solar-year date, and your Long Count — all from your birth date alone.
We convert your birth date to a Julian day number and subtract the GMT correlation constant (584283, the Goodman–Martínez–Thompson correlation — the one that matches the 260-day count Kʼicheʼ daykeepers in highland Guatemala still keep), then derive the Tzolk'in tone and sign, Haab' position, and Long Count from that single day-count by modular arithmetic.
We don't assign a Year Bearer — traditions disagree on which day-sign carries that role, so we show the count itself rather than pick one convention and call it the answer. This is the classical count, not the modern 'Dreamspell' calendar.
It's the Goodman–Martínez–Thompson number that lines up the ancient Maya Long Count with the modern Gregorian calendar — the whole reading is built from your birth date's position on that shared count.
Different living Maya traditions disagree on which day-sign carries that role, so rather than pick one convention and present it as the answer, we show the count itself and leave that judgment to the tradition's own daykeepers.
Half of what this page hands back is a position in the Haabʼ, the solar year — a month name and a number. The year those positions live in is a table of nineteen rows, and it has never been on this screen: you have been given a seat in it without ever seeing the room. Here it is, with the spelling older books use beside the modern one, and the day of the year each row opens on.
| Month | Older spelling | Days | Opens on day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pop | Pop | 20 | 0 |
| Woʼ | Uo | 20 | 20 |
| Sip | Zip | 20 | 40 |
| Sotzʼ | Zotz | 20 | 60 |
| Sek | Tzec | 20 | 80 |
| Xul | Xul | 20 | 100 |
| Yaxkʼin | Yaxkin | 20 | 120 |
| Mol | Mol | 20 | 140 |
| Chʼen | Chen | 20 | 160 |
| Yax | Yax | 20 | 180 |
| Sakʼ | Zac | 20 | 200 |
| Keh | Ceh | 20 | 220 |
| Mak | Mac | 20 | 240 |
| Kʼankʼin | Kankin | 20 | 260 |
| Muwan | Muan | 20 | 280 |
| Pax | Pax | 20 | 300 |
| Kʼayabʼ | Kayab | 20 | 320 |
| Kumkʼu | Cumku | 20 | 340 |
| Wayebʼ | Uayeb | 5 | 360 |
Everything surprising further down comes from the last row. Add the Days column and it reaches 365, but the column is not level: the rows above the last hold 360 between them and the last one holds 5. So the year is not a whole number of rows. The day-signs come in twenty, which is exactly the length of a full row, so that leftover does not simply sit there — it is how far the day-signs slide between one Haabʼ new year and the next. We measured the slide rather than deriving it, walking the full round and reading the sign that opens each year: it is five signs, every single time, for 52 years running.
The Opens on column begins at zero, and so does the numbering inside each row. The Maya counted a month's first day as its seating rather than as its first — day numbers run zero through nineteen in a full month and zero through four in the short one. So when this screen writes back 0 Pop, that is the opening day of the solar year, not something standing before it. Books that renumber the days from one are quietly moving every Maya date by a day.
Ask which day-signs can stand on the day a month opens and the answer is not twenty. Walking the full round gives exactly four of them — Ikʼ, Manikʼ, Ebʼ and Kabʼan — and those same four open every row in the table, the short one included. Narrow it to the row that opens the year and each of the four does the job thirteen times, once for every tone, which comes to 52: the number of years in one Calendar Round. This screen says it will not name a Year Bearer, because living traditions disagree about which day-sign carries that role, and it should not. The arithmetic does not name one either — but it does shut the door on sixteen of the twenty signs before the disagreement can even start.
The same leftover shows up if you count whole dates instead of openings. A tone, a day-sign and a Haabʼ position could in principle be assembled 94,900 different ways. Walk one full round, collect every combination that actually turns up, and the count stops at 18,980 — one in five. The rest are not rare. They never occur at all, in any year, in either direction from the era base, and no correlation constant would change that.
One more thing the Days column settles: the Haabʼ has no leap day. It counts to 365 and starts over, while the year on your wall holds back roughly a quarter of a day each time — so the Haabʼ walks steadily backwards through it. Over the single round measured above, the day the Haabʼ year opened moved from April 30, 1900 to April 18, 1951, twelve days earlier across 52 years. Nothing in this table causes that drift and nothing in it corrects it; a Haabʼ date and a Gregorian date simply are not the same kind of object.
This section is only about the solar half of your date. The day-sign and the tone beside it come off a different wheel, and the Long Count underneath them both is the same elapsed day-count written in another base. The constant that ties all three to the calendar you use is named further up this page, and the article this screen links to lists the carved dates it is checked against.