The two hundred and sixty day ritual calendar of the Maya has been counted without interruption in the Guatemalan highlands, which makes it one of the few pre Columbian religious systems in the Americas whose continuity is not a reconstruction. In K iche communities the count is called the cholq ij, and the person who keeps it is the aj q ij, usually rendered daykeeper or sun priest.
The calendar combines twenty named days with the numbers one to thirteen, so a day is a pairing such as Eight Batz, and the cycle closes after two hundred and sixty of them. Each named day carries a character, and a person's day of birth is understood to give them a disposition and a set of obligations. Much of a daykeeper's work is accordingly biographical: reading the day of a birth, choosing days for undertakings, and conducting the ceremonies a particular day requires.
Divination uses a bundle of tz ite seeds and crystals, counted out in groups against the calendar while questions are put. Becoming a daykeeper is not a matter of study alone: the calling is typically indicated by illness, by dreams or by the day of one's own birth, and it is confirmed through a period of apprenticeship and a formal initiation. This is a living vocation held by people now, and the atlas describes its shape rather than instructing anyone in it.
Two pressures bear on the practice. Evangelical churches generally condemn it outright, and conversion in a family can break a lineage of transmission. And ceremonies conducted at archaeological sites depend on access arrangements with the state and with tourism operators, which is why the unpassed law on sacred sites matters in practice and not only symbolically.