Mol, the Month of Water

Mol is the eighth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months and a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Mol, glossed as water and carrying the sense of gathering or collecting, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, a Maya date naming the day by its place within the month together with its Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great interlocking cycles of Maya timekeeping; a full Maya calendar-round date names both the Tzolk'in day and the Haab position, a combination that does not repeat for fifty-two years and so fixes a day with considerable precision within that span.

Mol, the eighth month, is generally translated as to gather or to collect, and Diego de Landa's account of the Yucatec ritual year places ceremonies concerned with water and with the renewal of ritual implements in this part of the calendar, a reading some scholars connect to the gathering of water from cenotes, the natural sinkholes that were the primary fresh-water source across much of the northern Yucatan Peninsula and were themselves treated as sacred access points to the underworld. As with the calendar's other months, this association rests on colonial-period ethnographic description rather than on an unambiguous Classic-period inscriptional record naming a specific water rite for Mol alone, and the month's glyph does not by itself confirm the connection independently of Landa's text.