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Sacred Correspondences
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Sip in the Calendar Round

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Sip in the Calendar Round

Sip, older spelling Zip, is the red conjunction, the partner of Wo, the black conjunction, that precedes it. In colonial Yucatec sources the word Sip is also a name associated with the deer and with hunting, and hunters are described as observing the month, which is one of the places where a Haab month carries a recognisable occupational association rather than only a name.

That association should not be pressed into a season. Because the Haab has no leap-day correction its 365 days lose ground against the true solar year by about a quarter of a day annually, so the month drifted steadily through the real calendar over the centuries and cannot have marked a fixed hunting season for long. Whatever seasonal fit the name once had was true of a particular era and not of the calendar as such.

A Maya date does not name a month and a number in the way a European one does. It names a day in the 260-day Tzolk'in, by number and sign, and a position in the 365-day Haab, by day and month, and the two together form the Calendar Round, which repeats only after 18,980 days, a little under fifty-two years. Within the Haab the days of a month are numbered from zero to nineteen, and the zero day is not called first but seated, the seating of the month, a usage the Classic inscriptions write with its own glyph.

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