Sek

Sek is the fifth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Sek, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month, reckoned from the seating of the month onward, alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. The Haab tracks the solar year of 365 days but takes no account of the extra quarter-day, so over centuries it drifts against the true seasons, a feature the Maya were aware of and worked within. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, meshed with the sacred count in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round.

Sek, also transcribed Tzec, is the fifth month of the Haab, following Sotz. Its name's meaning is not confidently established; unlike Pop or Sotz, no widely accepted Yucatec etymology has been settled among epigraphers, and proposals remain tentative. Diego de Landa's account of the Yucatec ritual year places a ceremony honouring beekeeping and the harvest of honey and wax in this general part of the calendar, activities of real economic importance in pre-Columbian Yucatan, where honey was both a food and a trade good and wax supplied the copal-adjacent materials used in ritual. As with the neighbouring months, the exact alignment of Landa's described ceremonies to a single named month should be treated with some caution, since his account groups related observances across the surrounding weeks rather than assigning each rite to one Haab period alone.

Sek appears in Diego de Landa's sixteenth-century account under the spelling Tzec, and it is the month his description associates with the ceremonies of beekeepers, held to secure a good yield of honey. Honey and the fermented drink made from it had a settled place in Yucatec ritual, so the association is of a piece with what the colonial sources say about the month elsewhere.

Landa's Relacion is the single richest source for the Postclassic Yucatec calendar and also the most awkward, since he wrote as a churchman describing practices he was working to suppress, and the surviving text is an abridgement of a lost original. Where the atlas reports his festival notices it reports them as his account rather than as the practice of the Classic period, which is separated from him by six centuries and known from different evidence.

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.