Sotz

Sotz is the fourth 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, Sotz, which means bat, the month takes its name and its glyph from the leaf-nosed bat, a creature of considerable importance in Maya iconography and associated with the night and the underworld. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names the day by its position within the month together with its interlocking Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great cycles, the solar Haab and the sacred Tzolk'in, that mesh together in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round through which the Maya located every day in a long web of time.

Sotz is the fourth month, and its name is one of the more securely translated in the Haab: sotz is the Yucatec word for bat, and the month's hieroglyph in Classic inscriptions depicts a bat head, making it among the clearest correspondences between a month name's meaning and its glyphic form. Bats carried significant symbolic weight elsewhere in Maya religion and mythology, notably as the death-associated Kamazotz of the Popol Vuh, the Kʼicheʼ Maya sacred narrative, though that text is a distinct Postclassic highland source and its bat god should not be assumed to be the same figure invoked by the Yucatec lowland month name. As with the months around it, the specific ceremonies Yucatec communities observed during Sotz are recorded only in general terms by colonial-period chroniclers rather than in a detailed surviving ritual calendar.

Sotz means bat, and its glyph in the Classic inscriptions is a bat head, one of the more immediately legible of the nineteen. The bat is a substantial figure in Maya religious imagery well beyond the calendar, appearing in the Popol Vuh as the killing bat of Zotzilaha, one of the houses of trial in Xibalba, and as an emblem of the Tzotzil, whose name carries the same root.

Within the calendar Sotz is the fourth of the eighteen full months and behaves like the rest of them: twenty days, numbered from the seating at zero through nineteen, meshed with the 260-day Tzolk'in so that any given date is named by both counts at once. The pair repeats only after 18,980 days, the Calendar Round of a little under fifty-two years, and that period is the longest span the Round alone can date without ambiguity.

For anything longer the Classic Maya used the Long Count, a linear tally of days from a fixed starting point, and Classic monuments routinely give a Long Count, a Tzolk'in day and a Haab position together. A date recorded in all three is fixed absolutely, which is why the inscriptions can be correlated with the European calendar at all.

The Calendar Round was not only Maya. Central Mexican peoples ran the same 260-day and 365-day pairing, calling them the tonalpohualli and the xiuhpohualli, and the fifty-two-year completion was marked in the Basin of Mexico by the New Fire ceremony, in which household fires were extinguished and rekindled from a single new flame. The Maya sources record no equivalent ceremony, and the two traditions should not be run together on the strength of the shared arithmetic.