Wo

Wo is the second of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Wo, with the gloss of the black conjunction, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names the day by its position within the month, from the seating of the month through its nineteen numbered days, together with the interlocking Tzolk'in day. The month names such as Wo derive from the Yucatec Maya recorded at the conquest; the Classic-period glyphs for the same months are read somewhat differently. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great cycles that the Calendar Round meshes together across a span of fifty-two years.

Wo, sometimes transcribed Uo, is the second month, and unlike Pop its name's meaning is not settled among epigraphers; proposed readings connect it to a frog or toad, an animal that appears in the month's glyph in some inscriptions, though the link to a specific ceremony is documented only from the colonial period rather than from Classic texts. Diego de Landa's sixteenth-century account of Yucatec practice associates the surrounding months with renewal rites carried out by priests and diviners, refurbishing idols and instruments used in divination, though Landa's description groups several months' observances together and modern scholars caution against reading every detail as specific to Wo alone. As with all nineteen Haab periods, Wo's position slowly cycled through the true solar seasons over the centuries because the 365-day vague year carries no leap-day correction.

The name recorded here as Wo appears in older literature as Uo, and it is the second of the eighteen full months. Its meaning is given as the black conjunction, pairing it with Sip, the red conjunction, which follows it; the colour-paired month names are one of the most distinctive features of the Haab list and they recur later in the year in the four storm months, Chen, Yax, Sak and Keh, black, green, white and red.

Those pairings are not decoration. Colour and direction form a single system in Maya thought, with red for east, white for north, black for west and yellow for south, and green at the centre, so a set of colour-marked month names carries a directional order inside the year. How far that order was operative in the calendar rather than only in the naming is not settled, and the atlas does not assert more than the names themselves support.

Structurally Wo behaves like every other full month. It runs from its seating, written 0 Wo, through 19 Wo, and because it is twenty days long and the Tzolk'in day sign also cycles in twenty, its seating carries the same day sign as the seating of Pop before it and of Sip after it.

Wo also illustrates a difficulty in the sources. The colonial Yucatec spellings recorded in the sixteenth century, Uo among them, were fixed by Spanish ears and a Spanish alphabet, while the Classic glyphs were read centuries later by epigraphers working from the signs themselves. The modern spellings used here follow current orthographic conventions for Mayan languages, so a reader comparing an older book with this one will meet the same month under three spellings and should not take them for three months.