Caban

Caban is the seventeenth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Caban, it corresponds to the day No'j in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the earth and its movement, and, in the K'iche' No'j, thought, knowledge, and wisdom, the mind that understands. It joins the sense of the living, moving earth with intelligence and synchronicity, the incense of the mind rising like smoke. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the east and the colour red. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them.

Caban is the seventeenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as No'j, meaning thought, knowledge or wisdom, distinct in emphasis from the Yucatec sign's own association with earth and movement, though contemporary daykeeping practice reads the two as compatible facets of the same underlying sign, intelligence understood as an expression of the earth's own ordering movement. In the directional scheme, Caban belongs to the east and the colour red, opening the fifth and final four-day directional set. No'j is widely regarded among contemporary K'iche' daykeepers as governing intellectual and scientific work, and days bearing this sign are traditionally considered favourable for study, planning and the resolution of complex problems.

Yucatec Caban, also written Kaban, is glossed as earth, and the K'iche' name for the same day is No'j, thought or knowledge. The two are far apart as words but not as ideas in Maya thought, where the earth is the place from which understanding comes and where the shrines that daykeepers serve are earth shrines.

The central Mexican seventeenth sign is Ollin, movement or earthquake, which agrees with the Yucatec earth reading in substance if not in wording; Ollin is also the sign of the present world age in the Aztec cosmology recorded on the Sun Stone, the age destined to end in earthquakes.

Caban is a Year Bearer in the Classic system, where the four are Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, and it remains one under its K'iche' name No'j in the living highland count, whose four bearers are Iq', Kej, E and No'j. It is not a bearer in the Postclassic Yucatec system Diego de Landa recorded, which uses Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak. A No'j year is spoken of by daykeepers in terms of deliberation and counsel, and the ceremonies that mark the change of bearer are still kept.

No'j years occupy a particular place in highland Guatemala because the change of bearer is marked by ceremony at the mountain shrines, performed on a fixed day and attended by the wider community rather than by specialists alone. The Mam town of Momostenango is the best known centre of this observance. These are living observances, described here rather than prescribed, and the details of them belong to the communities that keep them.