Cauac

Cauac is the nineteenth 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, Cauac, it corresponds to the day Kawoq in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the storm and the rain, the thundercloud that renews and purifies, and in the K'iche' Kawoq the community, the family, and the midwife, the gathering of people like the gathering of the rains. It is associated with renewal, the well-being of the whole, and the cleansing storm. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the west and the colour black. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that living tradition understands them.

Cauac is the nineteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Kawoq, meaning storm or rain, matching the Yucatec sign's own association with storms and renewal. In the directional scheme, Cauac belongs to the west and the colour black. The Cauac glyph in Classic-period inscriptions is distinctive, incorporating a stippled or textured pattern epigraphers generally read as evoking stone or a storm cloud, and it appears prominently in Long Count date notation as the sign marking the Tun, the 360-day period, in the calendar's Initial Series introductory glyphs. Contemporary K'iche' daykeepers associate Kawoq with family, community and collective gathering, reading the storm's power as a metaphor for the force generated when people come together.

Cauac, also written Kawak, is Kawoq in K'iche', and the sign is the storm. The Classic glyph carries a bunched cluster of markings that epigraphers also read as stone, so the sign stands both for the rain-bearing cloud and for the living rock, which in Maya thought are not far apart since the rain is understood to be held in the mountain.

Central Mexico places Quiahuitl, rain, in the nineteenth position, agreeing with the storm reading. In both traditions the sign belongs with the rain deities, Chaak among the Maya and Tlaloc in central Mexico, and with the thunder that announces the season on which the maize depends.

Cauac is a Year Bearer in the Postclassic Yucatec system Diego de Landa recorded, whose four permitted openers of a Haab year are Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak. It is not one of the Classic four, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, nor one of the four used by the highland communities that keep the count today. In K'iche' practice Kawoq is connected with the community and with the midwife, and, as with all these readings, the atlas records what the tradition holds rather than offering it as counsel.

The nineteenth sign carries a further association through the Haab, whose five-day closing period, Wayeb, is a time of danger in the colonial accounts precisely because the year is between bearers. Storm and stone, cloud and mountain, are the images the sources reach for when describing that interval, and Cauac belongs to the same group of ideas without being confined to it.