Cimi

Cimi is the sixth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, kept by living daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Cimi, it corresponds to the day Kame in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is death, not chiefly as an ending to be feared but as transformation, release, and passage, the necessary turning that clears the way for renewal, and the honoured connection to the ancestors. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the north and the colour white. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them; among daykeepers Kame is a day for remembering the dead and for letting go.

Cimi is the sixth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Kame, a name directly related to the word for death in K'iche' and other Mayan languages. Cimi's imagery is death and transformation, read in the daykeeping tradition not as an omen of literal mortality but as a sign governing endings, transitions and the release that precedes renewal, a reading consistent with the broader Mesoamerican treatment of death as a stage within a cycle rather than a final termination. In the directional scheme, Cimi belongs to the north and the colour white. The Cimi glyph in Classic-period inscriptions is conventionally identified by a stylised skull or closed eye, one of the more visually consistent day-sign glyphs across the epigraphic record.

Cimi is the Yucatec name and Kame the K'iche', both built on the Mayan root for death, and the Classic glyph is a skull or a percentage-like sign read as death. The K'iche' Kame is also the name of one of the lords of Xibalba in the Popol Vuh, where One Death and Seven Death rule the underworld, so the day name and the mythological name are the same word.

Sixth position in the central Mexican count is Miquiztli, death, another exact agreement. In both traditions the sign is read less as an omen of dying than as the pivot between states, the point at which one thing gives way to another, and daykeepers today speak of it in connection with the ancestors and with debts owed to them.

The atlas records these as the meanings the tradition carries, not as guidance for choosing a day, which in living practice is the work of a trained ajq'ij and not of a book. Structurally, Cimi opens a trecena once in each round and is not among the four Year Bearers of either the Classic system, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, or the Postclassic Yucatec system, Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.

One further structural point belongs here, because the sixth position makes it visible. A day sign recurs every twenty days regardless of its number, and a numbered sign such as 6 Cimi recurs only every 260 days, so the day and the named day are two different periodicities running at once. Everything the count is used for depends on that difference.