Ix

Ix is the fourteenth 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 from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Ix, it corresponds to the day I'x in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the jaguar, the great cat of the forest, sign of earth-magic, the sacred landscape, and the power of the daykeeper and the shaman. It is associated with the spirit of the earth, with strength held in reserve, and with the altars and mountains where offerings are made. 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, framed as that living tradition understands them.

Ix is the fourteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day by the same name, Ix, one of the small number of day signs where the Yucatec and K'iche' names coincide directly rather than diverging. Its imagery is the jaguar, one of the most significant animals in Maya religion and royal iconography, associated with the earth, the night sun's passage through the underworld, and with rulership itself, jaguar pelts and thrones being standard markers of Classic-period kingship. In the directional scheme, Ix belongs to the north and the colour white. Contemporary daykeepers also associate Ix with earth-based ritual specialists, and the day is traditionally regarded in some highland communities as favourable for divinatory and shamanic work specifically.

The fourteenth sign is Ix in Yucatec and I'x in K'iche', the jaguar, and it is among the most heavily attested day names in the Classic inscriptions, where jaguar imagery is bound up with rulership, with the night sun passing through the underworld, and with the sorcerer's animal counterpart.

Central Mexico places Ocelotl, jaguar, in the same position, so the correspondence is exact. The jaguar is one of the very few images that carries the same weight everywhere in Mesoamerica, and the day sign is only one of its appearances; it is also a throne, a title and a military order.

Ix is a Year Bearer in the Postclassic Yucatec system, where the four days permitted to open a Haab year are Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak. It is not one of the Classic four, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, nor of the four the highland Guatemalan daykeepers use. Highland practice associates I'x with the earth and with the mountain shrines, a reading that keeps the sign in current ceremonial use rather than confining it to the inscriptions, and the atlas records it as description of a living tradition rather than as instruction.

Jaguar days are among the best documented in the Postclassic Yucatec record because Ix is a bearer there, and a year opened by Ix is named for it in the colonial sources. That gives the sign a double presence, once every twenty days as an ordinary day and once in the name of a whole year, and the two uses are distinguished in the sources by context rather than by any difference in how the sign is written.