Kan

Kan is the fourth 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, Kan, it corresponds to the day known in the living K'iche' tradition as K'at. The Yucatec Kan carries the imagery of the seed, the ripe maize, and abundance, fertility and the maturing of what was sown, while the K'iche' K'at adds the image of the net that gathers. It is a sign of ripeness, increase, and the fruitful ordering of life. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the south and the colour yellow. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them.

Kan is the fourth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as K'at, a name generally glossed as net or netting, distinct from the Yucatec Kan's own association with seeds and ripeness, an example of how the colonial Yucatec day names and the living highland K'iche' names, while corresponding positionally within the same 260-day count, do not always share a single underlying meaning. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Kan belongs to the south and the colour yellow, the direction associated across Mesoamerican cosmology with maturity and abundance, consistent with the Yucatec name's own harvest and seed imagery. The day closes the first four-day directional set that begins with Imix, after which the East-red, North-white, West-black, South-yellow sequence repeats through all twenty signs.

The fourth sign is a case where the names in the different traditions are actively misleading if taken at face value. Yucatec calls it Kan, and the K'iche' daykeepers call the same day K'at, meaning net or snare, while the K'iche' word Kan belongs to a different day altogether, the fifth, which Yucatec calls Chicchan. Anyone moving between a Yucatec source and a highland Guatemalan one has to hold both lists at once.

Central Mexico places Cuetzpalin, the lizard, in fourth position. Yucatec Kan is glossed as seed and also as lizard, so the two traditions overlap here without coinciding, and the seed reading is the one that governs its associations with ripeness and yellow maize.

Kan matters structurally because it is a Year Bearer. In the Postclassic Yucatec system that Diego de Landa set down in the sixteenth century, only Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak may fall on the first day of a Haab year, and the year takes its name from whichever of the four bears it. The Classic inscriptions use a different set of four, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, and epigraphers read the difference as a change in counting convention rather than as an error in either system.

The K'iche' gloss repays attention on its own account. A k'at is a net bag, the carrying net in which maize is brought from the field, and daykeepers read the day through both senses of a net, the thing that gathers and the thing that entangles. The Yucatec Kan is at the same time the word for yellow, the colour of ripe maize, so the fourth sign is bound to the harvest in both branches of the tradition by different routes.