Sotz, the Month of the Bat

Sotz is the fourth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months and a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Sotz, which means bat, the month takes its name and its glyph from the leaf-nosed bat, a creature of considerable importance in Maya iconography and associated with the night and the underworld. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names the day by its position within the month together with its interlocking Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great cycles, the solar Haab and the sacred Tzolk'in, that mesh together in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round through which the Maya located every day in a long web of time.

Sotz is the fourth month, and its name is one of the more securely translated in the Haab: sotz is the Yucatec word for bat, and the month's hieroglyph in Classic inscriptions depicts a bat head, making it among the clearest correspondences between a month name's meaning and its glyphic form. Bats carried significant symbolic weight elsewhere in Maya religion and mythology, notably as the death-associated Kamazotz of the Popol Vuh, the Kʼicheʼ Maya sacred narrative, though that text is a distinct Postclassic highland source and its bat god should not be assumed to be the same figure invoked by the Yucatec lowland month name. As with the months around it, the specific ceremonies Yucatec communities observed during Sotz are recorded only in general terms by colonial-period chroniclers rather than in a detailed surviving ritual calendar.