Cimi, the Day Sign Behind It

The corresponding Maya day is Kimi, in Yucatec Cimi, and the word means simply death. Its glyph is a skull or a death's-head with the percentage-sign markings that denote death in Maya writing, and it is associated with the death gods of the underworld, Xibalba in the Popol Vuh. Colonial and modern sources treat it as a day connected with the ancestors and the dead, and in highland practice it is a day for remembering and petitioning them. Maya thought does not treat death as a euphemism, and the Classic-period material is direct about it. The Dreamspell name is a modern reframing, which readers should know when they meet the seal, since the two are not saying the same thing.

Cimi is the sixth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery death and transformation, read in Maya daykeeping tradition as governing endings and the transitions that precede renewal rather than literal mortality; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Kame. In the directional scheme, Cimi belongs to the north and the colour white. Arguelles's Solar Seal 6, White Worldbridger, borrows Cimi's death and transformation imagery, recasting it under a name of his own coining, "Worldbridger," a term with no Maya precedent, chosen to soften the association for a Dreamspell audience unfamiliar with the day sign's traditional meaning.