Wo, the Second Month of the Haab

Wo is the second of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Wo, with the gloss of the black conjunction, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names the day by its position within the month, from the seating of the month through its nineteen numbered days, together with the interlocking Tzolk'in day. The month names such as Wo derive from the Yucatec Maya recorded at the conquest; the Classic-period glyphs for the same months are read somewhat differently. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great cycles that the Calendar Round meshes together across a span of fifty-two years.

Wo, sometimes transcribed Uo, is the second month, and unlike Pop its name's meaning is not settled among epigraphers; proposed readings connect it to a frog or toad, an animal that appears in the month's glyph in some inscriptions, though the link to a specific ceremony is documented only from the colonial period rather than from Classic texts. Diego de Landa's sixteenth-century account of Yucatec practice associates the surrounding months with renewal rites carried out by priests and diviners, refurbishing idols and instruments used in divination, though Landa's description groups several months' observances together and modern scholars caution against reading every detail as specific to Wo alone. As with all nineteen Haab periods, Wo's position slowly cycled through the true solar seasons over the centuries because the 365-day vague year carries no leap-day correction.