Xul

Xul is the sixth 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, Xul, glossed as the dog and also carrying the sense of an end, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, a Maya date naming the day by its place within the month together with its Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two interlocking cycles of Maya timekeeping: the 365-day Haab and the 260-day Tzolk'in turn together like meshed gears, returning to the same paired position only once every fifty-two years, the span the Maya knew as the Calendar Round.

Xul is the sixth month, and its name is generally translated as end, a reading consistent with its position roughly at the midpoint of the eighteen twenty-day months rather than at the calendar's actual close, which suggests the name may originally have marked the end of a distinct ritual or agricultural sub-cycle rather than the Haab as a whole. Xul's glyph in some Classic inscriptions has been associated by epigraphers with dog imagery, and a dog is one of several animals linked to the month in later ethnographic and colonial sources, though the specific ceremonial content Diego de Landa records for the surrounding months centres on general renewal and purification rather than on a dog cult tied exclusively to Xul. As with the calendar's other months, its seasonal position drifted over centuries because the 365-day vague year carries no leap-day correction.

Xul means end or dog depending on the reading taken, and it is the month in which Landa places the festival of Kukulcan at Mani, described as a gathering drawing people from a wide area and lasting several days. That notice is one of the better known passages of his account and one of the few that ties a named Haab month to a named deity festival at a named place.

It also carries the usual caution. Landa was writing in Yucatan in the 1560s about practices already in retreat, and what he records is Postclassic and colonial Yucatec observance, not the Classic-period usage attested in the inscriptions, where the month glyph is common and the festival is not.

A Maya date does not name a month and a number in the way a European one does. It names a day in the 260-day Tzolk'in, by number and sign, and a position in the 365-day Haab, by day and month, and the two together form the Calendar Round, which repeats only after 18,980 days, a little under fifty-two years. Within the Haab the days of a month are numbered from zero to nineteen, and the zero day is not called first but seated, the seating of the month, a usage the Classic inscriptions write with its own glyph.

The Xul notice also shows how thin the ground is for month-by-month ceremony. The Classic inscriptions record period endings, accessions, births, deaths and warfare with dates; they do not record an annual festival calendar. Everything known about what was done in a given Haab month in Yucatan comes from the colonial period, and projecting it back onto the Classic cities is an inference that the evidence does not support.