Chicchan

Chicchan is the fifth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Chicchan, it corresponds to the day Kan in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the serpent, the celestial snake and the life-force it embodies, vitality, instinct, and the coursing energy that the Maya associated with the movement of the body and the sky. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the east and the colour red. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that tradition understands them; the serpent is among the most persistent images across Maya art and cosmology.

Chicchan is the fifth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day, somewhat confusingly for readers of the Yucatec system, as Kan, an unrelated homophone of the Yucatec fourth day sign's own name, again illustrating that the Yucatec and K'iche' day-name sets, though positionally aligned, are independent vocabularies rather than direct translations of one another. Chicchan's imagery is the serpent, associated in Maya iconography with life-force, with the sky and with rain-bringing power, the feathered or celestial serpent recurring as a major figure across Mesoamerican religious art generally. In the directional scheme, Chicchan reopens the cycle at east and red, the same direction and colour as Imix, marking the start of the second of the five four-day directional sets that structure the twenty signs.

Chicchan in Yucatec is Kan in K'iche', a name that in the highland lists means both serpent and the colour yellow. The overlap of serpent and yellow is not accidental in Mayan languages, and it is one of the reasons the fifth sign is so consistently drawn with snake imagery from the Classic inscriptions through to the divining almanacs of the Dresden Codex.

The tonalpohualli agrees exactly: fifth position in central Mexico is Coatl, serpent. Where Maya and Nahua signs match this plainly, it is usually taken as evidence that the name travelled with the count rather than being attached locally afterwards, though the direction of travel and the date of the borrowing are not settled and the earliest secure attestations of the 260-day count come from Oaxaca rather than from either the Maya lowlands or the Basin of Mexico.

Chicchan opens a trecena once in each 260-day round. It is not a Year Bearer in either the Classic set of Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban or the Yucatec set of Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak, which is a structural fact about its position in the twenty rather than anything to do with its meaning: the four bearers must be spaced five apart, and Chicchan sits between two of them.

The serpent of the fifth day is not only a calendar sign. In Ch'orti' ethnography recorded in the twentieth century, chicchan beings are serpents associated with springs, rivers and the bringing of rain, and are addressed in agricultural ceremony, so the word survives in Maya religious language independently of the day count. Sign and being are the same word, and it is not clear which usage is prior.