Ik

Ik is the second of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count kept by Maya daykeepers to this day and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Ik, it is known in the living K'iche' tradition as the day Iq'. Its imagery is the wind and the breath, moving air, spirit, and the life-force that animates, and by extension speech and communication. In the older sources Ik is linked to breath and to the wind that brings both the life-giving rains and destructive storms. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the north and the colour white. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, presented as that living and reconstructed tradition frames them.

Ik is the second of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition of highland Guatemala knows the corresponding day as Iq'. Its imagery is breath and wind, and by extension speech, spirit and the intangible animating force the Maya associated with living things, a sense reflected in the word's shared root across Mayan languages with terms for breath and for spirit generally. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Ik belongs to the north and the colour white. Because a day sign always combines with one of thirteen numbers to form a unique name within the 260-day count, an Ik day recurs, paired with the same number, only once every 260 days, and a person born on this day is traditionally read by contemporary daykeepers as carrying Ik's association with communication and with the changeable, sometimes turbulent, nature of wind.

Ik is the Yucatec spelling; the K'iche' daykeepers of highland Guatemala call the same day Iq', and the Classic inscriptions write it with the T-shaped sign that scribes also used for wind and for breath in ordinary words. The T element appears carved through palace windows and worn as a pectoral, so the day sign and the architectural motif share an image, and both point at moving air.

In the central Mexican tonalpohualli the second position belongs to Ehecatl, wind, the aspect under which Quetzalcoatl was worshipped as the bringer of breath and of the storm that precedes rain. Maya Ik and Nahua Ehecatl agree exactly in meaning, one of the clearest matches in the twenty and a reminder that the 260-day count was shared property across Mesoamerica rather than the possession of a single culture.

Ik carries weight in the year as well as the trecena. It is one of the four Classic-period Year Bearers, the signs on which a 365-day Haab year is permitted to begin, together with Manik, Eb and Kaban; those four are spaced five apart in the twenty because 365 leaves a remainder of five when divided by twenty. The K'iche' communities that keep the count today use this same set under their own names, Iq', Kej, E and No'j, rather than the Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak that Landa recorded for Postclassic Yucatan.