Mayan Sun Sign Calculator (Tzolk'in Day Sign and Tone)

Mayan astrology, in the sense most people search for it, means the day sign and number that the ancient Maya calendar gives to each date. The calendar behind it is the Tzolk'in, a count of 260 days. It is made of two cycles that run side by side: 20 named day signs and 13 numbered tones. Each date has one of each, such as 4 Ajaw or 11 Ik', and the same pair comes back only after 260 days.

This is a living tradition, not only an ancient one. In the highlands of Guatemala, K'iche' Maya daykeepers still keep the 260-day count today, calling it the Cholq'ij, and they use it to name children and to choose days for ceremonies. Our calculator uses the same count. We present it for curiosity and entertainment, with respect for the people who keep it.

Your day sign is sometimes called your Mayan sun sign, and the page for it is often called a Mayan birth chart, though the system has no planets or houses. It is a calendar reading, and it gives you a name and a number for the day you were born.

Enter your date of birth. That is all the tool needs: no name, no birth time and no birth place. A carved stone block rises on Vela's table. The tone sits on top in Maya bar-and-dot numerals, and your day sign's name is cut into the stone beneath it.

The free result shows:

• your day sign, one of the 20, written in the Yucatec Maya spelling with its English meaning and its K'iche' name;
• your tone, a number from 1 to 13, drawn with bars and dots;
• the Long Count date of your birthday, in the form baktun.katun.tun.winal.kin;
• a short reading of what the day sign is traditionally linked with.

The Maya counted days in several ways at once. The calculator uses two of them.

• The Long Count gives every day a number counted from a fixed starting day in the calendar. It is written as five numbers: baktun (144,000 days), katun (7,200), tun (360), winal (20) and kin (1). 1 January 2000 is 12.19.6.15.2.
• The Tzolk'in is the 260-day count. Each day moves the tone up by one (after 13 it returns to 1) and the day sign on to the next of the 20, so the pair only repeats after 260 days.

To connect the Maya calendar to our own dates, scholars use a correlation constant. The calculator uses the standard one, the GMT correlation (584283), which is the most widely accepted among Maya scholars and fits the calendar that K'iche' daykeepers have kept without a break.

You can check the result against two well-known dates:

The first is the end of the 13th baktun, the date that drew so much attention in 2012. It was a turn of the Long Count, much as an odometer rolls over, and the Maya count simply carried on the next day.

If you have tried another Mayan calendar calculator and got a different answer, that is common. There are two main reasons.

The Dreamspell or 13 Moon calendar. Many sites use a system created by José Argüelles from 1987 onward. It uses names such as "Red Magnetic Dragon" and a count of its own, with its own rules for leap days. It is a modern system and not the traditional count. Its day signs usually differ from the traditional Tzolk'in by several days or more, so the two will often disagree. We use the traditional count that Maya daykeepers keep, and we say so plainly so you know what you are looking at.

The "Mayan zodiac" of animal signs. Some websites list 19 or 20 animal signs by date range, much like a Western zodiac, and match them to months. This list is a modern invention. There is no such zodiac in the Maya calendar, and the date ranges have no basis in Maya sources. If you would like a zodiac that does run on animals, our Chinese zodiac calculator uses a real traditional system.

A third, smaller reason is the choice of correlation. A few authors prefer constants other than 584283, which shift every date by a few days. The GMT correlation is the standard one, and it is the one used here.

The Yucatec names are the ones most often seen in books and on monuments. The K'iche' names are the ones used today in Guatemala. Spellings of both vary between sources.

The tone is the number that goes with your day sign. The Maya wrote numbers with a bar for 5 and a dot for 1, so 13 is two bars and three dots. The themes below are a common modern shorthand for what each number stands for, and different writers phrase them differently.

The Tzolk'in is a real calendar with a long history, and the date it gives you is a matter of arithmetic. What the day signs say about your character is a tradition of meaning, not something that science can confirm. Our short readings describe what people born on each day are traditionally linked with, in plain terms and with no promises. Daykeepers in Guatemala read the calendar in a ceremonial setting that this tool does not attempt to replace. The page is for entertainment and curiosity only.