Q'anil
Q'anil, Lamat in the Yucatec form: the eighth day sign, the seed and the rabbit. This page is the reference for the sign the tradition reads as fertility.
What the daykeepers say
The daykeepers read Q'anil as the seed: fertility, plenty, the harvest and the four colours of maize. A person born under it is read as creative, fertile in every sense, generous and abundant, with a talent for making things grow. It is the sign on which the daykeepers ask for the crops and for children.
The honest shadow is the seed's waste: over-indulgence, a scattering of what should have been planted, and a carelessness with plenty that assumes there will always be more. The tradition says Q'anil must learn when to plant and when to keep.
The meaning, as the site reads it
Fertility and ripening, sowing and harvest, plenty
Born under it
Generous and productive, devoted to family and to land
The shadow: Waste, self-indulgence, overreach
The trecena
Every 260 days the sign opens a trecena, a run of thirteen days that carries its name: the next 1 Q'anil is 14 June 2027. A birth on any day of the count is read with its number as the strength and its sign as the character, and the number is read from one, low and beginning, to thirteen, high and complete.
The two counts, stated honestly
Two apps can give one birthday two different day signs, and only one of them is this count.
This page follows the living highland count, kept without a break in the K'iche' and Kaqchikel communities of Guatemala and correlated to the Long Count by the GMT constant, 584283. Dreamspell, the count most apps use, was invented in 1990: it borrows the 260 day shape, renames the signs, skips leap days and runs about forty-four days apart, so the same person is a different sign in it. Neither app is wrong about its own arithmetic; they are counting different things, and only one of them is the count the daykeepers keep. We say which we use, and today is 11 Tijax in it.
The day turns at dawn for most highland daykeepers, not at midnight, so a birth in the small hours is flagged rather than silently assigned; the calculator does that, and it names the correlation it used.
About 60 seconds · needs only your date of birth · a birth before dawn is flagged
Questions people ask
What is my day sign?
The sign of your birth date in the 260 day count, worked out by arithmetic from the Julian Day Number rather than read off a table. The calculator gives the K'iche' and Yucatec names, the number, the direction, and the Mayan cross as one lineage reads it.
Why does another app give me a different sign?
Because it is probably Dreamspell, a count invented in 1990 that shares the 260 day shape and nothing else with the highland count: different names, no leap days, and a count about forty-four days apart. Both are consistent; only one is traditional, and this page says which it uses.
Is Q'anil a good day sign?
The daykeepers do not rank the twenty. Each carries a capacity and a shadow, both on this page, and the number it is paired with is read as its strength.
We read charts for pattern and coherence, not prediction. Nothing here tells you what will happen, and nothing here tells you who you are; it shows a structure and leaves the judgement with you.