Imix (Imox)
The first of the twenty Maya day signs: a water lily in a cartouche. Eric Thompson read it as the earth crocodile and abundance; K’iche’ daykeepers, who call the day Imox, hold it to be the nawal of water.
Meaning
Imix is the first of the twenty named days of the 260-day count, which come round in a fixed order from Imix to Ajaw, each joined to a number from 1 to 13 (the Maya calendar explains the count). Its K’iche’ name is Imox. The day belongs to a living count: the K’iche’ daykeepers of Komon Tohil, in Zunil, Guatemala, in an account of the days that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian reproduces on its Living Maya Time site, write that the name comes from the words for “sea”, “river” and “lake”, and call Imox the nawal of the sea. On this day, they write, people ask for rain, for someone who has left home or country to come back, and for the calming of mental and spiritual disorders and of problems at home.
Origin and history
Sylvanus Morley, in his 1915 introduction to the glyphs for the Smithsonian, found the sign for Imix “practically identical” in the carved inscriptions and the painted codices. Eric Thompson, in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (1950), identified its usual form, a large circle edged with smaller dots and curving lines below, as a water lily. He read the day as the earth itself, the monster or crocodile whose back is the surface of the world, the same idea as Cipactli, the earth crocodile that opens the Aztec count (see Aztec day signs). Because the great earth crocodile floats in a pond under a cover of water lilies, the lily became its attribute; in Thompson’s summary the lily was probably its symbolic form, abundance its aspect and the earth its domain. The codices often pair the Imix sign with the K’an sign of maize; Gates counted nearly 200 such pairs, which he read as food and drink. What the Classic Maya called the day is still uncertain: Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke give Ha’ or Baah, each with a question mark.
Imox among the K’iche’ today
Every spiritual guide (ajq’ij) whom the anthropologist Canek Estrada Peña consulted in K’iche’ towns between 2009 and 2012 named Imox the owner, guardian or energy of water. Some call it anima’ ri cho, anima’ ri plo, “spirit of the lagoon, spirit of the sea”, and it is to Imox that people pray for plentiful rain and against drought. Estrada also notes that Maya daykeepers in the Guatemalan highlands now begin the list of days with B’atz’, where the scholars’ tables begin with Imix.
How the reading of Imox has changed
Estrada sets the older ethnographies beside his own fieldwork. In the 1930s Leonhard Schultze Jena recorded Imox as a bad day, the day of the left-handed and of whatever is tangled or causes quarrels. In the 1960s Barbara Tedlock gave its mnemonic as kamöxirik, “becomes possessed or goes mad”. The guides Estrada met in 2009 to 2012 spoke of it first as the day of water. Thompson cited Schultze Jena’s note that in Chichicastenango Imox was linked with Mo’x, a name for the earth god, and took the earth to be the day’s old meaning. Estrada sets aside the question of which meaning is original and asks why the day’s meaning has changed.
Read next
- Next in Maya symbols and godsIk’ (Iq’)The second Maya day sign, a T shape in a cartouche: the day of wind, breath and life. K’iche’ daykeepers call it Iq’, the day of wind, air, spirit and the heart of the sky.
- Imix and the Aztec Cipactli, the earth crocodile, both open the 260-day countAztec day signsThe twenty signs of the Aztec 260-day count, the tonalpohualli, from Crocodile to Flower. Each day was named by a sign and a number from 1 to 13, and the day of birth was read for a person’s fate.
See also
K’an (K’at), Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna, Maize God, Maya calendar.
Sources
- Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction (J. Eric S. Thompson, 1950), J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 589 (Washington, 1950), chapter 3, “The cycle of 260 days”; Internet Archive full text, Internet Archive, pp. 70–73, “Imix, Imox, Imux, Mox”
- An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs (Sylvanus G. Morley, 1915), Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 57 (Smithsonian Institution, 1915), chapter III and figs. 16–17; Project Gutenberg eBook 43491, Project Gutenberg, chapter III, Table I; Table I and figs. 16–17
- The Meaning of the Days in the Maya Sacred Calendar (Komon Tohil, Living Maya Time), Group of K’iche’ Day Keepers Komon Tohil, Zunil, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, “The Meaning of the Days in the Maya Sacred Calendar”, reproduced with permission in Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (PDF), National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, p. 2, Imox
- Anima’ ri cho, anima’ ri plo: acerca del día Imox entre los k’iche’ (Canek Estrada Peña, Estudios de Cultura Maya), Canek Estrada Peña, “Anima’ ri cho, anima’ ri plo: espíritu de la laguna, espíritu del mar. Acerca del día Imox entre los k’iche’”, Estudios de Cultura Maya XLV (UNAM, Centro de Estudios Mayas, 2015), pp. 191–224; Redalyc PDF, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Redalyc), pp. 194–196 and 199
- Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke, Mesoweb, 2020), Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs, 17th revised edition (Wayeb and Mesoweb, 2020), Appendices, Tables X–XI, “Day names in the Tzolk’in calendar”, Mesoweb, Table X
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .