Lamat (Q’anil)

The eighth Maya day sign, a four-pointed star: the sign for the planet Venus. K’iche’ daykeepers call the day Q’anil, the seed.

Maya symbols and gods. Also called kanil, lamat, lamat maya day sign, lamat mayan sign, lamat venus, q’anil, qanil, qanil nawal, qanil seed.

Meaning

Lamat is the eighth of the twenty day signs of the 260-day count; in K’iche’ it is Q’anil. Its glyph, Eric Thompson wrote, “is the sign for the planet Venus”, a four-pointed star with a small circle in each corner, and in the head forms a celestial dragon with Venus marks on its body. The Aztec day in the same place is Tochtli, rabbit (see Aztec day signs). 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, derive Q’anil from “seed” and “yellow”: the colour of gold and of cane, the third colour of the Sun, the sign of the four seasons, and of people, animals and plants.

Origin and history

Morley found the sign practically the same on the monuments and in the codices. Thompson read the day through the Kaua manuscript’s augury, a drunken, ill-spoken character with a jaguar’s head and a dog’s body, which matches the Venus god Lahun-Chan as the Chilam Balam of Chumayel describes him, and concluded: “Lamat, then, is the day of the Venus god.” Kettunen and Helmke give the Classic Maya name, with a question mark, as Lamaht.

Star or seed?

The scholars and the daykeepers read the day differently, and Thompson thought he knew why. He took the highland names Kanil and Khanil for corruptions of K’anal, the word for star in Tzotzil, Chaneabal and Chuj. In 1950 he wrote that it was “virtually certain” no diviner in the Guatemalan highlands knew Lamat had been Venus, and that, hearing a likeness to an old word for ripeness, they had made it a lucky day for the maize crop. The Komon Tohil daykeepers write of Q’anil as the seed, in their own account of the day, and do not mention the planet. The Venus reading rests on the glyph and the Yucatec auguries; the seed reading is the one the daykeepers keep.

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. 77 and 88, “Lamat, Lambat, Kanil, Khanil”
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; p. 40
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. 3, Q’anil
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 squares and rectangles or stars.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research

Added October 9, 2026.

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