Ok (Tz’i’)
The tenth Maya day sign, the dog. The codices draw it as a dog’s ear with two black spots; K’iche’ daykeepers call the day Tz’i’ and make it the nawal of justice.
Meaning
Ok is the tenth of the twenty day signs of the 260-day count, written Oc by Morley and Thompson; in K’iche’ it is Tz’i’. Eric Thompson found that several highland lists give the day the meaning of dog, that its head form may well be a dog’s head, and that the Aztec day in the same place is Itzcuintli, dog (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, also derive Tz’i’ from “dog”. They write that it stands for the five senses and is the nawal of material and spiritual justice, and that on this day people ask to keep away poverty, misfortune and bad habits.
Origin and history
Morley found the day rare on the monuments, and its usual codex form unlike the carved one. In the codices, Thompson noted, the dog’s ear stands for the whole head, with two black spots at its base. He followed the dog into the underworld. Yucatec oc is the root of ocol, “to enter”, used of the setting sun, and the Lacandon put small dogs made of palm leaves at each corner of a grave, thought to go with the soul to its resting place. He concluded that the god of the day, whose Maya name is lost, led the sun through the underworld each night from west to east, a Maya equivalent of the Aztec dog god Xolotl. Kettunen and Helmke give the Classic Maya name, with a question mark, as Ook. The dog has its own page.
Read next
- Next in Maya symbols and godsChuwen (B’atz’)The eleventh Maya day sign, the monkey and the craftsman. K’iche’ daykeepers call the day B’atz’, the thread of time, and hold their new year and initiate new daykeepers on it.
- Ok is the dog day; the codices draw it as a dog’s earDog symbolismIn the Odyssey the dog is the faithful one: Odysseus's old hound Argos knows him after twenty years away. In the British folklore John Brand collected, a dog howling at night near a sick person foretold a death, and Cherokee storytellers say the Milky Way is the trail of meal a dog spilled as it ran.
See also
Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna, Maize God, Maya calendar, Maya numerals (bar and dot).
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. 78–80, “Oc, Tzi, Elab, Elac, Chi”
- 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, Tz’i’
- 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
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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