Cosmology · 4 + 1
Four directions, one centre
Maya space was quartered — four world-directions, each with a colour, a bird, a tree, a sky-bearer — around a fifth point, the axis where the World Tree rises. The calendar is woven through this scheme: the year bearers process around the directions, and the 819-day count steps through them explicitly.
The quincunx
The five-point diagram
In the sources
What is actually attested
Primary — Classic period
- Colour + direction terms occur in Classic inscriptions, and the 819-day count formula pairs each station with a direction and colour.
- Directional gods and "sky-bearers" (the Bacabs / Pawahtuns) appear in Classic art holding up the corners of the sky.
- Rain deities (Chaak) and other supernaturals are quadrupled — one per direction — on Classic ceramics.
Postclassic codices
- The Dresden and Madrid Codices give the clearest colour-direction diagrams — New Year pages, world-direction almanacs, the "cosmogram" arrangements.
Colonial — Yucatec
- Landa's Relación and the Books of Chilam Balam lay out the neat, symmetrical "East red / North white / West black / South yellow, centre blue-green" system that most popular accounts repeat.
Editorial note — the crisp four-direction / four-colour table is largely a colonial Yucatec systematization. Colour-direction association is genuinely Classic; its exact, uniform mapping as usually printed is a scholarly extrapolation backward from Landa and Chilam Balam, not a single Classic-era statement. Sources also disagree on whether "north" and "south" meant compass points or "up/zenith" and "down/nadir."
Calendar link
The count moves through the directions
Today the 819-day count stands at the — station. The year bearers, too, are imagined as walking a circuit of the directions — each new Haab' year "carried" into one quarter of the world, the burden passed around the compass over a four-year sub-cycle before the colours repeat.