Find your Maya calendar KIN by birth year

Choose the year you were born and you can see the rhythm of the 260 days that year traced. But there is one important premise here: your KIN (Galactic Signature) is determined not by your birth year but by your birth day. Because the Tzolk'in completes one cycle every 260 days, the KIN shifts as the date changes, even within the same year.

Because the 260 days of the Tzolk'in differ in length from the 365 days of the solar year, they slip by 105 days each year. So the KIN of January 1 moves from year to year, and over the course of a year nearly all 260 KIN make one round — even people born in the same year are granted different seals and tones if their birthdays differ. The year is an entrance, not the answer itself.

Even so, there is something that people born in the same year share. What KIN that year dawned with, and in what order it ran through its 260 days — something like the ground-color of an era. At the same time, each individual's seal and tone scatter according to their birthday. A loose solidarity of being "born in the same year" and the uniqueness of "my own KIN" both come into view here.

Step back one more level and there is the "Calendar Round," which completes one cycle in 52 years. This is the least common multiple of the 260-day Tzolk'in and the 365-day Haab' calendar: 18,980 days = 73 turns of the Tzolk'in = 52 turns of the Haab'. Among the ancient Maya, this span of 52 years, when the same combination of the two calendars returns, is said to have been honored as a milestone marking one full turn of a human life.

It is precisely because of this 52-year cycle that "tracing from one's birth year" carries a distinctive meaning. The same calendrical arrangement comes around 52 years before and 52 years after — grandparents and grandchildren, past and future, can feel as if connected by an invisible thread. Lay out the birth years of a family and a pattern of time spanning the generations rises into view.

Feel free to use this casually. Begin from your own birth year and trace toward the years of your parents, your children, the people dear to you. Simply gazing at what KIN each year began with and which seals it held in abundance gives the numerical calendar a sudden expressiveness.

From 1910 to 2030, you can choose year by year and step into the flow of those 260 days. From the entrance of your birth year to your own unique KIN — and on into the tapestry of time that runs through family and era — let your journey expand.