What is a Mayan Daykeeper?

Since I’ll be presenting excerpts from my interview with Mayan Daykeeper Hunbatz Men, author of Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion at the Edgar Cayce Forum on October 26th, at 7:30 p.m., I wondered what a Mayan Daykeeper was. This how Wikipedia defines a Mayan Daykeeper:

A daykeeper was the name for a diviner in the pre-Columbian Maya culture. The Mayans are renowned for their advanced skills in the fields of mathematics and astronomy, and had come up with a complex system of tracking days. The Maya calendar actually consisted of three individual calendars, the most sacred of the three being the Tzolkin or divinatory calendar. It was a daykeeper’s task to keep count of the days with coral seeds according to this sacred calendar, as well as to perform divination rituals based upon the dates of the sacred calendar. In this respect, their role was not unlike that of a modern astrologer, in that they attempted to use the day of a person’s birth to divine certain traits they would inherit as a result of that day, as well as what might befall them in the future. Daykeepers, unlike astrologers, would not take into account the position of the stars.
Daykeeper

That’s pretty interesting considering that each of the days are ruled by both the number and god of two different calendars. So, who needs to consult the stars! There’s a lot of divinatory information simply through knowing about the meaning of the numbers and gods of the two calendars, the Haab and Tzolk’in.

My talk is called, “Do Mayan Shamans believe the world will end in 2012?” and it will be held at 7:30 p.m. at Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and sponsored by the Edgar Cayce Forum.