The Maya Almanac

The Maya Almanac is a field guide to Maya cosmology, told in 125 cards arranged the way the Maya arranged the world: four realms at the four directions, and a center that holds today.

The center is a real calendar. Each day the app computes the true day of the Tzolk'in count, the same 260-day round that daykeepers in highland Guatemala still keep, using the standard scholarly correlation (GMT 584283). It is not a shuffle. Everyone who opens the app sees the same day, because there is only one. The Haab' date, the trecena, and the nine-night cycle appear alongside it, each marked with how firmly it is attested.

Around the center sit the four realms: The Sky, The Road Below, The Old Words, and The Green World. Gods and day signs, the Hero Twins, the ceiba, the milpa, the small ones who keep the cornfield. Every card names its sources and says plainly how we know what we claim to know: carved in stone, painted in a codex, recorded by a colonial hand, kept in living practice, or reconstructed by scholars.

The honesty goes all the way down. 116 cards carry photographs, scans, or tracings of real artifacts, and every image is credited by author and license on a Sources page inside the app. Nine cards deliberately carry no image at all, because no attested image of those figures survives, and each of the nine says so on the card itself. I would rather show you an empty frame than an invention.

One more thing the app says out loud: the Maya are a living people. Around six million Maya are alive today, and the count this app computes is still being kept this morning.

Search across all 125 cards. Fully offline. No account, no tracking, no notifications, no streaks. Your time here stays yours.

If the almanac becomes part of your days, there are four optional tips in Settings. Nothing in the app is gated behind them. Sixty percent of what is left after costs goes to the Endangered Alphabets Project, which carves the world's vanishing scripts into wood so they are not forgotten, and on every tenth tip all of it does.