An Introduction to Using the Calendar
A calendar remains an intellectual abstraction until it is used. Then it becomes something quite different; it becomes a cultural organizing principle. Pretty much everything in society has a temporal component to it, from a trip to the dentist to an annual holiday. Life is organized and in some ways created by calendars. It is important not just what calendar an individual uses, but also what calendar everyone else is using because, ultimately, it is a shared agreement about how to divide and organize time.
By choosing to use a different standard of time like the Mayan Tzolkin parallel with the usual Gregorian calendar, it is possible to get interesting perspectives on both. Following the different energies of the day signs gives a different feeling to each day, and it also makes you aware of how much subliminal influence a calendar can have on our lives. Only by having some other standard to make comparisons with can this be made obvious.
Some Mayan traditionalists strongly disagree with the Argüellés interpretation of the Tzolkin, arguing that it is made up and an appropriation of Mayan culture. Argüellés's defense is that Dreamspell is intended to be a universalized version of the Tzolkin and that he has never claimed it is the Mayan calendar.
Many thousands of people in dozens of countries around the world are now using the Tzolkin calendar in one form or another. Some have been introduced to the calendar in the traditional way, through meeting a day keeper and being given a reading. From the point of view of the indigenous Maya, this is still an essential experience, but many more people have been introduced to the Tzolkin through books and websites about the calendar, events about it, or friends who already know about it. For the sake of completeness and impartiality, decoding charts for both the traditional Mayan day count and Argüellés's Dreamspell version are presented.