How to Calculate Your Birthday in the Mesoamerican Calendar

Are you wondering how to convert your birthday into the Mesoamerican calendar?

It’s actually pretty simple, despite the complex mathematics that went into creating the calendar.

But before you start, it’s important to understand how these calculations work. Here is an article that explains the Mesoamerican calendar.

The Calendars of the Calendar Round

As mentioned in that article, the Calendar Round is composed of two very important calendars: the Sacred Round and the Solar Round.

The Sacred Round (tzolk’in to the Maya) was a series of 260 days and was taken into consideration for ceremonies, weddings, and warfare. Some sources seem to suggest that the day you were born on in the Sacred Round would determine your personality throughout your life.

The Solar Round (known as the tun or haab) consisted of 360 days, with 5 unlucky days at the end. This calendar, clearly, marks the movement of the sun and seasons.

You can determine your birthday using any combination of Mesoamerican calendars, but here we will use the Calendar Round. This provides a specific date within a 52-year period. This date refers to the season in which you were born (based off the solar calendar) and the significance of the sacred calendar at that specific junction of time.

Online Resources for Calculating Your Birthday

There are many online resources that you can use to calculate your birthday. Here are four that I recommend:

Maya Calendar Converter (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

FAMSI Date Conversion Tool (Images broken as of publishing of this article)

Mayan Calendar

Aztec Calendar

Enter your birthday in each of these conversion tools. Although each one will show the Long Count at the beginning, the Tzolk’in and Haab are labeled in each sequence.

Try finding your birthday now! What other dates would you want to convert?