In Mexico, Cheryl triggers the magic that follows her home.

After I came home from my cultural tour of Mexico in May of 2012, I knew I wanted to write about it. When I researched I found there are many books written by women who travel and find themselves. What could I do to make my book stand out?

I decided I wouldn’t write about my tour unless I had an interesting story for a novel, and I could tailor the trip to fit inside the story.

That December 22, 2012, at the time of the Winter Solstice and the supposed end of the world: I got an idea! A flash of an idea. I was so fascinated by this idea, and the Mexican Maya concept of the end of the world, that the story for the novel was born.

Entering the West is that novel.

Entering the West, or “entering the day” is the way the Classic Maya referred to the direction of west and the movement of the sun at sunset. They felt the sun was entering somewhere…the earth, the underworld perhaps. Some feel the sun is being swallowed by a jaguar.

There were four directions: north, south, east, west and then the center. The corresponding colors were white, yellow, red, black and green for the center.

The Maya translation for sunset that can be read in glyphs on ceramics and painted on tombs is och k’in , meaning to “enter the day”. Och means to enter, and k’in means the sun and corresponds in the Maya Long Count calendar to one day.

This seems to be the opposite to how we in Calgary, Canada visualize the movement of the sun; we see the sunset as ending or finishing the day, not starting it.  After comparing many older and modern Maya languages and dialects, they seem to mostly agree that their word for sunset is to “enter”.

The Maya glyph looks like this.

Calgary is in the west.

The color of the west is black.

The sun is also a symbol of the king.

The sun setting is the sun entering the west.

 

Special thanks to Nicholas A. Hopkins and J. Kathryn Josserand and their paper Directions and Partitions in Maya World View, which can be viewed here.