Red Dragon (Seal 1)

Red Dragon is the first of the twenty Solar Seals, and as a red seal it belongs in Arguelles's scheme to the east and to the quality of initiation; red seals occupy positions 1, 5, 9, 13 and 17 in the cycle of twenty. Its stated triad is birth as its power, nurturing as its action and being as its essence, and as the opening seal it carries the sense of origination for the whole 260-day round. In the Dreamspell's own logic the seal is combined with one of the thirteen tones to make a kin, and it heads the first of the thirteen thirteen-day wavespells into which the count is divided. The colour and direction rotation Arguelles uses, red east, white north, blue west, yellow south, is adapted from the genuine Maya colour-direction scheme, in which west is black rather than blue.

In the Dreamspell tradition devised by Jose Arguelles, Red Dragon, Solar Seal 1, opens the sequence of twenty seals and is described as governing birth, nurture and primal being, an interpretive gloss consistent with the borrowed Tzolk'in imagery of the waterlily and crocodile but original to Arguelles's own system rather than translated from Maya sources. Red Dragon belongs to the Dreamspell's Red colour family, one of four groups of five seals each, alongside Red Serpent, Red Moon, Red Skywalker and Red Earth, said in Dreamspell teaching to share an "initiating" quality within the wavespell structure. It is worth restating plainly: this is a modern esoteric framework built on Maya vocabulary, not the calendar Maya communities keep, and Mayanist scholars and Maya organisations have objected publicly to its presentation as authentic tradition.

The corresponding day in the Maya count is Imix in Yucatec, Imox in K'iche'. Its glyph is generally read as a waterlily and it is associated with the earth-crocodile or the primordial reptilian earth from which the world rises, and so with the underworld waters, with abundance and with the beginning of things; the Aztec equivalent, Cipactli, is explicitly a crocodilian earth monster and likewise opens the count. There is genuine continuity between that and the Dreamspell reading of birth and origination, which is the seal where the correspondence is closest. What is not continuous is the name: Dragon is Arguelles's substitution, and the creature in the Maya sources is a crocodile or a waterlily-earth monster, not a dragon in any sense a reader of European or Chinese material would recognise.

Imix is the first of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the waterlily and the crocodile, primal waters and the earth floating upon them, a sign the living K'iche' Maya daykeeping tradition of highland Guatemala knows by the related name Imox, still kept today in an unbroken count that has never used Arguelles's Dreamspell numbering or terminology. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty Tzolk'in signs, Imix belongs to the east and the colour red. Arguelles's Solar Seal 1, Red Dragon, borrows Imix's name and its general sense of origin and nurture, but the Dreamspell's own day count is not synchronised with the Tzolk'in daykeepers actually use, so a Dreamspell date naming Red Dragon does not fall on a day the K'iche' tradition would itself call Imox.