Yellow Human (Seal 12)

Yellow Human is the twelfth Solar Seal, yellow and of the south in Arguelles's rotation. Its stated triad is free will as its power, influencing as its action and wisdom as its essence, and it is read in Dreamspell practice for choice, discernment and the specifically human capacity to decide. It stands seventh in the second wavespell. The name is Arguelles's and is not a translation of the Maya day name, which denotes something quite different.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Yellow Human, Solar Seal 12, is described as governing free will, wisdom and influence, built from Eb's borrowed human and path imagery. Yellow Human belongs to the Dreamspell's Yellow colour family, alongside Yellow Seed, Yellow Star, Yellow Warrior and Yellow Sun. As with the other nineteen seals, the specific gloss of free will is Arguelles's own construction, not a term drawn from the K'iche' daykeeping tradition's own reading of Eb or E. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the twelfth of twenty. Free will, the gloss Arguelles attaches to this seal, echoes a distinctly modern, individualist framing with no counterpart in the K'iche' daykeeping tradition's own reading of Eb or its counterpart E, which centres on the human being's path and service to community rather than on autonomous personal choice as such.

The corresponding Maya day is Eb, whose glyph is generally read as a tooth or a skull-like head, and which is associated in the sources with rain, with the road or path, and with what modern highland practice calls the road of life. The Aztec equivalent day is Malinalli, twisted grass. Colonial Yucatec sources treat Eb as a day of gentle rain and of the ladder or stairway. The Dreamspell substitution of Human introduces a category, the human being as such, that the Maya day list does not contain, since the twenty days are not a list of beings but a set of signs with their own histories. This is one of the plainest cases in which the Dreamspell name should not be taken as information about the Maya calendar.

Eb is the twelfth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the human being, service and the path a life follows; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as E, connected to the road or path. In the directional scheme, Eb belongs to the south and the colour yellow, closing the Tzolk'in's third four-sign directional set. Arguelles's Solar Seal 12, Yellow Human, borrows Eb's human and path imagery directly, and the Dreamspell gloss of free will and wisdom draws on the same sense of the individual's chosen road that the K'iche' name E already carries.