Yellow Sun (Seal 20)

Yellow Sun is the twentieth and last Solar Seal, yellow and of the south in Arguelles's rotation, and it closes the cycle of seals. Its stated triad is universal fire as its power, enlightening as its action and life as its essence, and Dreamspell practice reads it for completion, illumination and the wholeness of the round. Because the twenty seals run against thirteen tones, the last seal does not coincide with the end of the 260-day count; the cycle closes only when both wheels return together, which is the arithmetic the system inherits from the Maya count.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Yellow Sun, Solar Seal 20, is described as governing universal fire, enlightenment and the completion of a cycle, closing the sequence of twenty seals as Ahau closes the twenty Tzolk'in day signs. Yellow Sun belongs to the Dreamspell's Yellow colour family, the same "ripening" group as Yellow Seed, Yellow Star, Yellow Human and Yellow Warrior. As with every seal, this is Arguelles's own late-twentieth-century interpretive gloss built on borrowed Maya vocabulary, not a rendering of what Ahau means within the living Tzolk'in tradition kept by K'iche' and other highland Guatemalan daykeepers.

The corresponding Maya day is Ajaw, in Yucatec Ahau, and the word means lord or ruler. It is the most important day of the twenty: the Long Count records dates by the day 4 Ajaw at which the count begins, Classic-period rulers bore the title k'uhul ajaw, holy lord, and the glyph for the day is also the glyph for a ruler's face. It is associated with the sun and with the sun god K'inich Ajaw, so the solar element of the Dreamspell reading is genuine, but the political and dynastic content, the day of lordship, is absent from it. That is a fitting note on which to close the set: the Dreamspell has taken a calendar embedded in the statecraft, agriculture and ritual of a specific civilisation and rendered it as a system of personal psychological attributes, and however useful its users find that, the two are not the same object.

Ahau is the twentieth and last of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the lord and the sun, the most prestigious of the twenty signs and, in the Long Count, the only sign on which Katun and Baktun period endings can fall; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as Ajpu. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Ahau belongs to the south and the colour yellow. Ahau is numbered out of sequence in the Dreamspell's own list, appearing here as Solar Seal 20, Yellow Sun, even though the twenty seals otherwise run in the same order as the twenty Tzolk'in signs; Yellow Sun borrows Ahau's solar, lordly imagery directly.