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Imix, the Day Sign Behind It

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Imix, the Day Sign Behind It

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.

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