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.