Blue Eagle (Seal 15)

Blue Eagle is the fifteenth Solar Seal, blue and of the west in Arguelles's rotation. Its stated triad is vision as its power, creating as its action and mind as its essence, and it is read in Dreamspell practice for foresight, planning and the wide view. It stands second in the third wavespell. Here the Dreamspell name does translate the Maya day name, and the associated meaning is not far off, which makes it one of the better correspondences in the set.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Blue Eagle, Solar Seal 15, is described as governing vision, mind and far-seeing perception, built from the borrowed imagery of the Tzolk'in day sign Men. Blue Eagle belongs to the Dreamspell's Blue colour family, alongside Blue Night, Blue Hand, Blue Monkey and Blue Storm, a colour grouping substituted by Arguelles for the traditional Tzolk'in's black-coded third directional set at this position. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the fifteenth of twenty. Vision and mind, the seal's Dreamspell gloss, follow Men's own eagle-and-vision imagery reasonably closely, one of the seals where Arguelles's adaptation stays close to its Tzolk'in source rather than departing from it as sharply as Wizard, Warrior or Skywalker do elsewhere in the same twenty-seal sequence.

The corresponding Maya day is Men, associated with the eagle and, in some colonial sources, with the aged moon goddess and with the craft of building; the Aztec equivalent day is Cuauhtli, eagle. The eagle in Mesoamerican thought is a solar and celestial bird, paired with the jaguar as the two great predator emblems of warrior orders in central Mexico. Modern K'iche' practice reads the corresponding day Tz'ikin, bird, for fortune, for money and for the intermediary between earth and sky. The Dreamspell reading of vision and mind picks up the eagle's height and sight, which is a reasonable extension, though again it is a modern reading and not a report of Maya doctrine.

Men is the fifteenth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the eagle and vision, both literal eyesight and, by extension, foresight; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as Tz'ikin, the general K'iche' word for bird. In the directional scheme, Men belongs to the west and the colour black. Arguelles's Solar Seal 15, Blue Eagle, borrows Men's eagle and vision imagery closely, one of the more direct name-borrowings in the system, though the substitution of blue for the traditional black remains original to the Dreamspell's own colour scheme.