Blue Hand (Seal 7)

Blue Hand is the seventh Solar Seal, blue and therefore of the west and of transformation in Arguelles's rotation. Its stated triad is accomplishment as its power, knowing as its action and healing as its essence, and in Dreamspell practice it is the seal most associated with healing work and with the hands as instruments. It stands second in the second wavespell. The healing emphasis is one of the elements that has given the system its use in workshop and therapeutic settings, which is the context in which most people encounter it.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Blue Hand, Solar Seal 7, is described as governing healing, knowledge and skilled accomplishment, built outward from the borrowed imagery of the Tzolk'in day sign Manik. Blue Hand belongs to the Dreamspell's Blue colour family, alongside Blue Night, Blue Monkey, Blue Eagle and Blue Storm, a group with no basis in the traditional Tzolk'in's own black-coded third directional set; Arguelles substituted blue for black across this entire family when he built the Dreamspell's colour scheme in the 1980s. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the seventh of twenty, and, as with every wavespell in the system, its thirteen-day span runs on Arguelles's own fixed correlation to the Gregorian calendar rather than on the count kept by working Maya daykeepers.

The corresponding Maya day is Manik', whose glyph is a hand in the gesture of grasping, and which is generally associated with the deer; the Aztec equivalent day is Mazatl, deer, which supports the identification. In the colonial Yucatec sources it is a day connected with hunting and with the forest, and in some highland readings with strength and with the four points that hold the world. The Dreamspell reading of knowing, accomplishment and healing draws on the hand glyph and sets the deer aside entirely. That is a fair summary of how the system works: the Maya sign supplies an image, and the meaning attached to it is Arguelles's.

Manik is the seventh of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the deer and, by extension, the hand as an instrument of skilled work and healing; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as Kej, the K'iche' word for deer. In the directional scheme, Manik belongs to the west and the colour black. Arguelles's Solar Seal 7, Blue Hand, borrows only the hand half of Manik's paired imagery, dropping the deer association entirely, another example of how the Dreamspell selectively adapts rather than translates the Tzolk'in day-sign meanings it draws on.