Blue Night (Seal 3)

Blue Night is the third Solar Seal. Blue seals, at positions 3, 7, 11, 15 and 19, are placed in the west in Arguelles's rotation and carry the quality of transformation. Its stated triad is abundance as its power, dreaming as its action and intuition as its essence, and it is one of the seals most emphasised in Dreamspell practice, since the system as a whole is presented as a recovery of dreaming and of a natural timing. The blue for west is a departure from the Mesoamerican colour scheme, in which the west is black, ek', and blue-green, yax, belongs to the centre; the substitution is Arguelles's and appears to be aesthetic.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Blue Night, Solar Seal 3, is described as governing abundance, dreaming and the intuitive, interior life Arguelles read outward from Akbal's borrowed association with night and enclosed space. Blue Night belongs to the Dreamspell's Blue colour family, alongside Blue Hand, Blue Monkey, Blue Eagle and Blue Storm, a group Dreamspell teaching glosses as "transforming." Note that this Blue grouping has no basis in the traditional Tzolk'in's own direction-colour scheme, which assigns Akbal's position to black, not blue; the substitution is original to Arguelles's twentieth-century system.

The corresponding Maya day is Ak'b'al, meaning darkness or night, and by extension the interior of the earth and the underworld. Its glyph is one of the standard signs for darkness, and it is linked to the jaguar as a creature of the night sun, to caves, and to the passage of the sun through the underworld between setting and rising. In the divinatory readings recorded from colonial and modern sources it can carry both the shelter and the danger of the dark. The Dreamspell reading of dreaming and intuition is a plausible modern extension of night symbolism but is not what the Maya sources say; they are concerned with darkness as a place, the underworld and the cave, rather than with dreaming as a psychological faculty.

Akbal is the third of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery night, darkness and the interior of a dwelling, a sign the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows as Aq'ab'al. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Akbal belongs to the west and the colour black, not blue; Arguelles's Dreamspell substitutes Blue for this third colour group, one of the clearer points at which the Dreamspell's own colour scheme departs from the traditional Maya direction-colour assignment even while preserving its underlying four-group, five-seal structure. Solar Seal 3, Blue Night, borrows Akbal's name and its association with dreams and the interior, unconscious life.