Red Earth (Seal 17)

Red Earth is the seventeenth Solar Seal, red and of the east in Arguelles's rotation, and it closes the third wavespell. Its stated triad is navigation as its power, evolving as its action and synchronicity as its essence, and it is read in Dreamspell practice for alignment, for the sense that events coincide meaningfully, and for the earth as a living body. Synchronicity here is borrowed from Jung, and its presence is a good marker of the system's actual intellectual sources, which are twentieth-century western esoteric and psychological rather than Mesoamerican.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Red Earth, Solar Seal 17, is described as governing navigation, synchronicity and the patterned unfolding of events, built from Caban's borrowed earth and movement imagery. Red Earth belongs to the Dreamspell's Red colour family, alongside Red Dragon, Red Serpent, Red Moon and Red Skywalker. The term "synchronicity" here echoes the psychologist Carl Jung's own concept of meaningful coincidence, a Western borrowing layered onto the Maya-derived name rather than a term found in K'iche' daykeeping tradition itself. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the seventeenth of twenty, three from the sequence's close.

The corresponding Maya day is Kab'an, in Yucatec Caban, from the word for earth, and it is associated with the earth itself and, in several sources, with earthquakes and with the movement of the ground; the Aztec equivalent day is Ollin, movement or earthquake, which is the day-sign of the present world age in the Aztec cosmology. Colonial Yucatec sources also link it to thought or reasoning. The Dreamspell reading of navigation and synchronicity keeps the earth and adds a modern layer; the association with earthquake, which is the concrete and rather alarming content of the Aztec parallel and of some Maya readings, is not present in it.

Caban is the seventeenth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the earth, intelligence and synchronicity; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as No'j, meaning thought, knowledge or wisdom. In the directional scheme, Caban belongs to the east and the colour red, opening the Tzolk'in's fifth and final four-sign directional set. Arguelles's Solar Seal 17, Red Earth, borrows Caban's earth and synchronicity imagery closely, one of the system's more direct name-borrowings, keeping both the earth association and, loosely, the sense of intelligent, patterned movement No'j carries in K'iche' tradition.