Red Serpent (Seal 5)

Red Serpent is the fifth Solar Seal, red and therefore of the east and of initiation in Arguelles's rotation, and it closes the first wavespell of thirteen kin. Its stated triad is life force as its power, survival as its action and instinct as its essence. In the Dreamspell the serpent is read for the body, for vitality and for the instinctual level of the person, and it is one of the seals most often used in the system's health-related material. As with every seal, its meaning in a given kin is modified by the tone it carries and by the four other seals of its oracle.

In the Dreamspell tradition, Red Serpent, Solar Seal 5, is described as governing survival, instinct and life-force, an interpretation built outward from Chicchan's borrowed serpent imagery. Red Serpent belongs to the Dreamspell's Red colour family, the same "initiating" group as Red Dragon, Red Moon, Red Skywalker and Red Earth. As with each seal in this system, the gloss is Arguelles's own construction from 1987 onward, layered onto a Maya day-sign name rather than drawn from what Chicchan signifies to a working Maya daykeeper interpreting the authentic Tzolk'in. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the fifth of twenty, opening a thirteen-day sequence Arguelles's system runs in parallel to, but never synchronised with, the authentic Tzolk'in trecena.

The corresponding Maya day is Chikchan, the serpent. Snakes are among the most important creatures in Maya iconography: the vision serpent through whose jaws ancestors and gods appear in Classic-period relief, the feathered serpent of the Postclassic, and the sky-band serpents of the codices. In modern K'iche' practice the day Kan or Can is associated with justice, with the spinal column and with the force that moves in the body, so the Dreamspell reading of life force and instinct is not far from one living interpretation. What should be kept clear is that the modern highland readings belong to communities that still keep the count, and are their property to teach; the Dreamspell reading, whatever its overlap, was constructed separately in the late 1980s.

Chicchan is the fifth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the serpent, associated in Maya iconography with life-force and with rain-bringing celestial power; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day, somewhat confusingly, as Kan, an unrelated homophone of the Yucatec fourth day sign Kan discussed elsewhere in this atlas. In the directional scheme, Chicchan belongs to the east and the colour red, reopening the cycle's second four-sign directional set. Arguelles's Solar Seal 5, Red Serpent, borrows Chicchan's serpent imagery and its association with vital, instinctive force, and opens the Dreamspell's second wavespell.