White Wind (Seal 2)

White Wind is the second Solar Seal. As a white seal it is placed in the north in Arguelles's rotation, with white seals at positions 2, 6, 10, 14 and 18, and the north in his scheme carries refinement and purification. Its stated triad is spirit as its power, communication as its action and breath as its essence. In the working of the system a seal has no meaning on its own: it is read with the tone it carries, with its position in the wavespell, and through the oracle of guide, analogue, antipode and occult partner, so that a full kin reading involves five seals rather than one. The whole apparatus is Arguelles's own construction of 1987 to 1990 and should be dated accordingly.

In the Dreamspell tradition, White Wind, Solar Seal 2, is described as governing communication, spirit and the breath that carries messages between people, an interpretation Arguelles built outward from Ik's borrowed association with breath and speech. White Wind belongs to the Dreamspell's White colour family, one of four five-seal groups said in Dreamspell teaching to share a common underlying quality, here glossed as "refining." The seal also opens what Dreamspell teaching calls a wavespell, a thirteen-day sequence structurally parallel to, though not equivalent to, the authentic Tzolk'in's own thirteen-day trecena; White Wind's wavespell is the second of twenty such sequences in the Dreamspell year.

The corresponding Maya day is Ik', which straightforwardly means wind and also breath, and the glyph is the T-shaped sign used throughout Maya art for wind and for the breath of life; the same T-shape appears in the windows of the Governor's Palace at Uxmal and in jade breath-beads placed in the mouths of the dead. Ik' is associated with the wind god and, in the Postclassic and colonial sources, with K'uk'ulkan, the feathered serpent, whose Aztec counterpart Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl is the wind god and likewise governs the second day of the count. This is one of the cases where the Dreamspell reading, spirit, breath and communication, sits close to what the Maya sources actually support, and it is worth saying so; the divergences elsewhere are more striking because the correspondences here are real.

Ik is the second of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery breath, wind and speech, a sign the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows as Iq'. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Ik belongs to the north and the colour white. Arguelles's Solar Seal 2, White Wind, borrows Ik's name and its sense of breath and communication, and sits in the Dreamspell's White colour family alongside White Worldbridger, White Dog, White Wizard and White Mirror. As with every seal, White Wind's Dreamspell date does not correspond to when the true, living Tzolk'in count actually places an Ik day, since the Dreamspell runs its own fixed correlation to the Gregorian calendar and, distinctively, skips the leap day the Tzolk'in count does not, so the two drift steadily further apart.