[This post pre-exists the Resonant Truth website and is not formatted, but still fun!]

Red Serpent is one of 20 aspects celebrated by the Maya as day names around which to orient their spiritual life. The glyph image is clearly a snake: scales, squinty eyes and all, with an incongruous full-lipped mouth. All the days named for animals also invoke gods with their characteristics, so Red Serpent is both earth-bound reptile and a divine incarnation of the instinctual, cold-blooded slitherer whose long, legless form is echoed in all of nature, from the sticks we use to erect shelters, to the lightning ribbons in a stormy night sky. Phallic? Indeed. This passage through the Red Serpent’s energy is as close to sex talk as we get in the Tzolkin calendar. The glyph’s prominent mouth is a reminder that even as a Serpent is a strong visual of male genitalia, this wavespell’s unique feature is a stream of wide openings that are easily vaginal, oral, to be entered and emerge from in deeper peace. Oh my.

This is a welcomed relief after recent wavespells that invoked death, the strong storm, and the awkwardness of being only human. The Red Serpent wavespell is the 9^th of 20, and as we bear down to the midpoint of the 260-day cycle, we are designed to enter the core of ourselves, finding a root grounding that we will spring up from in the second half of the Tzolkin spin. By the end we have embodied balance. The Red Serpent is characteristically intense, as we gulp air and descend even lower into our own mulch, and it often demands us to come to terms with our physicality, our so-called lower form, reptilian survival. How strong an organism are we? How well have we cared for our body vehicle? Are we muscular, lithe, supple, slipping helpfully into the cracks so we are not flattened by fast-moving motorized technology? Do we have the capacity to rest long hours, even seasons, to retract from the maelstrom and be solitary? Red Serpent, in its god image, may ask such reticence and self-reliance from you.

On the other hand, coming back to triple-X astrology, this is a time to do the snake dance, which I think means sidewinding around someone intimately, or generating through non-sexual techniques the same achievement of kundalini surges. It’s not about thinking your way into situations that will provide cosmic-orgasmic release, but expressing that hunger, a real survivalistic need, in every activity you undertake. So if it’s walking to the mailbox, grocery shopping, banging out your life story on a laptop, you are infused with physical vitality, awareness of your body and its yearnings, a consummate yogi. If you have a partner, let the dialogue fall away and be preoccupied by the revelation of their breath, heartbeat, skin temperature, fluttering eyelids when they sleep. What is this miracle of physiological life? You can observe yourself the same way, in amazement.

The Tzolkin holds an overlay of ‘portal’ days – 52 of the 260 are deemed higher energy, gateways between dimensions, shortcuts through obfuscation, episodes of enlightenment. The portals are staggered pretty widely at the beginning and end of the 260 days, but as we enter the heart of the Tzolkin, they condense into a ten-day ribbon that runs through the Red Serpent wavespell, looking pretty snake-like and as darkly potent as venom. If one portal day is a passage past obstacles, clear vision amid clutter, a time-shift or time-travel, then ten of them are an exponential revelation. You will define your own experience, your own great gateway, for this wavespell, but it helps to think again of the snake itself for inspiration.

The shedding of snakeskin is a tight unfurling, like crawling out of a spandex sleeping bag, and the bondage you may feel by your own physical decay can be claustrophobic at times. As we worm our way through the Red Serpent portals, we are forced to feel – more than see – the things we have outgrown: habits, relationships, hungers, angers. We may even invoke them one more time, nostalgically, as we fight to scale back and let a new skin, supple and brightly colored, shine through. The ten portals begin on the second day of the wavespell, with its challenging energy, and so it helps to remember all the hard lessons we have recently accumulated: death leads to rebirth, stormy weather to clear skies, humans to heaven. The Red Serpent’s confinement in its own dry catacomb leads to emergent ease and vitality.

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Red Serpent. Its power is life force, which is a consideration of the ‘poison’ that preserves its own existence at the expense of others’. We all have that, metaphorically speaking, the great power that gives us endurance and dominion in our immediate physical surroundings. That it can kill off attacks and invasions that endanger us is not a cruel or ominous quality. It’s an innate self-preservation so that our strength and flexibility are useful in the world, of benefit. All the ways snakes intimidate – rattling, the expanded hood, bared fangs – are not to hunt pray. This showiness is their defense system, how they stay alive against danger. So look at your own drama surges, your intensity, and see how they serve to preserve you. Is the danger real, or just an innocent hiker stumbling along the path, eyes on the sunrise?

Similarly, the Red Serpent’s action is to survive. Reptiles in general are maligned by the comparison of a cold-blooded killer to their non-mammalian inner workings. They come across as having no feelings, no soft spots, no love in their hearts. But we humans are just a layering of the animal evolution before us, so that before we were feline, canine, primate, we took on the best qualities of amphibian and reptilian strains. A Serpent’s survival mechanism is imbedded in our own steamy bloodstream, and is best demonstrated lately in the neverending endurance of Wall Street bankers, or the resentment of Republicans. What qualities survive in you, no matter what? What makes you cool, or cold hearted in a way that helps? Best to admit some kind of slit-eyed detachment, apparent indifference, so you don’t come upon it unawares – tzzzz!

The essence of Red Serpent is instinct. There is a uniformity to instinct, life force and survival, as if a snake is so streamlined and simple that its qualities are a blur of the same elements. Your instinct will be well-honed in this window, because we are meant, too, to use if for our survival. How we do that in modern times is different than the old hunter-gatherer paradigm, but there is one way that has stayed true over the eons. We make love, we make babies, food and shelter. The demise of Western Civilization, possibly poisoned for our highest good by a serpentine god image, is also an opportunity to get back to basic human needs. Your instinct – a sensation of safety or danger – will direct you on the path back to primal yearnings. No way you’re going to be able to think it through in this passage; go with your gut. Paying attention to your inner organs will be a distraction from the rough transition of a lost skin layer.

Characteristics of the Red Serpent – Is this you or someone you know?

Imagine occupying this persona for the upcoming 13 days:

‘Serpent people have a strong will; they are charismatic, spontaneous, passionate and bold. The Serpent is a good leader, a night person and he likes to be alone. He is the embodiment of instinct and the satisfaction of the senses. He is a person of extremes. He can be closed and withdrawn, yet he can also be extremely emotional. Serpent hates anger and rage; he tends to deny his own feelings and protect them onto his environment. Movement and dance are excellent outlets for [transforming] this raw energy.’

– Nicole Zonderhuis, The 13 Moon Diary of Natural Time

Remembering Yellow Human – Last Wavespell’s Learning

Much of this wavespell was a literal headache for me, a days-long brain freeze in my frontal lobe, obscuring the intuition of the third eye.  This low-grade depression seemed to exemplify that whatever our species has accomplished with mental agility – solution-oriented breakthrough, enlightenment and innovation – is now a hardened mass of materialistic excess that interferes with spiritual connection. I was actually appalled, experientially, by how hard it is to be Human, how nearly unnatural.

To be a Human at this juncture seems to be a form of reckoning, a 12-Step ‘inventory’ of our past indiscretions, the errors of our ways. That’s a harsh downward turn for a civilization that likes to see itself at the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, if we did adopt some deep humility glancing over our big blunders, we probably could feel within our regrets and fear of the future the essence of our own individual Humanity and our role in the collective. We could find among our mistakes, distinct successes.

What was the success of your Humanity? What felt right, invoked your life’s wisdom, influenced others when you let it flow through you? Find it, to remind you of the best of your Human form and gift. What felt wrong, static, even paralyzing? It’s helpful to name these negative impressions as we go into the Red Serpent wavespell, because these hard and stuck places are exactly what we are about to slough off.