Blue Monkey Tribe
In Mayan: Chuen
Left pointer finger
Action: Play Power: Magic Essence: Illusion
Antipode (opposite and balancing energy) to Red Dragon
Analog (support and similar energy) to Yellow Star
Occult Power (mystical, magical energy) to White Dog
Guide to some in the Blue Night, Blue Hand, Blue Eagle and Blue Storm tribes
Blue Monkey is one of the 20 archetypes to be celebrated by the Maya in their Tzolkin sacred count. The 20 day signs are represented on our fingers and toes, and the journey through their images tells a creation mythology. Each of us is born on a day of the Tzolkin, and belong accordingly to one of the 20 ‘tribes’ and its teachings. We may embody the ancient icon described in the Mayan stellae – the stone carvings of their temples – or relate to the modernized language of the Tzolkin as channeled by Dr. Jose Arguelles. Through emersion in the calendar count, we can find our own correlations between self and the core images of the day signs. By meditating on the words, images, and our own perceptions of Tzolkin birth energy, we can find another awakening to ourselves and how we relate to the world.
Blue Monkey’s glyph is a perfect metaphor for the energy it holds. On the one hand, it looks like an abstract face, some hint of squinty-eyed meditation. This is a reflection of the trickster shaman monkey-mind that we celebrate in the Blue Monkey tribe. At the same moment, the glyph imagery is more literally the black coals of a hearth fire held in a sacred space, calling up ancestors and spirit helpers with the drifting smoke. The inward horns are characteristic of many of the Mayan glyphs – the ear canals of inner listening and taking in divine messages. The dark block at the top is the mental manifestation of both this deep hearing of spiritual instruction, as well as the transformation of smoke signals into a physical response. In other words, Blue Monkey’s mastery is of bringing the magical realm into thought form. The dream exists in the ethers, and Blue Monkey’s playful imagination starts to formulate a way for it to also live on earth.
The glyph’s trick of the eye – is it a face, or this other parable? – is the essence of Blue Monkey time and people. Things are not what they seem, for better or for worse. Blue Monkey is the master of illusion, the magician as we view him in everything from pulling a rabbit out of a hat to being the supreme shaman of shape-shifting, dreaming and speaking pure prophecy. If we are suffering, Blue Monkey can invite laughter, turning court jester and bringing the Coyote medicine of Native American spirituality. And if we are already in joy, the Blue Monkey gift is of exponential infusion of still more, an effervescence that is childlike, irreverent of seriousness and sobriety.
Sometimes Blue Monkey energy is too playful for our tolerances, like a few centuries with the Cat in the Hat’s hijinks when we can only handle an hour of that unboundaried mayhem. This is an egoic dilemma, a human reaction to reverting back to primate and its less responsible impulses. Blue Monkey is brilliant, mentally sparked, creative and full of life. In human form we seem more refined, thoughtful and careful, but it’s possibly a de-evolution, as our free will and judgmental mind pushes joy and play into abeyance. Blue Monkey’s gift is the remembrance of our own most primal ancestry, our most relatable animal nature. Our minds are honed to lightning-quick awareness, but we are not industrialized to asphalt, preoccupied with plans and preparations for wrongdoing. We get to be bright, skilled and savvy without focusing it on material accomplishment.
To that end, by human assessment, Blue Monkey can seem irresponsible, irritating, and those born into its energy can pass a lifetime on earth wrestling with the expectations of our species that we pound a sober work ethic into our waking days. It’s a challenge to understand why such things matter, when Blue Monkey – compared to human counterparts – is drawn past matter into ether. Blue Monkey can literalize the swinging from tree to tree, not touching down to earth when there is this clearer access to the sky and its angels. This higher mind is part of the Blue Monkey gift, and is challenge is the wrestling to be grounded after all that time aloft. As humans are pounded into the ground by gravity and a developed fear of heights, of downfall, Blue Monkey is a healer to our wound of being landed and rarely in flight. Blue Monkey brings laughter and light to the thick pace of an everyday life, the density of being earthen.
In strength, the Blue Monkey can make life richer, more colorful and awing, by turning rain into rainbows, downfalls into acrobatic pratfalls, clown maneuvers. And at the same time, this gift of transforming life’s dullness or ills to magic and revelry is also often distrusted as irreverent, immature and even psychotic. The Blue Monkey state of mind is dreamy, bouncing the unseen realm of spirit off the walls of established institutions, trying to regress our modern culture back to a primal, instinctual lineage. This is a departure from the normal expectancy that we always progress, modernize and make life ahead of us less risky and dangerous. In some ways an endangered species, dependent on raw nature for a homeland as it rapidly is effaced from the planet, Blue Monkey lives for the day, for the passion of the moment, for the dream of lifting off to the spirit realm while still a planetary citizen. Its focus, as in the glyph, is communion with unseen energies, and makes fires not for practicality like warmth or cooking, but for homage, purification and honoring.
When born into a Blue Monkey lifetime, we abandon the literal, linear path and are called to the swinging, wending way that we see actual primates adopt as they move through the jungle from vine to vine. We find the child’s play of stepping out of industry and material accomplishment and choose life force, primal nature. We have honed minds that extend out to highly skilled hands, fingers and toes – the extension of our passion reaches our outermost extremities so we are deeply embodied. Embodiment equals joy, freedom, a full belly laugh. The sweet magical machinations of our pre-human brain activity make us born jokesters, inventors, innovators. We don’t use our minds to worry, but to make ease and delight. This is a giant infusion, within the Tzolkin’s array of energies, of spiritually supported fun. We can land in our Blue Monkey identity, or Blue Monkey days, certain that our humanity will be upended and reverted to something more passionately raw. This is unsettling in transition, and relieving once we have surrendered to its liberation.
Blue Monkey’s action – its direction in life – is to play. In English, we balance many activities around that verb. We play games, play roles, play instruments. Our playfulness represents skill as much as free time and merriment. We find delight – are of light – when we direct ourselves to games of learning and chance. There is no laziness or wasted time here unless our ego applies judgment that sheer, laboring accomplishment is the better use of our awakened days. Blue Monkey knows a deeper truth, that much can be manifested – handled and made with our hands – if our minds are light, infused with imagination. So we commit in Blue Monkey lifetimes to dexterous fingers, a lot of physical expression – dancing, athleticism, tree climbing and sexuality – and a bright, active process of thinking it through. In play, we jest, we produce entertainment, we stop the workday and try other exertions. Whatever irresponsibility ensues is possibly a barricade to true creation, rather than a means to it, so trust the joyful avenues and child’s instinct for art and beauty that Blue Monkey brings.
Blue Monkey’s power – its offering to strengthen us in turn – is magic. While a primate in Africa may or may not be a factual magician, the reiteration for the Blue Monkey tribe is that before we were human – conditioned to be rational, logical and guarded against wildly free imagination – we were drawn toward the elements of earth, fire, air and water with no picture of harnessing their energies for industry. Magic is the unkempt freedom of the natural world, and when we are in our Blue Monkey nature we are primally attuned to be as liberated. In this state of grace, synchronicity and enchantment is sparked. The dance from tree to tree allows much greater visioning than standing earthbound, so we see the creation of the gods in every flare of color – bird’s wing and flower bloom – and in the singsong of wind, downpour and animal call. When standing in a Blue Monkey incarnation, we are masters of magic – can draw down spiritual teaching through the images of our bright minds, and impart it to others visually, through art, music and strongest visual story. Our gift and intent is to fill others with the awe we are given through our open channels to Creator and its colorful designs for our growth.
Blue Monkey has the essence of illusion, and is the shadow dance of a monkey mind. With so much mental activity – in-flow of spiritual awakening, extreme imagining – many thought forms and insights will spin not into actualization but oblivion. As a monkey jumps from tree to tree and switches perspective routinely, plans and picture of the right next step also change up and not all are manifested. Illusion is not a lie or deception, but a flare of light. Sometimes that spark feeds the flame of a creation, and sometimes like a falling star it is quickly extinguished. Whether it comes into ‘reality’ or remains surreal, the illusion of the Blue Monkey allows us all to develop our imagination and dreaming alongside their ever-bursting picture of what could be. They lead us, circling our slower pace many times as we step more doggedly through our earth walk, with visions of potential outcomes. Blue Monkey needs cohorts on the path of creation, and can feel the pain of our slower species not jumping alongside its dance through shadows and light. Still, the mind will come up with new solutions and invitations and find partners for the trust that as with the Sanskrit teaching of maya, all is illusion, undeniably transitory and light, in this life.
Blue Monkey is antipodal, opposite, to Red Dragon. Red Dragon honors the most serious spot of our creation, the dark and wet succor of our mother’s womb. This consequential passage seals our connection to all life by threading us to another, to the biological vessel of our mothers on earth as well as the immutable grander dependence we hold for a divine sheltering in the heart of the goddess. Thinking of monkeys in their junglescape, it’s not all playtime, as there are long passages of crooning in familial love, grooming and embracing, making faces and chatter to each other. Red Dragon is the heart behind pure play, unsullied by bitterness, aggression. Blue Monkey needs the opposite energy of maternal care, the nurturing breast and belly centers, to balance its child nature, and to drop into the umbilicus of reconnection after much time swinging freely through open air. Red Dragon, in turn, needs Blue Monkey to infuse all that time in the red blooded womb with sky blue free play, unfurling limbs that were tightly fetal to outreach towards all elements of life outside a mother’s grasp. Exhilaration and independence are fueled by Blue Monkey’s daring and vitality, then it drops back into tribe, into community, the circle of an ongoing relationship to Mother Earth.
Blue Monkey is analogous, supported by Yellow Star. The active imagination and deep inner visioning of Blue Monkey creates some of the most spectacular, sky-infused art of our existence. Blue Monkey people are born musicians, artists, artisans. They are crafty and agile with their hands and choose embodied art forms where their mental acuity is released into expressions of their whole physicality. Yellow Star includes art, adornment, elegance and beauty, so Blue Monkey is supported by such surroundings – the attention to décor, jewelry, costume. Yellow Star is also the specific of the night sky aglow with those sparks that settle into the monkey mind for new imaginings, new dreams. Blue Monkey, as the trickster shaman, needs the constellations of star clusters to infuse the dark energies it encounters with those bright seeds of light.
Blue Monkey has a mystical, occult relationship to White Dog. White Dog is the mammalian seed of Blue Monkey. Just as a human is an evolution beyond primate, the four-legged dog is its predecessor. Blue Monkey finds much etheric support from returning to its roots in the loving heart and loyalty of the White Dog nature. It’s the grounding and connection to earth and our earth family, to community and commitment to offspring. This is a change up from unbridled free time, independence. White Dog brings Blue Monkey into the heart center, but through the force of lust, love, and hunger for procreation. It’s the infusion of our child nature with first attraction, adding partnership to our playtime. Blue Monkey’s lifetime is always charmed by falling in love, grappling with the entrances and exits of different personalities that coexist with an ever-present desire to (pri)mate.
If you are guided Blue Monkey, you are led through life in laughter. You are drawn to magical offerings instead of a rational reasoning, and yet you can get caught up in illusions that other would judge as falsehood. Really, you are just willing to go into uncharted waters and off course, out of line and the cage-grid too many rules create. The pull of Blue Monkey is back to your child nature, and it can be hard to look grown up with its demands of sobriety. Use you Blue Monkey guidance to find the purity of joy and play, rather than to avoid adult responsibility. It’s possible to have a primal connection to nature and its freedom without sacrificing yourself as immature and undeveloped. Follow Blue Monkey into the healing and wholeness that enjoying all dimensions of life can bring.
Blue Monkey people:
Elton John – Blue Magnetic Monkey
Chuck Yeager – Blue Lunar Monkey
Paul McCartney – Blue Electric Monkey (portal)
John Lee Hooker – Blue Self-Existing Monkey
Oprah Winfrey – Blue Overtone Monkey
Warren Zevon – Blue Rhythmic Monkey
Little Richard – Blue Resonant Monkey (portal)
Kristen Wiig – Blue Galactic Monkey (portal)
Ben Stiller – Blue Solar Monkey
Tiger Woods – Blue Planetary Monkey
Jose Arguelles (creator of the Dreamspell, our modern Mayan calendar) – Blue Spectral Monkey
Beck – Blue Crystal Monkey (portal)
Flea – Blue Cosmic Monkey
