Red Skywalker Tribe
In Mayan: Ben
Left ring finger
Action: Explore Power: Space Essence: Wakefulness
Antipode (opposite and balancing energy) to Blue Night
Analog (support and similar energy) to White Worldbridger
Occult Power (mystical, magical energy) to Yellow Star
Guide to some in the Red Dragon, Red Serpent, Red Moon and Red Earth tribes
Red Skywalker is the first 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.
Red Skywalker is shown in the Mayan glyph as a pair of pillars that surge skyward. Behind them, in the ground, is each of their root systems. The space between is like the air we gain in jumping out of our own shadows, leaving our footprint to momentarily launch ourselves into space. We are quick to gravitate back to earth, but for an instant we are aloft, in flight. Red Skywalker is the exploration of this jaunt skyward – including the height we gain towards the heavens, the roots we return to, and the clear space we create between, liberated to float untethered for a while. There are two columns to encourage this type of journeying in tandem with another. To get high in spirit or hallucinogenic in body we need a fellow traveler or shamanic guide. If we launch alone, we are isolationist, but if we move outwards into open space with another, we are partners in exploring the outer limits and new frontiers of awakening.
This relates sweetly to Red Skywalker being represented by the ring finger of our left hand, traditionally in Western Civilization the place where we wear a wedding band. To honor the Mayan historical resonance of this finger is to place the commitment of marriage in Red Skywalker’s domain and teaching. So the twin pillars of the glyph can represent two people choosing marriage as a way to recognize earth-rooting but simultaneously aim for astral consciousness and a vertical connection between stars and soil. Likewise, marriage is spacious, a dreamy disconnect from an absolutely earthen life, and a leap of faith into the unknown. We are separate, in union, but aiming in tandem for an upright and outward exploration of heavenly realms. We are individual, but increasingly identical, lifting and landing in shared exaltation.
Red Skywalker was traditionally a day-reverence of corn. Corn was the main Mesoamerican food staple, harvested by the men and mashed into maiz or meal by the women. The marital relationship was most centrally around creating family and feeding it. The plant cycle for corn in the Mayan territory is 260 days from seed kernel to a tall stalk of edible ears. This describes, as well, the length of gestation in the womb, from conception to birth. The Tzolkin calendar, 260 days in length, honors each of these primal cycles, one that occupies the women’s work, and the other the men’s. There is such beautiful symmetry, then, between corn and true creation, and that a new life nourished within a womb for 260 days is growing alongside the plant that will in fruition sustain it after birth into independence from its mother. This interplay between male and female nurturing, and the connection between a human’s emergence and the organic arising of a corn stalk, reiterate the most natural state of bonding between the genders. We co-create life – one within the womb, one without in the fields. One invents a child from interior darkness, and the other metamorphoses bright sunlight into good food. Were the role-playing of the sexes so simple in modern life.
Corn is also different these days. It comes in cans, is a scratchy snack at the movies, and only occasionally in midsummer are we exposed to its freshness from the farm. In taking a day to honor its vitality and godliness, we have to hearken back to the nature of ancient horticulture, its purity and personal touch. Corn was grown by every man for his family’s survival. He dedicated himself to its care and vibrant growth. There were prayers, invocations, fertilizing elixirs, examination of every stage of each stalk’s ascension toward the sun. The solar rays feeding the plants were likewise honored, and the rain or river gods. The corn plant was loved, protected, held in reverence just like the child in utero. And so it birthed, too, as potent and lush and magical.
Corn was a food staple, but for the hands-on care it received through its harvest, it was also alive in plant spirit medicine. When we come to Red Skywalker in the Tzolkin count, we are steeped in ancient tradition of working with the essence of nature’s elements, of hearing the running river and the pulse of the sun and the soil regenerated from composted decay. We can know this history through the corn’s listening ears. It’s mystical, and more like the hallucinogens that also come from plant form: ayahuasca, mescaline, peyote, marijuana, mushrooms. When we enter the Red Skywalker time, calling on corn spirit as a guide, we are lifted off the earth with its upward focus. We are made high like these other more obvious mind and mood alterants. Corn’s delicate rooting and gigantic upsurge towards the heavens becomes a metaphor for a transcendent state that plant ingestion can inspire.
So Red Skywalker, finally, is an invitation and opening to lifting sky-high and listening to the spirit voices that live there. We are prophets, leaving physical trappings in meditation and astral-traveling in essence to another realm. Our body seems to sleep or still as we vacate it – space out, get high, day-tripping through our psyche. We return to earth with the information we have gleaned from our stellar journey, our awakened consciousness, and offer it as prophecy to others who remained solidly landed. This is the crux of Red Skywalker people: the ones who seems spaced out, ungrounded daydreamers, but are in truth vitally connected here and able to trust their footprint so deeply they can detach from it for a while. They know how earth is like sky – minerals, micro-particles – and are comfortable in each spaciousness. They revere the sun, know it as a god-center and rise to it, so in life they are enlightened, loose and immaterial.
Red Skywalker people are the prophets of our times, able to rise high enough to glimpse the big picture of our earth landscape, but more interested actually in gazing still more skyward. They want to find truth within the darkness of the cosmos and are naturally adept at reading the twinkling messages of star clans and the other ancient emanations of our universe. They don’t drop down into our modern asphalt grid with ease, are actually ducking the surface layer of human tension on earth when the glyph shows the gap in their vertical column. Skipping people, places, things, they like essence and energy, airwaves and unreality. They like the dark soil of buried ancestors, earth’s regenerative messages, and they like the open cosmic field. If a Red Skywalker is alternately a stoner or high – metaphors for their comfort zones – it’s redundant. They exist naturally in the state others can attain only through hallucinogens.
Red Skywalker’s action – its direction in life – is to explore. The word origin of explore is to ‘cry out’ – while to implore is the cry or weeping inward. Red Skywalker is an extroverted, non-emotional state, taking any discomfort and moving it into an open space in the cosmos where answers can come; remember the many ears of a full stalk of corn. There is very little compost decay in a corn plant – the dry husks make dolls and the cobs can feed livestock or burn. So within a Red Skywalker person the melancholy of dark moods, downward spirals, don’t exist. All moves upward or otherwise evaporates. The cry, though, is loud, intentional, a prophet’s call for heavenly action and information. Red Skywalker certainly explores space in dreamtime journeying and daytime reverie, but the intention is not to conquer or bring back material souvenirs – altered consciousness that can be imparted to the earth inhabitants below is their only design.
Red Skywalker’s power – its offering to strengthen us in turn – is space. Again, how resilient Red Skywalker is to be a vertical column of transmitted prophecy with a cut out gap between earth and sky. That dodging of superficial life – the bustle of human activity on the earth’s crust – is their autonomy. Never really engaged with the goings on laterally – neighbors, family of origin, school teachers and classmates – they look to the sky and see its open emptiness, its space. This returns us to the partnership, though, wed into the glyph picture of a pair of prophets, channels. A Red Skywalker doesn’t explore space alone, doesn’t allow space that denies intimacy. They work in tandem with other seekers, other spacemen and women. Like corn never grows alone.
Red Skywalker has the essence of wakefulness. Corn itself is called a ‘long-night’ plant, meaning it grows best when germinated while days are still short, nights long. The 260-day harvest cycle is like nine months, indicating a certain start in the days coming out of darker winter solstice. When we enter Red Skywalker time or incarnate as Red Skywalker beings, we know darkness without fear: it’s the delightful entrance to the dreamtime and liberation from realism. As the days get longer, we refuse to reenter linear rationality, so that we daydream, remain mystical even when awake. And in the high productivity of growing towards the sky, relentlessly and fearlessly upward, we don’t flit into the torpor of being unconscious, deadened, dull. We are bright like the sun itself, and seeking, listening, wakeful.
Red Skywalker is antipodal, opposite, to Blue Night. Red Skywalker is the daydream, Blue Night the one while we sleep. In Blue Night, we safe-house our body in a shelter and let the soul enter the sky; in Red Skywalker, we are more fearless and leave our body vertical and awake while we drift off into more spacey realms. This is simply because there are fewer predators in the day; in the nocturnal dark we are vulnerable to their night vision. So we can be in the dreamtime, in daytime, without fear. More than many antipodal pairings, Red Skywalker and Blue Night have perfect symmetry. Together they form an incessant dream, a constant alignment with infinite consciousness.
Red Skywalker is analogous, supported by White Worldbridger. White Worldbridger is the moment of death, crossing over, and an emblem of the finality of the corporal life as well as the eternity of soul existence. A Red Skywalker crosses this portal in a day’s journey, home again in time for dinner. The knowledge that another world exists besides this oxygenated one is integral to Red Skywalker’s daring. Their willingness to experiment in other consciousness is based on watching the rites of death, and trying, actually, to access the afterlife while still embodied here. A shamanic death, where an initiate is pushed into their fear thresholds, or transcended in an altered state that reveals heavenly bodies, is part of Red Skywalker ritual. Red Skywalker in turn makes death less terrifying, is an exploration of the cosmic peace of an outer world, a preview of our aftermath that shows nothing to resist or fear.
Red Skywalker has a mystical, occult relationship to Yellow Star. Of course Red Skywalker is called skyward by points of light, rather than the inky black around them. They mystery is in the light source, the scattered designs a spider’s web of divine creation. Red Skywalker people are looking to the cosmos for a spectral beauty they can’t find in our surface world, and so the stars make more sense than many people or patterns of the civilization around them. Yellow Star is in turn enlivened by Red Skywalker – a visitor from afar who dares to rise against gravity’s bounds. It’s like being a deity who receives a disciple: touching, pleasing, and tales to tell from their travels. A star is sedentary, a cornstalk ever-reaching. For Yellow Star, Red Skywalker time and people bring fresh insight from the open ascent; in turn, Yellow Star delivers the prophecy of its sky tribe.
If you are guided Red Skywalker, you are called to space, to the combination of speckled light and vast black, and the day sky we experience here on earth as varied blue. You like clouds and chem trails and gazing through the canopy of trees at birds in flight. You go there, out of body and into the air. You know your footprint and choose healthy soil dark with recent mulch – you understand through guidance that death exists to fortify exploration of the afterlife. But you’re not called to physical mortality as much as letting each day live in the earth plane as well as with a sky clan of spiritual informants and aids who help you see eternity.
Red Skywalker people:
Lorne Michaels, Red Magnetic Skywalker
Khalil Gibran, Red Lunar Skywalker (portal)
Eddie Van Halen, Red Electric Skywalker
Barack Obama, Red Self-Existing Skywalker (portal)
Brian Wilson, Red Overtone Skywalker
Quentin Tarantino, Red Rhythmic Skywalker
Gwen Stefani, Red Resonant Skywalker
Fiona Apple, Red Galactic Skywalker
Jimi Hendrix, Red Solar Skywalker (portal)
Neil Young, Red Planetary Skywalker (portal)
Dave Eggers, Red Spectral Skywalker
Clint Eastwood, Red Crystal Skywalker
Dr. Seuss, Red Cosmic Skywalker
