In Mayan: Etznab

Left ring toe

Action: Reflect      Power: Endlessness      Essence: Order

Antipode (opposite and balancing energy) to Yellow Star

Analog (support and similar energy) to Red Dragon

Occult Power (mystical, magical energy) to Blue Night

Guide to some in the White Wind, White Worldbridger, White Dog and White Wizard tribes

White Mirror 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.

White Mirror is shown on the glyph as the four stepped corners of the renowned Mayan pyramids, built from gigantic stone blocks and carved on each side with steep stairs to the top. The pyramids were erected to access the heavens. The Mayan territories in Central America have a relatively flat topography, hovering at sea level. Through actual or psychic journeying they must have encountered the mountains found in other parts of our earth and modeled their stone monuments after granite peaks, nature’s own skyscrapers. The ode to the gods came at quite a price, as the Mayan also famously constructed their pyramids without the invention of the wheel, or the existence of pack animals to do any hauling. Almost impossibly, to the archeological eye, they quarried, moved and stacked stone using only human strength and ingenuity – unless they found a superhuman method of creating their temples, a divine influence so powerful it made the loads weightless or the men involved immune to exertion.

White Mirror time and people are deeply connected to the metaphor of the pyramid and all it served in the Mayan community. White Mirror is the intense, incomprehensible construction of these mammoth edifices – the brutal, epic erection of man-made mountains that allowed access to the heavens. It is the pyramid itself – the long, steep climb and the view above the landscape that offers a god-like view. It is the ceremony that the Maya famously held at the flat ledge at the top, a human sacrifice ritual meant to honor the gods as well as the victim who would have preferred to rise to the peace and divine royalty in heaven than further endure the human condition. It is then the masses watching the priest perform this violent ceremony, and their conviction that the slaughter was sensible, just and holy – and that their own sacrifice of remaining in planetary toil while others ascended was simply their fate, and ultimately they could also rise to the gods and be rewarded.

White Mirror in Mayan language is ‘blade’ and references the obsidian carved into a hand-held obelisk to make a tool that could cut through a rib cage and slice out a human heart. The priest performing this act held the blade high above his head – to the gods, to the sky – then plunged it into the victim strung on a stone bench with their chest bared. Obsidian is also used as a mirror, its polished black surface shining an apt reflection, so the wording has become more generic. In the modern incarnation of this calendar, we cannot easily reference human sacrifice as elemental to our environment or world order. White Mirror sticks out compared to Red Earth, White Wind, Blue Storm and Yellow Sun. It doesn’t qualify as an animal or a quintessential human role, as with other day signs, is not part of the cosmos or natural beauty. It truly stands apart.

So do those with its birth energy, then. White Mirror people are called to return specifically to the Mayan honoring of this day, and resurrect it for our modern culture in a palatable form. We cannot simply eradicate the memory of the most primal, potent ceremony of the Maya and skip over the White Mirror moment as a time to reflect, to notice the world’s tendency to show itself as ‘another yourself’. White Mirror is, of course, a strong teaching that what we dislike – and revere – in others is always a version of ourselves projected outward. It’s a picture, too, that if we each are always reflecting one another we create in unison that endless, funhouse mirroring that makes light of our sense of being separate, individual, one. We are actually infinite and every version of ourselves in receding back into the reflection is like a single lifetime among the long string of incarnations we embody as a soul.

But beyond this image of looking back at ourselves from the outside, identifying our body as apart from the essence within, or seeing that in physical form we are more alike other humans than different, White Mirror is an exploration of sacrifice, of faithful offering of self to the care and blessing of the divine. The word ‘sacrifice’ holds sacred within it, so we approach it as a ritual that is holy, serene. We anticipate a painful edge, cutting us open and apart, but in order to find something deeper within that is god-like in itself. To orient to the Mayan ritual, the cage around our heart is cracked and we are freed. Our heart center is lifted, elevated, removed from darkness and held to the light of the sun source. Our physical existence – life in human form – is altered, and we join with the pure light of one god, rising from this temporal incarnation filled with strife. The Maya beheaded the dead and threw the skull down the steps into the crowd. We are likewise taken out of the scrutinizing, analyzing cranial perspective at this juncture of giving our hearts to god, and all that heady conjecture is plunged back to earth, disconnected and disempowered, reconfigured as a sort of game ball instead of a control tower.

As White Mirror, we use this raw indigenous remembrance to allow dismantling of non-physical constraints in our lives. We aren’t going to literally be raised lifeless to god, but we are going to feel our hearts freed through fearlessness, through extraction of obstacle and the trust that there is more than this corporal moment. We extend our faith to the sky while feeling the firmest foundation of many tiers of stone settled beneath us. We use this dynamic duality of earth, air to be truly extended between – out of our comfort zone, certainly, but still in sacred space. The White Mirror time – a day, wavespell or entire incarnation – lives in the stillness of a positive rupture, the anticipation of necessary change inviting unimagined liberation. In psycho-spiritual terms, it’s an ego death. We are offered to the gods in an abrupt violence the ego can’t fathom or keep in its hold.

The sacrifice, then, is merely of the ego, and yet the ego continues its assertion that it is seminal, dominant and if it dies we are dust. White Mirror destroys the ego’s will to be singular and separate by circling us back to the realization that we are reflections of one another, not apart, and more similar than different. And more than mirroring each other, we mirror the divine. When we are metaphorically laid out on cold stone, hearts offered to god, the priest shows all that our love center, the organ of warmth and sustaining life, is our own piece of heaven. We use White Mirror to turn the sheen of our surface existence to the sun, reflecting more of its light and heat.

White Mirror’s action – its direction in life – is to reflect. The wording is either literal – ‘I am another yourself’ – or figurative, as we ponder, take a serene moment to both remember the past and anticipate the future. A White Mirror does have the interesting karma of moving through the world shining people’s behaviors back at them, but also reflects the spark of light within them that they themselves may have felt was lost. A distorted mirror makes the reflection unwieldy or unrecognizable, but the clear mirror – from still water instead of troubled or murky – shows another the truth of themselves they may have no vantage point to detect. The more we calm ourselves, the clearer the portrait is for another to view. And likewise, the stillness we hold is the stillness that will surface within them.

White Mirror’s power – its offering to strengthen us in turn – is endlessness. Much of the White Mirror’s prophecy reads like a transcendent hallucination. Imagining mirrors reflecting each other – into infinity – offers a dizzy disorientation where nothing is really in danger except our mental control or ability to conceive of such endlessness. This is a journey that many choose through hallucinogens, or under the guidance of a shaman. The original Mayan sacrifice was this level of psychic transformation – for the priest, the victim and the gathered populace. It was an invocation of the gods whose direct energy feed pulsed all into a trance-state, into transcendence. The endlessness of White Mirror undulates between the ego’s struggle with losing dominion – an endless tug of war between resistance and surrender – and the ecstatic state that arises when that conflict between will and essence subsides. The endlessness is what essence is – a soul life that never stops. When we attain this within our human experience, we are liberated from fear of death and all its nuances, are free from the idea that there is ever an ending.

White Mirror has the essence of order, and this refers to the Mayan ceremonial hierarchy. In White Mirror moments, there is a divine source acknowledged by all – the one to whom the temple was erected towards. There is the priest, endowed with a resilient channel to the sun itself, who wields the blade and frees the heart. There is the chosen victim – often a royal child or the victor of a battle or ball game, rather than the serf or defeated warrior – painted blue to invoke the dreaming night, the crossing through physicality to ether. There is then those not holy enough to rise to heaven in this enchantment, the crowd below who can only hope for such ascension. When we live in White Mirror, we see the strata within life’s ceremony, can distinguish the layers of awakening and the place each holds in empowerment. The burden of being a priest is the same but different as the burden of being on the ground gazing up at the spectacle. Every role has its gift, and its limitation. But there are distinctions in life, tasks and fates divided to encompass the whole experience – and White Mirror understands this demarcation between people.

White Mirror is antipodal, opposite to Yellow Star. Yellow Star honors Venus, and the powerful beauty it gleams. For men, Venus is an invitation to hold the beauty of power – warriorship, masculine strength and determination, fearlessness – and for women, it is the power of beauty – that making our hearts shine through to our skin pores, our tresses, is to be a flower or gemstone in the world, a shimmering light for the men to return home to. White Mirror is beyond gender roles or distinctions of beauty, assaults our human perfection frailty both with its blade. We need Yellow Star – the reference of beauty – to counterbalance the ugliness or cruelty of the sacrifice ceremony. But then the ritual itself shows the luminescence of life force – essence again, that Yellow Star within every one of us. White Mirror reveals that the sparkle in the sky is a reflection of our own spark inside.

White Mirror is analogous, supported by Red Dragon. The birth represented by Red Dragon, the primordial vessel or womb from which we all emerge, is part of the death depicted in human sacrifice. The hole left by our absent heart is regenerative, bathed in blood and ready to hold new life. Red Dragon, as the space in utero, needs a different sort of sacrificial act – the severing of an infant from its mother to enter oxygenated independence. Red Dragon people can feel the White Mirror moment as a means to actually complete a birth cycle and double their nurturance from being sustained by solely mother, to both maternal and paternal influences: again the sacrificial loss is ultimately only exponential liberation.

White Mirror has a mystical, occult relationship to Blue Night. The Blue Night indication of our home, the house that shelters us to sleep deeply enough for sweet dreams, always holds the decorative mirror that lets us see ourselves within this sanctuary. In open air, we might catch our reflection in windows or water, but in the security of our home we take longer views to coif or simply realize our physical form. We place ourselves in the dream of life, see the film of ourselves instead of always standing distantly behind the camera. This is part of the holism of endlessness, that we are part of reality and not separate from it, seamlessly interwoven. White Mirror serves the occult empowerment of Blue Night by making dreams a softer sacrifice ceremony. We don’t have to actually climb the temple stairs and be assaulted in faith. Our dreams take us there imaginally, offset the ego’s dominance, and allow us the liberation of an ascended life – all in the hours of a night’s sleep.

If you are guided White Mirror, you are sometimes drawn towards playing the scapegoat, losing your autonomy and taking the fall while others continue obliviously upright and vertical, ironically more like the walking dead while you are a fallen angel. You are attracted to ritual, ceremony, celebration and faith in the power of devotion. You follow what is familiar, similar to you, like another yourself. You are potentially strongly Mayan in your past life incarnations, remembering the sacrifice itself through your astral body, and drawn to the authentic teachings of that people.

White Mirror people:

Kurt Cobain – White Magnetic Mirror

Iggy Pop – White Lunar Mirror

Joni Mitchell – White Electric Mirror

Sigmund Freud – White Self-Existing Mirror

Walt Whitman – White Overtone Mirror

Chris Farley – White Rhythmic Mirror (portal)

Janet Jackson – White Resonant Mirror

Chris Martin – White Galactic Mirror

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – White Solar Mirror

Jesse Jackson – White Planetary Mirror (portal)

William Burroughs – White Spectral Mirror

Stevie Nicks – White Crystal Mirror

Tom Waits – White Cosmic Mirror