Yellow Seed Tribe
In Mayan: Kan
Right pinky finger
Action: Target Power: Flowering Essence: Intuition
Antipode (opposite and balancing energy) to White Wizard
Analog (support and similar energy) to Blue Eagle
Occult Power (mystical, magical energy) to Red Earth
Guide to some in the Yellow Star, Yellow Human, Yellow Warrior and Yellow Sun tribes
Yellow Seed 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.
Yellow Seed’s glyph shows clearly a seed dropping into a hole prodded into soil. The seed is divided in two, as is the channel in the ground. Many seeds do split into two parts as they are released from their pod – such as a pea – yet the significance of the duality here is to include both halves of creation, male and female, when imagining how new life is generated. Yellow Seed is a celebration of reproduction, whether in plants or animals. In humans, male seed moves into the channel of a woman, penetrating her earthen nature with its sunlight. A child blooms through the same canal in birth. Each sexual partner has come in turn from a male and female ancestral lineage – parents, grandparents, and their outreaching family tree. Yellow Seed’s glyph connects us, distinctly mammalian, to all flora and fruit. It’s an invitation to sense the simplicity of how we regenerate life – and also the complexity of holding both feminine and masculine natures within our whole being.
Yellow Seed most prominently likens us to plant life, and also honors the indigenous life purpose of tending fields, submitting like the crops themselves to weather conditions and seasonal cycles. We are threaded to plants through epochs of depending on them for sustenance, even if by this modern moment few of us do have to bountifully harvest our food. Our bloodline and every ancestry lead back to a form of farming the process of planting seed in soil. We know plants, too, from most kindergarten classrooms that teach the wonder, the extraordinary miracle of a seed nugget – hard and dense – transformed to the climbing height and full bloom of a sunflower. So early on in our ancient lineages and in our current lives we were introduced to nature’s easiest explosion, where a tiny bead of potency unfurls into leaf and flower with color, scent and succulence – and maybe further evolves into being edible or providing the canopy of shade, the materials for a dwelling or vessel.
In our current civilization, more confront seeding through human procreation than in farming, so we can drop into the awakening that we have commonality with plants in the way our sexuality parallels the penetration of a seed into soil. Further, all our creative endeavors, beyond childbearing and into whatever we bring into bloom in the world, also imitate plant development. We condense our intention into potency – giving it our all – and then choose the best conditions for growth. We aim for rich, fertile and live giving soil, and hope for the blessing of rain. We wait for the sun’s inspiring warmth and illumination, through night’s of dormancy and chill. Creating a child has a similar, light speed synchronicity with plant development: male sperm targets female egg in a small window of a woman’s menstrual cycle. But outside these seminal inductions of new human life, we seed fields and valleys of our inspired ideas over our lifetime. We watch some take root and fully fruit, others falter from degrees of drought or darkness. In the Yellow Seed time, we learn acceptance of nature’s law in determining what of our hopes and dreams will manifest into formed reality.
Yellow Seed celebrates cycles: seed, shoot, sprout, stem, leaf, flower and fruit – as well as the decay of eventual death that leads to composted plant matter and fertile soil for the next growth. Yellow Seed people live in cycles, and embody all levels of development as their days unfold. They can be hard, protected and contracted as a seedpod – seemingly defensive and hidden. They dig into their past experiences – memories turned over to mulch and become new fertile soil. They have loyalty, then, and focus on their ancestral lineage. Their arc of growth includes vulnerability – a giant shift from holding a tight shell as they send their tender shoot towards the heat and light of the sun. They are prone, really, to darkness for much of their lives, having to navigate the absence of sun – or enlightenment – while also always orienting to it, hungering for the nourishment it offers.
Things move faster for Yellow Seed people when they do break away from the soil of their past experiences and can live on light more directly. Always rooted in their histories, they are yet expansively taking in bursts of illumination that come straight from the godhead of each day’s sunlight. They grow faster in this climbing skyward, unfurling layers of petals, leaves and the center point of their floral heart – the stamen for pollination, the seed pockets stirring that will bring a next generation to life.
A Yellow Seed person has their explosive flowering stage, their ultimately fruitful manifestation. Still they can’t stay there in fixed accomplishment, as rhythmic dying and decay is inherent to their lifetime. They wilt, fall into human styles of depression, despair and a sense of disconnection with source. They follow the patterns of their forebears, are reminded again of their recent and ancient histories, uncertain if they can rise again in light. And unsurprisingly, they absolutely can – and do – and the cycle of letting the past inform and inspire future growth, always assisted by divine influence and inspiration, begin once more.
The Yellow Seed tribe is sexual. They understand sexuality as also cyclical, digging into intimate darkness with another in order to explode in light. They sense sexuality as flowering, the body rooted into the earth through fleshy communion, and fostering waves of ecstasy that resemble Technicolor bloom, verdant scent, lush succulence and the moving bloodstream of floral nectar, tree sap. The orgasmic high, or simply the resounding love that sexuality stirs, are a different kind of communion with the sun and its refracting light.
Yellow Seed people are dual-natured, holding clear access to both masculine and feminine impulses within their one body and soul. Men have softer expressions of anima – gentle touch and sensitive vulnerability – and women have their thornier armoring, their willingness to stretch high and mighty like a corn stalk or climbing vine. Each Yellow Seed understands the balance and challenge of being alternately hard-shelled, impenetrable, and conversely unprotected in total openness, in damp darkness, with a will and impulse to move toward the light that strengthens them. These are versions of male and female personas, and a Yellow Seed further undulates between them as it breaks the surface of the soil into the air stream – tough masculine endurance – then unveils its heart-shaped leaves or pretty flower parts – astonishing feminine beauty. Even a flower shows its reflection of diverse human sexuality in its vaginal petal layers or phallic stamen, and Yellow Seed people understand life through such sexual, floral metaphors.
Practically, the Yellow Seed tribe is oriented to the outdoors, to earth, to rainfall, to sunshine and seasonal changes. Yellow Seed people are innate farmers and gardeners and tenders of the planet’s ecosystems. They sense the earth’s hungers and hurts, and look for sustainability rather than fast answers. They are slow, steadily cyclical but only quickening with full radiance of enlightenment, just as the plants they foster. They thereby understand patience and stumbling into and through dark passages where others might feel mostly blind. They are telepathic, used to pulsing their energy towards the sun that fuels their growth without necessarily seeing it clearly, or envisioning their future as much as steadily moving towards its call.
Yellow Seed people and Yellow Seed passages are also signified by the portal energy they hold. The glyph shows a seed dropping through a channel, presumably into the earth. The wavespell that celebrates Yellow Seed within the Tzolkin holds a parallel, astounding run of ten portal days. The ten days within the overlying 13 push us deep into the earth, a free fall through the sediment layers of our recent and distant past that will fuel our new and future growth. The portals invite us to hold our life experience, both traumatic and transcendent, as the place to root for all new accomplishments. We are fed by our losses, whether of painful ruptures or triumphs that still had a finite ascendance in our lives: times of scarcity or abundance, focal karmic connections that felt beloved or in enmity, surges in our connection to spirit and times, too, in the dark womb of the earth mother.
The stretch of portals within the Yellow Seed homeland wavespell imitate the glyph imagery, and so Yellow Seed people express the ability to hold space for any fall into the unknown, any journey into darkness. They can take us there sexually, to places of exploration and intimacy, or in the work of being a guide or healer, helping others accept the chaos of an underworld, the density of this earth life, as a hearty foundation for rising once more toward Creator’s splay of light.
Yellow Seed’s action – its direction in life – is to target. A healthy plant must orient itself to the most replenishing soil, and other conditions of water and light. Yellow Seed people are particular about where they can live and how they can be present in the world. Nature is a great calling, as well as nurturance so they are able to take the risk inherent to every seed’s journey of being unguarded and tender in order to emerge in greater strength and girth. A seed will sometimes lodge along a granite cliff face simply because a clot of sediment has been lodged there by wind currents, and so it is that a Yellow Seed person might not need a lot to live and grow, but it has to be the most fertile and vital within their wider landscape. They will thrive in these conditions and falter when settling for more spare or toxic resources. Always, cyclically, they hone in on improved environments for letting themselves root, letting their guard down.
Yellow Seed’s power – its offering to strengthen us in turn – is flowering. Clearly a seed does not sound like a flower, yet a flower’s delicate and dynamic unfurling isn’t just through its petal layers. It begins with a seed’s shell softening in damp soil and that first alchemy into succulence. A Yellow Seed person is always opening, expanding, unveiling themselves in increasing splendor. Their time in hard closure, separate from other lush natural flows, is only one part of their lives. Otherwise, their impulse and life’s purpose is expressing themselves in power and beauty and appetite for enlightenment. They know how to transform darkness – and nature’s garbage as it decomposes in sediment layers – into full verdant bloom, as delicate as a buttercup or as dominant as an oak tree. A Yellow Seed works to full expansion, the ultimate outstretching of life force as with angel wings or arms reaching for an embrace, and only at that pitch of openness do they fold again, in some view triumphantly falling back to earth after reaching the most ecstatic state of connection to Creator’s inspiration. Again, we can feel a Yellow Seed’s flowering like an orgasmic release. Our sexuality is our version of such emanation of scent and fruit. Whether or not it generates a new creation in the form of a child, we ourselves are restored with ecstatic life force and connection to the divine.
Yellow Seed has the essence of awareness, owing to its incredible porous receptivity. A seedpod is purposefully hard, but the moment it cracks and a shoot begins its ascent toward the sun, it is essentially all skin and fluidity, drawing in nutrients and light waves. This succulence and vulnerability is representative of Yellow Seed people; they feel life, rather than watch it analytically. They move towards light, active in the day and dormant at night as well as in reflective darkness and light energy in situations and other people. They are sensitive, thin-skinned and lushly water sodden so that their emotions lead them in life, as well as their intuitive perceptions. They can easily listen to nature, hearing birdcalls and water flows as well as the silent telepathy of trees and stones. They regard humans with the same deep receptivity – and are too tender to take harsh edgier behaviors that cut into their snaking stems before full bloom. The Yellow Seed tribe moves toward humanity that is akin to nature, rather than unwittingly – or willfully – destroying it.
Yellow Seed is antipodal, opposite, to White Wizard. Yellow Seed moves toward the sky, embracing the invitation of a divine force to rise and expand in its presence. White Wizard’s glyph shows the descent of Creator’s all-seeing eye into our homes and hearts, allowing and inspiring us to do god’s work on the planet, to be a visionary healer among humanity and the other species we encounter. In this way, Yellow Seed and White Wizard move in opposite directions, but they share a common impulse of connection to the spirit and sun-drenched world. In order to serve, historically, those who are injured or ill, a White Wizard shaman uses tinctures and ointments extracted from plant sources. And for a Yellow Seed to thrive in mass communion – as a field of flowers or a crop of vegetables, an orchard of fruit trees – it requires the skill of a master farmer, one who can vision and create harmony in its environment. White Wizard gives Yellow Seed connection with others of its nature, and Yellow Seed gives the White Wizard its power and potency to touch not just the air where it blooms, or the earth its leaves fall to fertilize – but the larger world of other species. White Wizard validates Yellow Seed’s healing and nutritive properties, revering its sacred essence and offering it an empire of influence.
Yellow Seed is supported and similar to its analog, Blue Eagle. Birdseed is the most obvious connection, as most winged creatures are oriented to feeding from plant life. A Blue Eagle is more of a raptor, but as a flower cannot actually uproot and float into the sky, a bird will take it there through digestion in its belly. In flight, through Blue Eagle’s expansive visioning and fast movement, its touching of the higher mind and heavens, a Yellow Seed person is brought even farther into celestial and sacred expression. Similarly, being carried in the digestive tract of a bird and excreted far from its original flower stalk, a seed is brought to new territories, touching unexplored terrain and trying out adaptation in an alien world. Yellow Seed fortifies Blue Eagle’s incredible eyesight, its ability to rise almost to the sun, with its protein-rich condensation. When a Yellow Seed offers its fate to the service of fortifying others, it spreads its influence widely and fuels the awakening that happens when we gaze at our lives from a god’s perspective.
Yellow Seed has a mystical, occult relationship to Red Earth, unsurprisingly. Red Earth is the soil of our planet, but it is also the seismic undulations of its different layers of heat and hardness. Red Earth is the ceremony humans enact to imitate the earth’s emissions of volcanic steam or water flows. Yellow Seed falls through darkness to rest on the earth and roots there. Likewise, Yellow Seed people need to reconnect to earth through nature experiences or tending gardens, traveling the planet’s vast distances and different environments – and as much they need to make ceremony foundational in their lives. They are restored, and remember themselves, through rituals that imitate the earth’s movements. They are drawn to open fire, water blessings and indigenous expressions of ceremony. Red Earth, in native, tribal ceremony, uses plant offerings for its burning purifications – sage, cedar, sweet grass and incense – as well as the daily blessing of a harvested meal.
If you are guided by Yellow Seed, you are led through life by a deep sensitivity and willingness to dig deep, even get lost in the darkness routinely, cyclically, for a while. You are attracted, though, to light – from the purest innate appetite to expand yourself to full release, accompanied by incredible beauty, productivity, and influence on others who feel fed and inspired, filled by your splendid vitality. You are drawn towards the earth as a base, with Creator being more sustaining than superficial material interests. You move through life following cycles that include death and resurrection, reviewing the past to explode vibrantly into future bloom.
Yellow Seed people
(featuring female singers, in dedication to my daughter):
Jennifer Holliday – Yellow Magnetic Seed
Amy Winehouse – Yellow Lunar Seed (portal)
Beyonce – Yellow Electric Seed
Evangeline (my daughter) – Yellow Self-Existing Seed
Sinead O’Connor – Yellow Overtone Seed
Nancy Griffith – Yellow Rhythmic Seed
Taylor Swift – Yellow Resonant Seed
Billie Holiday – Yellow Galactic Seed
Maria Callas – Yellow Solar Seed
Exene Cervenka – Yellow Planetary Seed
Erykah Badu – Yellow Spectral Seed
Demi Lovato – Yellow Crystal Seed (portal)
Sheryl Crow – Yellow Cosmic Seed
