Yellow Warrior Tribe
In Mayan: Cib
Left index toe
Action: Question Power: Intelligence Essence: Fearlessness
Antipode (opposite and balancing energy) to White Worldbridger
Analog (support and similar energy) to Blue Night
Occult Power (mystical, magical energy) to Red Serpent
Guide to some in the Yellow Seed, Yellow Star, Yellow Human, and Yellow Sun tribes
Yellow Warrior 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.
Whether living as Yellow Warrior or embodying it for a passage of time, we may feel our hearts are closed – shielded against vulnerability – and insensitive. It’s not an easy fate, to hold Yellow Warrior for a lifetime. In order to honor those who do, it’s necessary to recall the sanctuary a warrior provides for those not forced to fight. We are safe because others are operating at risk of their own lives. We are relaxed and open hearted because another is acting as our shield. We are unguarded and at ease because another wields a sword and incurs the karma of killing, truly or on a metaphoric level. Even if we are considering our current society, there are many other warriors beyond the soldiers who fight with firearms. There are those that fight for justice, for innovation, for freedom, for the planet’s health – and often they are fueled by passion but dulled, too, by the fray of facing resistance. There is virility, fierce strength and strategic intelligence in a warrior stance, but by definition there is no peace.
Yellow Warrior is archetypally male, even if we are born in female visage. It represents the taut, focused and directive side of our elemental being. Women may war, and men may be pacifist, but when we go to war, or guard against invasion, we are sunk into masculine animal instinct and our musculature flexes so tightly that it contracts the emotional fluidity of our feminine aspect. In our physiology, we may not have easy flow: digestion, reproduction, breath, menstruation and intuition can feel blocked when we are in the fight/flight reactivity of self-preservation. Yellow Warrior people may struggle with both suppressed emotion and physical injury or incapacity. They are on some level war weary and battle scarred. In the masculine instinctual imperative of accomplishment and guardianship, they will continue to serve to protect even when hardened by further scar tissue and overtaxed joints and muscles. And yet we can marvel, pay tribute to the Yellow Warrior that moves as our shield so that we may be comparatively at ease and in the feminine archetype of openness, receptivity and flow.
Yellow Warrior is outward seeking, often away from home, but by the glyph’s depiction deeply connected to the earth. The ‘question mark’ it holds is the seismic shakedown of our planetary shifts. Ultimately, Yellow Warrior is much greater than any fight it insights or refutes. Its service is to the earth itself, whether by protecting territory or journeying over its surface in long tours of exploration and feral adventure. A warrior, too, is fired by the earth’s molten layers, is stayed against the arising of death by the magnetism of its core. Yellow Warrior is ceremonial, honoring and imitating the earth’s emissions in preparation for battle: cleansing rituals of fire, drumbeats that vibrate like earthquakes, and adornment using power objects and symbols to define where on this planet we originate from, how we are connected to its rawness and episodic eruption.
To gentle the intensity of Yellow Warrior in ourselves or as we pass through it in the Tzolkin cycle, we can relate to how the earth is periodic but not constant in its upheaval. A forest fire or flood, earthquake or volcanic explosion will disrupt the peace now and then, but in truth we are more often left with days where we can be open and expansive instead of tightened against potential trauma. A warrior is prepared for the shock of unexpected threat, and sometimes has the fate to instigate it, but most of the warrior way is simply meditative, a stilling and focusing of the mind, a training of the body to respond quickly to its directive. A warrior has more likeness to a monk than disparity.
Yellow Warrior is in service to peace by being the shadow dancer against ill will, heading it off at the edges of a tribe before it reaches the deepest vulnerability of its heart. In order to face death, in one self or delivered to an enemy, a warrior is also more like the earth and its forces than other humankind. They are directed by the energy of the planet, offering them fearlessness through deep rooting, and the ability to sharpen and attack through the friction the earth itself holds and releases.
Yellow Warrior people need never actually fight by the standards of an ancient era, but it is in their mystic bloodline to hold themselves with the dignity and virility of predominantly men in all indigenous cultures. They may in our modern world choose to fight for principles, for truth and dignity – or the fight is even more subtle: to endure in a world where energetic conflicts arise with more and more frequency, to still oneself in the chaos of upheaval, being cool amid feverish frustrations. All must honor Yellow Warrior for bearing an ancient way, and revere the sacrifice held in such constancy of being both guarded and at risk.
Yellow Warrior’s action – its direction in life – is to question. A modern warrior stance is less likely to launch a physical attack than to upset its enemy through resistance. Yellow Warrior will question the status quo, question the ruling powers, question stagnancy and denial when it binds organic evolution. The cosmic question mark of the glyph is a reference to the rolling and quaking that happens to the planet, and this primal connection to earth is what fuels a warrior’s will to fight. Changing stasis, challenging complacency, envisioning a way of living that is closer to the heat and fluidity of our earth – Yellow Warrior pushes for inquiry rather than apathy.
Yellow Warrior’s power – its offering to strengthen us in turn – is fearlessness. For all the shielding against feeling, the defense system a Yellow Warrior carries and endures, it is ultimately well-guarded against harm. This breeds fearlessness. When we are practice and prepared in strength and self-preservation strategies, we can go forward into difficult circumstances in placidity and confidence. And at other times, in war, we are so drawn into the moment by extreme hardship, we have no time to anticipate, to be anxious. Our fear thresholds have been met, and so fall away. We, in Yellow Warrior’s nature, move from a deeper place than anticipated danger. Yellow Warrior people balance their guarded nature with the willingness to go into situations that others would find intimidating and unsafe. Yellow Warrior has dropped into the moment long ago and can proceed forward while others worry about future outcomes.
Yellow Warrior has the essence of intelligence, which is different than Yellow Human’s essence of wisdom. Intelligence is innate skills at sorting what life throws at us, an active mental acuity. Wisdom is insight that has been gathered through experience. Yellow Warrior people are born with keenly observant minds, in part because the energy centers in their torso are shielded or shut down, and the most liberated part of their embodiment is high in their heads. A warrior is not just brute strength, but is a strategist, quick on their feet but also fiery in their minds as they anticipate, defend, and counter offensively in short succession. The battlefield and the journey there amass decisions for our minds, choices that are for our salvation. The mind, like the musculature formed in martial training and combat, is honed and charged with excitement, while also stabilized with cool watchfulness. In this endless exercise of active thinking, intelligence is required and in turn cultivated, refined.
Yellow Warrior is antipodal, opposite, to White Worldbridger. As the antipode power denotes a challenge, it’s unsurprising that the warrior’s most potent confrontation is with White Worldbridger’s power of death. A warrior can be strong, guarded, fierce and intelligent, but always, in the metaphor of battle, death is the ultimate threat. Yellow Warrior simultaneously is motivated by the challenge of death to be more careful, more fierce, more honed in mind, body and spirit. Without death looming, a warrior could be lazier, less focused, so death is a strengthening agent. And yet, as with all antipode powers, the opposition can feel to us in our humanity like stark conflict, like polarity that leads us off center. Certainly, for those of us who fight from pride or self-importance, the death of our ego will serve to create balance. If we fight selflessly for a cause that will serve the whole, death might be the ultimate liberation, the reward for our service. In any case, a warrior has death much more closely within reach than those who are not at the frontline of battle.
Yellow Warrior is analogous, supported by Blue Night. Again, in ancient archetypal imagery, a fighting emissary stays the night in the open, without any shelter that holds permanence. Perhaps there is a tent, but as often there is just open sky. In that night sky is a mythology, a reassurance of divine presence as written in the stars. There is also respite and rest under nightfall, as most battles will occur in the light of day. There may be the fear of attack, but many more shadows to hide within. And when Blue Night is the dream, the full relief of drifting into a surreality that is far from any actual battlefield, that is the greatest support to the Yellow Warrior of all. The war is for a passage forgotten and the psyche unbound from the body’s guarded stance. The dream brings something closer to paradise, or expends fears in feverish nightmares that can still be woken from. Blue Night is supported by Yellow Warrior because the content of our nocturnal journeys requires virility, fearlessness and preparedness for living constantly in the present moment of inexplicable fantasia.
Yellow Warrior has a mystical, occult relationship to Red Serpent. As compared to its antipode power of death, Yellow Warrior is illuminated on more subtle levels by Red Serpent’s active and instinctual ability to survive. The magic of a warrior life is scraping by and getting through, of being in unbearable circumstances requiring strength, focus and fearlessness and staying alive – or in our modern every day experience, staying true. We fight because we have a faith, and feel an urgency to protect it. When we survive, so does the ideology we fought for, the passion. It prevails. Red Serpent teaches the Yellow Warrior to fight for the core levels of being, the ones closes to the earth. We don’t fight for ideas, ideologies as much as what really moves us in our embodiment – what we feel low in our chakras, our attachment to family, community, beloved, and our own powerful vitality.
If you are guided Yellow Warrior, you have a questioning and intelligent mind calling you forward fearlessly on your path. You are drawn to stand tall and face down dissent. You are willing to journey away from home, the heart of your own tribe, in order to protect its ease and grace. You lead with a shielded heart, in order to protect the vulnerability of others who are less guarded. You may enter into the fray of fighting more than others, are ready to strike – yet you have innate training in how to be efficient in some element of conquering. You follow the heat of active conflict, in order to feel it resolve and restore peace.
Yellow Warrior people
Carlos Santana – Yellow Magnetic Warrior
John Barrymore – Yellow Lunar Warrior
Miles Davis – Yellow Electric Warrior
Julia Roberts – Yellow Self- Existing Warrior (portal)
Lin-Manuel Miranda – Yellow Overtone Warrior (portal)
Ellen DeGeneres – Yellow Rhythmic Warrior
Maxfield Parrish – Yellow Resonant Warrior
Rachel Maddow – Yellow Galactic Warrior
Ingrid Bergman – Yellow Solar Warrior
Ray Charles – Yellow Planetary Warrior (portal)
Anthony Bourdain – Yellow Spectral Warrior (portal)
Lionel Richie – Yellow Crystal Warrior
Mariah Carey – Yellow Cosmic Warrior
