White Dog (Seal 10)

White Dog is the tenth Solar Seal, white and of the north in Arguelles's rotation. Its stated triad is heart as its power, loving as its action and loyalty as its essence, and it is read in Dreamspell practice for affection, fidelity and companionship. It is one of the small number of seals whose Dreamspell name is a direct translation of the Maya day name rather than a substitution, which makes the divergence in meaning the more visible.

In the Dreamspell tradition, White Dog, Solar Seal 10, is described as governing loyalty, love and heart-centred devotion, built directly from Oc's borrowed dog imagery. White Dog belongs to the Dreamspell's White colour family, alongside White Wind, White Worldbridger, White Wizard and White Mirror, glossed in Dreamspell teaching as "refining." As with all twenty seals, the gloss is Arguelles's own interpretive addition rather than a statement of what Oc means to a working Maya daykeeper. Its Dreamspell wavespell is the tenth of twenty. White Dog's loyalty and heart-centred gloss is one of the more direct borrowings from Oc's own attested Tzolk'in sense, though the framing as a discrete named wavespell theme within a twenty-part cycle remains Arguelles's own structural invention from 1987 onward, without precedent in Classic or Postclassic Maya calendrical practice.

The corresponding Maya day is Ok, the dog. The dog in Mesoamerican thought is above all a psychopomp: it guides the dead across the waters of the underworld, and dogs were buried with the dead for that purpose in many Mesoamerican cultures, a role shared with the Aztec Xolotl and the day Itzcuintli. Dogs also appear in the Popol Vuh among the creatures that turn on the wooden people and help destroy them. The Dreamspell reading of loyalty and love takes the domestic and affectionate side of the animal, which is not absent from Mesoamerican sources but is much less prominent in them than the funerary role. The difference is a good illustration of how far a modern reading can travel from its source while keeping the name.

Oc is the tenth of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery the dog, associated in Maya belief with loyalty, guidance and the soul's passage through the underworld; the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows the corresponding day as Tz'i', the K'iche' word for dog. In the directional scheme, Oc belongs to the north and the colour white. Arguelles's Solar Seal 10, White Dog, borrows Oc's dog imagery directly, one of the more transparent name-borrowings in the whole Dreamspell system, retaining both the animal and its general association with loyalty and heart-centred devotion.