Blue Monkey

Blue Monkey belongs to the blue family, with Blue Night, Blue Hand, Blue Eagle and Blue Storm. In the Tzolkin the colours take turns: red begins, white refines, blue transforms, yellow ripens. A blue sign changes things, and Blue Monkey changes them through play. If your kin is a Blue Monkey, you were born to loosen what has set too hard.

The nature of the sign

Watch a monkey for ten minutes and you will see the sign. Curiosity, speed, mischief, and underneath it all an intelligence that is working the whole time. Blue Monkey people have that mind. It sees connections the rest of us miss and it cannot help pointing them out, usually with a punchline.

The old Maya saw this sign as the weaver and the artist as well as the trickster, and the two belong together. Play and creation come from the same place. The child with the crayons and the painter in the studio are doing the same work.

The teaching, as I have come to understand it, is that play is one of the few reliable ways through seriousness. A Blue Monkey at its best brings air into a room that has run out of it.

Who you are

You are quick. Quick witted, quick to laugh, quick to see the absurd side of whatever is in front of you. You are creative, and you need an outlet for it, whether that is paint, music, words or comedy.

You question rules, because you can see, plainly, that most "shoulds" are habits wearing a uniform. You push at a boundary to find out whether anything is behind it, and a surprising number of times there is nothing there at all.

You move when you talk. Hands, face, the whole body. You are hard to miss. You are also sharper than you look, and your humour has an edge that can cut when you are not watching it.

Strengths

The first strength is lightness. You can take a room that is grim and frightened and have it laughing inside a minute, and the laughter is relief. Relief lets people think again.

The second is the agile mind. You see round corners. You connect Tuesday with last year and the answer falls out. Give a Blue Monkey a stuck problem and let it play.

The third is permission. Being around you makes other people braver and freer. You are the friend who gets them up to dance, who talks them into the trip, who makes it safe to look foolish, and a life needs at least one of those.

Challenges

The shadow of Blue Monkey is cleverness turned to cruelty. The same wit that heals a room can wound a person, and the line between a joke and a jab is one you need to watch more closely than most. If you have to say "I was only joking" more than once a week, the joke is doing something else.

The second trap is humour as a hiding place. It is very easy for a Blue Monkey to make everyone laugh and leave the room without anyone, including the Monkey, having felt anything. Ask yourself whether the joke is opening the door or closing it.

The third is mischief that slides into carelessness. Testing boundaries is fine. Breaking things that mattered to other people because it was funny at the time leaves a clean up, and it falls to someone.

In love and work

In love you are fun, and your partner will tell you so. You bring spontaneity and delight, and you make life lighter for whoever shares it with you. You need a partner who is not threatened by your creativity or your need for room to move, and who will not try to iron you flat. Someone too rigid will drive you up the wall, and you them. You can be wary of commitment because you fear it means becoming conventional. In my experience it does not have to. The right person is the one you can still play with at seventy.

At work you belong in the arts, in theatre and comedy and music, in writing, in design, in any role that pays you to think sideways. You are a natural teacher, because you can make anything interesting, and children in particular will follow you anywhere. You will suffocate in a rigid hierarchy or a job that wants a smaller, quieter version of you. Do not take that job for the money.

Your sign across the tones

Your tone is worked out from your kin, and the Thirteen Tones page explains all thirteen. Here is how Blue Monkey tends to read at three points on that scale.

With a low tone, 1 to 4, Lunar or Electric for instance, the play is young and lively. A Lunar Blue Monkey feels the pull between the joker and the artist and spends a lifetime finding out they are one creature. An Electric Blue Monkey is pure spark, the one who gets the whole project moving by making it fun.

With a middle tone, 5 to 9, say Overtone, the sign has presence and reach. An Overtone Blue Monkey commands a room and lifts everyone in it, and must learn that charm is a kind of power and should be used as carefully as any other.

With a high tone, 10 to 13, Spectral or Cosmic for instance, the trickster becomes the teacher. A Spectral Blue Monkey uses humour to dissolve what is false, and knows exactly which pompous ideas to tip over. A Cosmic Blue Monkey has played the whole game through, understands that play was the wisdom all along, and shares it lightly.

Across the traditions

Blue Monkey sits in the blue family of the Tzolkin, the transformers, beside Night, Hand, Eagle and Storm. The Chinese Astrology section has a Monkey of its own among The Animals, a different count with a different meaning, and it is worth reading the two side by side. The Western Astrology section and The Signs pages will show you where play and invention sit in your own birth chart, and the Vedic Astrology section and The Nakshatras pages give you another view again.

When did you last do something purely because it was fun, with nothing to show for it afterwards?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.