My sacred tattoos, including Hunab Ku (Galactic Butterfly) on my sacrum at bottom

I’ve been receiving a lot of intuitive nudges on the sacrum and coccyx, both literally and energetically. With my own experiences in having sudden pains over the last several months in that area (physically due to a fracture of the tailbone I had about 11 years ago, but energetically linked to much more), hearing from a few others on issues or focus on this area, and even clients and friends getting sacred tattoos on their sacrum, it all started to hit me again, as to the significance of this region. I then was reminded about the connections that had taken place for me about 8 years ago and how it all is energetically linked with the now.

March 5, 2004 I got my second sacred tattoo. It was the Hunab Ku symbol (or Galactic Butterfly, as it’s also known).

This symbol is called the Galactic Butterfly which is said to represent all of the consciousness that has ever existed in this galaxy. This is all of our physical ancestors both human, animal, reptile, fish, shell fish, plants as well as the consciousness which organized all of the raw material from a whirling disk into stars then planets and solar systems. Big Meaning. So big that the original Maya had no symbol for this. In their civilization it was like having no name for God. Just knowing the concept was good enough. Later this pattern was devised by Toltec or Zapatec weavers as a pattern for blankets and this is where Jose Arguelles came across it. He called it Hunab Ku. The indigenous peoples call it “The Galactic Butterfly”. Butterflies are seen as ancestors returning for a visit to physicality. Wearing one of these symbols is very powerful as it broadcasts your reaching to actively join the consciousness of our galaxy. ~ Ian Xel Lungold

I was intuitively drawn to place this Galactic Butterfly on my sacrum. At that time in my life, everything was just intuitive for me in what I did. I would then come to see later, the significance and reiteration of why I would be drawn to certain things. And right after I got this tattoo, a whole unraveling started to take place, as I also got my first computer and was able to do research and uncovered deeper meanings to so many things that were emerging in my life at the time, including this tattoo, the placement and the paintings that started to channel. I had opened a doorway that created a flood of energy , experiences, and information into my life in new ways from that point on. The symbol itself, Hunab Ku, had come to me while I was in a bookstore with my brother after getting my first butterfly tattoo, by just being drawn to a book where it was in and I had always had in back of mind that if I ever got another tattoo that that would be it. That was like somewhere near 1998-2000. And then several years later it emerged, after staying with me all that time.

What I discovered, alongside the meaning of this symbol, was also the significance to my own life and soul history and path, as well as the connection with the sacrum bone.

As I shared in my book, Spiritual Skin:

Brian Stross’ “The Mesoamerican Sacrum Bone: Doorway to the Otherworld,” addresses in great depth some of what I came to realize about the potency of my placing the Mayan Hunab Ku (otherwise known as the Galactic Butterfly) on my sacrum. He states:

The sacrum bone has been viewed by some cultures as a “sacred” bone, and been seen as related to reproduction, fertility, and reincarnation. … “in Mesoamerica the sacrum represented one index of the more generalized but variously manifested ‘portals’ or doorways permitting translocation of shamans, spirits, and deities between worlds or levels of the cosmos.”

Brian Stross continues to share:

In Mesoamerica the sacrum, along with closely associated bones, is apparently seen as sacred in some Indigenous societies even today, though surely less so now than in earlier times. The name “sacrum,” designating the more or less flat bone with eight holes located at the base of the spine, comes directly from Latin os sacrum, meaning ‘sacred bone’.  Sugar points out that while most bone names readily reveal their origins, it has long been a mystery why the sacrum bone (os sacrum) should be called the “holy bone.”  “That it is a translation from the Greek hieron osteon merely pushes the inquiry back from the first Latin use in about 400 AD to the time of Hippocrates (about 400 BC)” (1987:2061).  Following the trail through several explanatory hypotheses about the origins of the name sacrum, Sugar introduces evidence that the sacrum in tradition was the bone necessary for resurrection, identifying it as the “almond” or luz of the Hebrews and the ajb of the Arabs, and ultimately deriving its conceptual underpinnings from the ancient Egyptians (1987:2062‑2063).

Upon finding that some Mesoamerican Indian languages also named this bone with words referring to sacredness and deity, one may well ask why societies distant from one another refer to the sacrum as a “sacred” or “holy” bone.   Presumably such naming practices reflect independently, rather than through diffusion, the cultural importance of this bone, and one can suggest plausible explanations, based on observational logic, for its being termed “sacred.”  The word “sacred” for our purposes can be defined as “worthy of veneration, reverence, and respect on the one hand, and protected by tradition and ritual against symbolic or actual abuse on the other.”

The sacrum bone is, among other things, the fulcrum of support for the human torso, and as such is well designed to take great physical stress.  It is what we sit on, and by sitting we place ourselves at rest in a position that can be maintained without significant movement for long periods of time.  Perhaps more importantly from perspectives of symbolism and cultural importance, it is located next to the reproductive organs, which are of utmost significance for the species as well as the individual, and are surely of great significance in most if not all societies.  In its proximal location, the sacrum could well be thought to share significant qualities with the reproductive organs, and even to transport material from the brain to those organs.

Several cultures around the world assume that the sacrum participates directly in procreation by channeling seminal fluid through the spinal column to the penis, most notably ancient Egyptians and some cultures of India.  Its location on the body and the formal similarity of spinal fluid to semen provide an observational basis for these conclusions.  Even Leonardo da Vinci, with such a fine grasp of human anatomy, must have made a similar assumption, for he placed in his drawing of a human male a seminal duct leading from the sacrum at the bottom of the spinal cord to the penis (Huxley 1974:64).

Sacredness of this bone is also related to a belief found in various parts of the globe that the sacrum is the “resurrection bone” from which residual raw material remaining after death a person will be reborn, presumably by attracting the spirit residing within.   This notion may spring from the observation that as an especially hard bone, the sacrum resists disintegration through time, and is often among the very last visible remains of a body that has been left on the ground or that has been unearthed long after burial.  A rational basis for attaching importance to the sacrum bone can thus be constructed from empirical observations and conclusions underlain by a kind of observational logic.

Stross goes on to share some fascinating insights and research presenting the ritual and symbolic significance of the sacrum in Mesoamerica  and its place in conjunction with a shamanic world view. His findings also present things pointing to the fact that:

…the sacrum as a focal part of the pelvic girdle represents a metaphor for the cosmic portal linking this world with the Otherworld while emphasizing the generative or (pro)creative aspect of the life cycle, just as the jawbone as a focal part of the skull represents another metaphor for the cosmic portal, but one emphasizing the analytical or destructive aspect of the cosmic cycle.

He then continues with a discussion of the human pelvis in shamanic worldview:

A pillar of five fused sacral vertebrae within the pelvic girdle supports and balances the human torso.  This pillar, the sacrum, is attached to four more fused vertebral bones together called the coccyx, but otherwise known as the tailbone.  The sacrum (or the sacrum and the coccyx together) is a pivot, a support, and a focal center in the human body….Some Mayan names for pelvic bones or for the rump region suggest that the procreative area of the human body was in the past identified by Mayans as a figurative “fire” composed of the coccyx surrounded by figurative pelvic “hearthstones,” three being the traditional number of stones in the Mesoamerican hearth.  Two of the pelvic “hearthstones,” the hipbones, are similar in form, like mirror images, while the third, the sacrum, is different.  The pelvis, so closely connected to the creation of new life, somewhat resembles a skull and shares other features with the skull…

Dictionaries of Indigenous Mesoamerican languages do not often include words for sacrum or coccyx for understandable reasons, but there are a few that do, and related concepts such as Spanish rabadilla ‘coccyx, lower extremity of vertebral column (including that of a bird)’ and rabo ‘tail, hind end’ can sometimes be found when the more explicit form are not available.   In those Mayan languages for which we have translations of sacrum and coccyx, the words usually relate the sacrum to notions of ‘god’ and ‘sacred’, while the coccyx is related to ‘fire’.  For example, Yucatec Maya has a word for sacrum, k’ul, which also means ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ (Barrera Vasquez 1980).   Itzá Maya has the word k’uul ‘hip, tail bone’ (Hoffling and Tesucún 1997:402), which surely derives from the Itzá root k’u ‘sacred, holy’.

The Tojolabal Maya word for sacrum s‑bah h‑wawtik (literally “sacred image, sacred self”) is based on the verb wawtikan ‘to worship, deify,’ and ultimately derives from the root waw ‘man’ (Lenkersdorf 1979 (2):666; (1):395).

In Choltí Maya data limitations render uncertain what the word xun‑xun means besides ‘coccyx’, but in a near linguistic relative, Chontal Maya, the root xun means ‘trivet, the three stones of the hearth’. For the Yucatec Maya a bird’s coccyx is called the “griddle of the rump” (xamach it), and in Chol Maya the base of a bird’s tail (its rump or coccygeal region) is called simply and literally “fire” (k’ahk) (Aulie et al 1978:21).