American Indian Traditions

Thank you. Is this from you and Frank Lloyd Wright No. Ah. Someone else Someone else is an aficionado. I'm sorry not to have Frank Lloyd Wright included in this series yet but obviously we'll have to do another series which we'll do later in the year or early in 83 and we'll include many of the American figures who deserve to be included in this series. And one of them certainly will be Mr. Hall. And I'll try to get a lot of biographical information. By that time. I have left out several major figures one of them George Washington so that we could have a another series that goes back to the beginning. So the second series on American spiritual classics will begin with William Penn and that aspect of the American Indian traditions taking in Pontiac and Tecumseh and so forth. Hiawatha the historical Hiawatha. And we'll try and do a series of starting with that basis. Most of the figures in this series are known up to probably the last two lectures. So I will from time to time as the lecture series goes along try to introduce a few elements from the lesser known figures here so that by the time we get to them they should be somewhat more familiar. We have a very very strange condition in this country that the last thing that is ever taught is American history. You can go to universities until you have 3 or 4 PhDs and even major in American history and you rarely get American history. It seems that the further advanced you get the more finagling become the details. Until one is an expert on the last six months of a certain happening in one part of this country. And what gets lost in this focusing and of course this kind of scholarly work is necessary. But what gets lost is the context. And this country I think more than any other civilization that's ever been expressed has a sense of context. And our our great figures always have been visionaries who have been tuned in to the larger contexts and the reverberation of their concerns have come to a focus in many expressive ways some in politics some in writing or in art. Music. Even visions. Psychology. Even a couple of them. But the central phenomenon is always that when an American discovers where it is that he is and how he happened to get there as a specimen of human spiritual nature it always comes as a shock that no one around him seems to understand this. And so the urge is of course to make it all very clear for the others. And out of this we have for the last 200 years been collecting some of the world's really greatest geniuses and we put them in children's books and we leave them on the shelves of our studies and we pay lip homage to them. And very few are actually known in depth. And what is worse is that their their visions do not carry over into our lives. And so we find ourselves running on very very thin fuel. We find ourselves using an image base which is childish to say the least one which ten years makes an old fashioned element seem out of place and one in which we are encouraged continuously at this late date to think only in terms of the future. And I'm a great aficionado of science fiction have lectured on it from time to time. But this inculcation of the notion that we as a people will at some time come into our own in a future which keeps receding away from us is exactly the kind of dead end which they American Indians to a large extent found themselves in. And I think by reviewing just a little bit of some of their early career we can find two different directions of realization. One is that increasingly it is incumbent upon the individual to focus spiritual tensions so that we finally give rise late in the civilization of the American Indian to the spiritual giant. And we will close the course with Black Elk who is probably as close to a figure of the quality of Moses as we will ever find. But one who did not not manifest the other direction is that somehow it must be with the people as a whole and therefore the individual must modulate themselves to fit into a direction and a career for the tribe or the group or the nation. So these two directions. Now it is it is difficult to for us to focus. Most of us have been raised in the education of the 1940s or the 30s or the 50s. And it's difficult for us to break some stereotypes. One of the basic stereotypes. That exists is that somehow the American Indian is a primitive recent arrival. Having perhaps by now given the accord of having crossed over a land bridge from Asia. Sometime glibly during the end of the last ice age. And we imagine in our minds that this happened a couple of thousand years ago or 3 or 4000 years ago or perhaps 6 or 7000 years ago. And these kinds of notions seem to evaporate in our imagination into an indefiniteness and that somehow the European explorers the early ones who came here found 1 or 2 examples of excellent architecture in the southwest and 1 or 2 mysterious mounds in the Atlantic seaboard. And that that was about it. That that was the extent of it. Well the last ten years of American archaeology have really opened everyone's eyes and we now find ourselves in a situation where we're embarrassed by the riches that lie before us and we are finally in control of recovering the situation as much as possible. The classic example of what had happened heretofore was the case of a mound called the Spiro Spiral Mound in Oklahoma and in the mid 1930s a group of enterprising individuals decided to go into this very large conical mound. They bought it and they dug tunnels and caverns and they excavated and they brought up wheelbarrows full of trinkets and so forth copper masks some 2 or 300 of them all kinds of ceremonial beadwork and so forth. These things were sold almost immediately for what they could get. The individuals when they finished their dig put TNT in the middle of the mound and blew it up. And it was only some 10 or 15 years later when certain items from this collection began to surface so that museum directors began to ask where did this come from And the lines traced back. And it turns out that the Spiro Mound was one of the great treasure troves of the New World. Gone forever. No chance at all to ever reconstruct it. We have a second example. If you are on the east coast of the Mississippi River just across from Saint Louis where one can still see the Jefferson Arch in the background and the buildings of Saint Louis about 4 or 5 miles in from the Mississippi River in among farms and small little communities which are now suburbs of East Saint Louis Illinois. One is absolutely astounded to see enormous mounds which even after untold centuries of erosion and so forth are still incredibly impressive. And of course if one were to go there today one would find the archaeological excavations of five universities and two private organizations all going out at the same time. And all of this was due to the fact that an interstate highway was going to cut through this series of mounds and as the excavation for the highway proceeded of course more and more citizens became interested. And it wasn't so much the artifacts found but the mounds themselves began to command attention. And slowly but surely the complex began to reveal itself that this site Cahokia was the greatest Metropolis in the New World. Outside of Tenochtitlan and housed at one time upwards of 50,000 people the central mound was 16 acres at its base which is larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza and stretched 100ft high and was only the center mound of some 120 other mounds and that in fact this complex extended for 2 or 3 miles in depth in some eight miles along the bottom land. And this was a very strategic site because the Missouri River runs into the Mississippi River there at Cahokia and just north about ten miles the Illinois River runs in and south about 100 miles or so. The Ohio River joins the Mississippi so that the Cahokia community was in control of the major waterways of the whole central part of the United States. And in fact artifacts there have begun to be turned up to the extent that we now know that they were trading up beyond the Great Lakes up into Canada. They had materials that could have only come from the Carolinas. They had artifacts and certain kinds of chert stone hard stone which are only found down around Oklahoma. And of course the Gulf Coast was represented and they had certain kinds of minerals and things that came from the Rocky Mountains. And the date of Cahokia goes back its beginnings are about 200 AD and it reached its first plateau as a development about 600 AD And we know now that from 600 to about 900 AD that the Cahokia area became a metropolitan area. That the blending of tribes there produced a very very high quality civilization and that in fact from one burial mound which was uncovered evidently a very very high chieftain hit the bed for his grave was made up of drilled seashells by the tens of hundreds of thousands of them all placed like fallen petals from a fruit tree. And he was bedecked and laid out and put into a mound which was exactly on a north south center line and With the ensuing triangulation it became quite apparent that in fact the entire complex as enormous as it was was all laid out on an ideational plan that was coordinated with several directions one a north south axis. Two a direction linking up the summer solstice sunrise. And in fact they found at Cahokia that there was in one of the mound complexes just off the main mound a post palisade. We have just the holes and just bits of the timber in. And it was dated from very early in the community. Five feet off Center was a point through which one could cite the summer solstice over one post. The winter solstice over another post and the equinox. Sunrises. All these are sunrises over another post. What was interesting was that the angle between the solstice and the equinox was 30 degrees and each post was seven and a half degrees from each other. And so taking the angle between the two solstice sunrises one had 60 degrees and the angle between the summer solstice sunrise and due north was 60 degrees. So that we have a very very sophisticated relic of geometry raised to a very high science because once one has raised the civilization up to the point to where you are able to coordinate on a cosmological level a metropolitan urban city with universal geometric angles. And once you have 30 and 60 and so forth you begin to have all the secrets of geometry and design. And we realize now that this was in fact very very sophisticated civilization. It reached its culmination apparently between 900 AD and about 1050 or 1100 AD then something happened. Some period of decline began to set in. And yet because it was so massive and by this time so traditional the Cahokia community was continually inhabited up until about 15 1600 AD and it was only with the first contact with White explorers that the ruins of Cahokia finally passed into silent oblivion so that we have the prospect of having had a civilization in the very center of this country that went on for at least 14 or 1500 years and was raised to a very sophisticated level. Another early indication of the genius of the American Indian. We have covered all over the northern part of this country Montana especially Wyoming things that are called medicine wheels but are actually set up to be astronomical computers. And this particular one the Big Horn medicine wheel very interestingly had several sites along with the summer solstice sunrise that these were cairns of rocks and it was about 90 feet in diameter. And this is up at the top of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming northern Wyoming very near to Yellowstone. What was peculiar about the fact of having three different star rises was that Aldebaran and Rigel and Sirius when they rise at dawn in the summer months they have in between their rising an exact period of 28 days that is Aldebaran will rise over the marked rock cairn exactly on a specific date usually coinciding with the summer solstice sunrise in June. And then another strange phenomenon happens because of the brilliance of the summer sun. At those latitudes north and those altitudes high the star rises brightly and then disappears into the glow of the sunrise. So it's a disappearing phenomenon and it's almost like a magical appearance of the bright light disappearing into the vast matrix the unknown out of which the sun comes up. And then 28 days later regularly like clockwork blue bright Rigel which is the central star of course in the constellation of Orion rises exactly 28 days later and again goes through this phenomenon of disappearing into the ambience of the atmosphere. And 28 days later in August Sirius will rise from Canis Major. And again the same thing will happen. So that by the third star by the third summer month it is time at that latitude to harvest and pack up and get ready for the winter because the first snow is always come by mid-September. I lived in Western northern Canada and it snowed on the 10th of September every year. And everything died so that there was no sense in waiting for the September sunrise so that those three months were the apex of man harvesting and bringing himself together. Now the Big Horn sun wheel is one of only about 70 that have been discovered so far and there is a very large one that they found in northern Saskatchewan. It's very very far north and seems to go back some 1000 years BC so that we have the phenomenon of having this country covered with the sophisticated ruins of very very very high civilizations. All of this seems to have lost steam to have lost its spiritual sustenance. Just about the time that the European explorers were beginning to make inroads it's almost like a tai chi movement. That is the one power came in. The other power waned. Now the first real explorers and I guess I should mention there are all kinds of books to to consult. The society here has a wonderful document The Schoolcraft History of the Indian Tribes of the United States published under the auspices of the United States Government published by Lippincott. And there's six huge volumes like this. And Schoolcraft was nobody to play cards with. He probably wouldn't play cards at all as you can see by his taciturn Attorney discretion. And on the front cover just to give us the gospel truth is the Red Man scalping his White brother. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was published by the United States government. So this particular volume came out in 1857. most of them came out in the 1850s. Some of them came out. And we'll see that 1855 later on in this lecture series. 1855 is a remarkable center line date in this country for its spiritual development not the Civil War but 1855 just about the same time as this. As you pour through Schoolcraft You. You get the sense of the epic drama of the wonderful European individual who steps forth into this wilderness and by his incredible courage and the blessings from above he is able to carve out a destiny for himself and by the most precarious of steps to plant an inroad that somebody else takes up. And so that one has the sense of this inevitable divine chain of events finally leading of course to the Great Union. What actually did happen of course after Columbus in 1492 there were several persons like Cabot who sailed along the coast. There were persons like Verrazzano who in 1524 actually seems to have sailed into the vicinity of New York Harbor. There were even individuals like Cartier the French explorer up in the Saint Lawrence Gulf area. None of them actually touched ground in a real sense. The early accounts all seem to suggest that if they put a landing party ashore for a few hours and with great trepidation managed to take something from the land and go back to the ship that they had done something really fine. The fact is is that the very few of the early persons coming to the United States for even 100 or 200 years into the development were actually afraid of this country. And I think in order to get the sense of this kind of trepidation one has to imagine now that other than the sandy beach which you imagine in your mind the forest that is immediately past it stretches unbroken for several thousand miles that most of the accessible ports of entry of this country were covered by what is known as a virgin forest. That is a forest that had never been felled ever. That the size and antiquity of trees on this continent approached what we find today only in certain parks like Sequoia or Yosemite which you've had the experience with I think most of us may have. Here in California. The feeling of a primordial forest is one vastly different from just a parkland. The feeling that one gets is the certainty that this plant life is conscious and not only conscious but sacred. And not only that but linked together in some basic basic way which takes a kind of a modulated key to the spirit to fit in to be able to penetrate into it to be accepted into this ecology. And we have all kinds of experiments now that have shown that plants actually seem to cringe if one even boils water near them. So you can just imagine thousands of miles of unbroken forest that has grown together for tens of thousands of years. That vibration was perceptible. And of course human nature is able to pick this up. Even the astronauts were picking up the feeling that radar had been directed to them orbiting in the shuttlecraft just a few days ago. We're sensible to this. We are able to experience this. The only individuals who were immune to this were the conquistador type personalities who with their cut slash and burn mentality just plowed ahead. And I think the characteristic person like that was De Soto. And De Soto of course had been a lieutenant of Pizarro in Peru had grown filthy rich by confiscating other people's property. He had really mastered the whole thing except that he hadn't acquired the fame. He wasn't Cortez or Pizarro and he was frantically searching around for a place which he could call his own and his finger finally touched the map of the New World someplace called Florida. And he thought this is it. This is the place. And of course with all of his drive he managed to actually amass from Cuba and from his home base somewhat above a thousand men. Now these were not just soldiers. These were persons like himself egotistical giants furnishing their own armor expecting to have their own share of the treasures of the world. And many of them owning their own horses. And it was with this kind of. Dare we say motley crew an army of the grandiose that De Soto actually seemed to march up and down the coast and interior of the southern part of the United States in the 1540s. 1542. The American Indians by that time had had plenty of experience with their contacts even by 1542 and they simply made way. They burned villages in front of him. They decimated crops in front of him so that De Soto found himself constantly entering a terrain that had been ruined. And of course there were all kinds of guerrilla warfare techniques of taking potshots at them from behind So he was harassed which in the personality of someone like a De Soto. This is only the trumpets sounding the future glory. And of course nothing whatsoever of civilization was established by De Soto. The same with Coronado. In fact if one wishes to get a glimpse of the epitome of this I'll see if I can find a slide sometime during the series. Frederic Remington did a wonderful painting of Coronado's army on the march and in the glorious glitter of the armor of the individuals suspended in the dead dust of the environment one sees the perfect symbolic expression of these meteors of human nature flashing across the dust of conquest having no contact with the real Earth. Having no vision of the real sky and not even able to see each other as human beings. Just sales of grandeur coursing in their armor glinting in the light and passing through. Very very very little of this was was brought in. It was really a conception in the courts of Queen Elizabeth and England. This wonderful kind of mentality this cosmic mentality that was afoot there that began the first notion of the idea of taking man from Europe and placing him permanently as a growing civilized individual not just simply to go and get booty not just simply to go and have some kind of experience or even to retreat from something but conscientiously taking man the best that one could find in placing him in a new context to see if with a little bit of universal background man might not become more universal. And it was really in the court of Elizabeth with the grand conceiving of Sir Walter Raleigh in particular that the first real expeditions were set out with an eye towards finding some foothold in the sense of the beginning of a path of life. And the early founding of Jamestown I think has always been considered the the beginnings of the United States which we happen to find ourselves descendants of. It was there that the first person Virginia Dare was born. And of course the name Virginia is in honor of the virgin Queen Queen Elizabeth the First herself. So that it's with Virginia symbolically enough that we find the beginnings of what we would call the American Dream. And as soon as it had been established that this was feasible that is psychologically feasible. The idea because it was alive in its time was coming began to circulate among other groups. The most famous of course would be the pilgrim groups that founded the Plymouth Colony some 15 years later. These early communities were actually the beginnings of a process which once it caught on in the European mentality seemed like popcorn reaching the critical temperature. And all of a sudden within about 50 years of time within one lifetime there were 120,000 Europeans in the New World. And it was this incredible sudden development over that period from about 1620 to about 1670 that took the Indians by surprise. They had always conceived of these people as visitors as travelers. Their stories and records went back to times a thousand years before when the Vikings or the Irish or various other roving groups had come and visited and left or had stayed and become extinct because their colonies so-called their groups had died out. But it was in the 1670s in the north part the New England part the Massachusetts part of the United States that it suddenly began to occur to certain individuals Indian individuals of genius and perception that a watershed was at hand that if something were not done now it would never be done. And the individual who took it upon himself to see that the White man was ousted from the new world was the son of the Massasoit the great chief in Massachusetts. This this Indian Metacom was his Indian name but the colonists gave him the name of King Philip. King Philip. King Philip Schoolcraft loves to call him Philip. As if this were a wonderful kind of friendliness with the with the tyrant right now that he had been defeated and so forth. But there was a time about 1675 when Metacom decided that the thing that had happened so often to stop his people from dealing effectively with the parity of power was that they were not organized. So permitted is the individual who began to search around in his terrain in his background to try to find some model which he could use to unify the Indians. And of course there was one at hand the old Iroquois Confederacy from they were at that time fixed not only in upper New York State but all through the New England area and even further south down into Pennsylvania. But the old Iroquois confederation of bringing the five tribes together under one unified kind of leadership became a template in the mind of Metacom. Come and he began to carry this message around from tribe to tribe and sought to make a kind of a union in the New England area and the central tribe the kingpin tribe upon which he focused his union his massing of troops together where the Narragansett Indians very populous tribe very brave tribe able. I think the count according to Schoolcraft was able to put about 4000 warriors into the field by themselves a very sizable force. These are days when a thousand men was an unstoppable force. So Metacom began to organize all of the tribes in the northern part of the New England area together and from 1675 all the way through 1676 and on into the beginning of 1677 he was unbeatable and he moved with lightning rapidity. He would surface and a few days later he would be almost 100 miles away. The colonists began to suffer a case of the jitters and they very very quickly developed the kind of syndrome that developed in Italy during the Hannabalic Wars. Incidentally Arnold Toynbee has a wonderful huge study of the effect of the of Hannibal upon the Roman psyche. It turned the Romans into brutal military masters. A very similar kind of a psychological change came over the American colonists. Up until 1675 the problem was the New World. And after 1677 the problem was the red man the savage who will use every wily deception as a mask to get in close to you to find you in an unguarded moment to kill you. And this kind of a stereotype took form and took shape. Palpable shape during what is called the Pokanoket War. P-O-K-A-N-O-K-E-T War. And King Phillip or Metacom was the genius behind this. There were times when the colonists would assemble the faithful thousand men and send them into the field. And there were times even when Paul Metacom and the majority of the Narragansett Indians were even caught in a palisade fortification and some 300 of the Indian warriors were killed. And then at that moment of seeming victory for the colonists with Metacom and his troops fleeing into the forests the White colonists set fire to the entire stockade where the Indian women and children by the hundreds were quartered and massacred them. And of course the realization of this brought the Indian warriors back out of the woods. They reconnoitered. They attacked again the next day. They grouped themselves and the war went on. But something had happened. Something had snapped. Something had changed in the early American psyche for the very first time. A large body of people were butchered in the terms which we have come to recognize as a genocide. This happened about 1676. It was only about 5 or 6 years later that William Penn had his great moments of the joining of friendship with the Europeans and the Indians together. But the message of William Penn coming on the coattails of this tremendous trauma never really had the kind of public effect that it happened during the Pokanoket War. And I think I would like to give you a paragraph or two from our friend here Schoolcraft and then we'll then we'll take a break. While Church was in Rhode Island. Metacom was driven from his covert like a hunted lion. His wife children and others of his household being surprised and killed. By this time after the event at the stockade it became common policy to kill them all. The chief himself however escaped and fled from place to place. At length the brother of an Indian whom Philip had unjustly killed brought intelligence that the haughty Pokanoket Indian had taken refuge in a swamp located on Mount Hope Neck Church proceeded to the peninsula with a number of volunteers and a party of friendly Indians guided by the informer. They crossed the Taunton or Assonet River in perfect secrecy and reached the swamp after nightfall.Church then formed his men in segments of a circle in open order and marched them upon the swamp as radii to a center. Having placed a friendly Indian alternately next to a White man he issued orders to fire on any person who attempted to escape through the closing circle. No prisoners. There's a moment in the psychology of military planning where one reaches no prisoners. This is the savage stage. They waited for daybreak in intense anxiety and profound silence. A small select party under a certain Golding was detailed to advance and rouse up the Pokanoket Chief. While these arrangements were being perfected the attacking party was still behind. A shot whistled over church's head followed by a volley fired by a party of Indians sent out by Philip. Philip. Daylight had now appeared. The report of guns attracted the attention of the chief. And seizing his tobacco pouch and medicine sack called the Podunk his powder horn and gun. He started immediately to sustain his advance party. An Englishman not knowing the man levelled his piece at him on a venture but it missed fire. The Indians followed Philip and files the same man again discharged his musket at him sending. Two balls through his body and laying him dead on the spot. And of course this was the end. And very very quickly. They give the figure here. The Indians fought like tigers but they lost 130 men. The death of Philip was in effect the termination of a war that had threatened the very existence of the colonies. This is justification time that threatened the very existence of the colonies. For although the Pokanokets had been the prime instigators of it the powerful tribe of the Narragansetts and other auxiliaries one after another had joined the League. In other words they were getting organized. In other words the American Indian population by 1676 had realized finally that they had to work together and were doing it. And although scarcely two years had elapsed since the commencement of the war the entire Indian power of the country was openly or secretly enlisted on the side of the Mount Hope genius notwithstanding his rooted hatred of the Whites and of the whole scheme of civilization it cannot be doubted that he was a man who took a comprehensive view of his position. We would say and of the destiny of the New England tribes much less can it be questioned that he possessed great energy of character. You see he's dead and buried. And so it's all right to give a eulogy. It's all been forgotten. 1857. Much less can it be questioned that he possessed great energy of character persuasive powers suited to enlisting the sympathy of the Indians and very considerable skill in planning as well as in daring carrying out his projects into effect. And a certain historian calls him a person of good understanding and knowledge in the best of things. We may lament that such energies were misapplied but we cannot withhold our respect for the man who though lacking the motives that led Christian martyrs to the stake and civilized heroes to the imminent deadly breach was yet capable of combining all the military strength and political wisdom of his country and placing the colonies in decidedly the greatest peril through which they had ever passed. This of course written by a man who understood the war and its possibilities. And it really is much more important than the Revolutionary War because in this short two year period the twist in the spirit of the United States was made the crank in the flow. And from then on almost repeating it again and again. This same kind of twisted reverberation echoes invisibly and silently through the actions of the United States again and again and again until in our own time it has become almost an embarrassment of why an intelligent people can constantly make these kinds of odd contours that don't seem to make sense that seem to have an irrational movement. Where does it begin Where did it come from It came from about 300 years ago. Well let's take a break and have some coffee or some tea and and then we'll continue. Many have been coming for quite some time. This is almost two years now that I've been lecturing. In the first year that we were here we had a lot of various areas. And then the realization was is that a lot of the basics of the historical development of man's spirit were just not clearly enunciated. They were understood but they were understood hit and miss and sort of episodic parts. And that there was a need to have them somehow put together in a movement historically. So this is actually the fourth chorus. And so I can see that there are many who are here for the first time and don't realize that there is a larger larger context and a method and everything operating here. I won't say too much about it except that there are other elements afoot here other than just giving a lecture on a subject. Something else in motion here. The diagrams up here. It's quite interesting in one of the ruins in Mesa Verde southern Colorado one of the very great early Pueblo structures. And one of the few facades which contain all three stories. There's a window that looks out across the horizon and on the upper part of the window. because the walls are very thick are seven dots arranged in a well-known pattern of the Little Dipper. And it turns out that in summer twilight if one is in this particular room of the Mesa Verde Structure and one looks out you can see the Little Dipper and Ursa minor is very much much dimmer somewhat on the order of five magnitudes dimmer than the Big Dipper. So it's not at all just an easy object to see as a constellation. But it was singled out. And in fact the case has been made that the pattern of the Little Dipper Ursa minor is very very formative in the religious astronomical background of all of the North American Indians. And that in fact the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is in fact a replica in a mound shape of Ursa minor. And why would this be not so much for this star up here as part of the Dipper. That would be this egg shape that the serpent is reaching for. But rather in the curl of the tail. Because the curl of the tail. The maze of life the labyrinth of existence for which some clue must be had by man in order to find your way out is represented in Ursa major by a very famous star. In fact the star's name is Polaris. And Polaris of course is the North Star the pole star that spot observable In our latitudes which seems to be the center pole of the sky. Through which from Polaris to the earth and beyond where we cannot see some kind of a meaningful axis in the cosmos must be evident and that therefore it is the rightful center pole of any kind of a structure that man may make for himself and that if he uses the template of those aspects of the cosmos that revolve around that pole star for himself that template will eventually give him a geometry of meaning that could be trusted that you could care for so that we have this attentiveness in the North American Indian to the sky. And in fact we have very near those Mesa Verde ruins just south in New Mexico evidence on an observation point of a hand and a crescent and a bright splash much like a crescent moon and a star with the hand as the seal of the presence of an understanding intelligence. Who observed this And it turns out that ruins there disclosed articles which by Carbon-14 dating seemed to indicate that the site was occupied somewhere between 950 and 1100 AD which fits very closely into the time which a very striking phenomenon would have been observed in the sky. And that was in 1054 when this colossal supernova that is now the Crab Nebula appeared on the horizon and was the brightest celestial object in the sky except for the sun. And through our astronomical and computer technology which we have we can run the movement of the Crab Nebula back to its supernova stage. And we can take that latitude of the Earth and run the phenomenon of the rising of that supernova star around the Earth back and the only place on the planet that it would have been seen in conjunction with the crescent moon was in northern New Mexico and that was the beginning of the phenomenon the beginning of its visibility to this planet. So that with a curious kind of a spiritual irony this heralding star was visible with the crescent moon in this great archetypal vision in the evening sky. Only at this point by the time that the star had reached China the declination between the moon and the star was too great for there to be a correlation. And 1054 seems to fit very very closely to the terminus of the civilization of these very places that they seem to have fallen into ruin Simply to have been abandoned. Let go of why one of the native traditions which has been kept alive and kept in somewhat of a secret circulation is that the religious power began to become invested in two opposing factions and that their stalemate their equilibrium produced a tension which was unbearable for everyone else and that the entire society was just abandoned and all the great Pueblo structures were left to the wind. It certainly is not from the early event which was supposed to have been the cause the great drought in the southwest which occurred in the 13th century but already before them the ruins the monuments had really effectively been abandoned. And these individuals called Anasazi or the Ancient Ones were regarded by the Diné the Navajo people as being those persons the stragglers of that civilization who taught them the arts of weaving and pottery making and so forth and actually acclimated them to the Four Corners area of the United States. This feeling that there is a coordination between the land and the persons who inhabit this land and celestial or cosmic events has always been here. And of course it occurs in almost any civilization or culture that we see. And yet the United States more than almost any other place except perhaps for Egypt seems to have had its history and its spirit structured almost like a geometric diagram on events that have happened within this correlation. The land of course is really the problem. It's the problem in our time. It was the problem all along. The ancestors of ourselves never had a problem with the astronomical correlations. Many of them thought about these kinds of events but it was the land that gave them a problem. In fact this country was styled a wilderness. A wilderness in the sense that it was desolate of civilization desolate of man. And in fact when Alexis de Tocqueville the great French historian was traveling in the United States something like this came up. De Tocqueville resolved to see wilderness during his 1831 trip to the United States and in Michigan Territory. And in July the young Frenchman found himself at last on the fringe of civilization. But when he informed the frontiersman of his desire to travel for pleasure into the primeval forest they thought him mad. But of course de Tocqueville having been raised and Rousseau and so forth had the opportunity to conceive of the wilderness as a source of pleasure An excursion to see what kinds of vibrational harmonies would come out of him when he would step out of the context out of the frame of reference that he'd always been in into something far more vast. And all the frontiersmen of course say this is strange. The Americans required considerable persuasion from de Tocqueville to convince them that his interests lay in matters other than lumbering or land speculation that he wasn't looking for gold. He wasn't looking for some secret kind of booty. He wanted to go and see the trees. This was strange. It was almost incomprehensible. Reminded sometimes of John Muir's writings. And I suppose in the next series we'll be able to work John Muir in some of his private sides. I read once the journals of Hale Tharp who was the first White man to go up into Sequoia National Park. And he lived in a fallen tree on Crescent Meadow. And about the third or fourth season that he was up there he began to get up in the middle of the night because he thought he saw forms of people gathering in the meadows before him. He thought that the trees were like giant cowled individuals there. These kinds of feelings penetrate. I remember when Captain Edward White made the first EVA out from an orbiting satellite and he wouldn't come back. And that golden umbilical cord going back to the ship. And later on Pete Conrad made the observation because he had made an EVA. And he said you know he said that silence out there really penetrates something of that feeling something of that event. And it's only recently that there have begun to be actual studies of this. This quotation came from a book by Roderick Nash published by Yale University not too long ago. Wilderness and the American Mind. Wilderness and the American Mind. And of course several historians like Turner made a great academic reputation on the idea of the frontier and the American mind and so forth. And later on when we get to the West the United States and the West we'll see there's a study called Virgin Land the symbol of the Virgin Land: The Symbol of the American West. All of these aspects of course are wrapped up in the mystery of the American Indian. And as long as the energies of comportment are polarized much like they were in 1675 those energies will forever be a confused hidden enigma hidden away. We have to get over that polarity. We have to get over that experience. And a lot of the American vision is trying to wake up from what one was brought up in to see what one actually is living in what actually is going on what is the situation. And we will see that all of the individuals in the series have had those moments in their lives and their careers where they have woken up where they have through some discipline and some vision begun to see. And these two aspects of disciplining oneself and the corollary of having a vision are part of the essential spiritual energies of the American Indian. Because fasting and dreaming or the two legs on which the primordial intelligence of the early inhabitants of this continent universally found their ordination in the world and in themselves. Fasting and dreaming. And in fact once we begin to zero in on some of these ideas making them clear enunciating them and then taking them and looking through the literature the evidence the background we begin to find that all along there have been those individuals who have realized just exactly what we have just now come to realize and have done something about it Along with sponsoring school craft the United States government also sponsored the Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Annual Reports and they made them into beautiful volumes like this. And instead of having some scalping we have the noble visage of a chief on the cover. And the editor of this volume was J. W. Powell. John Powell very very famous here in the West. And this is from 1891. And this is the report to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1885. And in it we have a number of interesting reports one on Indian languages. And it turns out incidentally that California is a very very cosmopolitan place We had over 20 language families spoken here within the confines of California so that it always was a center of immigrants from everywhere. Every single language on the continent was spoken someplace here in California. But there is also a very large report on the Grand Medicine Society. The women of the Ojibwe Indians the Ojibweg speak Algonquin the same as the. The Blackfoot and the Algonquin language in fact covers all about two thirds of the United States. And in this report on the midewin. And of course they give all the appropriate diagrams and we have them here in the library and one can find for oneself in here the sketches of the Leaders of the tribe characteristic individuals and diagrams of the lodge initiation ceremonies and so forth. But I thought this was very interesting because this paragraph by Powell seems to indicate something which we should follow for follow up for about 10 or 15 minutes. He wrote the Ojibwe believe in a multiplicity of spirits or their name for it was Manitou which inhabit all space and every conspicuous object in nature. Everything is alive. These Manitous in turn are subservient to superior ones either of a charitable and benevolent character or those which are malignant and aggressive. The chief or superior Manitou is termed Kitchi Manitou great spirit. Wakan great spirit Kitchi Manitou. Approaching to a great extent the idea of the God of the Christian religion. The second in their estimation is Wezhaa Manitou. Wezhaa Manitou a benign being upon whom they look as the guardian spirit of the meadow. When the grand Initiation Medicine Lodge Society and through whose divine provision the sacred rights of the women were granted to man the Animikii Animikii the Animikii or Thunder God is if not the Supreme at least one of the greatest of the malignant Manitous. And it is from him that the jiisakii J-I-I-S-A-K-I-I are believed to obtain their powers of evil doing. The jiisakii were not actually shaman but they were what we would call con men with a purpose who had a tie in to a certain trick. They were like magicians who could do one trick really well and therefore they had power over people because they had supposedly great capacities. Because they could show you this one thing that they could do. there were out of every tribe would have shaman but not every tribe would have these jiisakii. They would be maybe 1 or 2 in the territory. They would be the loan sharks that sort of thing. They got their power of doing evil things from Animikii the Thunder God. But Wezhaa Manitou. Wezhaa. Manitou who gave instead of evil power gave a ceremonial cycle which would give rules of initiation of bringing new people into it of putting them through various degrees and raising them up to a purification consciousness whereby they would increasingly realize their place in nature in the natural order until they were able to realize what we would call now a transcendent threshold moment by which they would no longer have dreams that were individual but dreams which were cosmic and they would enter into the way then of the grandfathers the way of the Great Spirit and no longer be limited by what their particular life would style for them. They would be free. So evil is being able to do a certain thing with power and authority and using that as a handle to get your way and good is finding a structure which yields freedom. There is one other to whom special reference will be made who abides in and rules the place of shadows the hereafter. He is known as Matchi Manitou Shadow Spirit or more commonly Ghost Spirit. The name of Manitou is never mentioned but with reverence and thus only in connection with the right of the ruin or a sacred feast and always after making an offering of tobacco. And of course this is the taking in of the breath and having it circulate and passing out the calumet. The peace pipe is the ritual object by which that happens. And at the end of the lecture series when we get to Black Elk we'll see a wonderful presentation of this of the place of the of the Calumet and of tobacco as a spiritual movement of the basis of life the air these developments this appearing in 1891 and certain other individuals who were active at that time began to lay the foundations for a change. And the American Indian no longer was the hidden enigma in the background. But patiently over the decades the basic elements of their lives and livelihoods and backgrounds began to surface. And we find from the 1880 probably I think 1879 was the first volume of this all the way through until the First World War that very very patiently a small group of anthropologists and ethnologists laid the foundations for a dawning a realization of the Red Man which is coming to fruition in our own time. And it was during this period that we find American Indians for the first time those in position of authority within their own tribes and of spiritual insight began to make. Pointed adoptions of certain White people to bring them in as their adopted sons. Or their adopted daughters and to pass on to them the sense of the spirit of the rites and the initiations and these structures which led to liberation so that we begin to find writings about the turn of the 20th century by European descendants who had been adopted by Indian who were beginning to look through red eyes and see their own world in those terms. And one of the finest and greatest of that whole group was Walter McClintock and his book The Old North Trail. He has several books and you can see here the Indian is now placed on the horse with his rifle and his dignified mobile individual in the universe. And McClintock left Pittsburgh traveled west and after many years of spending time in northern Montana southern Alberta particularly in Montana up around Shelby Cutbank those areas north of Great Falls and east towards Glacier National Park near enough so that you could see the rocky silhouettes at in the morning. He was adopted by Sinopa or Mad Wolf into the Blackfoot nation. And the Blackfoot name for themselves is Siksika which means moccasins which are black on the bottom. Because man has been using you've been going on the path and if you've been on the path then of course your moccasins. So Blackfoot or Blackfoot Siksika those people who are moving right on the path. See our Mad Wolf adopted McClintock into his family made him his son and over several trips McClintock kept coming out. And finally Sinopa began to tell him that he was having visions that he must pass on the core the operating core the symbolic liveliness of the Blackfoot Nation to his White son. He didn't know why. It wasn't something that he particularly wanted. Although he loved his son he had no particular love to proselytize at all among the White people. And yet he began to feel this need. And this of course was at the same time as Black Elk was having his visions at the same time as many other American Indians as we will see were having similar visions. And in fact the same time in which the Ghost Dance religion began to sprout up in the western part of the United States. Well we haven't time to go into the entire aspect but I think that a few things here from McClintock might be interesting. He incidentally was quite amazed when he came back from Pittsburgh. He had been dreaming of his Red father and he came back and just as he walked into the tent he saw Sinopa and his wife gives to the son in prayer. And I looked up and smiled as he looked up and he said it was just as the dream had told him and that his son was just in time because all the preparations were being made that Sinopa's wife gives to the son had had the visions in the winter in February to give a Sun Dance the most sacred of all the ceremonies of the Plains Indians and that this Sun Dance would be the one which they would teach their White son the ways of the Great Spirit in the Red way. And of course here McClintock came in right on time that night. McClintock says that he was asleep in the teepee and it was curious to him because all of a sudden he could hear. He could hear the way in which the murmur of the stream was punctuated by the flap of the ears of the chief in the gentle wind and how the hiss of the sap in the wood on the fire and all of it seemed to make a symphony in his ears. And he went to sleep with the sound. And when he woke up the sound was still there still modulated still carrying you. And you see between the lines that he was in a spiritual flow and that he was prepared by circumstance to receive the information on the Sun Dance. And of course he goes into it for several hundred pages. They even see it was a great chief. He would even stop the Sun Dance ceremony at a certain part to make sure that his son understood that he had seen everything not to take notes but to see it. So that reverberated clearly in himself. And then the ceremony would go on. Here is two paragraphs. Here are two paragraphs from McClintock inside the Sun Lodge. Very very late in the ceremony. It's an eight day ceremony. This is somewhat near the seventh day. Probably. Probably near the beginning of the seventh day. Spotted Eagle his Blackfoot name. Master pen and Bull child. Prominent medicine men were chosen by the chiefs to take charge of the ceremonies to be given inside the Sun Lodge. On the morning of the fifth day. They had walked slowly through camp dancing blowing their medicine whistles as they signal to the tribe that they were proceeding to the Sun Lodge and then Bull Child would wear these robes famous among the Blackfoot purchased by him from Brings Down the Sun a celebrated medicine man of the North. Many bird and animal tales were attached so that the fringe were like the tales of these creatures and this is like we see fringe on jackets and so forth and we see it as a declaration. Or we don't realize that the old shamanic origins of this are like the little tails and the legs of all creatures so that the robe or the shaman's garment is the cloak of life the cloak the the rainbow cloak of many colors all the aspects of life. And of course interspersed with it always were like little ringing symbols so that when one would move there would be this whisper of sound like a backdrop. For what For the human voice to enunciate the prayer so that all of the feet of creation were moving with the motion of the posture of man. Hence the words in the ceremony I am sacred. As I am standing here I am sacred as I move. Just those declarations. Of course if you read them in an anthropological text it seems very very sparse. But when you put it into a spiritual context and understand what's going on it is profound. Many bird and animal tales were attached including those of the eagle the owl the weasel the mink the gopher. Et cetera et cetera et cetera. It had also a small bell two shields several pieces of fragrant punk from the cottonwood tree. There were paint marks on the back of the robe to represent stars. One group of seven across the shoulders to represent the Great Bear and under the right shoulder a cluster of six to represent the Pleiades in the center of the back. The sun was represented by a double circle in black and red and there was also a small Maltese cross with a morning star. In other words man was cloaked with the cosmos. He was not only a focus of Earth and its life but he was a focus of the template of the heavens and between heaven and earth. Man in his sacred mysterious way moves with deft shrewdness to liberation. Before entering the Sun Lodge Bull Child gave a long dance outside. In one hand he held an owl and crotales which belonged to the medicine of his robe and in the other an eagle wing that went with his medicine bag. The mashkikig. The medicine bag. Medicine bag is a portable shrine. The symbolic designs painted upon his face and body had been revealed to him by the son in a dream while sleeping in a medicine booth of a former Sun Dance. The marks upon his arms represented the rainbow upon and those upon his cheeks stars. Across his mouth was a red cross the sign of fasting. The red cross on the mouth. The sign of fasting. Upon the center of his forehead was a red disk for the sun and upon either temple two yellow streaks for sun dogs. You know when the sun glints the out of the corners. These are sun dogs. Upon the front of his otter beaver hat was fastened a white shell representing the sun and above it was painted a crescent for the moon. At the back of the hat were two spotted eagle feathers and in his hair a single red eagle plume. We could see from the description that McClintock was paying attention when he danced. He faced first towards the rising sun blowing his medicine whistle and making mysterious motions with both arms extended toward the sky. Medicine whistle is a bone from the joint from the eagle which eagle bones are hollow of course structurally very very strong but hollow and their whistle is kind of a flattened tinny hi toot which sounds at first to the ear like somebody has whispered something or wheezed something. And the sense is to turn to hear what was that And it's gone before you do it so that what happens is you find yourself in that posture of trying to follow it. And of course this is just the kind of sound to wake someone up spiritually. Just that sound. It's a preparatory sound to awaken with both arms extended toward the sky. Then he danced facing the west and waving the eagle wing in the direction of the setting sun. The door of the Sun Lodge faced towards the east opposite the entrance. Upon the inside was a small booth for the exclusive use of the medicine men. It was closely interwoven at the sides with back and back with ground pine to bar inquisitive eyes from the outside. The floor was made of earth taken from the foot of the center pole. It was hardened by wetting and then covered with white clay. Pine boughs were spread within upon which they slept. When the medicine men entered the booth they announced that they would fast for four days which meant the tribe that the Sun Dance would continue four days longer. During this time the medicine men ate but four bites of dried meat before sunrise and four more after sunset with an allowance of about one shell of water. They might eat gooseberries and sweet cottonwood pulp provided they were brought to them but they could not gather them and they could not leave the booth during their fast. And so we find here of course the fasting and what is coming out of this are not just the dreams because one has dreams when one is young but when one is matured and further along one has the visionary sense brought in home so that instead of going to sleep to have a dream one remains in presence to have a vision. And of course this was the time honored way of the American Indian to prepare oneself. Now we have in our time of course had certain individuals this book Voices of Earth and Sky: The Life of the Native Americans and Their Cultural Heroes published up in Healdsburg California by Vinson Brown. For those who were at the Gandhi lecture last week Brown went to India about 20 years ago and spent a year with Vinoba Bhave Gandhi's successor and Vinoba like a good spiritual guru instead of coming over and collecting money or opening up ashrams here and that tell them go back and find the center of spiritual life in your area and learn it. And Brown realized that it was the American Indians. And so he began investigating. And he says here in a few sentences something I think that's interesting. He says. I have long been interested in the religions of the Native Americans but after commencing an intensive study of these religions I am convinced that there are far too complex and varied to fit into any neat categories. In fact it may be very difficult ever to do this for three reasons. First scientific study of these religions started only in very recent years. A tremendous lot of information has been lost due to the dying off of so many of the old people who still had some knowledge of them. Second the ethnologists and other scientists who have studied these religions have been. Many have come from many varied backgrounds themselves. Hence their interpretations of this very complex and subjectively difficult subject have often clashed. And third the Indian informants themselves often differ in their interpretations and their ideas and some even change their own ideas over a comparatively short period of time. And then an interesting statement. And for those who were here for the Hasteen Klah lecture this will be pure insight and pleasure. For example when I was visiting the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe New Mexico a few years ago the friendly curator told me that they had asked one old Navajo medicine man. Of course this was Klah to explain the meaning of a sand painting he had done for them. He did so but the trouble was he also came back to the museum twice later each time giving a completely new interpretation of the same sand painting. We have this Klah lecture on tape for those who would like to to get into that. It was Klah's way as a masterful medicine man to say that it is the vision capacity that you carry in your presence that must be alerted. Not the mind with its meanings with its referential episodic polarized techniques. None of that has any validity or place at all in the logic of spiritual meaning. What you need to see is how your focus your moving presence illuminates it. And that's it. Well we'll see an individual who next week I think had some of those qualities. The first individual in the American colonies to finally wake up fully and become quite an individual. Benjamin Franklin I hope that you'll be here for that.