As It Is Above, So It Is Below
By Patricia A. Kurtz
Throughout the ages, mankind has created relationships with the stars. Cultures wove their beliefs and traditions into stories told around campfires or inside their homes. While modern man typically considers this sharing process to have been mostly an oral tradition, perhaps some enterprising ancient North Americans also put their cosmology into a more permanent record. Instead of paper, they used the ground; instead of pens and pencils, they used colored stones.
Many ancient Native Americans were dedicated and discerning observers of the sky. We know that some of them built elaborate devices with which they could predict solstice, equinox, stellar risings and settings, lunar standstills and eclipses. In 1997, Herman Bender of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, discovered an assembly of rocks, called a petroform, near Horicon Marsh that was created by a prehistoric culture. With color-coded rocks--particularly white granite and red rhyolite--and meticulous precision, the people had laid out a human-shaped effigy 55 feet in height that, when viewed from the air, eerily resembles a mirror reflection of the constellation Scorpius.
By definition, a petroform can be one of a number of different kinds of rock or lithic formations, including stone circles, such as the well-known Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming. Often found on hilltops, petroforms can be as simple as a cairn of rocks, or as complicated as lines of rocks and figures arranged on the ground in the form of animals and/or humans. In addition to their spiritual associations, the petroforms and related mounds and circles can function as a form of calendars, pointing to summer and winter solstice and equinox sunrises and/or sunsets, the cardinal directions, eclipses and other cosmic events. The largest found to date—nicknamed Star Man—measures 62 feet. Individual elements in the groupings can measure from a few feet to many feet in size. According to archaeologist Dr. Jeffrey Behm of the University of Wisconsin, petroforms have been found in Wisconsin, the Ohio Valley, the Northeast, the Southeast, the northern Plains, and in the inter-mountain West. He suspected they were once widespread throughout North America.
When Bender, a geologist and co-founder of the Hanwakan Center (www.hanwakan.org), found the petroform he came to call “Sky Being,” he got more than he bargained for. He’d been mapping lithic alignments in association with some stone bison effigies near a mound grouping, and he thought he’d found a large stone circle. He asked a friend to fly him over the area so he could photograph the site. After developing the film, a “star map on the ground” was revealed, he explained in a recent interview. Without Bender’s astronomical interests, it’s doubtful he would have recognized the potential stellar attributes of the petroform, and he would “never have been led to his current interpretations” for a number of other archaeological sites in the area, which now appear to be astronomically or cosmologically driven as well.
Ancient Astronomers
An ancient astronomer who wished to create such a setting would probably have looked for open ground with a good view of the horizon. Before settlement, dating back to the mid-Holocene period some 5,000 years ago, the Wisconsin landscape was dramatically different than it is now. Instead of the cultivated fields and woodlands that now cover much of the area, open savannah and grassland were dominant, stretching to the south and west. To the west were unobstructed views overlooking the Horicon Marsh basin and prairie where deer, elk and bison once roamed. It would have been just what the astronomer called for.
The Sky Being petroform lies just east of the Niagara escarpment on the north end of a prominent mound group. At present, this ancient shrine place contains otter mounds, a panther or cougar, and conical-shaped mounds. There is also an irregular crescent-shaped bear mound. During road construction on the site completed in 1956 that destroyed four of the otter mounds, carbon dating was performed that indicated a use or date of origin between A.D. 526–1026. This complex site covers generations of time, and likely was occupied by more than one culture or linguistic group at different times.
There is evidence that the mound grouping adjoining Star Being was built over earlier petroforms. Acccording to Bender and Dr. Jack Steinbring, that is not unusual in the realm of petroforms and associated mound groupings. Dr. Edgar G. Bruder studied the stratigraphic record of the mounds during a road construction project on the edge of the site in June 1954. He noted, “Each of these mounds contained a large glacial boulder and from all indications these were also in place on the old surface and the mounds built around and over them….”
Bender painstakingly measured and mapped every stone (including shapes and colors) within an approximate two-acre area of the mound group adjoining Sky Being. As mentioned, the resulting maps and charts reveal a striking similarity to the constellation Scorpius. An ambiguous component of the site is a red rhyolite, bison-shaped stone located in the position of Sky Being’s “head.” This headstone doesn’t have a place within the mirror reflection of Scorpius, but stellar teachings of the Lakota Native Americans may provide a theory.
A star chart dated for autumnal equinox 2001 B.C. shows the sun in the constellation Libra in the same place that the “headstone” is placed on the ground. The Libra-sun association within the petroform is worth further investigation. Important considerations include its red color, bison shape and possible summer-solstice sunrise alignment—all solar representations to the Native North Americans (and their celestial counterpart to God). If this interpretation is correct, the petroform’s body (Scorpius), together with the headstone (the sun), mirrors the equinox event of 4,000 years past, and may indicate its date of use. Bender says that many other petroforms appear to date from the mid to late Archaic period (3000–1500 B.C.), which are also the accepted dates of the Proto-Algonquian movement. Were these the people responsible for the petroform’s construction? Analyzing some Native American “mythology” might provide clues in determining who these builders were, and yield insights to their motivations.
On Earth as It Is in Heaven
The ancient Lakota ancestors were adept at determining which constellation the sun was in at all times during the year. Why would ancient people consider this important? According to Ronald Goodman (Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology), the “Spring Journey” of the Lakota “was tied to ‘following the sun’ through a specific set of constellations that had earthly counterparts in the landscape.” Additionally he wrote that they “felt a vivid relationship between the macrocosm, the star world, and their microcosmic world on the plains. There was a constant mirroring of what is above by what is below.”
The Cheyenne tell of their ancient homeland on the shores of the great lakes far to the north before they had bows and arrows. Upon leaving there, they traveled south, stopping at various places for periods of time, before arriving in the prairies of North Dakota. Linguistic experts trace the migrations of the Algonquian-speaking people—ancestors of the Cheyenne, Mohican, Ojibwe and others—along the same routes.
The people who inhabited the area considered the stars to be of great significance. Native origin stories and ceremonies teem with celestial images and their counterparts on Earth. Thor Conway (Spirits on Stone: The Agawa Pictographs) wrote that the Ojibwe conducted ceremonies oriented to a series of sacred sites: “…unusual landscape features associated with mythic heroes covered the country.” If so, these people could continually look out over—and literally live within—their cosmologies. While collecting and cataloging data for the sites, Bender received several phone calls from Native Americans in the Black Hills area of South Dakota. These led to a series of meetings on the Star Being petroform site that enhanced his interpretations of petroforms, and consequently changed his life.
From Boise, Idaho in 1995 came Ralph Redfox, one of the last of the Wolf Lodge of the Cheyenne Nation. Intelligent, well-read and well-versed in his Native traditions, this somewhat fragile-looking, 82-year-old elder walked the sites with Bender numerous times since his initial trip, looking, musing and talking about the ways and history of the Cheyenne people. He is convinced that his ancestors were responsible for the petroform and other similar sites in the area, and has been instrumental in providing Bender with an understanding of Cheyenne cosmology.
He explained the significance of the bison to the Cheyenne. While for thousands of years, the giant bison and the more familiar present-day bison were their means of food and clothing, these creatures also represented the physical embodiment of solar power in the animal world. The sun was their physical representation of God in the sky. A site that represented the bison so completely would have been a very holy place, mirroring God in the Sky by creating God on the ground.
If we listen to the descendants of those who probably built these extraordinary devices, we may find that the ancients placed their gods and origin stories upon the landscape all around them. We are given a glimpse of cultures that for thousands of years managed to live with a profound marriage of God (Father Sun) and the world that gave them life (Mother Earth).
