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Moonlady Showcase
Happy Lunastice:
A Tale of Earthworks, Golf Courses and Civil Disobedience
Happy Lunastice! In the sky is occurring a profound celestial rhythm, one that captivated the ancient inhabitants of this continent -- the 18.6-year standstill cycle of the Moon. To humans 2,000 years ago, this complicated pattern of lunar rising and setting points was like a message from the divine, something that only the most intelligent of starwatchers could detect. As if to answer back, to tell this luminescent intelligence that they understood its message, in the first few centuries AD ancient humans called Hopewell built an immense octagon-shaped lunar observatory of dirt in the green hills of mid-Ohio. It's been termed one of the 70 greatest ancient wonders in the world.
Lunar Standstill
Solstices and equinoxes, the annual solar cycle shapes our year. But the lunar standstill cycle shapes our lives. Both are similar.
A Solstice refresher course: On Fall Equinox, the Sun rises due east in the sky and sets due west. But as autumn unfolds, each day the Sun rises and sets a bit more toward the south, or lower in the sky, until Winter Solstice on December 21st or so. There it reaches its maximum southern point where it rises and sets in the same place for three days. Solstice means "Sun stands still." Then its path begins inching upward again, through Spring Equinox until Summer Solstice when it rises and sets to the north, or high in the sky.
The Moon has a similar pattern of rising and setting between southern and northern standstill extremes that happens during the 27 or so days it takes to orbit around the Earth. Over 18.6 years, those rise and set points go from being very wide apart, about 77 degrees, when the Moon reaches its maximum north and south standstills, to being rather close, only about 49 degrees apart, for the minimum standstills.
We are now in the maximum northern lunar standstill, or lunastice. During the autumn months of 2005, the Moon is rising and setting as high to the north as it can.
What beautiful minds, what immense curiosity, compelled the ancient Hopewell to discern this epic yet subtle rhythm from the sky! To native cultures the Moon was often the grandmother deity, the wise observer of their lives. The Moon guided them on when to fish and when to plant. Her phases from new to full and back again was the same length as the life-giving cycle of women's menstrual flow. The Moon was magic, a light without heat, a light that opened up the night, allowing them to move about the landscape in the illuminated darkness. More than a celestial body in the sky, the Moon served as a partner in ancient lives, something with which a symbiotic relationship was formed, a co-creation of the world, the Hopewell world.
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The Hopewell and Their Earthworks
If we were taught anything about the 100 BCE to 400 CE Hopewell in school, it was something like "They were hunter-gatherers, they made mounds." True, they moved across the Midwest landscape with the patterns of ripening plants and maturing animals, living in seasonal villages of a few related clans. But they also altered their landscape on a vast scale, clearing forests for open space and wildscaping dozens of acres at a time. Finely wrought, intricate art was created from exotic materials brought in via a trade network that spanned much of the continent. They lived well, taking just a few hours each day to make food and shelter, leaving them leisure time for building on a grand scale.
"Indian mounds" were in reality sophisticated monumental earthworks of an ancient civilization. They were intricately layered with different types and colors of earth, created by stacking one 50-pound block of packed dirt after another. Some were connected by ruler-straight ceremonial roads, sacra via, one of which goes for an estimated 60 miles. Thousands are felt to have gathered inside these enclosures, coming in massive pilgrimage from across the continent to leave offerings of imported goods and participate in shamanic ceremonies and lunar standstill celebrations.
The Hopewell may have lacked a written language, but they were mathematical masters. In the present-day town of Newark, just east of Columbus, the Hopewell built their finest earthen monument: a precisely shaped 20-acre Circle joined by a narrow pair of walls to a 50-acre Octagon. Formerly the Moundbuilders State Memorial, the duo is now dubbed the Octagon Earthworks. The Octagon's five-foot-high walls encode all eight major points of the lunar standstill: maximum northern and southern Moon rises and sets, and minimum northern and southern Moon rises and sets. On those dates, one of the Octagon's long earthen walls will line up with a standstill horizon point like a rifle barrel and scope.
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The Octagon and the Golf Course
The maximum northern Moonrise is the big kahuna, the alignment around which the Octagon Earthworks were focused. Instead of an exterior wall, the entire central axis of the earthworks lines up with that particular Moonrise point. On those dates, an observer on the back of the Circle directly opposite Octagon can look down the pair of connector walls and see the Moon rise through that narrow slot and across the Octagon. It's the raison d'être for the earthworks' existence. (Visit http://www.octagonmoonrise.org to view the graphic.)
Viewing the Moon rise can be a tricky affair. At Full Moon, it crests above the eastern horizon at sunset. Easy enough to see. Each night it rises about 45 minutes later, so for a few dates the viewing's good: the sky is dark and the hour not too late. The Moon gets a little smaller each night until the New Moon phase, when it rises and sets with the Sun, invisible to the eye. So for much of the time, the rising Moon is either washed out by the Sun's glare, or it's too small to see, or it rises when most of us are asleep. And for most folks to be out viewing the Moon, at least in modern times, it is best done on weekends when they don't have to wake up early the next day.
Compounding these impediments to Moonrise viewing is that the Octagon Earthworks are situated on, of all things, a private golf course and country club -- a bit as if Stonehenge shared its soil with a shopping bazaar. When the city of Newark transferred ownership of the Octagon Earthworks to the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) in 1933, it came with a hitch attached: a long-term lease to the Mound Builders Country Club, whose fairways and buildings are largely contained inside the Octagon and Circle. The MBCC controls access into the earthworks. Getting them to allow full public exploration of the site is comparable to getting a hippo to open its mouth for a root canal.
In early fall of 2001 my husband and I traveled to the Octagon Earthworks, only to find out that viewing on that day was limited to a one-story observation platform adjacent to the connector pair. Since you can't see much of either the Circle or Octagon from that view, it's a bit like trying to comprehend a horse by looking only at its foreleg. What you mostly see is the putting green of the country club's ninth tee. A paved footpath leads along the outside of a short section of the Circle, which has all the satisfaction of viewing a room through a closed door.
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Moonrise 2005
So it wasn't much of an exaggeration when a public relations blitz of posters, postcards, media and internet during 2005 heralded the "once in a lifetime" opportunity:
Moonrise Octagon Earthworks
Fall 2005
Newark, Ohio
Be there
Though my plate was more than full from projects and chores, I did indeed have to be there. They don't call me the Moonlady for nothing! But I was just as driven by my book project on the ancient divine feminine of North America. The Hopewell's feminine approach to architecture intrigued me. Though lacking in a known goddess figure, their monumental constructions were as earthly, horizontal and receptive as the stone temples of patriarchal cultures were cold, vertical and piercing.
The Newarks Earthworks Day on Saturday October 22, 2005 was a wild success, with over a thousand people gathered in spite of cold rain, folks from California, New York, Texas, Ontario, England and even Egypt. The organizers did quite the tap dance to schedule the event on a viewable Moonrise fate with the following Sunday being one of five days a year when the miserly MBCC allows the public full access to the Octagon Earthworks. But the most anticipated event, the one with busloads from schools and other groups coming in, was the Moonrise viewing on Saturday night, complete with public ceremony and procession conducted by Native American spiritual leaders. It's one thing to see earthworks. It's quite another to experience them in action as they might have been.
So it was crushing, absolutely crushing, when the Moonrise viewing was canceled by the MBCC even though the skies were clear. The reason: too much rain the days before had soaked the gold course grounds. The raison d'être of the whole earthworks weekend was not to be seen. That is unless you were a MBCC member at the private party that night. Those chosen few got to see the Moonrise in all its aligned glory from the ninth tee. The ground evidently was not too wet for them.
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Civil Disobediance on the Mound
Those of us with plane flights home on Sunday were panicked -- this was our only Moonrise chance. Like ancient times, we made pilgrimage across a continent to be in this event. Lucky for me a public safety officer informed me of the back entrance to the earthworks. Must be OK, I think. I wasn't alone. After pulling into a parking lot, I followed a steady stream of people walking to the Observatory Mound, located on the opposite end of the Circle from the Octagon. About a hundred gathered.
With its prime view across the Circle and through the connector walls, the Observatory Mound was where Hopewell leaders presumably orchestrated Moonrise ceremonies. For us it was the right idea, but the wrong era. In the intervening centuries since the Hopewell, large trees had grown up inside the Circle, blocking the view from the Observatory Mound. Any attempts to move past the trees were rebuffed by MBCC security guards wielding large flashlights.
So we waited in the cold wet darkness of an Ohio autumn night. The mood was friendly, but subdued. We joked that Henry David Thoreau would have been proud of our very civil civil disobedience. Even with the blocked view, we felt it important to be a part of this. When the half-full Moon began peeking through the trees around 10:30 pm, the crowd grew anxious, focused and still. Although a few did howl, this was a solemn, even spiritual, event, in contrast to the irreverent party for the elite down the fairway.
As the Moon crested above the trees, some were moved to tears. A couple broke into a chant from southeast Native American traditions honoring Neesa, the Seneca name for Grandmother Moon. Mostly we all watched in silent wonder. If the earthworks really were a communication with the Moon, then the message was being heard loud and clear. As moonlight flooded the circle interior, the ground picked up a tangible sense of electricity. This was the earthworks' moment -- it literally came alive.
By midnight most of the civil disobedients had moved on. I pondered what to do next. My smudges and small offerings had been cleverly left at the hotel. But I did have one thing: Her name. The Shawnee are considered likely Hopewell descendents and their main deity was Kohkumthena, grandmother, world creator and reality weaver whose light was the Moon.
I stepped out into the moonlit fairway and spoke her name three times: Kohkumthena, Kohkumthena, Kohkumthena. The vibrating sensation in my feet intensified, I felt dizzy. Having no offering for her, for the earthworks, for all the lunar deities I have loved and known, I gave what I could -- a piece of my art. I walked a counterclockwise spiral, my pacing leaving a dark trail in the dew-drenched grass. Below it I paced a crescent Moon.
Standing in the grass, cold water soaking my socks and shoes, I didn't care. This is what it meant to be alive, to be in the middle of cosmic connection between Earth and infinity, to be embodied yet ephemeral, mortal yet divine. What a gift from these ancient people! Amid modern mania, the Octagon Earthworks are able to impart a rare moment of peace and purpose to a human life, transcending cultures, transcending time.
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A Concluding Pilgrimage
At the Octagon Earthworks open house the next Sunday, OHS staff and volunteers led guided tours of the 20-acre Circle and 50-acre Octagon by foot and on golf-cart trams, (until the later were forbid by the MBCC, greatly disappointing some elderly folks and a girl on crutches). I floundered for an approach to spiritually connecting with the earthworks until OHS archeologist Bradley Lepper cited an interesting fact. The 60-mile sacra via, termed the Great Hopewell Road, terminated at a circular embankment just outside the Octagon walls. Pilgrims to this site probably started there with some kind of purification ceremonies. And so would I.
By mid afternoon a steady drizzle had chased off most visitors. We remaining explorers, the faithful, the few, shared an interesting silent camaraderie. Some meandered, some sat. I chose the ceremonial pilgrimage route, attempting to re-create what was missed the night before. After smudging in the circular earthwork, I put on the headphones and started up a special CD of acoustic rhythms and nature sounds blended with electronic tones and pulses that encourage meditative theta waves. Soon my gait, breathing and rhythms settled in sync.
Many things rumbled in my mind about how be with such a site without disrespecting the Native Americans who feel an attachment to it. Once again I focused simply on names, identities. While in pilgrimage walk I chanted evocations of Kohkumthena and all the divine feminine of North America that it has been my pleasure to know -- Mesoamerican, Native American, Latino, and even those female deities of this place and at Poverty Point and Cahokia whose names we'll never know. Where do the borders between them lie? Or are there any? I thirstily drink in the native people's culture and stories of these places, for you really can't comprehend anyone, human or divine, until you know their story. But my connection to this place is not through their stories. I strive to find that essence that preceded human efforts to codify it in art and words, to instead connect with the energy that existed before the borders of culture and race, state and nation, came to be.
I walked the white way, the Moonrise path along the main axis of the Octagon, beneath towering trees, across artificial fairways. Perhaps it's because the land had been plowed for decades, or maybe it was the country club's presence, but the Octagon didn't feel overtly spiritual to me. It felt something else: busy, social, human. All the Hopewell life that once been in this space, the gaming and feasting, meeting and greeting, trading and making art, still resonated from the soil like ghosts tugging at my attention. The land had not forgotten.
Lost in time, I suddenly found myself across the Octagon at double-walled conduit's opening. I stepped in and wondered: Am I passing through the intimate portal of a great divine feminine? I entered the Circle and my soul just opened up. I felt safer, sacred in her womb, a small bundle of energy seeking union with the source. I continued walking, silent and awestruck.
Once to the Observatory Mound, I could see that it rose behind a niche in the Circle. Leaving my discrete offering of a copper penny slid into the soil, I stood in the niche as if implanted in the womb wall. I lit a prayer candle and let it burn, sheltering it from the mist, and stood in meditation staring at the flame, a powerful nexus of fire, water and earth. I closed my ritual and ambled back around perimeter of circle, gestating in quiet contemplation. When I reached the conduit, my spirit soared, my pace quickened. It felt as if I was being birthed anew, now fully whole and healed. Going down the conduit and into the Octagon, it was no longer a golf course. It was eternal.
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