AURA

If you look at the text in the note you’re hearing me in, you’ll see a link to a book online I told Sine about that describes how the Hopi keep track of the seasons, when it’s time to plant, and so on. And it’s these that determine their rituals that represent how the movement of our earthly home is bound up with their lives. The calendar is dictated by the movement of our star against landmarks they have which have nothing to do with the four points on a compass that’s run by magnetism. It’s the solstices they look at. They use four points, but dictated by the solstices. And I can see why the Tohono O’Odham by Tucson call the Kitt Peak telescopes “the long eyes”, because you need range to appreciate the position of the sun. The Hopi do this by looking at distant landmarks, like the San Francisco Peaks that you see when you’re heading out of the Park to Flagstaff. The San Francisco Peaks, where the Kachinas live who bring rain, mark the direction of the winter solstice sunset. The day of the coming winter solstice ceremony is set when the sun sets eleven days before the solstice at Luhavwu Chochomo which is a valley in the Peaks about 80 miles from the Hopi village. You can see why they don’t move around the country like we do from job to job: their life, their calendar, their ceremonies are tied to the views they have from their spot on spaceship earth.

SINE

These pages describe the landmarks the Hopi rely on to chart the sun’s movement for agricultural and other purposes and why these do not coincide with north, south, east and west.

That book is very good. It tells what different people think about what the universe is doing. And you know the chapter that comes after the one Aura is telling you about is called Chinese Cosmology that you can see by just getting to page 16 and keep going.

Stephen C. McCluskey,”Native American Cosmologies,” in Norriss S. Hetherington (ed.), “Cosmology” ( London: Taylor & Francis, 1993), pp. 13-16:

Go to pp. 13-16