Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
As Above So Below: Indigenous Astronomy And The Meaning Of America’s Ancient Mounds
In this episode of God Is Red, we walk through Taylor Keen's (Omaha / Cherokee) book, Rediscovering Turtle Island: Chapter 8, Indigenous Archeoastronomy!
Taylor's words show how sacred geometry and, at times, sacred algebra structure places like the Newark Earthworks and Serpent Mound with the Stars. This conversation also faces the reckoning: why interest in Indigenous wisdom often fades when it challenges modern agriculture, settler myths, or Jeffersonian nostalgia. We compare Old World sites like Avebury with Turtle Island’s sacred geography / mounds to dissolve the myth that life travels in only one direction. And we look ahead to Taylor’s next book on Picture Cave
If you’re up to rethink “civilization,” astronomy, and what it means to be related with land and sky, jump in! Then share your take, leave a review, and subscribe so more listeners can find these stories and the living science written in earth.
Listen to Chapter 1 of Rediscovering Turtle Island
Learn more about Taylor's work HERE.
Purchase Rediscovering Turtle Island HERE.
Learn more about Daniel's work HERE.
Hello. Welcome to the podcast. This is another episode in the God is Red series with my dear friend, my brother Taylor Keene. In this episode, we're talking uh quite a quite a length about chapter 8 in his book, Rediscovering Turtle Island, a First People's Account of the Sacred Geography of America. The chapter is titled As Above, So Below, Archaeostronomy of the Earthenworks and the Journey of the Souls. In this episode, Taylor talks quite at length about what are these quote Indian mounds that history has so remembered that you may live close to, depending on uh where you're listening to this in the uh Western Hemisphere. And uh what do they really represent symbolically? What is this star worship? What is this journey of the souls? It is a great conclusion to the subseries within the God is Red series, when where we have been walking through Taylor's book chapter by chapter. And so if you're just tuning in with us today, I encourage you to go back a couple of episodes, well, eight or seven or eight of them. I don't know. Link would be in the show notes, I'll put it there. And start with us from the beginning and uh maybe go buy a copy of the book, go get it from your local library, um, Taylor Keene's Rediscovering Turtle Island. And uh you can read a chapter, listen to an episode as we discuss that chapter, read the next chapter and repeat that over and over, with this one being the culminating episode. And so uh I really don't want to say too much more. Uh Taylor gets into a bit of a flow uh talking about these different mounds and what they represent, and I would much rather just get to that. And so without further ado, today's episode with Taylor Keene.
SPEAKER_01:So I've mentioned my friend Gary before. I've tried to talk him into joining us here for a podcast, but he would rather just listen and then ask me questions offline, which I find very intriguing. And Gary's listened to all of our podcasts. So if you're listening to this one, buddy, I'll I'll see you soon. And uh he always gives good good feedback. And at a certain point when we started this journey together, brother, we the way that Gary described as was we started all warm and fuzzy, and then we started getting angry. And he said, What the heck are you guys talking about? And he said, You know, there's this pushback and this thing you called the reckoning, and you never told us what was going on. And so I was trying to explain to him some of our conversations offline, but you know, we've talked about it during our sessions too. But the reckoning as we began to address European ag methods versus indigenous ag, and ultimately just the generic topic of regenerative ag, I don't think we've explained why we have feelings about this topic and why we think, well, I mean, you know from the membership count, maybe we should go through some of those numbers. Um at first, my addition to Unshod helped give a lift, correct? Yes. That's when we were being warm and fuzzy and Gary's language. Yeah. And then I it must have been when we started talking about regenerative ag that you started losing listeners. Which if I if I recall had not happened to your podcast up to that point. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, in three and a half years. Yeah, it's always been a steady climb in one direction, typically typically pretty, pretty routinely dependable.
SPEAKER_01:And then what happened? We we hit a cliff, right? We met some truth, I think.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. There's there's a steady point, and I'm sure you have better words for this, and you obviously have a direction for your taking this, but if I can insert, there's there's a steady point in the conversations I've had, in, and if I understand correctly, your friend Gary is also not in the European settler class.
SPEAKER_01:No, he doesn't have a dog in the fight, but he loves to uh critique and and debate, which I appreciate very much. Yeah. There's this He's an avid listener.
SPEAKER_00:There's a threshold that I have found in talking with both before you and I ever began this podcast series, but also throughout this podcast series with people. There's a th certain threshold where I think people romanticize the idea of indigenous wisdom or place-based knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge or pre-colonial worldviews, or, you know, they've read a book on decolonizing the mind or whatever. Maybe Robin Walking or Braiding Sweetgrass is typically where a lot of people start that come from my direction. And that threshold is so strong that in the beginning, when you and I were first chatting on this podcast, the first couple of episodes, the happy episodes, as you or Gary called them, it it I get a lot of response from those. I get emails all the time that I share with you constantly, or messages or something that people say, oh, I listened to the first episode of the God is Red series and it changed my life. And it's when you and I are talking about kinship and the indigenous worldview and things that are, while unbelievably important, they're still entirely philosophical for most, or philosophically oriented for most. But as we gravitate into the idea that indigenous agriculture is the idea of working with the mother to produce food that is both healthy for the mother and healthy for her earthlings, her humans, um, that that on the one hand is there, but then regenerative agriculture has that same idea, but it's through force or through excessive power or through directive uh food ways or improving one area but denuding another, all of the conversations that we've had. Um and it's counterposed in that way. And when it becomes counterposed in our listeners' mind or in the human's mind, let's say, um, there's sides to choose. And as it becomes counterposed and becomes polar and there's sides to choose, people are they feel like they have to pick a side, right? That it's re indigenous agriculture versus everything else, or that it's industrial agriculture versus everything else, or that it's regenerative agriculture, you know, against everything else. And um, and as they have to work through that understanding, I think, to some very large degree from an agricultural conversating perspective, that's the reckoning. Or especially when you start talking about indigenous cosmologies, I think we've lost more followers around that than than anything else, this idea that the uh cosmologies or the archaeoastronomy or the sacred geography or the sacred places of indigenous peoples here in the Western Hemisphere mean a lot from a spiritual and culturally religious perspective, or even have bearing to the Judeo-Christian worldview or other worldviews. I think that's pretty alienating as well for most people.
SPEAKER_01:No, I I think this is important to understand because our conversation um is definitely heading in a direction that may make people uncomfortable. I think what Gary was saying was that we were intentionally being provocative. I guess we are, but I think it's important because indigenous peoples are the most misunderstood thing in North America today because of what I call the founder's dilemma of America, earlier chapters in Rediscovering Turtle Island. It's a psychological mindset that on the one hand describes indigenous peoples as, you know, this romantic savage with this sort of altruistic pantheism, you know, we're children of the forest kind of thing. Which is dangerous because no human being should be painted through only one lens. And when we start talking about other things that are deeper than that, or perhaps correctly, point the finger at European thought as not being the best answer, yeah, people get offended by that. And that's for the reckoning, I think.
SPEAKER_00:When you speak about the founder's dilemma, which we've obviously done in in great accords, that same founder's dilemma as we speak about it, and if it doesn't have any sort of emotion, I think, behind it, definitely for you, I think for me as well, but not as personally, of course. Like even the vice president of the United States, I don't know if you saw his remarks, J.D. Vance recently, but in a speech, he uh I think it was at Mississippi State, he was giving a speech and he made the comment that when, and he and he says this outright, without any sort of qualifiers, as if that would have made it any better, but it might have, just a little bit, like a blunt spear going into the heart, let alone a sharp one. But without any qualifiers, he says, when Christian um immigrants came to the new world in the 14 and 1500s, what they found was a savage people who through across the continent practiced child sacrifice. And it's by the grace of God that the Christians were able to eradicate and tame the wilderness and its peoples, or something like this. The point is that white Christian amazing people came to the Western Hemisphere and cleaned off the face of earth the child sacrificing pagan savages. And this is the vice president of the United States in October of 2025. So not just is this a founder's dilemma, but this is this is a dilemma of today, and that if we can't learn from the founder's dilemma and we can't turn in and look at our own hearts, and I don't mean that too emotionally, I just mean very practically, if we can't look into our own being and ask some questions, it's easy to let our vice president off the hook for these comments, I think. It's very easy to look at America and see it as a Christian nation that rids the earth of the scourge of its indigenous peoples. Did you did you see that comment by Vance? Is that new a new comment to you?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I've I've seen other comments. There's, you know, been a I think we've discussed this, the painting American Progress and Lady Columbia with her teaching book in her hand floating across the plains and in in her wake or European settlers now Americans running away in fear of the indigenous peoples. We've discussed that. I just thought it was important. I didn't mean to go down a big rabbit hole here, but to talk about Gary's comment that you know we're not pandering, we're having an honest conversation. And uh why important to me to try to for us to discuss on the podcast here why we thought what was happening.
SPEAKER_00:I I don't know. I th I think this is really an important moment for so many of us because I know more people today that are diving into the roots of their blood memory, of their own ancestral pasts, reawakening their own hearts and minds into those ancient lifeways of Western Europe or wherever it might be. And uh, and as you and I discussed in one of the first episodes, I think to some very large degree, while the blood memory of, like, say, the ancient Irish is still attainable, it's still findable, I think it's only truly navigable um in the community, in the kinship, in the relation between people like yourself and the themselves that are searching. Because if we are all truly related, I'm maybe two thousand, two and a half thousand years from the first point of colonization, but as we come together, I think this collective, as Jung talks about and as Eric Ross writes about in his book Matakuya, is uh I don't know, just this coming together and remembering a relation. I mean, I think it's so powerful, but I think it does have the ability to reckon, to alienate, to segregate if people's hearts are closed or their minds are closed.
SPEAKER_01:And that was direct.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think so. I mean, as I understand it, as I understand it. I also think people just listen to podcasts to have their minds supported by things they already think about. Yeah, I think the meat the medium is I think it's challenging for a lot of people. I think I I got this one comment. I didn't share it with you because it was very personal for the person, but they they said that when they listen to the God is Red series, they feel like they have to like hide their phone and kind of like sit in the corner. It's like like a dirty pleasure, you know. Which I think is you know, imagine like you know, sitting at the back of the of uh like an evangelical church listening to a God is red episode. That was the picture that they were trying to cast. And I think it's a I think it's a good picture. I think it's a healthy picture, though.
SPEAKER_01:Well, my guess is I I'll I'll let us never satisfy Gary's uh questions, but we gave it a shot. Sorry, Gary. Sorry, Gary. He also said that the other reason he uh didn't want to come on the podcast to join us as a guest was that he would cuss too much. And I said, Well, that's that's fair.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there'll be a second or third reckoning if that was the case.
SPEAKER_01:The the Gary effect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So that that one would be easy. Easy to talk to himself.
SPEAKER_01:So we're here to talk about chapter eight of rediscovering Turtle Island as above, so below. Yeah. And it was the I can't remember if it's the longest chapter or if Cahokia was the longest. We talked about it.
SPEAKER_00:I think you argued last time that this was longer.
SPEAKER_01:I knew after I had written it that it was probably gonna be the most confusing, if not troubling, chapter for readers, but I want to explain why I wrote it. So going back to our original conversation, why write this book? It all has to do entirely with my perspective as you know, I'm supposed to be a teacher for the seventh generation. And uh it's not like in a literal sense that I'm gonna be in front of a classroom with all these individuals. They're now, what is it, 17, the oldest of them, because the four album bison, and the fourth was born in 2007, and that's what kicked off the prophecy. And I was chastised by a friend and academic colleague who knew much more about the prophecy than I, but that I didn't know all my stories, and how was I supposed to be a good tribal teacher if I didn't know my tribal stories? That's what started this journey. And so I framed this chapter because I became obsessed with the ancient earthenworks that were part of the Mississippian culture, pretty much all across the Midwest. And I I I knew that there was a lot more to the mounds than what had been speculated in the past. And I believe it wasn't even until the 19 late 1970s or early 90s that scholars began to think about applying archaeastronomy techniques of analysis to understand what was going on with the mounds. And uh I was just fascinated by these older works that describe what they saw, the shapes and the declinations of angles, and you know, these things that look like an inverted water drop, maybe these conical mounds, some of them and you know, just vast, interesting, seemingly random shapes laid across, some of them perfect circles, some of them octagons, some of them squares. Um I don't know if your readers know this, but I'm a proud Freemason. We have a lot of symbology in there. Geometry is terribly important. And as I began to look at all these mounds, I began to make some realizations. Oftentimes, Europeans, one of the first questions we get asked is about did we have written languages? As if that's the only way to pass on information. You know, I could certainly point to my Turkey history, my paternal ancestry. And you know, we had Sequoia, who did come up with a syllabary that was inspired by I think it was sort of a Germanic alphabet sort of structure and adapted it to a phonetic syllabary. But when I came across the mounds, I realized that this was our writing, this was our immortalization, and entombed within all of these ancient earthenworks, you know, which were built, you know, basketful by basketful by thousands of people with a purpose. And, you know, they're perfectly designed and engineered, and in many cases so complex and stunning that I began to realize that this wasn't just sacred geometry that I was witnessing. This was in three dimensions of sacred algebra to make these sort of conical mounds with um, like I said, it looks like if you were to drop a a marble into the water and it's after effect. You see this little ring sort of wave coming out, and then this conical mound in the middle. I realized this was how we expressed ourselves. And that not only was there mathematics, but there were, you know, pretty serious engineering efforts and into construction. Oftentimes these were ceremonial. Some of the mounds, sometimes they were burial mounds. There was layer upon layer of different types of fill and different types of soil and different colors of soil. And just, you know, I was just blown away by the expression. And I found them to be beautiful. And as I began to try to understand everything, this chapter was written for the seventh generation, in particular for indigenous peoples. Um how-to guide of how to interpret what's going on. And yes, it is sort of heady. Lots of pictures and graphs and mathematics. And I wanted to prove to the seventh generation of indigenous youth that we were not savages. We had advanced mathematics at a time, um in some cases before other societies. We're going back to you know some of these ancient mounds, I think we're gonna to me, chapter eight and chapter nine are um inseparable because at the very end, chapter nine is not a very long chapter, but we go into some of the earliest works as I was learning more about that things happened before the Mississippian culture. And so you've got I can't remember if it's uh Watson's Break or Poverty Point, but you know, we're talking about you know, four to five thousand years before present. And some of the mid mounds in Florida are going back to you know 7,500 years before. Just the antiquity of some of these beginning to build things. It just it just was mind-boggling to me um how complex and a rich history indigenous peoples have. Secrets they had learned about the universe by building these mounds and realized um that's the title of this chapter, as above, so below is basically a hermetic maximum. And that with all human beings, I think, whether or not it involved uh entheogens, psychoactive plant medicines, I'm beginning to believe that it probably did, by what plants I've seen around sacred sites. Either way, we were looking to the stars and trying to interpret what the stars said. And in many cases, these earthenworks are inspired by, if not designed after, constellations. And so we have this whole notion of the journey of the souls of um traveling back and forth across the galaxy to where we originally came from, the Seven Sisters constellation. And so understanding that the journey of the souls going to heaven, as it were, has probably got to be most one of the most important themes. And just our relationship to the sun and the moon and the stars is what the mounds are really all about. And I um really became intrigued with the work of my Dear friend and mentor, Dr. Will Romain, who's uh renowned for his work in archaeoastronomy, although that he would tell you really what he's studying is Earth analytics, more than just looking at the stars, but a lot of his work has documented how these ancient works are tied to the stars. And that's what all of the crazy graphs are about. Another fellow Freemason and friend, my friend Doug Lewis, we had breakfast after he had read this. And uh, I was quite surprised whenever he said uh that this chapter was his favorite one because he's a very visual person and likes the graphs. And I said, I'm no one's ever told me that was their favorite chapter. So I knew it was going to be cumbersome for some people to read. But you know, the the final takeaways are that a lot of these things are pointing or aligned um to true north. Sometimes they're uh aligned a little bit off so that they can align to the Milky Way, which served as a portal for our souls to go back home to. There's a a theory by my friend uh Ross Hamilton. He believes that there's a relationship between certain constellations and these mounds themselves. And he sort of posits the theory. I've never had the time to validate it. I know most of the anthropologists think it's all hogwash, but it's intriguing. And it's one of the images in this chapter where he posits that a number of the constellations that lie within the path of the journey of the souls through the dark rifts of the Milky Way are tied to some of these mounds that are here or were here, because so many of them have been destroyed by European agriculture. Lose another listener. But it it's just to me the possibility of something so symbolic that you could walk this world's version of the constellations of the journey of the souls would be a very powerful notion. As above, so below.
SPEAKER_00:John Locke, the uh enlightenment thinker and writer, he has this quote that I think about in times like these more than I would like, but and I would roughly paraphrase it to say something to the regard of In the beginning, the whole world was the new world, or in the beginning there was the new world, or something like this. And what he's saying is that in the beginning of humankind, what we now see in the American continent, that is to say, the Western Hemisphere, is the beginning of mankind. He calls it a new Eden. This terminology is not lost on a lot of early Western frontier settler writings, journals, governmental politics, things like this in the early colonial period of the American experiment, 15, definitely the 16, early 1700s. This idea of the primordial wash or beginning of man is uh being played out right in front of us. And um I I think it's that worldview, by the way, which it is, it's it's it that's a worldview. Um it's a very separatist worldview, it's a very modern worldview, it's a very problematic and colonial worldview. But I think that's that's the worldview that a lot of your words and your thoughts, especially in this book, challenge, that I think also could be thrown into that idea of the reckoning that we talked about earlier. But how I want to phrase it here for a question for you, maybe is to develop this thought. How may what a lot of people in the Western world would call star worship? How might this be seen as a very advanced way of human culture, maybe human politicking, so humans existing in that culture in organized ways, but also maybe like from a religious perspective. How might star worship, again using the modern term, be seen as quite advanced, let alone the construction of these mounds? Let's break off the construction from the purpose.
SPEAKER_01:I've never heard that term before, but I'm fascinated by it. I'm not sure what it is meant to be related to, but um you know when you look at the indigenous cosmology, you have earthmaker, creator, and then we have spirit. She's the feminine life force, and typically our story tie everything to the sun and the moon, all things sacred masculine or to the sun, and sacred feminine is to the moon, even to the point that within the Siouan cosmology and the Sian genesis, first man is the sun, and first woman is the moon. And uh, she has her abode on the moon, and first father can return to the sun. When first father was uh killed in the uh underworld stick ball match near the beginning, the sun went dark and so he had to be uh revived. Their their first son was morning star Venus. First daughter was uh evening star Venus and from Evening Star first um she was impregnated by rays of the s of the sun and makes me wonder if that has to do with like solar flares and knowledge that may have come to us because of such things, or um so it was an immaculate conception by a star, basically. And so uh we have a whole universe um not based off uh the magnanity of one singular deity, but uh birth by the universe. So I'm sure that probably is heresy and unsettling for some. But that yeah, the whole star worship is there's nothing, there's no human that doesn't like to look at the stars. And to me, it's just natural that we would especially if if our stories say that we came from the stars originally. There's plenty to ponder with what that means. The thunder beings stars personified that took their form here. I don't know why that's so hard for people to understand, but it's very common in indigenous thought that these spiritual deities uh can take many forms, a form in the upper realm and the lower realm and in the middle realm here. You can take human forms. So it's um it's interesting that everything is tied to the stars. Is that where you're wanting to go with this question?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I I mean, I don't know if I had a particular destination in mind. Rather just to play with the thought that for so much of Western civilization, the thought of uh those who worship the stars as being quite antiquated to the uh philosophies or mores or politics of the day seems to be the general rule, right? So when the Greeks looked into the German and Slav and Gallic peoples of their northwest and east, right, they called them barbarians because their language sounds like bar, bar, bar, bar, and so they just called them barbarians, people who are not Greek. But a lot of them practiced many different pagan ways, star worship, pantheons of deities in the cosmos, in the heavens. I think a lot of these people share these thoughts. And so when the Greeks look at them, they called them, you know, others, barbarians, heathens, antiquated people, savages, and that same idea is played and replayed, I think, in the Western hemisphere. And so it's so interesting that the idea of archaeoastronomy or sacred geography, or maybe and sacred geography linking the cultures, the ancient cultures of the old world, with what has been known to the history of the last 500 years as the new world, that just as we as Western Europeans look at Stonehenge or Kobeki Tepe or Karahan Tepe in Turkey and so many others, that these places also exist here in what John Nock and everybody else called the New World, the beginning of man once again. So my point is you see the height of star worship manifest in unbelievably organized, technologically, you c you called it geometrically and algebraically perfect structures, mounds, earthenworks, serpent circles, like you called them drops of water. I mean, all of the diagrams in your book just it just speaks to the multiplicity and plethora of shapes. Which which my point is it seems to contradict the narrative of star worship being an antiquated and pagan and savage and uncivilized practice.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. Note that uh I just found fascinating as I explored the landscape of the ancient earthenworks. Certainly we can uh talk about the the serpent mound. That was the first of uh Dr. B work that I found profound. I was trying to understand what it what the Serpent Mound is aligned to. First of all, it's just a beautiful, beautiful um architecture and construction. There were works of several scholars, uh including Dr. Bill, who uh looked at the alignments of the undulations of the serpentine form to the sun and the moon and to true north. Certainly uh one reason um the line to the stars, there's I think some obvious agricultural knowledge that can come from understanding the movement of time. And by looking at the stars, especially understanding procession of the earth, its wobble, and when that happens, allows you to measure time over a long period. The Mayans were, of course, very in tune with this notion, with their uh long count calendar, etc. But some of these sites go even deeper, and I don't think I even knew some of the stuff when I wrote this chapter. Dr. Bill, when we were discussing Serpent Mound, he talked about that there was a number of crystals beneath Serpent Mound. And as it turns out, it was uh struck by some extraterrestrial object. I can't remember if it was a comet or a comet fragment or what it was, but something hit that site. And uh I think anytime something from above in the heavens comes to this world, it gets everyone's attention. But um the heat and the power of it certainly changed some of the silicate matter into crystals. And so there's there's energy there. There's the whole field of energetics that I'm trying to study and learn more about, and that I feel at certain places for sure. And Serpent Mound's got a very um healing energy that I felt everyone should go and visit. It's just stunning. And I also walk around the mound complex. I had a very powerful experience while I was there. Dr. Bill was teasing me and saying if I'm lucky, maybe I'll find one of these woo-woo crystals. Even if I did find one, I wouldn't take it because that's sacred. But I was meditating down by the water, and almost all these sites are adjacent uh bodies of water. And uh I was meditating, and when I heard a cry of a bird very loud above me, and I realized pretty quickly it was an eagle, but what it had done was left its nest. It was probably the female because they're larger and they usually do the hunting. And she dropped down close to the trunk of the tree from the top, which is where I was sitting. And then somewhere just above me, uh, she broke her free fall, free fall, and went out over the waters. It was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had. Much better gift from the site than uh taking a souvenir home, which I wish people would knew at all. Very powerful. I had another experience, and I can't remember the name of the earthenworks I had asked Dr. Bill while I was uh, it was just days before the publication of my book, and uh, I wanted to go to all the places that I had seen and try to track down some of the scholars. So I, you know, obviously went to meet Dr. Bill in person. Uh, he's over over by Cleveland. And then when I was uh there in Columbus, um, I wanted to meet some of the other scholars, and um he gave me a couple of names of who to look up. I stopped at one of the sites that he recommended, and it was just a big parking lot, it was empty, and there was nobody there. But I can't remember the name of the works. I'll have to ask Bill again, but it's not in the book, but this is just from last year, my experience there. But it was a huge complex. So there was an earthen wall that was about five feet, maybe six feet tall, that stretched in basically a large square around the whole site, and at the east was an opening to walk through, but it's two miles long around, it's just mind-boggling. And there's all these different mounds, and you know, some of them are oblong and smooth, and some are, you know, square structures. Uh, it's hard to describe, but when I was in there, I just I went down and I didn't want to lay on any of the mounds because I didn't know what's what power is in them, and just found a level spot and laid there for, I don't know, a good 20, 30 minutes, just looking up and feeling, intuiting what was happening around me. And finally got my spiritual fill and got up and started walking back across, just you know, thinking, why was this structure so big? What was going on here? And as I walked out, I realized there was a park service employee, uh, a flat hat. He was in uniform, sitting on a picnic table over there. We were the only two people there. And uh, I was trying to get to the last site before you know the sun went down or whatever it was. And I was gonna walk past him, and then I was like, this is probably serendipity, so I better pay attention. So I went up and said, Hey, uh, I figure you probably know a little bit about this site. And he smiled and said, Yeah, and we started talking. As it turned, turned out, it was uh Dr. Brett Ruby, whom Dr. Bill told me to I shouldn't find. So what are the odds? That same day I run into him in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, outside of Columbus. And eventually I started asking questions about, you know, is this aligned to the journey of the souls? And he just stopped and says, You're not just the average bear coming to the site, are you? And I was like, No. Matter of fact, I've written a book on this thing and I'm friends with Bill, and he smiled and said, Let's go for a little walk over there and let's talk about this. And he postulated that that site could have held how many people he said it was. Could have held a hundred thousand people, something like that, uh, whatever the number was. Um, you know, that's not what we think of when we think of American history, but it's there. And they existed at a time when there was a lot more indigenous peoples here. And so that's the world that I live in, you know, thinking about those kind of spaces. The other thing that was very powerful that I talk about in the book, um, Bill's mathematics is mind-boggling to get to some of these things. He talks about root two triangles, which is a mathematic method to uh look at the mounds of the Cahokia complex, and to figure out that there's a tree of life reference. And it's using this complex mathematics to look at you know portions of the complex in different ways, but it's an Axis Mundi reference. And so I know there's a lot of graphs and lines and dotted lines in this chapter, but it's uh talking about the importance of the symbology and what went into a lot of these. I spend a considerable amount of time in the chapter talking about the Newark works and the great circle and octagon that was there. That was the other major site that I went to. And uh that's where I got to meet uh Dr. Brad Leppard, the Ohio State archaeologist, and uh got to spend uh a good amount of time walking and discussing the Newark works with him. At that point, the uh great octagon was still um a golf course, which has just changed hands within the last year. Finally, after a hundred years of uh uh settler colonialism by taking our most sacred site and turning it into a freaking golf course, is finally back into the public hands. And when I went there, I went to the sacred observatory spot, had a bunch of angry golfers flipping me off and shooting golf balls at me. Uh, guess people don't have to endure that anymore. But Bill's work in archaeoastronomy on this side I found to be mind-boggling. There's the Great Circle and the octagon, and it's one of the more complex graphs in there. But what that graph told me was not only was this a ceremonial spot, but there were portions of the ceremonial site, which, to my intuition, allowed for individuals who were not participating just yet to watch what was going on. So there's alignments to the sun, the moon, and the stars from multiple perspectives that you could see the beauty of maybe the sun rising or setting from different spots. What I posited in the book, the very last bit of it, is the ceremony of ceremonies. And it has to do with the great Hopewell Road, which is adjacent to the sacred circle and the octagon. And basically, there's alignments on the on the day of the summer solstice where the dark rich of the Milky Way aligns perfectly vertically. And as I paid in that very last story, the ceremony of ceremonies was initiates would um you know spend a whole year with all the different seasons and all the different celestial observations coming and going from the site culminating with the summer solstice. And uh, you would watch it rise. And I'm I have to look at the book to remember which one is sunrise and sunset. I think sunrise is seen from the great circle and sunset is seen from the octagon. I might have that flipped around. I am dyslexic. Either way, participants in my theories that they would hold the bones of their ancestors, maybe from their clan, from their tribe, from their family, because indigenous peoples believe that our souls still reside in the bones, and that at this time of year that there's a perfect alignment. And so after sunset, they would start walking on the Great Hopewell Road, which I believe points towards Sugarloaf Mountain. And the arch astronomy is still being worked out on that site. We're not sure if this is exactly where it was pointing, but either way, the Great Hopewell Road was constructed into the earth at a depth of between five and six feet, which gave it a literal um into the nether world. Inductees, candidates, whatever you want to call them, would begin that journey at sunset and start walking down along the Hopewell Road, carrying the bones of their ancestors and thus their ancestral spirits with them. And then you would see out of the southern hemisphere, the dark rift of the Milky Way coming up vertically up and over you, because it's that's what it was aligned to. And at a certain point, you know, you'd see the star Daneb, and uh you could lift that bowl of souls, basket of souls, uh, up to the stars, and they could make their journey back home. It's a direct path back to heaven. And uh then they would keep on going. Eventually, one of the theories is they come to Sugarloaf Mountain and ascended. It's not a mountain literally, but it's a it's a big, beautiful, conical hill structure. And as they were approaching sunrise, you would see passing across the path of the elliptic, the constellation of uh Scorpio, a serpent-like structure, which is not unlike the serpent mound itself, and you would see it moving towards the sun, as if it were gonna eat the sun. And what a powerful image. Who needs social media when you had no light pollution, and that's what you could do once a year at these these sites? And so there I wanted the seventh generation to know how powerful this site was, but I've said this before, but the fact that there's indigenous peoples alive today. after s the impact of smallpox and Spanish flu. Just just mind-boggling that we're indeed miracles. We're not savages. Indigenous peoples have in incredible works of art and construction and civilization. Many, many people were were here long ago, but certainly very real. So if people can uh understand that all the graphs and everything else is basically a how-to instruction guide for whoever wants to pick up this mantle of work for the future. They don't have to go back and recreate it. It's in print and they can find it and they can follow through with what I learned and they can take it further. And we'll continue to learn from these ancient person works and what mysteries they can still reveal about what our ancestors knew or what they were studying or what they were onto.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah it makes me think of the quote you read a couple episodes ago I believe it was Chief Seattle.
SPEAKER_01:It was two quotes one from Chief Seattle and the other from Luke was standing bear.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah it's yeah I think it was I think it was Seattle Chief Seattle when I asked about the uh the dead um yeah it was the government uh agent who was trying to convince him to sign the treaty to give give up their homestead land yeah you'll never be alone but the agent was basically like look you guys are about to be extinct so just sign the treaty Seattle I'm paraphrasing again but this may very well be true but when I'm gone and you're gone and your children's children think they're alone in the woods they will not be because the the souls and the spirits of all my ancestors who have been here for a very long time, all of them will be with whoever is still here I think about I think about that quote a lot but I think about that quote right now and in view of uh in uh in Thomas Jefferson's notes on the states of Virginia which we talked about in the previous episode in the founder's dilemma but in in one part of it I think it's like Query 9 or query 19 or some part of it. Jefferson mourns these mounds that uh we have these mounds yet we have lost the people that know what they are and then he places a comma there he pauses in his writing he says because we didn't have the time to document their language or something like this. And he has a fine opportunity to mourn the loss of an entire people and rather he takes that opportunity to mourn posterity's lack of improving our syllabary I guess but my point there is it's it's so interesting in view of the modern American man, even as we look at this idea of the reckoning and in view of some of our conversations about yeoman agriculture, yeoman farmers, regenerative agriculture, things like this this new Jefferson agrarianism that's so alive and and um wanting to be viable today. You have this resurgence of Jeffersonian thought in the yeoman farmer and regenerative agriculture and in the homestead. And I think about these mounds and it it seems like Jefferson's response to the mounds are a lot of people's today. A lot of people today share that same response which is if only we would have gained the language before the people went away. It's not that the mounds are important because all they do is show us that these pagan wood living savages were civilized. When I say civilized, I mean according to their own definitions of the term right? They had culture, they had pride, they had honor they had writing it just wasn't the way that Western civilization saw writing and documentation as you've been mentioning. And so it's so spe special my point is to sit with somebody like you and and go through them and that these these professors and and doctors of archaeology still you know have some understanding of the places before they're lost and now they won't be lost. And I think that's a very, very good thing because it reminded us of so many things our relations the sacredness of our own sacred sites I think of uh Chief Stanning Bear when he said why don't you guys go back to your own sacred mountains your own sacred rivers even more so insultingly he says don't you miss them but that's what's the matter with them how come they don't miss their sacred geography I think you know it I think today looking back it's so much easier to understand but the more work I do in my own way, I think it's becoming more true and truer and more true to me. It's that this great chasm of occupation and colonization that we have accepted as just the linear evolution I think of Christianity, of civilized government, of terms like this that has pushed us away from our past, so much so that I know many Irish people who live in Ireland who are politically Irish today and they don't understand their sacred spaces. I know many Irish Americans who are descendants of immigrants who don't know their sacred spaces yet at the same time yearn for them deeply. And yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of memory locked in conversations like this. Especially as like one of the one of the sites you mentioned it's in England I think don't you bring up um Scottish Serpent Mound? Yeah okay yeah so it's an Alba up in Scotland.
SPEAKER_01:The Ave yeah Aveberry Serpent Mount if I remember well yeah there's two of them the one I'm thinking of is Aveberry which I think is in the UK yeah that has the in interesting well the the American version has an in interesting terminus which I believe is talking about a temple on yeah an island in the east some may refer that as Atlantis some may call it something else but the it's very similar uh to the one in Avebury which has a serpent and an egg motif if I recall there's an alchemical interpretation of what that meant. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah the portsmith um yeah the portsmith is the one is the one here and then abebury is the other one. Yeah that that sacred connection I think is well it's very it's very challenging for people I think because if what you're saying is true here and we are all related and the let's say Ave Bury Serpent Mound bears to the similar mode of living and thinking and being as you're describing here we have some reconciling of our quote pagan savage past. And so both listening to you is learning, but it is also remembering and I think that is a very difficult and hard thing to do today in a era of separation, othering and forgetfulness.
SPEAKER_01:So um since we have gone through the last two chapters, I'm gonna take just a couple of minutes before we finish up here to talk about um book number two that I'm in the midst of writing. I don't know how much we've talked about Picture Cave we have talked about it, but I don't know if your readers know that that's what my next book is about. I also talk about um Sacred Seed in there. So but the working title as of right now is uh Picture Cave Finding the Divine Within and I start off the book the first portion is talking about my nonprofit Sacred Seed around in the three sisters and learning more about indigenous ag methodologies. Because somehow in rediscovering Turtle Island I didn't ever talk about Sacred Seed. I had a reader uh reach out to me and said I bought your book to learn about Sacred Seed and you never even discussed it in there. I was like oh I'm sure I did she said no you didn't I read it twice trying to find stuff and there was nothing there. So I start with you know that's my journey going inward finding the divine within Mother Nature and myself and then talking about picture cave and all of the divine that was uh entombed on the walls. The the the term finding the divine within is a loose translation of the term entheogen which you know mentioned earlier is talking about psychoactive plants in this case Datura, morning glory holly and the roots of the honey locust which are found at so many sacred sites. I'll be exploring the Siouan Genesis story of who was there at Picture Cave and what is its relationship to Cahokia and going this is a deep dive whereas rediscovered Turtle Island was fairly broad