After a longer than expected delay I'm back on the route. Thanks to everyone who checked in from time-to-time!
Two posts back I mentioned Steven Dick's verb-like definition of cosmotheology and his edited volume, Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Theological Implications (2000), which is the very interesting and highly readable product of a Templeton Foundation symposium held ten years ago. In that post I also called attention to the editor's important cautionary statement about the volume's inherent bias: that all the contributions appearing in the book reflect Western thought and values.
As I was putting together that post I couldn't help but think of a group of Native Americans offering a dramatic contrast to those Western views -- the Skidi Pawnee, a band of the Pawnee Confederacy who lived along the Loup River in the central region of what is now Nebraska until about the third quarter of the 19th Century. Among their many contributions to the tapestry of human culture, these buffalo hunters and village-dwelling agriculturalists of the Great Plains had the distinction of creating one of the most elaborate astronomically based belief systems in Native North America. That is, before the Skidi (or Skiri, as they are also known) were decimated by cholera and smallpox and removed to Oklahoma.
I also thought about them because I knew a truly remarkable artifact of Skidi culture can be found about an hour's drive from where I live, at the Field Musuem of Natural History in Chicago. It's a star chart. This is what it looks like:
The chart is made of soft leather decorated with painted stars, measuring about 22 inches by 15 inches. It came to the Field Museum in 1906 as part of some 400 ethnographic objects collected by George A. Dorsey, then the musuem's curator of anthropology, with assistance from James R. Murie, a mixed blood Pawnee (his parents were Pawnee and Caucasian) who was instrumental in recording Pawnee customs. The chart, estimated later to be between 100 and 300 years old when it was acquired, was part of the contents of "Pawnee Sacred Bundle No. 71898," but the Skidi knew it by another name. In translation from Pawnee, they called it the Big Black Meteoric Star Bundle.
A sacred bundle, or medicine bundle, is a collection of spiritually potent totems and relics, usually kept in a special leather pouch or bag, and used by Native people in the performance of important rituals and ceremonies. It is known the Big Black Meteoric Star Bundle was used in something called the "Great Washing Ceremony," an event held just before the spring and fall buffalo hunts. Part of that ceremony involved a footrace from a lodge to a river. The fastest runner carried the chart as he ran. If he was passed, the chart was given to the passing runner so that the chart always kept a lead position all the way to the river. Once there, ritual cleansing took place, and then the Skidi washed themselves and cleaned their homes.
How the bundle and chart functioned in other ceremonies isn't clear. Murie wrote that the chart was kept inside the bundle in a bag made from a bufflao scalp, and that it once was used to wrap a meteorite. But what is clear is that the stars painted on the skin and what else is known about Skidi religion reveal a sophisticated understanding of the night sky as well as a cosmology that, in its own historical context, is no less meaningful than our present view of the biological universe.
Our understanding of Skidi astronomy and cosmology comes largely from a monograph by Von Del Chamberlain, an astronomer who directed the former Hansen Planetarium (now Clark Planetarium) in Salt Lake City, UT, and the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. When Stars Came Down to Earth: Cosmology of the Skidi Pawnee Indians of North America, was acclaimed as the first major ethnoastronomy of a Native American people when it appeared in 1982. Now out of print, the monograph was the subject of at least one critical review, by anthropologist Douglas R. Parks, editor of Murie's Ceremonies of the Pawnee (1981), but it remains a landmark resource.
The Skidi believed that stars were either gods or people who once lived on Earth and then were transformed into stars at death. There was also a heavenly hierarchy of gods that served at the direction of Tirawahat, the supreme being of Skidi culture, whose name roughly translates into English as "the Universe and Everything inside." According to Chamberlain,
"The most important were the star gods who, at the discretion of Tirawahat, planned and carried out the creation of the earth and people. In the east things were planned, in the west they were carried out. The two most important gods were the great red male star of the east, Morning Star, and the bright white female star of the west, Evening Star. The former presided over councils in the east, where creation was considered by all the star gods. But creation actually came about through the female star of the west and those dwelt there with her and assisted her.
Four of her assistants -- Lightning, Thunder, Wind, and Clouds -- actually carried out the original creation of life and renewed it each year; they were spoken of as old men. They were the gods of weather as well as life . . . Thunder, the voice of the Mysterious Being, was one of the most important elements of Skidi mythology and was used in conjunction with observations of stars to set the calendar."
There is much more detail about Skidi star lore and religion than can be presented here, of course, but Chamberlain's concluding observations paint a fascinating picture of Skidi cosmology.
First, although several people have attempted to specifically identify the stars and related features appearing on the chart, the only ones that can be named in our tradition with reasonable probability are the stars Polaris, Lambda Scorpii, Upsilon Scorpii, Mizar, and Alcor; the star clusters Pleiades and Hyades; the constellations Coma Berenices, Corona Borealis, Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor; and the Milky Way. Each of these had a corresponding name and story in Skidi culture. Chamberlain concludes the chart probably was never intended to function as a map accurately depicting the locations of astronomical bodies; instead it was a magical object that incorporated the powers of stars and related features, which the Skidi accessed when the chart was opened. Second, Skidi religion was based on observed natural phenomena, and the sky was the focus of their observation. Chamberlain says, "whereas most other Indian groups supposed their origins to have been from the earth, the Skidi looked overhead to find their ancestors." Finally, Chamberlain states the following based on his analysis of Skidi ethnographic literature: "The Skidi were aware of the entire range of meteorological and astronomical phenomena [including] relationships between astronomical objects . . . Skidi priests were astute observers of nature. It was their business to know the stars ansd other clues that provided important information for the welfare of the people. Methods of astronomical observation inlcuded heliacal rising and evening twilight observations of selected stars, observations from earth lodges through smoke holes and east-oriented entranceways, observations of rising and setting directions of objects, and observations of apparent motions and positions of planets. It is also possible that the Skidi earth lodge served as an equinox observatory . . . The Skidi Pawnee calendar was based on a carefully determined combination of astronomical and meteorological phenomena . . . Skidi belief in the union of the Morning and Evening stars is a strong indication that they watched the changing relationships of the planets . . . The Skidi were very concerned with directions and used the stars to determine directions. It seems likely that they oriented their earth lodges by critical astronomical observations."
Skidi cosmology is a special and instructive example outside our Western experience.
Independent of the Western extraterrestrial life debate and its evolution toward the notion of an expanding universe teeming with life, unaware of the objections raised by some Christian theologians in response to the suggestion of life beyond Earth, these Pawnee saw a night sky filled with dieties who directed their natural world.
When the stars came down to earth the cycles and rhythms of Skidi daily life expressed themselves more or less as they always had, as far as memory could be imagined, until historical circumstances uprooted and changed forever the band's place in space and time.
Next stop: NASA's Kepler Mission
Skidi Band Pawnee Star Chart, Pawnee Collection, Field Musuem of Natural History, Chicago, IL. For editorial use only.
Banner bus photo credit: Dorothy Delina Porter.
