Conscious Choice: Pawnee Skies and Our Mythic Challenge

June 1999

Pawnee Skies and Our Mythic Challenge

by Eric Carlson

The time is 150 years ago. You are a young child living on the great plains of North America. All around you stretches an unbroken sea of grass. Above, a soft blue veil of sky reaches down to touch the far prairie in a vast circle, with you at its center. Like the wind blowing across the prairie, the water you drink comes from where you have never been — and flows to where you have never gone.

The Sun burns in the sky above, and a fire burns in the center of your home. It cooks your food and keeps you warm, and its smoke rises through an opening in the dome, taking with it your prayers to the Great Spirit who is always straight above you. Your elders tell you your home, round like the horizon and domed like the blue sky, was designed by the Great Spirit.

All day you run in and out of the tall tunnel entrance to your home. It opens in the direction of Morning Star, who planned the creation of the Universe, helped by the Sun who always rises from that direction. At the end of each day the Sun sets in the direction of Evening Star, who carried out the creation of the world with the help of the Moon. Inside your home is an altar to Evening Star, where a sacred bundle is kept and the Evening Star’s greatest gifts — maize and the buffalo — are honored. Four large posts hold up your strong roof of thatch and mud and sod. Each post is painted a special color — white, yellow, black, and red — the colors of four special stars that hold up the heavens.

At night the great dome of sky fills with stars. . .down to the horizon where darkness covers the land. Young and old come out to gaze and tell stories, often sitting on the roof itself. You hear how Evening Star and the Moon created the first girl child, and Morning Star and the Sun created the first boy child. You see the Great Chief Star that shines from the direction of the winter winds and never moves — and you watch the rest of the stars slowly circle around him through the night. Great Chief Star reminds the chiefs of their responsibility to care for their people.

Near Great Chief Star is a small square of four stars, Little Stretcher, showing how a sick child is tenderly looked after, close by Great Chief. A larger square a little farther away is Big Stretcher, for sick adults and their care. Three stars near it form an arc — the first star for a medicine man, a second for his wife (with a tiny star next to hers for her little dog), and a third star for her errand man. Also near Great Chief Star you see an important circle of stars — the Council of Chiefs. They show the chiefs of your people how important it is to cooperate with each other and maintain unity.

Each season brings its own special groups of stars to watch. In summer, high up, you see huge Birdfoot with tiny Bow nearby. In autumn, Sitting Rabbit delights you close to the horizon, and elders point out seven stars in a tight little cluster called Unity — another reminder of the importance of unity among the Pawnee. The Three Deer sparkle brilliantly in the winter sky; and in the time of the longest nights of the year, just before dawn, the priests point out the four great star gods who hold up the sky — White Star, Yellow Star, Red Star, and Big Black Star — at that hour shining just above the horizon from their four directions. A quick streak of light shooting through the sky tells of a possible message or visitor from its direction. Sometimes a star with a long feathery tail appears, a beautiful headdress in the sky.

Toward the end of winter the priests watch just before dawn for the first sight of two special stars close together, the Swimming Ducks, the first sign that spring is coming and a signal to listen for the earliest spring thunder and watch for sheet lightning around the horizon. When these signs are fulfilled, the priests know that it is once again time to reenact the sacred Story of the Creation of the Universe with solemn rituals, songs, and dances.

Twice a year your whole band leaves the earth lodges and travels far to the west on long hunting expeditions to bring back buffalo meat.

Your home away from home is a tepee. From night to night, as the hunt continues, you sit outside and watch the same stars you remember seeing from atop your mud lodge. There is Great Chief Star, as always, and the welcome sight of Evening Star from whom comes the gift of the buffalo.

Such was the world of Pawnee children of the Skidi (Wolf) Band, as they lived and grew only a few generations ago. The Pawnee then lived along a tributary of the Missouri River in what is now eastern Nebraska. Their priests conducted careful star observations through the smoke holes and entrances of the earth lodges, using them as observatories to set the times for their cycle of living and sacred ceremonies throughout the year.

For the traditional Pawnee, the great world of nature and the spiritual aspect of the Universe were clearly woven together, in daily life and in the architecture of their homes. We of today can scarcely imagine such a seamless connection between the inner and outer aspects of life.

The mythic star gods of the Pawnee with their potent connections to daily life are for us unimaginably distant places in space. The Pawnee Evening Star is our planet Venus. Morning Star is Mars, and Great Chief Star is Polaris, the North Star.

The four star gods holding up the sky are unrelated distant stars — White Star is Sirius, Yellow Star is Capella, Red Star is Antares, and Big Black Star is possibly Vega. (Today’s astronomers don’t know why this brightest star of the summer sky was known by the paradoxical name of Big Black Star.)

In our inherited set of constellations from Greek mythology, the stars that form the Council of Chiefs are Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. The Unity stars are the Pleiades. Birdfoot is Cygnus the Swan, and the Bow is Delphinus the Dolphin. The Three Deer are part of Orion the Hunter, and the Swimming Ducks form the stinger at the tail of Scorpius the Scorpion. We know the Big and Little Stretchers as the bowls of the Big and Little Dippers.

Far from the vast dark nightscapes of the Great Plains of the Pawnee, here in our city skies the stars glow dimly through the urban glare, barely noticed above our obstructed horizons. And, unlike the Pawnee earth lodges with their built-in cosmic connections, our modern homes carry neither inside nor out any sense of cosmic or spiritual connection. If anything, they whisper to us an alarm — of disappearing forests, burning oil, and global warming.

It can be a beguiling and fascinating relief to enter, through imagination, into the former world of the Pawnee, protected as we are from the downside of their lives. But, in experiencing vicariously their sense of being a natural part of an all-embracing, understood, and supporting cosmos, we inevitably become sharply aware of our own lack. With sudden nostalgia we wonder where and why it has deserted us — or have we deserted it?

Our sense of place and being at home in the Universe seems to have just disappeared somehow step by step "when we weren’t looking." Enthralled with all that is new, we in what is called the West have left behind a former world of stable culture and beliefs and embraced an unfolding saga of scientific and technological discovery and rapid cultural change.

Exciting and involving as these changes are, their enormity and speed inevitably produce in us at times a sense of disorientation, a feeling of loss and loneliness, as we face new mythic and cultural frontiers. We can turn aside to the toys of technology, to saturation entertainment, and even to creative work, but we find they fail to fully overcome the new void within.

Paradoxically, and perhaps consequently, we find ourselves reaching into the void without. Looking far beyond our local planetary explorations, our astronomers are able to present to us a cosmic gift — knowing for the first time that we are made of stuff created in the stars. They have woven the life process into our new Story of the Universe.

That, in itself, is a great achievement. But we retain a hunger for something more, a need for "contact" with other forms or levels of consciousness. We imagine that, perhaps somewhere beyond Earth in the depths of space, a "they" out there, maybe even a vast and ancient galactic community, will supply us with the connection we seek. The search is natural, it’s even called for, but I don’t think that’s where the real answer to our mythic loneliness lies. We must look in another direction — within our own consciousness.

Our culture and the Pawnee culture were both created out of assembled perceptions of the world. It is from these perceptions, whether limited or complex, that we humans then create out of our own interior consciousness the great Stories of the Universe that give our lives meaning.

These stories are not lying somewhere waiting to be "found," like archives in a cave. The observed facts by themselves create no story or meaning at all. Rather, stories are vital acts of creation from deep within ourselves. It is our own consciousness that produces the story and the mythic meaning.

The coherence, power, and beauty in the Pawnee mythos represent a great achievement of their culture. It shows us what lies ahead for us to achieve. We begin with a vision of a vast and complex evolving Universe and incredibly rapid cultural change. From this we must dare to create a mythos equal to the new reality we perceive!

We have barely begun to create such a mythos, and we should not expect a finished product at this early stage. The patchwork attempts to achieve a premature result are all around us, some from science, some from religion, none of them yet adequate to the challenge. Given our newly achieved perception of endless evolving and emergent reality, we will have to produce a mythos that is itself endlessly evolving and emergent.

We don’t have to try desperately to get to the end result in our own lifetimes. For our generation it will be enough — more than enough — to know that we are working on the early stages of a great new transcendent mythos for the planet, one that will be still growing in our children’s minds and in their children’s minds. . .one that will probably never be finished, because the saga of discovery and evolution of culture — and of consciousness itself — will likely be growing and changing forever.

Dr. Eric Carlson, Ph.D., is Senior Astronomer Emeritus at The Adler Planetarium & Astronomical Museum in Chicago, IL.

Resources

Details of Pawnee sky beliefs can be found in a book by Von Del Chamberlain, titled When The Stars Came Down To Earth: Cosmology of the Skidi Pawnee Indians of North America, published by Ballena Press, Los Angeles, CA, and the Center for Archaeoastronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

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