Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America

Stars

Introduction

The lights in the sky are stars, proclaimed the title of a wonderful science fiction novel I read when I was young.¹ As the years went by and my perspective became more dominated by the study of folklore and anthropology, I realized this assertion was only one option. From a human viewpoint, the lights in the sky are whatever we humans say they are. Through the centuries we have produced a wide variety of explanations and images to make sense of the lights in the sky.

This book is about those lights in the sky. The focus is on ancient Native Americans and the ways they identified and used the lights in the sky. It is not about their scientific understandings, although their empiricism is worth studying. Some years ago, sparked by an abiding interest in how Native Americans interpret the skies, I attended a conference on the subdiscipline termed archaeoastronomy. Although I had read a number of books and articles by the scholars in the field, many of whom were present, I had not realized that our interests were not quite the same until I listened to the papers. Their primary interest seemed to focus on the ways in which ancient people were early scientists. The scholars noted their early observations of the celestial world and the applications of their insights to human life. Such issues as the ways in which the annual movement of the sun along the eastern horizon produced solar calendars and the different alignments of human architecture to replicate stellar patterns were popular topics for discussion and exploration. The fascination was with ancient humans as early scientists, a worthy area of investigation and one deserving the portmanteau word archaeoastronomy. But it is not my interest.

What I want to know is how many astronomical systems exist in native North America. At that conference I asked several scholars the question How many astronomies are there in North America? This question is on a par with How many types of creation myths exist in North America? (There are eight; Rooth 1957.) My simple question brought conversation to a halt. The answer, it turned out, is that no one has ever tried to produce a comprehensive listing of Native American beliefs about the stars and separate them into coherent groups. Several scholars speculated that the task is probably too complex to produce anything more than ambiguity. This book is the test of that skeptical view. The problem probed is my simple question: How many astronomies are there in Native America of the Eastern Woodlands and Plains?

The approach is by constellations. The lights in the sky are stars, but those lights also make pictures. The pictures are not self-explanatory, though. They are in the mind’s eye of the beholder and his or her society. Where one society sees a human with a belt and sword, another may see a hand. One group’s bear can be another group’s stretcher. Constellation identifications have the additional virtue of longevity. They probably began as story, but a society may remember the identification of a given constellation—a name—long after the story is no longer told or has even been forgotten. How many modern Americans can tell the story of Orion? Surely far fewer than can identify the constellation of Orion.

Approaching the identification of prehistoric groupings of tribes by constellation similarities also has the virtue of simplicity. Attempting to compare Native American societies on the basis of complete astronomical knowledge is a hopeless endeavor for several reasons. Few ethnographers collected the astronomical wisdom of their informants, usually for the simple reason that they did not deem that information as important as the other topics they asked about. Then, too, few informants were likely to volunteer that information freely, whether as stories or as beliefs, after they perceived that their views were considered incorrect in the Western worldview. Every so often a researcher is able to present an unexpected body of astronomical knowledge, even from an almost extinct tribal group, by reconstructing the knowledge on the basis of a few comments, memories, and linguistic relics, as in the recent case of an Ofo astronomical calendrical system (King and Ventura 1999). But such cases are rare—too few to offer much hope of comparative analysis, especially if they do not offer information about constellations.

Thinking about the Cosmos

The issue of multiple astronomies is a complex problem. Two important areas of study are caught up in studying the ancient cultural understandings of the lights in the sky: the kind of thinking by which cognitive systems are constructed using the sky, regardless of whether they are consistent with modern scientific astronomy, and the historical processes by which they were transmitted and diffused. Human beings are characterized by their insistence on carrying around a model of the universe in their minds. Just as we seem driven to connect any random set of dots with lines, finding pattern whether or not there is any intended pattern there, we humans also take our observations of and encounters with the world, no matter how imperfectly seen or remembered, and build them into coherent cosmic edifices.

As far as we know, we are the only animals who do this. And what a trait it is! The wonder of the human brain is that it can conceive of a cosmos (order) at all, and for it to set out on a project to understand that cosmos at the ultimate level, in its totality, is spectacular. Moreover, we do it both as individuals and as societies. Most of us take our cultural cosmic model as given to us—that is the root meaning of enculturation—but we all add our own embellishments and minor rebellions to it. What extraordinary animals we are, to carry around the cosmos in our heads!

The other side of the coin, of course, is that our ability is also a sign of remarkable arrogance. Human beings, minuscule and short-lived participants in the cosmos, fancy that we have grasped the cosmos by making a mental model of it. Then we compound the arrogance by proclaiming the model to be the truth and resisting all attempts to modify or replace it with improved versions. From cosmic idea to ideological warfare—it is all part of the same phenomenon, our ability to construct cosmic systems in our heads.

It is that understanding of the human condition that leads me to consider that any study of humans exercising their cosmogonic skill is an attempt to understand the nature of Us. Whether the subject is a modern astronomer wrestling with how to interpret a telescopic observation or an ancient North American—an Other (very much not Us)—trying to figure out his or her relationship with a particular light in the sky, it is the same study: humanity creating cosmos.

There are differences between the ways in which such a study might be done, however. One way is history, whether current or past, and another is anthropology. A historical look at the work of the modern astronomer can be done by historians, interviewers, or philosophers. The key is that the person’s life and thought are available. Even if the astronomer is deceased, as with Sir Isaac Newton, the documentary evidence is likely to persist. In the case of a prehistoric Native American, however, nothing remains for study except sites, artifacts, and traditions collected by researchers in the historic period. To make it even more difficult, there never were any documents, because the societies in question were not literate. The researchers in this case are likely to be anthropologists and folklorists. The subdiscipline is not history or archaeoastronomy, but ethnoastronomy. The prefix ethno- is frequently used by anthropologists to indicate the specialized area of study within a discipline (botany, history, astronomy) in which the culture is that of an oral traditional society. Ethno- does not mean that the culture under examination is inferior or less complex than a literate one but merely that the methods of examination must necessarily be different.

The difference is caused by the vast gulf created by the rise of the sciences. The successes of astronomy and physics as disciplines rooted in the scientific method are overwhelming. They have demonstrated the usefulness of their hypotheses in thousands of technological marvels that have transformed our lives. The theories of scientific astronomy and related sciences are so powerful that they constitute a (the?) major cognitive framework for human understanding of the cosmos in today’s world. Those theories, together with their supporting data, constitute a body of knowledge that is taught in public education around the world, and the number of people who actually understand it all is large—thousands, perhaps millions. Most of us, of course, just live our lives in the worldview created by the sciences, and we speak easily in language larded with phrases like nova, black holes, and quantum leaps, even though we do not really understand what they mean or how they were derived.

So thoroughgoing has been this scientific revolution that those who live close to the new cognitive centers tend to forget how recent a change in the minds of humans all this is. It is only a matter of a few centuries since Galileo groveled at the feet of the priests of an obsolete cosmology, just yesterday in the human saga. Moreover, it is still possible to run across Americans who dismiss modern astronomy and geological epochs by referring to Bible verses. Those people are rarely encountered, perhaps, but they are the survivors of centuries of resistance of the older cosmologies to the new theories. The contemporary disciplines of the scientific method are still in direct battle with the supporters of older worldviews—witness the continuing skirmishes waged by large numbers of Christians against biological and social scientific theories, the so-called culture wars of modern life in the United States.

And that is the situation in the areas near the cognitive centers. As the locale changes to areas that receive only ripples from the far-off scientific explosions, people are happily going about their lives in the comfort of ancient worldviews. They are able to do so because only modest demands for change or rethinking are laid on them due to their distance. The old ways of thought still work. For such people the night sky still contains more than stars. The tales of the heavens form a continuity with ages and ancestors out of mind. Polynesians can still paddle the sea paths of the ancient heroes. African elders can still sit with the young under the night sky and use the lights in the sky as illustrations of the ancient stories they tell—they are mnemonics for narratives.

Native American ethnoastronomical research must begin with a basic understanding of the cultural apparatus of human societies. A few principles seem to be crucial. The first is that, as with any human society, the belief system is kept in the minds of the individuals in it, with variations from person to person. Second, the general belief system is carefully communicated to each successive generation through some form of education. Third, the cultural belief system is embedded in most material and behavioral manifestations of the society, from the social institutions to the art forms.

In an oral traditional society, some additional principles apply. The fourth principle is rooted in orality: since no permanent written records are kept, the burden of carrying the belief system must remain in a human transmission system, which usually involves a cadre of adults who are in charge of understanding, remembering, and communicating the wisdom of the society. And fifth, with a need to keep all members of the society refreshed on their knowledge of the belief system, the expressive arts in the society may become suffused with the belief system in many different ways, and frivolous art may be seen as an unaffordable luxury.

In an oral traditional society, as such organizations are termed, the expressive arts become freighted with meanings, since they must serve the function of enshrining all the elements of the cosmic understanding. The visual arts take on dimensions of iconographic symbolism that are not as necessary in literate societies, and the verbal arts become oriented around elaborate metaphors with layer upon layer of meaning, from practical applications to highly esoteric ideas. The student of the symbolic and cognitive world of oral traditional societies finds that the single most important key to understanding the worldview is narrative. Whether in proverbs (belief statements), tales (fictional stories), legends (accounts of human experience), or myths (legends of the ultimate), the worldview of the society appears as narratives. They tell or imply plots, with actors, actions, consequences, and sequential development. They are stories. Philosophical discourse, the alternative to narrative as a verbal way of thinking about the meaning of life, may occur among a few gifted people in oral traditional societies, but that way of talking and thinking is largely coupled with literacy when writing becomes the society’s way of preserving thought. In oral traditional societies, philosophical thinking, if present at all, is restricted to the few, and it is not easily passed on to the next generation. Instead, what is of primary importance is the set of narratives that enshrine the basic principles by which the world is comprehended. These are termed myths, a word derived from the Greek mythos, meaning story. Myths must be learned by repetition and retelling, and the keys to interpretation of the stories must be passed on by the ancient master-apprentice methodology.

It is very difficult for people of modern technological society to grasp the complexity of myth, because most of the burden carried by ancient myth has been shifted to philosophical discourse kept in books. The degree to which this alteration in traditional society has taken place can be seen in the modern misunderstanding of myth as falsehood. Myth has become mere fiction, and fiction has come to be seen as untruth—a reversal of the original understanding of myth. Contemporary American media routinely use the word to mean incorrect understanding or even lie. Sad to say, some of the academic disciplines use the word the same way, and the reason is not difficult to find, given their primary focus on literate societies and their cognitive processes. One result of this cognitive shift has been the necessity of inventing a special academic discipline, folklore or folkloristics, to study oral tradition and its societal framework. From the viewpoint of the discipline of folklore—and that is the perspective guiding this study—the word myth is respectfully used to refer to narratives, stories, in which are embedded profound understandings of the cosmos and how it works, especially in relation to the human sphere. Myths are stories about the ultimates.

The study of ethnoastronomy is inevitably the study of myths, for they are the bearers of cultural knowledge. Myth is the library of oral traditional society. The cultural truth contained therein is hard to grasp and difficult to interpret, particularly in cases in which the living bearers of the culture no longer know the keys. Nonetheless, the myths are still present and available, because vast numbers of them have been collected and published, frozen in time. If myth is the library of Native American societies, it is fair to say that their myths are in the libraries of literate society. Whether the cultural truths enshrined therein are the same as the cultural truths of the modern student, both Native American and outsider, is beside the point. The myths are available, at least in text form, and may be examined for insights just as any other cultural records.

The problem is how mythic study should proceed. As always in questions of methodology, it is important to determine the goal. What do we want to learn about Indian ethnoastronomy?

First Goal. As already stated, the primary goal of the study is to determine whether there are groups of tribal peoples whose astronomical lore reveals that they have shared with each other a common conception of the constellations and thus constitute coherent cultural clusters. This is an attempt to do historical research by myth analysis. The issue is whether myths can be treated as artifacts and compared with each other so as to produce historical insights about what has happened in the undocumented past of those peoples. Can astronomies be identified, and can those insights add to our understanding of the prehistoric past?

Second Goal. One step in the study of ethnoastronomy is to try to understand the selection of astronomical mysteries by particular tribes. Since the night sky is filled with puzzles, any society will have to be selective in determining which ones are worthy of attention by human puzzle-solvers. Being selective means living within limitations. Few societies could even entertain the notion of understanding all the mysteries, because the limitations are obvious. Some are external, such as geography. Where a people lives on the planet determines which celestial phenomena are visible. For North Americans, there is an unknown part of the celestial sphere lying beyond the southern horizon. South Americans may wonder about the dark shapes that seem to cover parts of the Milky Way, but North Americans do not, because they have never seen them—they do not appear in their sky. There is no place on earth from which all the constellations can be seen, so there is an automatic limitation on a people’s astronomical observations.

Another limitation is temporal. There are some phenomena in the sky that depend on observations over very long periods of time, periods exceeding the human lifetime. Oral traditional societies will find it almost impossible to be aware of such phenomena, since the transmission of observations for comparison through the centuries is not likely to be done in myth. The understanding of a comet as a recurring visitor whose cycle lasts centuries is likely to elude Native observers, because they cannot compare and date appearances of the comet. Whenever it makes its appearance on the celestial stage, it will come as a surprise to a generation unaware that the spectacular visitor was also seen by their own ancestors.

A good example of the temporal limitation on oral traditional societies is precession, the 26,000-year wobble of the earth’s axis in relation to the celestial sphere. The observable clues to the existence of such a cycle are a shift in the stable axis point in the vicinity of Polaris and the slow change of the zodiac sign at the horizon in relation to the solar year. Even to become aware of those indicators, however, requires observations over more than a millennium, and that is a serious stretch for traditional societies. In recent decades the argument that an ancient society had succeeded in becoming aware of precession and of enshrining it in their worldview has been offered a few times. The seminal argument was focused on northern Europeans, and the authors’ complex work has been applied in more recent years to the peoples of the Andes (Santillana and Deschend 1969; Sullivan 1996). One scholar has argued that knowledge of precession was the secret at the heart of Mithraism, the most widespread mystery religion of the Roman Empire (Ulansey 1989). Because of the ambiguity of the evidence and the obscurity of the argument, these spectacular claims for ancient astronomical achievement are still debated and likely to remain so. It seems safer in the study of North American oral traditional societies to accept the limitation that celestial phenomena that occurred time out of mind are beyond the reach of the local watchers of the sky.

Perhaps the most obvious limitation on what can be included in a society’s astronomical knowledge is human sight. Without telescopes, the celestial sphere is much smaller. Naked-eye observations produce a list of five planets, while telescopic vision says there are many bodies orbiting the sun—so many that the definition of planet becomes arguable.

These limitations are based in the restrictions of human existence, but it seems clear that no Indian society ever set out to understand even all the celestial mysteries that are observable. There are more limiting factors at work in their narrowing of ethnoastronomical interest. We should not forget the likelihood of many genius-level minds through the centuries that made no impact on the cultural inheritance. Lost to history are the records of anonymous thinkers who made insightful astronomical observations and created exciting hypotheses to explain them, only to have their work vanish at their deaths. What sorts of phenomena might have piqued their interest? Here is a brief list of mysterious phenomena that can be seen by the naked eye—the raw material available to tribal observers.

 1.  The celestial sphere moves across the night sky from east to west. Why? What is the mystery of east and west? The north and south have nothing comparable. Stars are born in the east and die in the west. Is there more than a metaphoric connection to biological birth and death?

 2.  The mystery of the north is that there is one star that does not seem to move. Moreover, there are stars close to it that can be seen even in a single night to revolve around it. Why? What is so special about that star?

 3.  When the sun rises, all the stars vanish, with a few exceptions. What happens to them?

 4.  The stars do not seem to move in relation to each other. They make distinct patterns that do not change from night to night. Why is that?

 5.  Several mysteries are connected with the moon. Its schedule of appearance in the night sky does not seem regular, and it does not move at the same pace as the stars. Even so, like them, it rises in the east and goes across the sky to the west. Further, the moon changes shape through time. It can also sometimes be seen in the daytime, when the stars have been obliterated by the sun’s light.

 6.  The sun and the moon each move across the face of the celestial sphere on their own unique schedules, and those schedules do not appear to be related to each other. The same is true for five stars, each of which operates on its own timetable. These scofflaw wanderers were called just that by the Greeks—planetoi. All seven of these mavericks, though, move from east to west, just like the stars themselves. Why are these seven on different schedules? Are the five small lights more than stars?

 7.  The sun rises and sets in a different location on the horizon every day. Why?

 8.  All seven of the wandering lights stay in a particular stretch of the celestial sphere, as if they are forbidden to go too far north or south. Is that a path they must move along?

 9.  There are 12 distinctive clusters of stars on that path followed by the wanderers, and the location of each wanderer can be described by its proximity to one of the clusters on any night. Do those cluster patterns have special meanings?

10. The stars are not all the same color. Why is that?

11. In addition to the cluster patterns, there is one huge streak of light, composed of countless stars squeezed together. What is that streak?

12. There is also one star cluster that is too tightly bunched together to be called a pattern. It is like a little ball of stars, and it is unique. What is it?

13. Sometimes the sun and moon turn dark red or even black out. Fortunately, they always recover from whatever that condition is, and the world is no worse for the event. What causes that?

14. Stars sometimes fall from the sky. They can be seen making bright streaks through the air, and sometimes they can be seen or heard to fall nearby. What are they?

15. Infrequently, a star with a tail will appear in the sky and over days or weeks will be seen at night, finally vanishing, never to be seen again by the observers. What are these all about?

16. Sometimes a new star appears in the sky. What does that mean?

Any one of these observations and ensuing speculations might have been the occasion for the creation of new cultural understanding, but there are apparently more factors than just a burst of creative insight involved in making a permanent increase in lore. Probably the most important is the notion of function. The new information has to have some significance in the lives of the people in the group, and among Native Americans the significance seems to be lodged most strongly in aspects of life that become celebrated (and remembered) in ritual and myth. The consequence of these reflections for the study of ethnoastronomy is twofold: since the societal functions of astronomical insights are likely to be few in number, there will probably be only a few astronomical phenomena widely known within each tribal group at any given time, and the most important and long-lived of them will be preserved in ritual and myth. Mere recognition of constellations does not indicate more than familiarity with the night sky, a condition that is likely to be widespread among people who live intimately with the natural order. Constellations that appear to be explained by or linked to stories or commemorated in rituals are more likely to be the asterisms that found a functional role in that society. Myths about stars are thus a justifiable focus for examination in seeking to understand which asterisms have been considered functionally important, and why.

Third Goal. What is the origin of the myths about constellations? Which ones began in Mesopotamia, and which originated in Mesoamerica? Which societies have been influenced by those myths? These are examples of origin questions that are probably hopeless, as generations of folklorists have discovered in a fruitless quest to locate the beginnings of myths and tales. One factor, of course, is the possible antiquity of some of the stories. Can anyone conceive of tracing a myth plot back to a Cro-Magnon creator? Moreover, since narratives are creations of human narrators, there is a sense in which a myth can be considered a new creation every time it is told. One of the clearest attributes of narratives in the oral tradition is that they are not stable. They are told differently by the same narrator at different times, by different narrators at the same time, and by different narrators at different times. It is a truism among folklorists that there is no original text, since every narrative event produces an original.

Yet there is some kind of continuity involved, otherwise it would be impossible to say I have heard that before. Listeners have never heard that narrative before, so the recognition must be at a structural level, perhaps the plot or part of the plot. When the audience corrects the narrator—just as in modern American society children tell their parents they have got their favorite bedtime story wrong—it is invariably the plot that is in question or a detail of it.

This is an intriguing problem. If there is something that constitutes a plot recognizable through time and countless unique renditions, a plot that can be recognized even in wide variations of details and episodes, then there is some justification for referring to a type. This is in the face of the fact that every narration is a unique performance by narrators who never tell it the same way twice. Figuring out the meaning of it is one of the great tasks and areas of significant achievement of the academic field of folklore. The endeavor has produced indexes of numbered motifs and separate volumes listing the plot types constructed of those motifs. All of the apparatus buttresses and makes possible the sort of research into narrative types that depends on the location of the thousands of recorded texts of narrations. Beyond the gathering of the raw texts lies the hope of identifying the synthetic structure—the it—that is held in the minds of many narrators and listeners through time and space. When there does emerge a narrative type that seems to be a viable construct, the correlative question insinuates itself—where did it come from?

Thinking about Method

Anyone who has read a volume or two of Indian myths is aware of the rich complexity of lore that is available in the collections. Most readers have thought, if only in passing, that there are treasures in those volumes, if only some key could be found to unlock them. Without such a key, the texts tend to sit gathering dust in the archives. One of my first publications in the field of folklore was an inadequate attempt to express my concern over the problem of neglected archival collections (Lankford 1982). By an accident of history, I was an apprentice in folklore at the very time the discipline had turned its attention to the other side of oral tradition, the less-studied realms of performance, cultural function, approaches to analysis such as structuralism, and the dynamics of transmission. The narrative event was the focus, and the text itself, which had for many decades been the heart of the discipline of folklore, became relatively ignored, and the scholarship produced by the study of texts met with indifference. The result of this shift in the discipline has been a vastly enriched understanding of the complexities of oral tradition and the processes involved in it. The negative impact is that the achievements and long-range projects of the earlier collectors and theoreticians in the discipline have received less attention in the past four decades as professional attention has been diverted to other ways of analyzing oral