by Rick Kearns: Indigenous children in Mexico can now learn their mother tongues with specialized computer games, 

helping to prevent the further loss of those languages across the country.  “Three years ago, before we employed these materials, we were on the verge of seeing our children lose our Native languages,” asserted Matilde Hernandez, a teacher in Zitacuaro, Michoacan.

“Now they are speaking and singing in Mazahua as if that had never happened,” Hernandez said, referring to computer software that provides games and lessons in most of the linguistic families of the country including Mazahua, Chinanteco, Nahuatl of Puebla, Tzeltal, Mixteco, Zapateco, Chatino and others.

The new software was created by scientists and educators in two research institutions in Mexico: the Victor Franco Language and Culture Lab (VFLCL) of the Center for Investigations and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIHSSA); and the Computer Center of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (NIAOE).

According to reports released this summer, the software was developed as a tool to help counteract the educational lag in indigenous communities and to employ these educational technologies so that the children may learn various subjects in an entertaining manner while reinforcing their Native language and culture.

“This software – divided into three methodologies for three different groups of applications – was made by dedicated researchers who have experience with Indigenous Peoples,” said Dr. Frida Villavicencio, Coordinator of the VLFCL’s Language Lab.

“We must have an impact on the children,” she continued, “offering them better methodologies for learning their mother tongues, as well as for learning Spanish and for supporting their basic education in a fun way.”

Villavicencio pointed out that the games and programs were not translated from the Spanish but were developed in the Native languages with the help of Native speakers. She added that studies from Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Languages (NIIL) show that the main reason why indigenous languages disappear, or are in danger of doing so, is because in each generation fewer and fewer of the children speak those languages.

“We need bilingual children only in that way can we preserve their languages,” she added.

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network… More

by Glenn Aparicio: Originally, our thoughts came from gratitude, because we felt blessed, loved and embraced by Mother Earth…

We weren’t just living on Earth; we were embedded in and of the Earth—participating in the renewal of cycles as they manifested in the movements of the sun, the rain and snow; the migrations of animals; the return of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts. We came from Earth and, in death, returned to her. All was part of the circle of life, known as the Sacred Hoop.

Our ancient thinking connected us to Earth, but today, our thought seemingly divides us, not only from Earth, but from other people, and even sometimes from ourselves. It is not Earth that has changed so much, but our thinking.

In the past 500 years, Western science has made enormous strides in technological advancement, all of which were predicated upon concurrent development of new types of thought—specifically, analytical, linear and critical thinking. While these aspects of thought were rightly valued, they inadvertently distanced us from nature even as we advanced our knowledge about the natural world.

Nature was once believed to be the source of our consciousness. But when we began to see the world as separate and outside of us, this shifted, and we reframed thought as a wholly intra-psychic phenomenon. We began to imagine that only humans could think and have language, which led us to consider humans to be transcendent and superior to the rest of creation. It helped us rationalize the usurping of more and more of the natural world for ourselves.

Today, we imagine abstract thinking as the only thought there is. Other aspects of thought have been cast out, renamed and demoted: they are now called instinct, feeling, emotion and intuition—all of which are considered inferior to rational, abstract cognition. This is a tragic mistake. Feelings, instincts and emotions are all part of a continuum of unfolding consciousness, and, significantly, they all serve to connect us to nature. The natural world unfolds like a plant grows, from seed, to root, bud and fruit. Our thinking could mature in the same way, if we allowed our gut instincts to lead to a heart knowing, and later unfold into an intellectual understanding.

All that happens when we imagine ourselves as transcendent from nature is that we despoil our own environment and remake nature for solely human concerns. We have remade land into real estate, the rhythms of the Earth into time, and time into money. All of the world’s beauty is in the process of becoming monetized, in service of an insatiable quest for growth. Only recently have we begun to question the folly of uncontrollable growth on a finite planet.

Clearly, we have to change, but change will not be possible unless we transform our thinking. We need not go back to how we used to think, or to that way alone—but we can reclaim and enlarge our definition of thinking. We must re-member to think as Nature thinks in the original sense of the word, which is to become whole again, the opposite of being dismembered. I call this mode of being Original Thinking, composed of 13 qualities or aspects that I will now discuss.

Original Thinking is thankful.

The origin of thinking is thanking. Both “thinking” and “thanking” came into English from the proto-Germanic pankaz, the root of “gratitude” and “thought.” In at least seven languages, including Old Saxon, German, Norse, Danish, Frisian and Dutch, there was a connection between thanking (or giving thanks) and thinking. How is that possible? It could be because, originally, all our thoughts were prayers. We thought/prayed from a sense of gratitude and blessing for All There Is, rather than from lack for what we didn’t have.

It is only when we learned to manipulate the Earth for our purposes that we came to see the world as somehow insufficient. For the world to be whole again, we must change our thinking. In fact, we must thank before we think. Imagine that: thinking as thanking. And the more you “thank” about it, the happier you are likely to become.

Original Thinking begins in wholeness.

Original Thinking is thinking that begins in wholeness, in gratitude for all there is. Thinking that begins in wholeness remains in wholeness, even if it employs abstract thought for limited purposes. We are always in relationship with the whole.

Original Thinking comes from particular places (origins).

Original Thinking comes from particular places which contain particular vibratory frequencies and inspire particular thoughts. If we attune to a place, we become aware of a deep knowing that is emergent from the place we are in. Our thoughts come from the place we are in whether we are aware of it or not.

I am composing this in Taos, New Mexico, a place I come frequently to write. I am attracted to Taos not just because it is surrounded by mountains and wide open spaces, but also because the land dives downward, deep into a river gorge 250 meters below the high desert plateau. When I am here, my thoughts expand in all directions, just as the land goes up, down and across. I also feel an expanded sense of time, because canyons and mountains are portals, presenting eons of time at once.

Original Thinking is not new or old, but both.

If we accept the premise of our thoughts originating from a place, and the land as a multidimensional inlet to time, a new (original) awareness may arise. We become liberated from seeing time as linear. Time becomes an open doorway between past, present and future; the past and future are braided together in an alive presence of the moment.

Original Thinking is in sync with the rhythms and cycles of nature.

There is a pulse and rhythm to nature and we humans are capable of synchronizing with it because human beings also progress in cycles, even if we are not aware of it. The human life cycle is not so different than that of a plant; we too are born in darkness; grow upward toward the light, and produce fruit, only the fruit of our lives is the wisdom that we hopefully pass onto future generations.

For millennia, human traditions and ceremonies were based on the awareness of life as a circle, and many traditions still practice this. The circle of life helps us act in harmony with all things as they arise and fall in their proper season.

Original Thinking is out-of-the-box thinking.

Linear thinking sees reality as partitioned into separate things, categories, and time blocks. Original thinking is outside the box of linear fragmentation, seeing beyond and across separations, categories, and disciplines. It is wholistic, meta-paradigmatic and timeless, connecting old and new in original and creative combinations of thought.

Original thinking looks for the pattern that connects

In the spirit of the ancient natural philosophers and moderns, such as, Gregory Bateson, original thinking looks for the pattern that connects. It sees the world as all related. This approach naturally lends itself to seeing partnerships and alliances in nature rather than separation and competition. It is an ongoing process—never completed but ever widening in scope.

Original Thinking embraces paradox and change.

Original Thinking is both/and rather than either/or thinking. What appears to be a polarized end of a dichotomy is really a complementary balancing side and that this can change over time. As the late Navajo elder Grandfather Leon Secatero once said, “In time, a negative becomes a positive and a positive becomes a negative.”

Original Thinking includes feeling, instinct and heartfelt emotion.

Original Thinking is a total movement of thought that originates in nature and enters the body through the feet, gut or heart, and only later is understood by the head. To think originally is to accept instinct, emotion and feeling as part of the continuum of thought.

Original Thinking is a form of participatory consciousness.

Original Thinking revives the old meaning of consciousness, which is “knowing with” rather than in separation. It is a form of participatory consciousness or thinking together that is very creative. It is not “group think” as in mindlessly following, but an active form of group knowledge construction and collaborative problem solving.

Original Thinking is beautiful.

Original Thinking is beautiful because it brings human thought in harmony and balance with the thought of all creation. Ironically, this form of beautiful thinking is similar to the roots of rational thought—rational coming from ratio—or the relationship between things. In the right proportions (what the ancient Greeks called divine proportion or the golden ratio) the relationship between things is beautiful. Ultimately, beauty can be a path of life, what in Navajo is called sa’ah naaghai bik’eh hozhoon, or the Beauty way. Living in beauty begins with and is nourished by harmonious and loving thoughts.

Original Thinking is radical.

Original Thinking is radical in the original sense of going to the roots. It is about asking the right questions to get to the bottom of things and is of great depth and dimension.

Original Thinking is wise.

Original Thinking is wise, and wisdom is timeless, appropriate for any era. But what is wisdom? It is born of real experience, but not in the way we commonly assume. It is not garnered through the accumulation of past results, for if it could be, then computers would be wise.

The people I consider wise are very present in the moment. They become wise through an attitude of open engagement. It is not the mere accumulation of life experience that makes them wise, but the way they have experienced life. A wise person trusts their intuition. They may have surprisingly analytical minds when needed, but they do not rely solely upon rational thought. They allow for the mysterious to augment their moment-to-moment awareness—and it is this quality that makes them wise. A wise person has wisdom vibrating through every aspect of their being; you can feel it just by being in their presence.

In sum, the way we think determines how we see the world. It is not that one mode of thinking is right or wrong, but we can learn to perceive in a deeper, wider and wiser way, and this I call original thinking. It is essential we expand our thinking to this new—and simultaneously old—awareness.

The way we think must change if we ever hope to solve a host of seemingly intractable problems: climate change; overpopulation; food security; healthy water, air, and soil; to name a few. We have created these problems for ourselves by thinking in partial, fragmented ways.

What the world needs now is original thinking, or thought that is timeless and whole. We must remember the source of our own consciousness: nature, which is whole. Nature is the original teacher. We cannot improve upon her. We can be grateful for the immense bounty she provides, and for all our relations in which we share this planet. And we can give thanks for the blessing of being alive, and remember that thinking is thanking in all our thoughts and deeds.

Source: Elephant Journal

by Gary David: More than any other tribe in North America, the Hopi Indians have developed according to the dictates and demands of what may be called a legacy of prophecy…

The predictions of the life to come do not merely pertain to the Hopi themselves but deal with impending events on a global scale. These prophecies began to be made public shortly before the mid-20th century. The Hopi are an aggregation of clans that came together at the “center-point” (Tuuwanasavi) in northern Arizona during the course of their migrations. Because they are not a monolithic tribe, the sources of their prophecies are fragmentary and multifarious. Part of the lack of narrative clarity also has to do with the secretive nature of the Hopi. These isolated, sedentary farmers living in unpretentious pueblos (basically stone apartment buildings) on the high desert of the American Southwest have looked into the future from their kivas (subterranean, communal prayer-chambers) and have seen some rather disturbing scenarios. Many times they simply do not wish to share these visions with the outside world. Considering the history of exploitation and genocide of Native Americans in general, this is understandable.

Snake Kiva in the village of Oraibi, the oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent, established about 1100 AD.

Like the Maya, among whom the Hopi once lived and with whom they later traded, the Hopi conceptualize the cycles of time as world-ages. The Hopi believe that we have suffered three previous world cataclysms. The First World was destroyed by fire—a comet, asteroid strike, or a number of volcanic eruptions. The Second World was destroyed by ice—a great Ice Age. As recorded by many cultures around the globe, a tremendous deluge destroyed the Third World. These three global destructions were not the result of merely random earth changes or astrophysical phenomena but of humankind’s disregard both for Mother Earth and for the spiritual dictates of the Creator. In other words, cataclysmic events in the natural world are causally connected to collective transgressions, or negatives human actions.

Unlike the Maya, the Hopi are rarely specific about the dates for the shifting of these ages. It has been said that the Maya were masters of time, whereas the Hopi are masters of space. The verb tenses here are deliberate, given that the Maya no longer follow the Long Count calendar of 394-year cycles. Instead they now use the Tzolk’in calender of 260 days—an amazingly complex system nonetheless. Living on their three primary mesas, the Hopi continue to perform a series of annual sacred rituals within their ceremonial cycle in order to keep not just themselves but rather the whole world in balance.

As time goes by, this task is increasingly difficult because our contemporary lifestyle, with its technological gadgetry and unseemly allurements, continues to erode traditional ways of life and ancestral Hopi values. Fewer and fewer young Hopis are learning their indigenous language, customs, and ceremonies. More youth are leaving Hopi-land to seek employment in urban areas. Those that do stay on the reservation are confronted with intra-tribal squabbles and, much worse, with high rates of alcoholism and increasingly available lethal street drugs. The dire signs of a Native American version of the “End Times” are everywhere.

Many Hopi spiritual elders (singular, kikmongwi) claim that we are living in the final days of the Fourth World. For more than 60 years, different Hopis have predicted various Earth changes that signal the conclusion of the current age and the onset of the Fifth World. In 1970, Dan Katchongva, Sun Clan leader from the village of Hotevilla, who died at age 112, spoke about deteriorating conditions of our time:

We have teachings and prophecies informing us that we must be alert for the signs and omens which will come about to give us courage and strength to stand on our beliefs. Blood will flow. Our hair and our clothing will be scattered upon the earth. Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind. There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds. All of this has been planned from the beginning of creation.

The Two Life-Paths On Prophecy Rock

Another spiritual elder from the same Third Mesa village, David Monongye, who may have lived even longer than Grandfather Dan, had warned: “When earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, drought, and famine will be the life of every day, the time will have then come for [either] the return to the true path, or going the zig-zag way.”

The “zig-zag way” refers to a line found on Prophecy Rock, a panel of ancestral Hopi petroglyphs (rock carvings) in northern Arizona. The zig-zag is the upper of two parallel lines. It supposedly represents the path of the Two-Hearts, who are wreaking havoc on our Earth Mother and living contrary to ecological principles and the laws of Nature. The lower line, on the other hand, is the path of the One-Hearts, who are close to soil and the growth of corn, beans, squash—that is, adhering to the true Hopi way. The upper path is divorced from the natural world and totally immersed in the synthetic, manufactured reality ofiPhones and Xbox 360s. In essence, it is a lifestyle that the Hopi call koyaanisqatsi, which means “world out of balance,” or “life of moral corruption and turmoil (regarding a group).” The lower way, rooted in earth-based rhythms, finds solace and spiritual sustenance from corn pollen, sunlight, soaking rains, and vast desert vistas—a life in accordance with the Creator or the Great Spirit.

This large sandstone panel facing due east was incised in ancient times with various arcane symbols. The petroglyphs were carved on the vertical surface of the boulder. (Caveat lector: What follows are merely possible interpretations. They are by no means an official Hopi reading of the symbology, nor are they sanctioned by the Hopi themselves.) The figure at the lower-left is Masau’u (Masaaw), the Hopi god of death, fire, and the earthly plane. He carries a bow with his arrow pointing to the underworld (previous Third World). His left hand holds the path to the current Fourth World. The circle to the right represents the Earth or rim of the horizon. The Christian cross signifies the Spanish (Catholic) incursion of Hopi-land. The square represents a village, pueblo, plaza, or the Hopi territory.

The two parallel lines positioned obliquely refer to the two life-paths humankind may take at the end of the current Fourth World. As previously mentioned, the upper line is the path of the Two-Hearts. On this line are four figures with enjoined hands, the last figure appearing to have two heads (hearts?). This line ends in a zig-zag up in the air. The lower line is the path of the One-Hearts. Resting on this line from left to right, are three circles, which represent three “world shakings,” or three world wars. To the right of the last circle are a corn stalk and a Hopi man tending corn. This line extends to the right across another section of the rock, whereas the upper line is not extended. The line on the right between the two parallel lines and perpendicular to them represents the last chance the Two-Hearts have to descend to the true path on the lower line. Grandfather Martin Gashweseoma from the Fire Clan of the Hotevilla village on Third Mesa stated to a group of us in front of Prophecy Rock during the summer of 2011 that this lower line represented “everlasting life” and the rising sun. Indeed, I did a quick compass-check of the extended lower line (see upper-right of the graphic) and found that if one stood at that point with his/her back to the rock, one would directly face the spot on the horizon where the sun rises on the summer solstice. The Hopi say that at this time Taawa, the sun god, is the strongest and resides in his Taawaki, or “summer house.” Grandfather Martin Gashweseoman, Fire Clan, Hotevilla, Arizona by Prophecy Rock. Signs that the Fourth World is Winding Down Some other predictions made public by various Hopi elders in the 20th century include the possibility of the Fourth World’s demise. These involve an increasingly erratic climate and a few specific signals or signs of social and political imbalance. The prophesized Earth changes include earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, record flooding, wildfires, droughts, and famines. Pandemics are currently on the minds of many. The 2014 ebola virus epidemic in West Africa has already claimed over 5,000 victims as of the end of October, 2014. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects as many as 1.4 million fatalities by January of 2015, although this may be a worst-case scenario. The Hopi also predicted a number of technological changes that would signal the end of the Fourth World. Long before it happened, the elders said a “gourd of ashes” would fall on the Earth. This refers, of course, to nuclear explosions—first the atomic test blast at Trinity Site in New Mexico, then the dual holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally the other hydrogen bomb tests on Pacific atolls and in the American Southwest (with their carcinogenic effects on the “down-winders”). Hopi prophecies include the fact that people would ride in “horseless wagons” on “black ribbons” (vehicles on asphalt). In addition, aerial vehicles would travel “roads in the heavens” (pathways in the sky, either benign contrails or deleterious “chemtrails”). The Hopi also stated that one of the final signs is that People would be “living in the sky” (International Space Station). Hopi elders also foresaw numerous social changes. They said that Hopi delegates would travel at four different times to the “House of Mica” (the U.N. building in New York), but each time their pleas for peace will be ignored. The socially conservative Hopi culture also believed that the end of the Fourth World would be signaled by women starting to wear men’s clothing (Women’s Liberation Movement, etc.). Finally, a Hopi friend of mine in his 50s said that his grandfather had predicted in the 1960s what seems to refer to 9/1l/2001. He said that an event would happen when America was sleeping, and the country would wake up to a thunderous eruption of war. We must remember that Hopi prophecies are not contemporary readings of world events, but statements made centuries or perhaps millennia ago. These disturbing commentaries on our current state of global affairs were simply relayed through the generations to the present via the Hopi oral tradition, with very few alterations made in the process. 

Source: Truth Theory

by Alex Ewen: The discovery and examination of the ancient Mexican skeleton, Naia, has led scientists to once again rethink the origins of American Indians…

While there has been a rancorous debate over some details regarding who the first peoples of the Americas might have been, the broader context is usually the Bering Strait Theory, the idea that Paleoindians walked from Asia over an ancient land bridge approximately 15,000 years ago. Among scientists, this theory appears unshakable, despite the lack of scientific evidence to support it. Indeed, a host of scientific evidence, from linguistics to genetics, does not support the theory.

As recent scientific discoveries have undercut the Bering Strait Theory, a new hypothesis has emerged, the “Beringian Standstill Theory.” The Standstill hypothesis, which proposes that Paleoindians lived isolated in the land bridge area for almost 20,000 years before migrating to the Americas, is also a controversial conjecture that has questionable scientific merit.

The reason for the insistence by scientists in the primacy of the Bering Strait Theory is not because of science, but because of dogma. This is well known among the scientists, many of whom have chafed under its strictures. So in 1998, Dennis Stanford, director of the Paleoindian program at the Smithsonian Institution, coined the term “Clovis Police” to refer to those “die-hard archaeologists who insist upon Clovis as representing the earliest culture in the New World.” James Adovasio, known for his excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, devoted an entire chapter of his 2002 book,The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, to the “Paleo-police” who have frustrated his attempts to gain recognition for the antiquity of the site.

When genetic studies that proposed an ancient contact between Polynesians and American Indians – not in conformity with the Bering Strait Theory – were published by University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca Cann, they were met with a swift and fierce rebuttal. Cann is a pioneer among geneticists, her research having developed the concept of the “Mitochondrial Eve” and the currently accepted “Out of Africa” theory of modern human origins. She was not someone to be trifled with, and she shot back in a letter in theAmerican Journal of Human Genetics, dismissing much of her critics’ data, interpretations, and point of view; “Rather than make dogmatic statements, we feel that it is better to encourage the open exploration of this debate, with more genetic markers and the use of data already in the literature.”

But open exploration of the debate is not going to happen, because the debate itself is moderated by ideologues, who determine the evidence that may be used, and ignore the evidence that does not fit the theory. In order to understand why this is, one must look at the history of the Bering Strait Theory, which will only shed a little light on the development of science, but offers important lessons on how and why a dogma is created.

The Birth of a Theory

When Columbus stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, he set off an endless round of speculation in Europe regarding the lands and its people. By 1797, Benjamin Smith Barton could write in his bookNew Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of Americathat the “opinions of writers concerning the origin, or parental countries, of the Americans are as numerous as the tribes and nations who inhabit this vast portion of the earth.

In those days, the study of science was still a subset of theology so virtually all of the early theories of Indian origins were based on the Bible. Typical of these early scientists was the keen-eyed Jesuit observer Friar Joseph de Acosta, whose bookThe Natural and Moral History of the Indies(as America was then known), published in 1590, is among the first in the nascent field of anthropology. For Acosta, the evidence was clear.

The reason why we are forced to admit that the men of the Indies came from Europe or Asia is so as not to contradict the sacred Scriptures, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam; and thus we cannot assign any other origin for the men of the Indies.

Similarly, the colonization was believed to have taken place only in the past few thousand years. The scientific consensus at that time, held by the foremost chronologists of the Bible, such as Jesuit philosopher Benedict Pereira, Irish archbishop James Ussher, the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the physicist Isaac Newton, was that humans were created around 4,000 BC and the Flood unleashed around 2,400 BC.

Although it would be another 138 years before European explorers would find the Bering Strait, Acosta and many other 16th-century scientists had already assumed that Asia and the Americas were connected. They reasoned that since all of the animals in the world were descended from those saved by Noah from the Flood, the animals that were in the New World had to have walked over by some as yet undiscovered passageway. Acosta argued similarly “that the race of men arrived by traveling little by little until they reached the New World, and the continuity or nearness of the lands helped in this.”

Not everyone agreed with Acosta. The 16th-century Swiss scientist and father of chemistry, Paracelsus, believed the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas were a separate creation of God and not descended from Adam and Eve. His theory, however, met with little support, as there was no evidence of a separate creation in the Bible.

In 1681, Diego Andrés Rocha proposed in his book,A Unique and Singular Treatise on the Origins of the Indians of Peru, Mexico, Santa Fe, and Chilethat Indians were the descendants of Noah’s son Japheth and had come to the Americas by way of Atlantis. Since Rocha believed the Spanish were also descended from Japheth, and thus related to Indians, the colonization of the Americas by Spain was to him a fulfillment of divine providence.

Not to be outdone, British writers such as Richard Hakluyt and George Bruder argued that ancient Indians were Welsh and thus justified the British explorations of North America. The Dutch legal philosopher, Hugo Grotius, believed they were northern Europeans who had sailed across the Atlantic, since had they come from Asia they would have surely brought their horses. Many believed Indians were descended from Canaan, the grandson of Noah who was cursed by God, or Ophir, a descendant of Noah’s son Shem who settled in a land rich with gold.

The most enduring origin theory based on the Bible was that Indians were the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief still held today by devout Mormons. It was proposed in 1567 by both French Benedictine scholar Gilbert Genebrard inChronicle in Two Volumesand Dutch priest Joannes Fredericus Lumnius in his bookDe Extremo dei Judicio et Indorum Vocatione.As evidence they produced the apocryphalSecond Book of Esdras, which tells the story of how the Lost Tribes escaped their Assyrian captors and fled “to a far away country where mankind had never lived,” a region called Arsareth, or in their view, America.

Irish anthropologist James Adair popularized this notion in his book published in 1775,The History of the American Indians,bringing a wealth of (what at that time was considered to be) scientific evidence to back up the Lost Tribes theory. Adair also argued that the early migrants had crossed the Bering Strait.

The Russians, after several dangerous attempts, have clearly convinced the world that [Asia and America] are now divided and have close communication by a narrow strait, in which several islands are situated, through which there is an easy passage from the north-east of Asia to the north-west of America. … By this passage, supposing the main continents were separated, it was very practical for the inhabitants to go to this extensive new world, and afterwards have proceeded in quest of suitable climes.

Although Adair’s ideas about the Lost Tribes would largely fall out of favor, his theory about the Bering Strait would not.

On September 6, 1856, a small article appeared in the local newspaper in Elberfeld, Germany.

In the neighboring Neander Valley … a surprising discovery was made in recent days. During the breaking away of limestone cliffs … a cave was uncovered, which over the course of centuries had been filled with clay sediment. Upon digging out this clay, a human rib was found …

The news caught the attention of the distinguished naturalist and professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen, who at first speculated that the ancient skeleton uncovered was nothing less than an ancestor of American Indians. Upon actual examination of the fossil, what he reported sent shock waves through the Western world.

Neanderthal Man, as he was dubbed, was human, but an entirely different species of human. The concept was not easy to grasp at that time. The idea that there might have existed other forms of humans had rarely been contemplated, much less fit into any existing theory of human origins. Schaaffhausen’s conclusions met with a swift rejection from most other German scientists, who argued that despite the extreme mineralization, the unusual skeleton was not old, he was either a ”poor wretch” who had been deformed by disease, or a Russian Cossack.

But others were ready to accept the possibility that ancient humans existed even if there was no mention of them in the Bible. Geologists, beginning with James Hutton in the 18th-century, had already begun to challenge the notion that the Flood had deposited the many differing layers of soils, rock, and sediments, and argued convincingly that the earth was much, much older than previously thought. In 1837 the Swiss botanist and geologist Louis Agassiz proposed his then extremely controversial theory that the earth had been subject in the ancient past to an ice age.

William Pengelly’s systematic excavations at Brixham Cave in England in 1858, where he found stone tools located alongside extinct ice age animals, was therefore seen as convincing proof of the antiquity of humans. The next year the excavations in the Somme Valley by French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who as early as 1847 proposed that men had lived during the ice age, were examined and confirmed, and the findings presented before a stellar assemblage of scientists at London’s prestigious Royal Society, where they were accepted.

With the discoveries of Neanderthal Man, Brixham Cave, and the Somme, antiquarians (as those who studied the human past were then called) were forced to make a choice, and out of that choice a new science, paleoanthropology, was born. The same year that the antiquity of man was confirmed and accepted by the scientists of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin published his famous work,On the Origin of Species, leading to a lasting break with long-held Biblical theories of the natural world.

Paleoanthropology, the study of ancient humans, began as (and still is) a mixture of many sciences and its founding members were composed of academics from practically every discipline: geology, anthropology, biology, archeology, anatomy, and chemistry, to name a few. They were joined by a host of amateurs: businessmen, doctors, bankers, and schoolteachers, who would search for fossils in their spare time.

In Europe dramatic discoveries rapidly followed one after another, and in America the new science was also taking off dramatically–but unfortunately, dramatically on the wrong foot.

Source: Indian Country

Radiocarbon tests of carbonized plant remains where artifacts were unearthed last May along the Savannah River in Allendale County by University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear indicate…

that the sediments containing these artifacts are at least 50,000 years old, meaning that humans inhabited North American long before the last ice age.

The findings are significant because they suggest that humans inhabited North America well before the last ice age more than 20,000 years ago, a potentially explosive revelation in American archaeology.

Goodyear, who has garnered international attention for his discoveries of tools that pre-date what is believed to be humans’ arrival in North America, announced the test results, which were done by the University of California at Irvine Laboratory, Wednesday (Nov .17).

“The dates could actually be older,” Goodyear says. “Fifty-thousand should be a minimum age since there may be little detectable activity left.”

The dawn of modern homo sapiens occurred in Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. Evidence of modern man’s migration out of the African continent has been documented in Australia and Central Asia at 50,000 years and in Europe at 40,000 years. The fact that humans could have been in North America at or near the same time is expected to spark debate among archaeologists worldwide, raising new questions on the origin and migration of the human species.

“Topper is the oldest radiocarbon dated site in North America,” Goodyear says. “However, other early sites in Brazil and Chile, as well as a site in Oklahoma also suggest that humans were in the Western Hemisphere as early as 30,000 years ago to perhaps 60,000.”

In 1998, Goodyear, nationally known for his research on the ice age PaleoIndian cultures dug below the 13,000-year Clovis level at the Topper site and found unusual stone tools up to a meter deeper. The Topper excavation site is on the bank of the Savannah River on property owned by Clariant Corp., a chemical corporation headquartered near Basel, Switzerland. He recovered numerous stone tool artifacts in soils that were later dated by an outside team of geologists to be 16,000 years old.

For five years, Goodyear continued to add artifacts and evidence that a pre-Clovis people existed, slowly eroding the long-held theory by archaeologists that man arrived in North America around 13,000 years ago.

Last May, Goodyear dug even deeper to see whether man’s existence extended further back in time. Using a backhoe and hand excavations, Goodyear’s team dug through the Pleistocene terrace soil, some 4 meters below the ground surface. Goodyear found a number of artifacts similar to the pre-Clovis forms he has excavated in recent years.

Then on the last day of the last week of digging, Goodyear’s team uncovered a black stain in the soil where artifacts lay, providing him the charcoal needed for radiocarbon dating. Dr. Tom Stafford of Stafford Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., came to Topper and collected charcoal samples for dating.

“Three radiocarbon dates were obtained from deep in the terrace at Topper with two dates of 50,300 and 51,700 on burnt plant remains. One modern date related to an intrusion,” Stafford says. “The two 50,000 dates indicate that they are at least 50,300 years. The absolute age is not known.”

The revelation of an even older date for Topper is expected to heighten speculation about when man got to the Western Hemisphere and add to the debate over other pre-Clovis sites in the Eastern United States such as Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pa., and Cactus Hill, Va.

In October 2005, archaeologists will meet in Columbia for a conference on Clovis and the study of earliest Americans. The conference will include a day trip to Topper, which is sure to dominate discussions and presentations at the international gathering.USC’s Topper: A Timeline

May, 1998 — Dr. Al Goodyear and his team dig up to a meter below the Clovis level and encounter unusual stone tools up to two meters below surface.

May 1999 — Team of outside geologists led by Mike Waters, a researcher at Texas A&M, visit Topper site and propose a thorough geological study of locality.

May 2000 — Geology study done by consultants; ice age soil confirmed for pre-Clovis artifacts.

May 2001 — Geologists revisit Topper and obtain ancient plant remains deep down in the Pleistocene terrace. OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) dates on soils above ice age strata show pre-Clovis is at least older than 14,000.

May 2002 — Geologists find new profile showing ancient soil lying between Clovis and pre-Clovis, confirming the age of ice age soils between 16,000 – 20,000 years.

May 2003 — Archaeologists continue to excavate pre-Clovis artifacts above the terrace, as well as new, significant Clovis finds.

May 2004 — Using backhoe and hand excavations, Goodyear and his team dig deeper, down into the Pleistocene terrace, some 4 meters below the ground surface. Artifacts, similar to pre-Clovis forms excavated in previous years, recovered deep in the terrace. A black stain in the soil provides charcoal for radio carbon dating.

November 2004 — Radiocarbon dating report indicates that artifacts excavated from Pleistocene terrace in May were recovered from soil that dates some 50,000 years. The dates imply an even earlier arrival for humans in this hemisphere than previously believed, well before the last ice age.DR. ALBERT C. GOODYEAR III

University of South Carolina archaeologist Albert C. Goodyear joined the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology in1974 and has been associated with the Research Division since 1976. He is also the founder and director of the Allendale PaleoIndian Expedition, a program that involves members of the public in helping to excavate PaleoAmerican sites in the central Savannah River Valley of South Carolina.

Goodyear earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of South Florida (1968), his master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arkansas and his doctorate in anthropology from Arizona State University (1976). He is a member of the Society for American Archaeology, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, the Archaeological Society of South Carolina, and the Florida Anthropological Society. He has served twice as president of the Archaeological Society of South Carolina and is on the editorial board of The Florida Anthropologist and the North American Archaeologist.

Goodyear developed his interest in archaeology in the 1960s as a member of the F1orida Anthropological Society and through avocational experiences along Florida’s central Gulf Coast. He wrote and published articles about sites and artifacts from that region for The Florida Anthropologist in the late 1960s. His master’s thesis on the Brand site, a late PaleoIndian Dalton site in northeast Arkansas, was published in 1974 by the Arkansas Archeological Survey. At Arizona State University, he did field research on Desert Hohokam mountain hunting and gathering sites in the Lower Sonoran desert of Southern Arizona.

Goodyear, whose primary research interest has been America’s earliest human inhabitants, has focused on the period of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition dating between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago. He has taken a geoarchaeological approach to the search for deeply buried early sites by teaming up with colleagues in geology and soil science. For the past 15 years he has studied early prehistoric sites in Allendale County, S.C., in the central Savannah River Valley. These are stone tool manufacturing sites related to the abundant chert resources that were quarried in this locality.

This work has been supported by the National Park Service, the National Geographic Society, the University of South Carolina, the Archaeological Research Trust (SCIAA), the Allendale Research Fund, the Elizabeth Stringfellow Endowment Fund, Sandoz Chemical Corp. and Clariant Corp., the present owner of the site.

Source: Science Daily

by Matt Toussaint:  Shamanic healing is a multi-dimensional experience.  It engages practitioner and participant on every level: emotional, psychological, personal, spiritual, physical, ideological, etc. 

The essence of healing itself is derived from an understanding ofwholeness, and so the implication is that to be healed is to be made whole again.  In order to be made whole, one must go on the journey of retrieving or reclaiming something that is missing, something vital that causes an imbalance, affliction or suffering.

For instance, a very common shamanic healing practice is soul retrieval.  A traditional view of soul retrieval goes something like this: a person suffers from an intense, traumatic experience that results in soul loss, where a piece or part of their soul is somehow trapped by the experience; this missing piece needs to be restored to the person, and in doing so they are brought back to health and made whole again.

From this view of healing, the foundational assumption is that suffering and affliction takes something away from us, something that is vital and belongs to us.  A state of wholeness is a state of health, where every aspect of our being — mind, body, spirit — is fully intact.  When we need healing, or when we need something to be fixed, we are saying that we need our wholeness restored so we can claim once again what is ours.

This holds as sound and legitimate.  But let’s look at this a different way.  Let’s say that a person in need of healing is already whole.  Let’s say that their experience of suffering is not the result of missing pieces, lost spirits, or trapped energy, nor is there something to be fixed or something wrong.  Instead, let’s say that the need for healing and the experience of suffering is the result of a specific arrangement or pattern of spirits and energy, and how someone relates to that pattern.  This pattern of spirits, or energetic signature, is very specific to each person and to each experience.  No two patterns will ever be exactly the same, just as no two people are the same.  But the answers to the questions and the path that leads to healing is always inherent in the pattern itself and in how that pattern is related to.  Knowing what this pattern is makes the process of changing the experience of the pattern a whole lot easier — and very effective.

This perspective shift is very simple.  It simply says that you are already and always whole, and that you have within you the entirety of your universe.  And so by nature of this entirety, you have everything you need to heal.  When someone comes to me for a shamanic healing session, I see their wholeness.  I see a spiritual being, an expression of energy that it is absolute, and absolutely perfect in their expression.  Even if that expression manifests as suffering.  Every piece of the puzzle is still intact.

What changes is not an addition to or retrieval of something that’s gone missing, but rather the unique way the pieces and aspects of ourselves are arranged.  The shamanic healing process is one that simultaneously provides an experience that shifts the patterns of energy — the spirits — while offering the person who is being healed an opportunity to change their perspective regarding their experience of suffering.  This perspective shift is a change in relationship to the very nature of the thing that causes the suffering in the first place.  Once this happens, the process can be very fluid, with seamless effort, and ultimately it works.

So instead of looking at healing as a journey to becoming whole again, we can understand shamanic healing as a process of aligning with one’s wholeness through a shift in the way you relate to and perceive whatever is causing you suffering.  The change in relationship and perception is the invitation to healing.  It opens the door within yourself and invites you to walk through it.  Once you make the commitment and move through the doorway, you’ve already agreed that healing will take place.  Indeed, it’s already begun.  The shamanic journey that ensues is a co-participatory event that you experience as the psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual structures within you align to correspond with the new way you are relating to the experience and yourself as a whole.

Source: Shamanic Evolution… More

Konnie LeMay: A misused gift that Native cultures of Turtle Island shared centuries ago with the world may finally be recognized for what tradition has always known it was…

Tobacco is rising again as medicine.

And it is being enlisted to combat some of the most fearful ailments on the world’s health horizon.

Much in the recent news is the experimental drug ZMapp, the only drug currently available to fight Ebola. But tobacco may also be a key in creating a gel that may prevent HIV transmission, in growing vaccines against cholera or cervical cancer and even in mass-producing human collagen to repair bones and joints. These are just a few examples of the research underway around the world using tobacco.

Tobacco has always been considered a medicine in traditional culture. A gift of the Creator, it has been used prayers or as an appropriate “thank you” to elders or others for knowledge or skills shared.

The group not only encourages a return to traditional use of tobacco, but also to using only unaltered tobacco or similar traditional mixtures, such as the Algonquin knick-knick. Bailey said that gifting elders or the drums at powwows with commercially produced tobacco may not send the right message. “It’s out of that bag – it’s still that substance that is diluted with chemicals.”

Bailey sees good potentials, though, for the new research using tobacco plants, even genetically altered, for medicines, as long as unmodified species remain protected for spiritual uses. “It seems fitting to me. These are very important to our overall public health. For all human health and well-being. … That is a ripple effect for generations to come.”

The potential uses and global reach for tobacco in medicines are impressive. Tobacco is one plant researched by biopharmaceutical companies around the world in biopharming – the use of genetic engineering techniques on plants to produce pharmaceuticals.

The Ebola drug ZMapp is now the most in the news. The drug itself, termed a “monoclonal antibody cocktail” when announced in 2012 by its creators, the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, does not use tobacco in the drug itself, but tobacco is the main source for rapid production of the antibody.

“This new development process significantly decreases the amount of time required for production, increases the quantity of antibody produced and slashes the cost of manufacturing,” a 2012 Mapp press release quoted Barry Bratcher, chief operating officer of Kentucky BioProcessing, which partners with Mapp.

The University of Louisville, Kentucky’s Owensboro Cancer Research Program under Kenneth Palmer is a leader in researching medical uses for tobacco and its relative, nicotiana benthamiana. Palmer’s team, for instance, has had some success with a microbicide, based on a protein in red algae, that inhibits transmission of the HIV virus during intercourse. Tobacco is used to create a gel with the protein. The process, according to the university, involves “inserting genes into a virus that grows in the plants or directly into the tobacco genome. The leaves of the plants are then harvested, processed and purified to derive a key vaccine ingredient.”

More traditional methods of producing vaccines might involve using something like fertilized eggs for incubation.

A CNN story by Madeleine Stix reported that the egg-based process for making a flu vaccine, for example, “can cost around copy 50 million each year,using 600,000 eggs each day. Tobacco plants can produce antibodies in much less time for a fraction of the cost, advocates say.”

Another benefit of tobacco for biopharming is that it is not a food crop. Experiments have and do use crops such as corn, carrots or tomatoes, but with intense concern from environmental activists and food industry groups.

Problems have arisen with food crops. In 2002, ProdiGene, a Texas-based biopharmaceutical company was fined $3 million after two incidents involving contamination of food – soybeans in Nebraska and corn in Iowa. In the Nebraska case, soybeans were planted on a plot used the year before to grow corn altered for a vaccine. When corn sprouted alongside the soybeans, it was harvested and eventually ended up among 500,000 bushels of soybeans, all of which had to be destroyed. In Iowa, the altered corn may have cross-pollinated a nearby food crop of corn, which also had to be destroyed. The multimillion-dollar fine included cost of incinerating the crops, according to theNew York Times. With tobacco, fear of crosspollination to a food crop is reduced.

As to the efficacy of ZMapp against Ebola, that has not yet been determined. While it was used on two U.S. health workers who recovered, it has also been used in the heart of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa with mixed results. However, the journalNaturereported in Augustthat a study using rhesus macaques infected with Ebola all recovered using ZMapp. No drugs using tobacco have been approved for general use in the United States.

What attention to ZMapp and its potential definitely will do, according to Palmer, is to encourage biopharming.

“Unfortunate as it is, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is a huge leg up for the field,” Palmer is quoted in the CNN story. “I think it will only help validate the technology as a viable option.”

For Native people, the question going forward will be whether this new use, more cognitive of tobacco as a medicine, will remain honorable to its sacred nature.

As Ojibwe elder and healer Ron Geyshick cautioned in the book,Te Bwe Win(Truth): “Never put out tobacco without a prayer, as tobacco is our most sacred way of communicating with the spirits.”

 Source: Indian Country

by April Holloway:  Rock paintings and engravings are among the world’s oldest continuously practiced art form 

and are as diverse as the wide-ranging cultures and civilizations that have produced them.Depictions of elegant human figures, richly hued animals, unusual figures combining human and animal features, and detailed geometric patterns, continue to inspire admiration for their sophistication, powerful forms, and detailed representations, as well as for providing a window into the daily lives of our ancient ancestors. Here we feature some of the most amazing and mysterious examples of rock art from around the world, though there are thousands more that are equally as impressive.

10. The haunting rock art of Sego Canyon – extra-terrestrials or shamanic visions?

The sandstone cliffs of Sego Canyon are a spectacular outdoor art gallery of petroglyphs painted and carved by Native Americans peoples over a period of around 8,000 years.  They are characterised by more than 80 imposing and haunting life-sized figures with hollowed eyes or missing eyes and the frequent absence of arms and legs. Some claim that the mysterious figures are evidence of alien visitation in our ancient past, while scholars maintain that the strange beings represent shamanistic visions produced in trance-like states.

Evidence of human habitation in Sego Canyon dates back to the Archaic Period (6,000 – 100 BC).  But subsequent Anasazi, Fremont, and Ute tribes also left their mark upon the area, painting and chipping their religious visions, clan symbols, and records of events into the cliff walls.

Advocates of the ancient astronaut theory suggest that the strange figures of the Barrier Canyon style rock art depict extra-terrestrials that once visited Earth. They point to the large, hollow looking eyes and the triangular shaped heads as evidence that the figures were not human.  However, others, like researcher Polly Schaafsma (1999) say that they represent shamanistic art associated with ritual activities of the Archaic people. Ms Schaafsma points to the fact that the ‘spirit figures’ are frequently shown holding snake forms, and their torsos sometimes incorporate water/life-giving symbols. The presence of these types of relational (figure/animal) motifs is considered to be evidence that there was a shamanistic tradition alive, at least during a certain period of time, among these Western Archaic people. 

9. Rare ancient rock art in Scotland may reflect rituals, territorial markings or star mapping

Last year, archaeologists discovered a rare example of prehistoric rock art in the Scottish Highlands. Researchers suggested that the large boulder, which contains numerous cup and ring marks, may reflect ritual use, territorial markings, or mapping of the stars. The carvings in the large stone, which was found in Ross-shire, Scotland, are believed to date back to the Neolithic or Bronze Age, around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.  However, precisely dating the art is difficult: even if the megalithic monument can be dated, the art may be a later addition.  John Wombell, of North of Scotland Archaeological Society (NOSAS), described the finding as “an amazing discovery”, and explained that it is one of only a few decorated stones of its kind in Scotland.

Cup and ring marks are a form of prehistoric art consisting of a concave depression, no more than a few centimetres across, carved into a rock surface and often surrounded by concentric circles also etched into the stone. The decoration occurs as a petroglyph on natural boulders and outcrops, and on megaliths such as the slab cists, stone circles, and passage graves such as the clava tombs and on the capstones at Newgrange.

Cup and ring marks are often found carved on standing stones and at stone circles – places thought to have been used for religious and ritual purposes in the past. Carvings often occur on outcrop rock where the site appears to have been specifically chosen so as to give uninterrupted views over the surrounding country. Others have said that they correspond to star constellations, or that they are records of land ownership or reflect boundaries.

8. Unusual pre-dynastic rock art discovered in Egypt

Last year, archaeologists discovered a rock panel in the Kharga Oasis about 175 kilometres west of Luxor in Egypt, which is believed to date back to the pre-dynastic era, around 4,000 BC or earlier. Egyptologist Salima Ikram claimed the rock art is a depiction of spiders, webs, and insects trapped by spiders, and this theory dominated mainstream news reporting.

However, since then, other researchers came forward with alternative explanations.  Dr Derek Cunningham, author of ‘400,000 Years of Stone Age Science’, suggested that the linear comb patterns are in fact an archaic form of astronomical writing.  He found that the angular offset of the ‘spider body’ and the many lines drawn on the panel, align with astronomical values considered central to the accurate prediction of lunar and solar eclipses.  For example, the body of the proposed spiders are rotated by 13.66 degrees from vertical, a calculation which corresponds to half a sidereal month. 

Michael Ledo, author of ‘On Earth as it is in Heaven: The Cosmic Roots of the Bible’, among other works, provided another interpretation of the unusual rock panel. According to Ledo, the figures represent zodiacal and other constellations.

7. 15,000 artworks over ten millennia reveal evolution of human life on the edge of the Sahara

Tassili n’Ajjer has been described as the finest prehistoric open-air museum in the world.  Set in a vast plateau in the south-east of the Algerian Sahara at the borders of Libya, Niger and Mali, and covering an area of 72,000 square kilometres, Tassili is home to an exceptional density of paintings and engravings which record climatic changes, animal migrations and the evolution of human life on the edge of the Sahara from c 10,000 BC to the first centuries of the present era.

Over thousands of years, successive groups of peoples left many archaeological remains, habitations, burial mounds and enclosures. However, it is the rock art, which was first discovered in 1933, that has made Tassili n’Ajjer world famous. The art comprises more than 15,000 paintings and engravings on exposed rock faces, and includes pictures of wild and domestic animals, humans, geometric designs, ancient script, and mythical creatures, such as men with animal heads and gods or spirit beings.

The art covers five distinct periods, each of which corresponds to a particular fauna, and can be characterised by stylistic differences.  While thousands of paintings and engravings from Tassili n’Ajjer have now been recorded, it is likely that there are many more yet to be found.  The images have shed light on the lives of the ancient people of the Sahara but have also left us with many questions about who painted them and what it all means.

6. 10,000-year-old rock paintings reflect belief we are not alone, claims archaeologist

In July 2014, the State Department of Archaeology and Culture in Chhattisgarh, India, sought assistance from the Indian Space Research Organisation to research a set of ancient rock paintings found inside caves near the town of Charama in Kanker district, in the tribal Bastar region.  According to one archaeologist, the art reflects the belief among ancient humans that we are not alone in the universe.

Archaeologist JR Bhagat, who has studied the rock art, claims that the newly-discovered depictions date back some 10,000 years, although the dating method has not been clarified. Bhagat suggests that the images may depict extra-terrestrials and UFOs as the paintings include large, humanoid beings descending from the sky, some wearing what looks like a helmet or antennae, as well as a disc-shaped craft with three rays (or legs) coming from its base. Bhagat explained that there are several beliefs among locals from the area. While few worship the paintings, others narrate stories they have heard from ancestors about “rohela people”, which translates to “the small sized ones”.  According to legend, the rohela people used to land from sky in a round shaped flying object and take away one or two persons of village who never returned.  However, Bhagat does concede, “We can’t refute possibility of imagination by prehistoric men.”

Bhagat has not made reference to the fact that the paintings in question depict what, in other contexts, archaeologists typically identify as shamanic images of humans, human-animal hybrids, and geometric forms. Images of figures with antlers, antennae, or spirit rays are familiar in shamanic art.

5. The Oldest Rock Art in North America

A set of petroglyphs in western Nevada dated in August 2013 to between 10,500 and 14,800 years old, are the oldest rock art ever found in North America.  The previous oldest rock art in North America was dated at 6,700 years old and can be found at Long Lake in Oregon.

The ancient petroglyphs in Nevada are carved into limestone boulders located on the west side of the now dried-up Winnemucca Lake.  The rock art includes both simple petroglyphs such as straight lines and swirls and more complex petroglyphs that resemble trees, flowers, or the veins of a leaf.  There is also a series of abstract designs that look like ovals or diamonds in a chain.  The deeply carved lines and grooves in geometric motifs share similarities with the petroglyphs found in Oregon. However, the meaning and symbolism has not yet been deciphered.

4. The 5000-year-old Cochno Stone carving that may see the light of day once more

With dozens of grooved spirals, carved indentations, geometric shapes, and mysterious patterns of many kinds, the Cochno Stone, located in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, is considered to have the finest example of Bronze Age cup and ring carvings in the whole of Europe. Yet, for the last 50 years it has laid buried beneath several feet of earth and vegetation in what was a desperate attempt at the time to protect it from vandals.

The stone, which measures 42ft by 26ft, was first discovered by the Rev James Harvey in 1887 on farmland near what is now the Faifley housing estate on the edge of Clydebank. It is covered in more than 90 carved indentations, known as cup and ring marks. The cup and ring marks, which are believed to date back some 5,000 years, are accompanied by an incised pre-Christian cross set within an oval, and two pairs of carved footprints, each foot only having 4 toes. Because of the array of markings on it, the Cochno Stone has been recognised as being of national importance and designated as a scheduled monument.

During the 1960s, the Cochno Stone was repeatedly damaged by vandals, so in 1964, Glasgow University archaeologists recommended it be buried to protect it from further damage. The stone has been covered ever since. However, the local council is now considering whether to reveal the spectacular stone once again.

3. The Mysterious Aboriginal Rock Art of the Wandjinas

One of the most intriguing and perplexing legends of the Australian Aboriginal people is that of the Wandjinas, the supreme spirit beings and creators of the land and people.  The land of the Wandjina is a vast area of about 200,000 square kilometres of lands, waters, sea and islands in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia with continuous culture dating back at least 60,000 years but probably much older. Here, traditional Aboriginal law and culture are still active and alive.

The Worora, Ngarinyin and Wunumbul people are the three Wandjina tribes – these tribal groups are the custodians of the oldest known figurative art which is scattered throughout the Kimberley. Perhaps what is most interesting about their figurative art painted on rocks and in caves is the way in which they have represented the Wandjinas – white faces, devoid of a mouth, large black eyes, and a head surrounded by a halo or some type of helmet.

The oral account of the Wandjinas has been passed from generation to generation as all of the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories have. The story goes like this – the Wandjina were “sky-beings” or “spirits from the clouds” who came down from the Milky Way during Dreamtime and created the Earth and all its inhabitants. Then Wandjina looked upon the inhabitants and realised the enormity of the task and returned home to bring more Wandjinas. With the aid of the Dreamtime snake, the Wandjina descended and spent their Dreamtime creating, teaching and being Gods to the Aboriginals whom they created.  After some time, the Wandjinas disappeared. They descended into the earth and since then, have lived at the bottom of the water source associated with each of the paintings. There, they continually produce new ‘child-seeds’, which are regarded as the source of all human life.  Some Wandjina also returned to the sky, and can now be seen at night as lights moving high above the earth.

2. The Mystery of the Judaculla Rock

In North Carolina, in the mountains of Jackson County, lies a large mysterious rock full of petroglyphs yet to be deciphered. For the Cherokee Indians the rock is of special importance and the site where the rock resides is a sacred site where ceremonies used to take place.

The name Judaculla comes from the Cherokees who believed that it was an ancient creature which dominated the mountains. Its name means ‘he has them slanting’ or the ‘slant-eyed giant’ – a powerful being with super-human powers with the ability to fly that used to jump from mountain to mountain and was even capable of controlling the wind, rain, thunder and lightning. The creature was able to take ordinary people to the ‘Spirit’ world and was able to communicate with people. It appears to be a similar type of ‘god-like’ creature as the ones mentioned in all mythologies around the world.

Judaculla was said to have once landed on the rock, leaving on it a seven fingered hand print. The stone is a curvilinear shaped outcrop of soapstone rock with more than 1,500 petroglyphs all over it. The ages of the petroglyphs are estimated to be between 3000 and 2000 BC and during digging around the stone, quarry tools were discovered. No other stones in the area were found with similar markings, making the stone quite mysterious.

Interpretations of the petroglyphs are abundant. They span from maps, to religious symbols with a secret message, or just graffiti of ancient people. They may represent animals or humans or other figures of importance. 

1. Asian cave drawings may rewrite history of human art

A study published in October 2014, in the journal Nature, revealed that more than 100 ancient paintings of hands and animals found within seven limestone caves on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, are as old as famous prehistoric art in Europe. The research showed that humans were producing rock art by 40,000 years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world.

Maxime Aubert, study lead and archaeologist and geochemist of Australia’s Griffith University, explained that before this discovery, experts had a Europe-centric view of how, when, and where humans started making cave paintings and other forms of figurative art. However, the fact that people in Sulawesi were also producing art at the same time suggests that either human creativity emerged independently at about the same time around the world, or when humans left Africa they already had the capacity and inclination for art.

 Source:  Ancient Origins

by Alex Ewen: Since the early 16th-century, questions about the origins of American Indians spurred a lively theological debate.

By the mid-19th-century, science was taking over, but that did not end the debate, indeed, it only made it more contentious than ever.

Skullduggery

On July 18, 1866 the distinguished geologist and scion of a prominent and intellectual Massachusetts family, Josiah Whitney, wrote to his younger brother, the linguist and philologist William Dwight Whitney, of a stunning find at the bottom of a gold mine in Calaveras County, California.

The great excitement now at the office is the discovery of a human skull at a depth 153 feet below a series of volcanic beds with intercalated gravels. I have just returned from the locality, and we have the skull in the office. It is a bony fide find of the greatest interest.

Whitney, a professor at Harvard, was the first “State Geologist” of California. For his scientific achievements, the highest mountain in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney, and a glacier, Whitney Glacier, would be named after him. Whitney examined the skull, which was still partially encrusted in gravel and volcanic ash and covered with a thin sheen of calcium carbonate. Although it was anatomically similar to modern humans, the skull was almost completely fossilized, strong evidence it was probably very old.

The only way to know how old, in those days, was to determine the age of the stratum in which it was buried, but Whitney had not discovered the skull. The skull was apparently found by the mine operator who then gave it to a Wells Fargo agent, who than passed it on to a doctor in San Francisco, who then contacted Whitney. Whitney visited the site, but it was now five months after the discovery and the shaft where it was found had been abandoned and become filled with water. Despite not being able to confirm the exact stratigraphic position of the skull, and therefore its age, Whitney went ahead and announced his preliminary results in a short paper before the California Academy of Sciences.

The news hit the world like a thunderclap. If the skull had indeed been found beneath four separate layers of lava, each layer between 9 and 40 feet thick, that meant that Calaveras Man was, under the reckoning of the day, around 10 million years old.

Whitney’s discovery was met with stunned disbelief from most scientists. Although the antiquity of man had just been recently accepted, 10 million years was a big, big leap. Given the new state of the science many still held an open mind. French anthropologist Jean-François-Albert du Pouget was willing to give Whitney the benefit of the doubt, although he found it odd that the skull was indistinguishable from a modern man; “it is difficult to admit the perpetuation of a type without appreciable modifications during the incalculable ages in which all nature has undergone so complete a transformation.”

But for many scientists, the idea that American Indians could be more ancient than Europeans was impossible. At the same time the theories of evolution for natural organisms were being developed in Europe, culminating in Darwin’s work, theories of social evolution had also been percolating, finding its synthesis in the works of British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who argued that societies increase in complexity over time.

Lewis Henry Morgan, in his influential workAncient Society, proposed that humans went through various stages of development, beginning with the “Older Period of Savagery” progressing through middle and later periods into the “Older Period of Barbarism,” which also had other stages until finally the “Status of Civilization” was reached.

Thus Canadian geologist Sir John William Dawson could state in his book,Fossil Men, published in 1880, that, “existing humanity, as it appears in the Native American, is little else than the survival of primeval man in Europe.” Dawson led the charge of those scientists who fought against the antiquity of the Calaveras Skull, calling Whitney’s discovery “fanciful and improbable.”

Nor were scientists Whitney’s only detractors; there were those who still held firmly to Biblical ideas of time and creation. “The religious papers,” paleontologist John C. Merriam wrote, “in particular investigated the case and pronounced it a hoax originating with some mischievous miners.” The stories that Whitney was the victim of a practical joke spread, becoming more and more elaborate with each telling, with more and more participants claiming to have been in on it, and making the new science a source of popular ridicule. To make matters worse, Whitney took his time defending his discovery, writing a detailed report about the skull only in 1879, a full 13 years later, which allowed the controversy to fester and grow.

With the release of his report, dissenting scientists were finally able to take a crack at dismantling Whitney’s discovery and the attacks were swift and withering. The geologist William Phipps Blake, who visited the site, argued that the calcareous sheen on the skull was not typical of a fossil washed into a gravel bed, and the skull should have been more damaged and abraded. Alphonse Pinart, a champion of the Bering Strait Theory who had actually kayaked through it, contended that the site was not pristine and so there was no way of knowing where the skull came from, all of which created “the most serious doubts regarding the antiquity of this specimen.”

Whitney replied that it didn’t really matter where the skull had been found, the gravels found encrusted with it were clearly of an ancient epoch, an argument dismissed by the prominent archaeologist William Henry Holmes, who countered that the Indians could have simply buried the person in those ancient deposits. A host of distinguished scientists rose to defend Whitney. Many, such as the paleontologist William Healey Dall and geologist George Ferdinand Becker, actually examined the skull. But the lack of proof that it had come from such a deep location made it difficult to defend its great age, and there were strong grounds to believe that even if Whitney was not the victim of some prank, the skull did not come from the bottom of the mine shaft.

With Whitney’s death in 1896 the gloves came off and the Calaveras skull was systematically debunked and pronounced a hoax. Unfortunately it would be another 70 years before the skull could be dated independently of the stratum it might have come from. Because it was almost completely fossilized, the skull could not be radiocarbon dated, but a fluorine test conducted by the archaeologist Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum (Natural History) found it to be approximately 5,000 years old, ancient yes, but by no means 10 million years old.

The Paleolithic War

The highly publicized battle over the Calaveras skull was just the opening salvo of a rancorous war among American paleoanthropologists that raged across the hemisphere over the next half-century. The battle lines became drawn between those who believed, or were willing to accept, that Indians in America were ancient, that is present in this hemisphere at least 10,000 years ago or even 100,000 years ago (the Paleolithic era), and those who insisted that Indians had migrated here only within the past 5,000 years.

AsAnthony T. BoldurianandJohn L. Cotterobserved in their history of the early excavations in the Southwest,Clovis Revisited, the conflict was due “in part to heated arguments over what exactly constituted acceptable evidence.” The new science was still working out its methodology for determining how old artifacts might be. But a larger problem was that, “a few of anthropology’s influential elite seemed firmly opposed to an American Paleolithic.”

Thus any archaeological site that might betray a hint of antiquity became a bloody battleground fought between competing camps of scientists. From the suburbs in New Jersey to beaches in Florida, the wilderness of Canada to the Mississippi Delta, from the Pampas of Argentina to the valleys of Mexico, the war raged without mercy. To make things worse, amateurs and dilettantes scoured the land looking for fossils, often making outlandish claims. Among the professionals there were dozens of theories as to how old Indians were and where they came from, with some even proposing an American genesis.

In Europe, spectacular finds piled up one after another: the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in southern France in 1868; the cave art of Altamira, Spain, discovered in 1879; the discovery of extensive Neanderthal tools in 1880. But in America, paleoanthropology was completely paralyzed by the infighting. By 1900, the new science did not have a single discovery that had any consensus among its members.

Paleoanthropology needed a leader, someone who could end the chaos and put it on the path to respectability. It found it in a most unlikely person, a Czech-born anthropologist by the name of Aleš Hrdlička. His impact on American paleoanthropology in the coming century would be difficult to overstate.

The Rise of an Orthodoxy

Although only 34 years old in 1903, Hrdlička was chosen to head the new physical anthropology department at the National Museum (now the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History) in Washington D.C. Physical anthropology, the biological study of humans, was at that time largely concerned with “racial classification,” often through the study of human skulls, and Hrdlička was by then one of its leading experts. Over the previous four years, Hrdlička had toured the Americas examining people and collecting skulls for the American Museum of Natural History and his skills had brought him to the attention of the curator of anthropology at the National Museum, William Henry Holmes.

Holmes, one of the most prominent critics of the Calaveras skull, was a veteran in the war among paleoanthropologists and the leading debunker of ancient archaeological finds. In Hrdlička, Holmes found a person who was an even more strident advocate of the modernity of American Indians and an unswerving devotee of the Bering Strait Theory, believing that Indians had originated in Central Europe and then reached the Americas no earlier than 3,000 BC. As the anthropologist Adolph H. Schultz wrote in 1944 in his memorial to Hrdlička,

In regard to his own conclusions, Hrdlička seems to have been rarely plagued by doubts … Thus, once having become convinced that man’s arrival in America was of comparatively recent date, he steadfastly clung to and passionately fought for this conclusion to the end of his life, even in view of evidence demanding a reconsideration of the problem of the antiquity of man in the New World.

These views were by no means a consensus among scientists then. Even conservatives like Sir John William Dawson, who was among the first to challenge the Calaveras skull and who believed that American Indians were relatively recent migrants, also believed that they had migrated through multiple routes, from Asia, the North Atlantic, and the islands of Polynesia. A host of others, like Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and considered the “father of American archaeology,” were firmly convinced that Indians were here in the Paleolithic, at least 10,000 years ago or more.

Hrdlička subscribed to the pseudo-scientific “eugenics” theories that were in vogue at the time. Eugenics, essentially scientific racism, was based on the work of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who had proposed that the perceived superiority of the white race was due to a superior genetic makeup, a theory highly controversial even then. Hrdlička worked with and was influenced by America’s leading eugenicist, Charles B. Davenport, and he received funding to conduct research and launch his magazine,The American Journal of Physical Anthropology,from Madison Grant, author of one of the most infamous works of scientific racism,The Passing of the Great Race.

Hrdlička’s theory of the Bering Strait migration was identical to that of James Adair, who had proposed it more than a century before, except for the Lost Tribes part. They were both based not on scientific evidence, but on a presumption born in religion that then migrated to science–the antiquity and preeminence of Western culture over all others.

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

by Robert Tindall: Animistic perspectives, which hold the cosmos as “a being to whom prayers and offerings are made,

who is endowed with understanding, agency and sentience, and responds to the actions of humans” are often dismissed as primitive, even as “incompatible with an impersonal regard of objective reality.” Yet this account of a healing of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (the consequence of severe rattlesnake envenomation), within the shamanic traditions of the Native American Church and the vegetalistas of the Peruvian Amazon, reminds us of how profound healing can be when it arises from indigenous perception of a sentient, living cosmos. It also demonstrates the diagnostic and healing capacities of shamanic traditions utilizing psychoactive plants, capacities sometimes beyond the reach of Western science.

SNAKE MEDICINE: HOW SHAMANISM HEALS

Our Native Mind

A snake which gets wounded heals itself. If now this is done by the snake, do not be astonished for you are the snake’s son. Your father does it, and you inherit his capacity, and therefore you are also a doctor. – Paracelsus

“Animism” is a concept first introduced into anthropological circles by one of its founders, Edward Tylor, as the belief in the universal animation of nature, souls, and supernatural beings. In his Primitive Culture (1871), he wrote that animism is a perception held by “tribes very low in the scale of humanity”, yet serving as the “groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men” (Tyler, 1871: 381).

Such paternalistic Victorian views towards animistic perception continue to hold sway in the popular mind, although a far more sophisticated understanding of indigenous perception has since developed, such as expressed by prehistorian Jean Clottes:

Traditional people, and I think the people of the Paleolithic had two concepts that change our vision of the world: the concept of fluidity and the concept of permeability. Permeability means the categories that we have, man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around, given certain circumstances. The concept of fluidity is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of spirits. A shaman, for example, can send his or her spirit to the world of the supernatural or can receive the visit of supernatural spirits. When you put those two concepts together, you realize how different life must have been for those people from the way we live now (Herzog, 2010).

Scholars in recent decades have proposed different schemas to distinguish the nature of the modern and indigenous experience of the cosmos.

Figure 1. Richard Tarnas’s primal and modern worldviews (Tarnas, 2006: 80)

Philosopher Louis Dupré depicts modern consciousness as a sudden, radical departure from tens of thousands of years of human culture, where “The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature”, and it “fell upon the human mind to interpret the cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible” (Dupré, 1993: 3). Cultural historian Richard Tarnas, who likewise sees the modern mind as an arrogation of interpretive power by the individual self, gives this model in figure 1 above to delineate the two forms of human apprehension.

Medieval scholar and fantast J. R. R. Tolkien, (whose mythopoeic works are our great modern guides to the indigenous mind of Europe) clearly had such a distinction in mind when he explained to C. S. Lewis:

You look at trees, he said, and called them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’ (Carpenter, 1979: 43).

For Tolkien, unlike Tyler, such an aboriginal worldview is neither prerational nor delusional. It is a form of human inquiry that satisfies a desire for sophisticated interaction with the cosmos, about which he stated “The magic of Faery1 is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these is the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is to hold communion with other living beings” (Tolkien, 2002: 113).

We would add healing to Tolkien’s list of primordial human desires satisfied by animistic experience. In my apprenticeship with my partner, Susana Bustos, Ph.D., in the vegetalista tradition of the Peruvian Amazon, we have repeatedly observed how in its shamanic practices (often facilitated by the psychoactive medicine ayahuasca), healing is achieved through animistic immersion in a vital cosmos. Our first documentation of such a healing occurred in 2005, when a young woman suffering from a brain tumor came to the jungle for a course of treatment with our maestro, the Ashaninkan curandero Juan Flores. In the three weeks of her immersion in the rainforest, where she drank medicinal plants and agua icarada, that is, water sung over by the shaman, as well as participating in ceremonies with ayahuasca, her tumor vanished, startling her doctors in Chile, who were poised to operate upon her2.

This process of unraveling disease through re-membering is key to the cosmovision of many indigenous peoples, who perceive disease as a consequence of unconsciousness. In fact, they believe the diseased soul can be sung back into harmony with the cosmos again. The Kuna peoples of Panama, for example, see sickness as a manifestation of a lack of attunement to the story of the Cosmos, and heal by singing the song of the Earth and Universe back into the diseased member. Similarly, among the Tzutujil Maya:

The world is a sacred building called the House of the World and our individual bodies are made like this House of the World and contain everything that exists in the outer world. The way the initiated shaman heals the person is to rebuild the World House of that person, remembering all its parts back to [the original flowering]. Welcoming all the parts back to life entails singing out a sacred map of ordered holy words and magical sounds. This is a microcosm of the macrocosmic Divine Order of the Original World Body. This sacred map re-creates all the sacred mountains, rivers, trees, springs, ancestral regions, and names of Gods and Goddesses and their abodes. When this song is sung properly, the individual song is harmonized with the Great Song of the Original World House and both the individual and the collective are made well again (Jenkins, 2012: 86-90).

Such elegant healing practices, predicated upon a non-Cartesian experience of the cosmos as vital and sentient, are routinely dismissed as “primitive” by Westerners, for whom its “mythicoreligious perspective” is “incompatible with an impersonal regard of objective reality” (González-Crussi, 2007: 4).

Yet intimate experience of the “mythicoreligious perspective” teaches otherwise, as this story about a healing revolving around the use of traditional psychoactive plants within an animistic worldview illustrates.

Snake Medicine

Not so long ago, emerging from the Amazon rain forest, I found a message from home awaiting me. Could the Ashaninkan curandero Juan Flores, whom I had been visiting at his center for traditional medicine, Mayantuyacu, heal a rare case of snakebite? Turning to Juan, who was seated beside me in his noisy office in Pucallpa, I posed the question to him.

“Yes”, he answered simply, with the traditional authority of a shaman to an apprentice.

Without pausing to ask for specifics, I relayed his response and a chain of events was set in motion that demonstrated the remarkable efficacy of indigenous, shamanic medicine. It was not, in fact, a mere snakebite that Juan was called on to heal, but a severe case of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIDP, which had occurred as a consequence of rattlesnake envenomation.

Upon returning to the United States, I was introduced to Nick, the man seeking treatment within the vegetalista tradition. I recognized him as someone I had seen around the tipi meetings of the Native American Church, or NAC. Laconic, dressed in black, and constantly smoking, Nick walked in heavy boots with a Frankenstein monster gait that I had found puzzling. Whenever he spoke in meetings, his words commanded respect, and it was clear that his participation in the peyote way of the Plains Indians was longstanding.

Nick, it turned out, had been bitten by a rattlesnake at its height of venomousness, and years later he was suffering severely degenerative effects from the toxins. He lived with pain – constant, intense burning in his lower legs, which extended up to his hips; painful cramping in his feet and hands; constant twitching (fasciculation) throughout his limbs; nightly cold sweats; loss of motor control; and an “indescribable” feeling of electric current in his extremities. Heavy orthopedic boots encased his numbed feet.

His long ordeal to find a cure had even led him to contemplate a radical, very dangerous experimental treatment that would have knocked his immune system “into the Dark Ages” through chemotherapy, but in the end Western technological medicine simply had no solutions for him. In the process of embracing his disease as an initiatory path, rather than a mere stroke of terrible misfortune, Nick had been astonished to find his own medicine of the desert chaparral, peyote, sending him on a quest for a cure in the Amazon with the rain forest medicine ayahuasca.

Nick had already experienced healing in indigenous ways. As he told us, at age twenty-nine, while undergoing alcohol withdrawal, he had suffered a cardiac infarction that scarred his heart. After his heart attack, he developed an arrhythmia, a violent limp of the heart that was deeply unsettling: “My heart would beat one… two… da dung. It would then stop and pick up again. It was so loud you could hear it.”

A friend suggested that Nick seek healing in the Native American Church, or NAC, since Western medicine had basically written him off as not long for this world. Nick had deep apprehensions, however: “As an addict, for me a medicine like peyote could be construed as a drug, and I had real concerns about risking my sobriety.”

Peyote, however, has a venerable history of usage to heal alcoholism and other sicknesses. A cactus with psychoactive properties, peyote has been used in ceremonial contexts for thousands of years by the native peoples of the Americas, both as a medicine to align the spirit with the cosmos and to heal the body of disease. Overcoming his trepidations, Nick chose to attend a meeting.

The roadman (or “one who shows the path” as the peyote shamans in the NAC are called) for the meeting, after listening to Nick’s explanation of his heart condition, said to him, “Well, there’s no reason you can’t be healed, but it not going to be me healing you. It’s really contingent on whether you’ve learned the lesson that you needed to learn by having your heart be that way.”

Something in the roadman’s words resonated with Nick. As Nick put it, “I was like: huh.” Right around midnight, the roadman went and fed Nick four medicine balls of peyote. Nick, bewildered, tried to focus on what was happening around him as the roadman fanned him with an eagle fan. “Then he took the eagle bone whistle and blew it right into my heart and I felt the arrhythmia leave. It wasn’t just me who saw it, either.” In an instant of animate synchronicity with the healing ritual, the fire, which was stacked up blazing about three feet high, dramatically flattened all the way down to the ground as if some unseen foot had stomped on it.

“The heart condition was gone. Forever. Just like that.” Nick laughed. “That’s kind of what got me coming around the NAC, you know? I felt obligated, like I owed my life, to whatever it was that saved me.”

The roadman for that particular meeting, Bob Boyll, gives an intriguing advisory to those who seek healing upon the medicine path: “Once you begin walking this sacred way, the stakes get raised and you get scheduled for a series of initiations. Your entire life becomes a test.” Within the lore of the Native American Church, it is generally recognized that life may become more acutely challenging after healing than before.

A couple of years later, Nick and his partner, Lisa, made a journey to Loch Loman Reservoir in Santa Cruz. It was a morning marked by strange omens. On the way, a fleeting illness struck them both at the same moment, numbing their faces and cramping their insides; it then vanished as quickly as it had come.

Then, at the lake, an enigmatic exchange occurred. A golden eagle flew across the sky and Nick called out to it, “Please drop a feather for me. Please drop a feather.” And as soon as the eagle flew above them, it did. Straight down. Nick hastily clambered into a rowboat and started out on the water to fetch it, but someone in an electric boat zoomed out of nowhere, picked up the feather, and stuck it in his hat. Nick, affronted, called out, “Hey, man, I asked for that feather. I asked that bird for that feather and it’s mine.” The man in boat shrugged, said, “Too bad you don’t have an electric rowboat,” and took off.

“Ten minutes later, the snake bit me,” Nick concluded.

It was only in Peru, while working with ayahuasca and the plant medicine jergon sacha, (a traditional antidote for snakebite: “jergon” signifying “serpent” and “sacha” signifying “wild”, “from the forest”), that Nick understood what had actually transpired that day. “I asked that bird for what I wanted”, Nick said, “but it directed me to what I needed. The eagle is a high energy creature, of the astral. The serpent is the energy of the Earth. At that point in my life I was freshly sober, like a little kid. My priorities were all out of whack. That feather belonged to that guy who got it. What happened to me was I got directed to that snake, because that’s what I needed in my life – even though I didn’t want it, even though it’s taken a huge chunk of my life. That medicine down in Peru showed me the truth of the matter.”

On that fateful day in Santa Cruz, like a naïve Persephone, Nick plucked a narcissus flower that abducted him into Hades.

“I’ve always fancied myself the amateur herpetologist. I’ve owned snakes my whole life. I’ve raised pythons, poisonous snakes. I see this rattlesnake sitting there, maybe ten years old, with black and white stripes. The kind they call coontails. I said to Lisa, ‘Should I catch it?’ She said, ‘Nah. Leave it alone.’ She already knew I knew how to handle reptiles, but my pride got the better of me and I reached out to grab it.”

Just at that moment the snake shifted position and was able to swing around and get its fangs in his finger. Pulling it off, still holding it in his hand, Nick grimly announced to Lisa, “Uh, I just got bit.”

Sometimes snakes will dry-bite, but Nick knew immediately that he’d been envenomated. “My hand was on fire. I felt like I weighed a million pounds.” To add insult to injury, the rattlesnake was close to hibernation, a time when a snake’s venom is most poisonous, containing both neurotoxins and hemotoxins, which attack nerve cells, burst capillaries, and destroy tissue and blood. As a result, the snake injected a more lingering poison into him than the reptile would have in another season.

Lisa managed to transport Nick back across the lake to the ranger station, where a helicopter was immediately called. On his way to the hospital, Nick felt his heart racing out of control as the venom liquefied his blood. “You know what?” he said to himself, “This feels like I could die.” Then a voice said, “Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine.”

At that moment, looking up, he could see his heart rate immediately slow on the monitor, and heard the paramedic reassure him, “Ah, that’s good. You’re going to make it”.

At the hospital, Nick’s hand still felt like it was stuck in fire. “Not only was my whole body shaking and quivering, like there were bees flying around under my skin, but I looked like I was the Michelin tire guy. They were sticking needles in my arm to check the pressure because they thought they might have to lance it. Fortunately, it never got that bad, but they did give me enough antivenom medicine for four people and four platelet transfusions.” Finally, the toxicity of the venom began to wane, but Nick’s system had been left devastated.

“Most people bitten by rattlesnakes are there for a day – three tops. I was there for fifteen days. Not only that, when I got out I went back to the doctor and they said, ‘Holy shit, you have no platelets! Don’t bump into anything!’ I went back to the hospital for another four days. I could have hemorrhaged and bled to death.”

According to Nick, in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the headline read: Man, 31, Bitten by Snake Trying to Impress Girlfriend.3

“You know”, Nick concluded, “ego is the number-one killer of men.”

The doctors eventually gave Nick a clean bill of health, and he thought he’d left this episode of his life behind him.

Then, a couple of years later, as Nick was playing music the fingers of his right hand stopped working. “‘Move’, I said to them, but they wouldn’t move.” Within days this paralysis progressed, allowing him to squeeze but not extend his hand. Nick began to make the rounds of the local hospitals. “I get all these tests, visit three different neurologists, and I finally end up with one of the best-known doctors in Santa Cruz, who said he thought I had Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Nick knew what that was – “It’s a death sentence. Ninety percent of the people who get it die within three years of diagnosis.” Nick lived with that diagnosis for almost a year, but then he began to notice that it wasn’t progressing the way he’d read about it. As he described his diagnosis of multifocal motorneuropathy, a form of the autoimmune disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy to me, I commented, “You learned a lot of heavy terminology during this time.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “there’s a positive and negative to everything. The negative side to learning Western medicine is you get sucked in. If you suffer from an ailment, you get sucked into the doctor’s way of thinking about it, which is God-cold and no resolution.”

“God-cold?” I asked.

“Yeah, Western medicine has no God in it, and there’s no resolution for CIDP. They call it an incurable chronic disorder. They have medicines that can slow it down, but no cure. I spent over a million dollars for an ineffectual Band-Aid.”

“During the course of all this”, he continued, “I tried to be as hopeful as possible, but finally I shut down and went into a black depression. I was brainwashed – by my own intellect and what doctors had told me – into accepting a hopeless diagnosis. I had given up and didn’t care if I died the next day.”

Finally, Lisa, now Nick’s wife, called for a sweatlodge for their family. For Nick, it turned into a kind of intervention. Nick ate “a ton” of medicine, but could not relinquish his argumentative, self-righteous mind-set. Finally, Boyll, who was running the sweat, said to him, “I love you, but you know what? We’re tired. We’re tired of how you’re being.”

Nick finally confessed, “You know what? I don’t know what to do.”

Boyll replied, “Nick, you’ve been here before. You remember when you were here last time?”

Then Nick put it together. “I was right at the same place where I’d been with my booze. Where I gave up all hope and there was no place to go. I hit bottom right in the middle of a medicine sweat. I experienced all kinds of revelations, was able to see with clarity what I’d been doing, how my behavior had affected my family. My life changed, and I picked up the fight again, but in a different way. I recognized that there was a definite reason why I was going through what I was. It wasn’t just a bunch of random circumstances. There was a plan to it.”

Nick still didn’t know what to do, but his confidence was growing again. He said to himself, “I’ll leave it up to Creator and something will come along”. A few weeks later, something did indeed come along.

You Are The Snake’s Son

In the dry hills of Tuolumne County, as a tipi was being set up for an NAC meeting, a rattlesnake was discovered sitting beneath a tarp in the exact location where the chief, or roadman, sits for a ceremony. Nick was present, and watched as the snake was taken outside and set beneath a bush. Knowing he was at fault for messing with that species of snake a few years earlier, he took the opportunity to make amends. “I gave it some tobacco and prayed for forgiveness for putting myself in a position to harm it and myself.”

That night, having ingested the psychoactive peyote plant in ritual context, Nick had a powerful experience of participation in an animate cosmos. Out of the clear blue sky the wordayahuasca came into his mind. “The peyote was saying, ‘You need to go South and work with this medicine’,” Nick realized.

“I had heard of ayahuasca” he said, “but I’d never had any desire to try it – at all. ‘That’s odd,’ I thought. I doubted it immediately.”

That evening at home, Nick said to Lisa, “You know, I just got this overwhelming message about working with ayahuasca. What is that?” Lisa had no idea. Nick wandered into the living room and, turning on the television, was greeted by the word ayahuasca emblazoned across the screen. It was a National Geographic program on Santo Daime.

That clinched it for Nick. “When people tell me stories like this, I don’t normally believe them. With this one, though, I thought there’s got to be something to this.”

Through Boyll and his partner, Ann Rosencrantz, Nick got in contact with Susana and I.

Like peyote, ayahuasca has an ancient lineage in its own habitat, the Amazon rain forest. Its name arises from the joining of two words in Quechua: aya, which signifies “soul”, “ancestor”, or “spirit”, and huasca, meaning “vine” or “rope.” Ayahuasca, therefore, is the vine of the souls. Actually it is usually an admixture of the vine ayahuasca and (in Peru) the leaves of the chacruna tree, like peyote the ayahuasca brew is psychoactive, and has long been utilized for similar shamanic purposes.

Shamans in the vegetalista tradition who use this medicine, among whom Juan Flores numbers, are called ayahuasqueros, and consider it the master teacher among the many plants utilized within the native pharmacopoeia. In Nick’s case, ayahuasca was ancillary to his main treatment: the plant jergon sacha.

Figure 2 Juan Flores with Jergon Sacha Plant

Upon arriving at Mayantuyacu, after many hours of air, land, and sea travel, Nick was immediately set at ease by the way Flores and his people began treating him as a patient, assuring him, “We’re going to get the venom out of you.” He was also introduced to the jergon sacha plant, a powerful snake venom antidote from the native pharmacopoeia. Most likely originally identified by its “signature” – the mottling on its bark that closely resembles the patterning on the back of the venomous pit viper known as the jergon – the large bulb, or “stool”, at the base of the plant has been used for generations to prevent and treat snakebite. Natives have long taken plant baths and rubbed themselves with jergon sacha to protect themselves upon entering the jungle; sought it out and quickly applied it, with great efficacy, after snakebite; and used it to treat the lingering consequences of envenomation.

Figure 3 The “signature” on a jergon sacha plant, whose bark has markings resembling that of the jergon snake.

Flores told Nick that he was toxified – the venom was still in his body and needed to be released. Western doctors had told Nick the same thing. The enzymes of rattlesnake venom end up stored in locales with the highest concentration of fat—the myelin sheath that covers nerves. As a result, Juan and a visiting doctor from Lima, who has been using jergon sacha to treat HIV, explained that Nick’s autoimmune system was attacking itself. Without removing the toxins that were at the source of the malfunctioning of his autoimmune system, no recuperation was possible.

Nick already knew this as well – Western science had no way to remove the toxins from his body, so he had taken immunosuppressants instead to reduce the symptoms. Juan was, in effect, informing Nick that the vegetalista tradition could do a lot better than that: it could actually cleanse his system of the venom.

Deeply encouraged, Nick began his dieta, the simple and direct method of Amazonian medicine where a patient drinks plant remedies that have been prepared by a curandero.

Both the medicines and the patient are sung over with icaros, the magical melodies that contain and transmit the healing virtue of the plants. As well, ayahuasca ceremonies are utilized to better enable the curandero to direct the spirits of the plants and other “doctors”, and for the patient to more thoroughly integrate the healing received.

Jergon sacha had an immediate healing effect. In keeping with the plant’s purgative power, upon drinking the preparation made by boiling its stool in water, Nick got quite ill: “It felt like I’d gotten bit by that snake again. I felt that same really heavy, heavy feeling, sweating, just sick as a dog. But they had said that might happen. I was drinking two liters of the plant medicine a day and the toxin was breaking up in my fatty cells and being rereleased into my bloodstream.” After the initial nausea passed, however, Nick found he was recuperating rapidly. In short order, the burning sensation and spasmodic jumping in his legs, which had kept him awake all night for years, vanished.

While jergon sacha is very effective as an antivenom, Flores explained to Nick that it was not going to be a quick fix because he had already sustained long-term damage, even skirted nerve death. Nick was therefore also given came renaco, a strangler vine of the Amazon rain forest whose muscular growth has led to its use to rebuild torn and degenerated muscle, ligaments, nerves, and bones.

Much as the rattlesnake had made an appearance at the tipi meeting where Nick was directed toward the medicine of the rain forest, the appearance of two venomous pit viper serpents heralded the successful conclusion of his treatment. On his last day at Mayantuyacu, within a single hour, a huge bushmaster – the largest poisonous snake in the Western Hemisphere – came racing down the slope toward the little village. Then an equally impressive jergon, the serpent that bestowed its name on Nick’s medicine, was discovered while clearing brush. Both were killed in the ensuing melee and their bodies brought and laid before an astonished Nick.

Nick’s totemic snakes suggest that his journey was an initiatory one. As he told us, having experienced the chthonic powers of the serpent, it has “opened up doors where I know I can help people. The most powerful messages you can bring people have to come from a place of experience. My work helping alcoholics and addicts, and now handicapped people, was completely revolutionized. I don’t just have a theoretical understanding of what it means to return from the dead. I’ve lived it.”

One morning after an ayahuasca ceremony at Mayantuyacu, an Argentine healer approached Nick and told him, “Last night I saw this Native American old man sitting next to you and he was talking to me. He was saying that with everything you’re going through, you’re reaching a place in yourself where you can help and heal people.”

“You know what else he told me?” Nick asked me. “He said, ‘You know, the best healers are the wounded ones.’”

Nick’s treatment was quite effective. Nerve conduction returned to Nick’s feet: one foot is entirely restored, and the other, which had degenerated so far that it felt as if “there was nothing there,” is now partially alive again. He has now resumed his career as a punk rock musician, and recently sent out an image on Facebook of his discarded orthopedic boots. He is hopeful that he can entirely rehabilitate.

Nick was received back into the NAC community with rejoicing and deep gratitude for the work of Juan Flores. Nick was visibly a new man after his treatment.

The Paradox of Shamanic Healing

Indigenous medicine comes wrapped in paradox for Westerners. Among these paradoxes is the distinction between curing and healing of disease, concepts which, as in Venn diagrams, overlap yet remain experientially distinct. The general thrust of modern, industrial Western medicine, psychiatry, and psychology is to “cure”, from Latin cura, “to care, concern, trouble,” by either suppressing symptoms (that is, managing disease) or excising it from the body. Treatment is usually considered satisfactory when symptoms abate or lessen so that the life of the sufferer is more tolerable. In many indigenous styles of medicine, which give equal importance to curing as the West, healing, from Old English hælan, “to make whole, sound and well,” may also involve searching out the hidden origin of the disease in the body/mind. In other words, there is a teaching contained within disease that must be heard, understood, and heeded. The patient must, in short, remember her or his way back to health, to harmony with the cosmos (Tindall, 2010)4.

In a healing quest through indigenous medicine, a cure may be found or it may not. Yet because of the experience of direct participation in the “larger matrix of meaning and purpose” within which the patient, and disease, is embedded, the valence of the disease will change. In such cases, it is the entire self that is engaged in unraveling a disease’s enigma, and the entire organism is the laboratory wherein the cure and/or healing can be found. As a consequence, such healing is always idiosyncratic, because each body’s laboratory is unique.

Additionally, if disease is cured shamanically, the methodology used (which in the vegetalismo shamanism of the Peruvian Amazon is a complex synergy of plants, the shaman’s icaros – or sacred songs – and the ecology of the healing locale itself) will often elude scientific researchers in search of a “silver bullet” molecule. The medicine may be non-exportable: its efficacy may vanish as soon as it is separated from the culture that gave rise to the healing in the first place.

What Nick’s rain forest quest indicates is that, unlike in Western, technological medicine, psychoactive native medicines are allies in a psychomachia – a battle of the soul. In a similar way, Nick’s recovery from an “incurable” disease can be seen as
an initiatory path, one more akin to the Native American vision quest than a patient checking into a modern hospital to undergo treatment.

Far from being surpassed and rendered obsolete by our contemporary technological approaches, traditional, animistic medicine with its “mythicoreligious perspective” continues to flourish, and reminds us of how profound healing can be when it arises from indigenous perception of a sentient, living cosmos.

Source:  RealitySandwich

 byJacqueline Howard: An ancient stone tool recently discovered in the high desert of southeast Oregon has archaeologists raising their eyebrows…

The tool, a hand-held scraper chipped from a piece of agate, was unearthed from beneath a layer of volcanic ash near the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter outside Riley, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced on Thursday. Archaeologists have linked the ash to a major eruption from Mount St. Helens that occurred about 15,800 years ago.

“When we had the volcanic ash identified, we were stunned because that would make this stone tool one of the oldest artifacts in North America,” Dr. Patrick O’Grady, anarchaeologist at the University of Oregon and the leader of the excavation, said in a written statement. “Given those circumstances and the laws of stratigraphy, this object should be older than the ash.”

(Story continues below photo.)

The scraper was found at an ancient rock shelter in the high desert of eastern Oregon. It could turn out to be older than any known site of human occupation in western North America.

The new finding may rewrite the story of early human migrations, as it was once previously thought that the first humans in the western hemisphere arrived about 13,500 years ago.

“For years, many in the archaeological field assumed that the first humans in the western hemisphere were the Clovis people – dating to around 13,000 years ago. While a handful of archaeological sites older than Clovis cultures have been discovered in the past few decades, there is still considerable scrutiny of any finding that appears older,” Stan McDonald, the bureau’s Oregon/Washington lead archaeologist, said in the statement.

If humans arrived more than 15,800 years ago, as the stone tool suggests, it would place humans in America’s West around the end of the Pleistocene era, when mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, and bison roamed the region, the Associated Press reported. But some scientists remain skeptical.

“No one is going to believe this until it is shown there was no break in that ash layer, that the artifact could not have worked its way down from higher up, and until it is published in a convincing way,” Donald K. Grayson, professor of archaeology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the excavation, told AP. “Until then, extreme skepticism is all they are going to get.”

Archaeologists plan to continue excavations at the Oregon site this summer, O’Grady said in the statement, adding “that’s the next step.”

Source: The Huffington Post… More

by Jair Robles: Interview With Sergio Magaña, teacher of the Nahuatl Tradition…

Re-posted by permission of SuperConsciousness:

in 1968, Carlos Castaneda wrote The Teachings of Don Juan, the first of a series of books de-scribing his training with a Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” named Don Juan Matus. Castaneda’s books have sold more than 28 million copies, and his work was the first glimpse into a vast and ancient body of knowledge developed in what is now Mexico by its indigenous peoples. Through his work we were introduced to a group of ancient Mexicans, known as the Toltecs, who developed and practiced the art of Nahualism.

In 1997 another Mexican author, Don Miguel Ruiz from the Toltec lineage published his best sell-ing book The Four Agreements. Ruiz’s work, is written as a simple guide to help change the hu-man mind, within its simplicity one can appreciate the profound wisdom behind it.

According to this Ancient Mexican tradition, such knowledge should be kept secret for 500 years after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Based on the information being revealed by Sergio Magaña an initiate and teacher of the Aztec and Toltec tradition: “It is at this time in history, the calendars indicate that human consciousness can shift focus from an awareness oriented around the needs of the individual to a consciousness that prioritizes the needs of the whole. It is a shift from orienting oneself in the world externally — What do I have? What do I look like? Who loves me? to a deeper understanding of Self — Who am I? How do my emotions work? What is my pur-pose? What is my relationship to the earth? This inward focus is also about our relationship to the Universe. By asking these questions and going inside we also become deeply aware of our con-nection to the cosmos.”

Following this mandate to open into the world the sacred knowledge also known as the return of Quetzalcoatl, Mexican author, Sergio Magaña (Ocelocoyotl), has recently published his second book with Hay House, called, The Toltec Secret, Dreaming Practices of the Ancient Mexicans, where he expands on the body of knowledge developed by the Toltecs, called nahualism. Accord-ing to Sergio and his teachers, “Nahualism is the art of being awake while sleeping and using the perceptions of the Nahual while awake.”

In this fascinating interview with SuperConsciousness, Sergio Magaña tells us that the main pur-pose of his tradition, has been to learn and master the art of planting dreams , also called sowing dreams in which you put your intentions. “That is our main discipline, that is named Mexicatzin - the venerable Mexihca. It doesn’t mean Mexican. Mexihca refers to the people that recognize the effect of the moon and of their dreams.”

Sergio Magaña (Ocelocoyotl), is a famous Mexican healer who has been initiated into the 5,000-year-old Toltec lineage of nahualism and the Tol lineage of dreaming knowledge. Sergio has been appointed head of a prestigious project with Club UNESCO for the Protection of Intangible Herit-age of Ancient Civilizations. Learn more at www.sergiomagana.com

SuperConsciousness: Can you tell us about your background, and how did you come across this body of knowledge, and where does it come from?

Sergio Magaña: I am originally from a very traditional Catholic family. My mother worked when I was a kid, so I was really raised by my nanny, and she was the daughter of an Otomi healer “curandero” and she was supposed to be the next one in the line of healers of her Otomi village. But she had problems with her husband and had to escape from the town and that’s how she ended up in Mexico City.

She began working in my family’s house, taking care of my brother’s, I am the youngest so I wasn’t even born at the time she came to my house. When I was born, I became like the son that she couldn’t have. She gave me a lot of love but because she was the daughter of a curandero, I grew up with half of my mind in a traditional and science based family and the other half in this magic world. For example, when I was very young instead of giving me an aspirin or something like that for a headache, she would light up a tobacco cigaret and blew out the smoke around me to take away the pain. From her I learned a lot about plants, the first time that I heard about dreams was from her because I was very shy and a scared boy. So she used an egg for cleaning my energy and then in a very poetic way, she told me: “This egg is a dream that never became, because the dream of this egg was to be a chicken. I will use the energy of this egg so that your bad dreams never come true”. Then she would crack the egg and do a reading with it and she did that for many people. She would also give me some interesting tips like having open scissors below your bed, so that the bad dreams would be cut and many things like that.

That is how I grew up and as a young man I was fascinated with this wisdom and I began search-ing for more and that is how I came upon these groups of keepers of the Mexica tradition. Most of them are dancers, that dance in the center of the main plaza of Mexico City and amongst those dancers I found my first two dreaming teachers.

The first one I found wasn’t very good but then I came across my two main teachers. Hugo Nahui who is still my friend and teacher and Xolotl the teacher that I work with. One of them is a repre-sentative of the lineages of the moon of Nahualisim. All of this tradition is based on two worlds: Tonal and Nahual. Tonal, that is who you are when awake. Nahual is who you are while sleeping and dead.

Nahualism is the art of developing your Nahual. It is dreaming knowledge and knowledge of how to die in an enlightened way. I feel very lucky because Hugo belongs to the ones that are named Mexihca. The Mexihca according to academics is considered as only one group within the Aztecs, but for the people that follow the oral tradition these were groups that existed a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago.They were named the people of the halo of the moon and they were the first dreamers. They used many different techniques like power plants that were documented in the books from Carlos Castaneda. But also other things like snake powder to enter in the energy of an animal and many, many formulas.

The other lineage is the Toltec. Toltec comes from the word Tol. Tol is a measure. The Toltec’s were the ones that knew the measure of the cosmos and they created a lot of disciplines based in breathing techniques, mathematics, postures called kin, that are very similar to yoga.

All these are techniques developed for lucid dreaming. The content of this book is mainly the teachings that come from this Tol lineage. The Tol lineage of nahualism that has been passed from master to student for 1,460 years at least and I am very fortunate to have found Xolotl because he’s one of the last.

Some people think that a lot of people in Mexico know about Nahualism. No, it’s almost extinct but there was a prophecy from Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec ruler that said hide our treasure until the time of the sixth sun and now is the time of the sixth sun and lineage’s that were closed are open-ing now.

SC: This leads to my second question, can you briefly talk about the sun cycles as they were understood by the ancient Mexican people and the coming sixth sun?

SM: If you see the Aztec calendar, the famous sunstone. The outer ring is represented by two ser-pents that have a human face. Every time that you find in Mexico a serpent with a human face it means Quetzalcoatl, the sacred knowledge.

The long count of the calendar is of 26,500 years and that is very similar to what science calls the precession of equinoxes. Another name for the calendar is nahui ollin, or the four movements. Ancient Mexicans realized that the main number that is repeated in the universe is the number four. For example, there were four elements, four main phases of the moon, four main moments of the day, like sunset, sunrise, mid day, mid night, two solstices, two equinoxes. Accordingly the long count is split it into four, which gives you periods of 6,625 years. That is what in the Toltec, Mexihca and Aztec culture, is identified as a sun and these four suns are very different.

One sun is mainly from the Tonal, -the awake-, and when we are awake, normally we have our eyes opened, so we are seeing the outside. During these suns of the Tonal, God is outside, the conquest is outside, medicine is outside, satisfaction is outside. If we look at the official history of the past several thousands of years, corresponds to that of a sun of Tonal. There were a lot of reli-gions, a lot of war, medicine came from plants or from other people. But now we are in a huge transition to what we call a sun of darkness in which you are to see inside. You must see your underworlds, referring to your unconscious, your dreams, etc. Medicine will come from the inside.

According to the Mexihca count the transition began with the full solar eclipse that was seen in Mexico City in July, 1991 and this transition period is going to end in 2021, but the sixth sun like all others will last for 6,625 years.

SC: What is the name given for the sixth sun?

SM: It’s Itztac Tonatiuh, which means, white sun and it is related to the white Tezcatlipoca, or Quetzalcoatl. There is a prophecy about Quetzalcoatl coming back, but is not true what they say in history books that the pre-hispanic cultures from Mexico confused Cortez, with Quetzalcoatl be-cause he was white and all those things. No, what this prophecy refers to is a return of a con-sciousness for Quetzalcoatl is a reference to the sacred knowledge.

SC: Quetzalcoatl is considered a level of consciousness, a body of knowledge, not a person or a being?

SM: It’s a level of knowledge. If you became enlightened they would call you Quetzalcoatl. And the real prophecy that comes from Nahuatl, says the return of the Quequetzacoatl, which means the plural of Quetzalcoatl. Many Quetzalcoatl’s.

SC: You already touched briefly on this concepts and it relates to my next question about the Tonal and Nahual. Are these two different realities that we live in?

SM: Yes, Tonal comes from the Nahuatl word Tonatiuh, which means, the sun and the word nahual comes the Nahuatl word nehua which means ‘I’, and nahualli, which means “what can be extended”. It refers to what extends beyond the tonal, -who we really are. From that etymology Tonal is who you are with the sun. Because in ancient times you were supposed to be awake in the day and sleeping in the night. Nahual, is who you really are, that is, the energetic body that you use for dreaming and the one that you would be at death. Kind of a spirit but they are also energetic bodies. For example, the energy that is surrounding your head when you are awake is the tonal and the energy that is surrounding your navel when you are awake is the nahual.

What happens when you fall asleep is that they exchange positions. The tonal goes down to the navel and the nahual goes up to the head and that is why you enter in the kingdom of the moon and you enter another reality.

SC: And your book is mostly about is the concept of Nahualism?

SM: Nahualism is the art of being awake while sleeping and using the perceptions of the Nahual while awake. Instead of exchanging positions, you achieve the techniques to meld them, to join them. For example if you join them you have lucid dreams and then you can control your dreams and if you are awake in what we call “ensoñación” , dreaming while awake, if you join them, you see other realities.

SC: So one is being conscious while you’re dreaming and the other is perceiving from a dif-ferent consciousness state?

SM: One is of course being lucid but controlling the dream. Those from the lineage of the moon used plants to get in to “ensoñación” to see dreaming realities while awake. When you can see imprints of the energy. It is also done with certain breathing techniques and then moving the eyes in certain positions that allow you to see. For example, if I’m seeing your face and I enter in what we call the Quetzal perception and I move my eyes in a certain position I would be able to see your face shape shifting and see your ancestors and see past lives. So it’s really to see different things, by moving the eyes in different angles.

SC: It allows you to pierce through the veil of this reality and look at other dimensions that are always there but we normally don’t see them?

SM: Yes, in Nahuatl all the directions, the four directions have the world tlan- that means next to. So it is said the place of the death (Mictlan), of the ancestors, is next to. The place of prophecy of the future is next to and people think it’s a metaphor because they haven’t experienced this. It’s just next to what would be your physical reality from a different angle of your eyes.

SC: Your book focuses mostly on developing the dream state. What is the first step that one has to do in order to begin taking control and consciously dreaming?

SM: Like I told you, tonal and nahual are two different energetic bodies. So when they exchange places the dream will always have an observer. That’s why people don’t appear in their own dreams. Because their nahual becomes the observer. So if the nahual is the observer then the tonal can sleep and you forget, your mind forgets.

To begin really become a constant, to an eventual lucid dreamer, the first thing that we do is to force our nahual to appear like an actor in the dream. If your nahual appears like an actor in the dream, then your tonal must see it because there will always be an observer and so the first thing that we do in my lineage are exercises that are done with masks.

Especially the masks of the archetypes that we are going to use. A serpent for healing, the hum-mingbird for relationships, the crocodile for abundance, etc. So you go, put that mask on and in front of a mirror you begin talking about your life. In ancient times this was usually done with obsidian mirrors or in a body of water like a river, lake etc.

This work produces three benefits:

First the habit of seeing yourself. Through neuroplasticity, you are creating a neural network of getting used to seeing yourself. That will eventually allow you to begin appearing in the dreams.

Second; for the tradition it is said that we have a very strong identification between our image and our history. Actually they have very poetic sayings, like our wrinkles are the lines in which you walk in the earth. It is necessary to break that strong identification between your face and your history. Because if you keep dreaming like your physical form you will keep repeating you. So if you begin talking about you with another face, then it creates a dissociation between your tonal or your mind with your history and then you get the ability of shape shifting.

So then in a dream you will be able to say serpent now and you will become a serpent and then you can command the healing of any part of your body. Or crocodile now and then you can com-mand the abundance and all those things. Our training starts while awake in producing this neuroplasticity. This added habit of seeing yourself in a mirror.

SC: Is it fair to say that these exercises are geared towards weakening how you identify yourself with your personality?

SM: Totally, it is breaking the ego and it’s free therapy actually. Because the mirror is like the psychiatrist of course.

SC: I’m going to jump into another question now that you’re talking about mirrors because throughout your book you talk about different practices that are done while seeing your re-flection in an obsidian mirror and later you talk about seeing your reflection in water, in rain water. Can you talk about this different levels of mirror work and what kind of experiences does one might have while doing this work?

SM: Of course, the obsidian mirror is the most sacred object of the tradition. Why? It was said that in the thirteenth heaven exists Centeotl or the one energy. The one energy that is like the equiva-lent to God, but for the tradition this is a complete black energy.

A lot of people when you say black they think of something bad, but even in the bible it is said from the darkness came the light. In our tradition it was said that in the beginning if the black eagle -is one of the names given to Centeotl-, if she tried to move or to do anything, it would move everything that existed. So she had to reflect herself to create a subject and an object, and everything we consider real is in that reflection.

The cosmos, the moon, people, everything and that reflection is named the Tezcatlipoka, -the smoking mirror. Oriental traditions say that everything is an illusion, in our tradition we say that we are a reflection.

Based on this concept, the academics said that the Black Tezcatlipoka was a God, because it was said that in his mirror he created tragedy or fortune for all the people and he was the main essence of ancient Mexico. But this idea of the Black Tezcatlipoka and that from his mirror everything was created, was vanished. When the Spanish monks came, they kept asking who is the black Tezcatlipoka? The native people answered the one that gives you everything and the one that takes from you everything. So from a Christian perspective, the one that gives you everything God, the one that takes from you everything, the devil. The one that takes you to peace, God. The one that takes you to war, the devil. So they almost erased him because in the Christian mentality, you are good or you are bad. You cannot be duality. But really, the Tezcatlipoka is the unconscious, your inside. The one that gives you everything and takes from you everything, the one that makes peace or makes war.

Then it was said that everything in the mirror -the original mirror-, the cosmos, and everything else that exists in it, we were so fascinated by the reflection that we forgot completely the one that reflects. The mirror is to remember. For this reason, the obsidian mirror is considered the sacred, sacred practice. The one that reflects Centeotl or the black eagle and the reflection that is you. The black Tezcatlipoka has many names. One name refers to your image or how you see yourself, -Yocoya; another name refers to your personal history -Molineki; another, - Moquekeloa, refers to that inner voice that is telling you this is difficult, you are too old, this is impossible, etc.

In the mirror you begin facing all these layers of your unconscious one by one and the most im-portant ones are the enemy. That part of you that sabotages, that has put you in bad relationships, in different problems and then through mirror work you disappear all these parts of you. Those patterns that repeat themselves again and again. You ask the mirror to pull that energy out of you, to go to back into the mirror and become nothing. A state without mind.

I have taught this all over the world and I have heard this more than a thousand times. People tell-ing me 36 days in the mirror did for me much more than all the work of my life.

SC: Obsidian mirrors are not very common these days, can these practices that you teach be done with a regular mirror?

SM: No, because the black absorbs and the regular mirror reflects. Another and easy option to have that I mention in the book, is water. The complication with a water mirror is that sometimes if you move you get wet.

SC: Another aspect that you talk about when it comes to dreams is the concept you call sowing dreams. What is sowing dreams and why is it done?

SM: There is a Mexihca phrase that is, very powerful and it says: The one that doesn’t remember his or her dreams and doesn’t work with them, is like the living dead. Because, then you have no control of your awakened state.

The purpose is not to become a lucid dreamer. That is only one part. For this tradition, dreams have between 4 to 2000 times the power of the awake.

The main purpose of the tradition is to plant dreams or to sow dreams in which you put your inten-tions. That is our main discipline that is named Mexicatzin - the venerable Mexica. It doesn’t mean Mexican. Mexihca refers to the people that recognize the effect of the moon and of their dreams.

By doing certain types of breathing until you reach a hypnogogic state, -that state where your are not completely asleep, but barely aware-, then you can plant a dream, with the archetypes that correspond to what you want. You begin by repeating, I’m a warrior of the dreams, I stay lucid and conscious while dreaming. I find the dreams that I plant in the shape of the snake (if its a healing dream), that heals my hypertension and you keep on like that.

For us the main purpose is not to be a lucid dreamer. The main purpose is to create your life through your dreams with a lot less effort than when you are awake.

SC: So first you go through the process of destroying the limitations with the mirror work and then you consciously create what you want to experience in your dreams, is that what I’m understanding?

SM: Yes.

SC: And eventually those dreams go back to your daily reality. Once you can have those dreams intentionally then they become reality in your waking life, is that correct? Is that the sequence?

SM: Yes it is. It doesn’t exactly happen that same night, sometimes it does. You keep planting the dream, it’s like meditating. Every tradition has their practices. In Nahualism, the practice is to plant dreams before falling asleep. It will take you about 20 minutes. You are destroying what you don’t want, and you are planting dreams.

Then if you have become lucid it’s very exciting when you find and you say oh, the serpent, the healing of the hyper tension, sometimes on the same morning as you wake up you are healed. Sometimes the effect of a dream goes from one day to six months but if you have dreamt it you can be sure that at least in six months you will have that result.

SC: In your book you give a lot of information about different aspects of dreams. It’s a wealth of knowledge and detail, you talk about colors, directions, scales, animals, just to name a few. Things that are present in our dreams and that we have to recognize and un-derstand their meaning. Was this knowledge given to you directly by some of the teachers that you’ve had or has it come through your own practice?

SM: By Xolotl, the teacher that you can see a picture of him in the book. I know in this spiritual world a lot of people say that they are channeling and I respect that or others who say that they found certain teachers but they can never show photos of them. My teachers are real people that you can also meet. For example I organize a pilgrimage to Mexico and people come from all over the world to work with them directly. So all those things that I put about dreams were given to me for from Xolotl and Hugo.

SC: All this knowledge has been passed down through generations, since the Olmecs, they were the original ones who developed this body of knowledge?

SM: It was said the Chichimecas and the Olmecs then the Teotihuacans, then Xochicalcas, the Toltec’s, and finally Mexihcas or Aztecs.

SC: For me one of the most fascinating things when reading about ancient cultures and tra-ditions from someone who has a deeper knowledge and understanding of them is how their interpretation of symbols, images and the concepts behind words is very different to that which is commonly known and your book is a very clear case for this. What do you think is one of the greatest misconceptions that exists about the ancient Mexican traditions?

SM: For example the Chac Mool. It is said that the bowl that he is holding was used to put the heart offered in sacrifice and for all the practitioners of the tradition we know that this is like a Yoga posture that is done with water or with a mirror to enter a lucid dream. There is a lot, a lot of misconceptions of what was happening. Because even the most sacred posture to enter into the other worlds that was at the top of a lot of pyramids and still is in Chichen Itza. It is a complete lie that it was used for putting the hearts of the sacrificed.

SC: This is your second book, is that correct?

SM: Yes.

SC: And you talk about expanding on this body of knowledge in future books. What is your next work going to be about and when can people expect to have it?

SM: I have three ideas. I have to see with my publisher what do they want. I want to write a book about death and dying in the Toltec and Mexihca culture. There are the three types of death. I would also like to write about all the meanings in the Aztec calendar. The third idea has to do with the many healing techniques in the Toltec and Mexihca tradition. I could also write books two and three on the Toltec Secret about Nahualism.

SC: Is there anything that you would like to add that I did not ask?

SM: Only to encourage people to explore that third of their life that normally is spent as a black out. Their dreams. To think that while they are unconscious they are creating their awakened reality. So if they are wasting their dreams probably they are wasting their lives also.

Source: Super Consciousness

by Kalyn B Raphael: To the Toltecs one of the most important things on a spiritual path– or in life– is perception…

This is because the perception one holds determines everything including our experience.

After all, it isn’t what happens to us as much as it how we see what happens to us.

We Know About This Toltec Wisdom, But We Don’t Always Live It

A pair of identical twins are alike in every way except for the fact that one is always optimistic and one is always pessimistic. Their parents are worried about the pessimist and decide to try to help him see things in a more positive light for their birthdays. So, they give the pessimist roller skates. He unwraps the gift and says “Oh no! I’ll probably fall and brake my arm on these!” Discouraged, but hoping he’ll feel better when he sees his brother’s gift they turn to the optimist. “I can’t believe it!” he yells with enthusiasm, “you got me a horse!” he says upon seeing the horse shit in his box.

Life, in Toltec lore, (Toltec wisdom) is nothing but one perception after another which shapes our experience. Toltecs value having a clear perception more than anything else, knowing that when you perceive clearly you are empowered. You know what is and and can, therefore, change it as needed or as you prefer.

Wisdom – How Do You See It?

Until someone embarks upon the Mastery of Awareness and comes to see how they have learned to misperceive life, knowing that we are in misperceptions is unknown to us. Just as a caged bird who has never known what it means to fly free, we also don’t know that we can be free of our misperceptions or what it is like. It takes dedicated focus and attention upon ourselves and our lives to begin to perceive the cage that binds our perception. It takes poking and prodding, asking ourselves what we believe and why;  asking ourselves what we want to believe and who we authentically are before freedom can be ours.

What do you see in yourself? Do you hold beliefs or perceptions about yourself, about how life is meant to be, about others or judgments that keep you in the same patterns of life? Do you have an urging to tap into the something more that beckons you, calling you to live a more connected life? Are you wanting to shift your perception and tap into Toltec Wisdom so that you too see life more clearly so that your life experiences are far more enjoyable?

Source: Toltec Mystery School… More

The Great Spirit, also called Wakan Tanka among the Sioux, The Creator, or The Great Maker in English and Gitchi Manitou in Algonquian, is a conception of a supreme being prevalent among some Native American and First Nations cultures. According to Lakotah activist Russell Means a better translation of Wakan Tanka is The Great Mystery.

The Great Spirit or Great Mystery is generally believed to be personal, close to the people, and immanent in the fabric of the material world. Lakotah prayers refer to Him as Grandfather; however, not all Nations assign gender, or only one gender, to the Great Mystery. Chief Dan Evehema, a spiritual leader of the Hopi Nation, described the Great Spirit as follows:

“To the Hopi, the Great Spirit is all powerful. He taught us how to live, to worship, where to go and what food to carry, gave us seeds to plant and harvest. He gave us a set of sacred stone tablets into which he breathed all teachings in order to safeguard his land and life. In these stone tablets were inscribed instructions, prophecies and warnings.”

“Old Man” is how the Great Mystery is “known” by the Blackfoot people. Old Man personally created all things and personally instructed the Blackfoot people on how to attain spiritual wisdom in daily life: Old Man is not an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic god like Jesus, nor a panentheistic deity as in Brahmanism out of which the whole fabric of existence is derived. Rather, Old Man is simply acknowledged to exist in the sense of the Aristotelian “prime mover” (“prime mover” idiom provided for the benefit of European audiences) and the traditional teachings are attributed to “him” as a source. There are specific tales regarding Old Man doing this or that or saying this or that but rather than being enshrined in a ritualistic, symbolic, or codified religion, these teachings are more used to guide individuals and communities on a moment-by-moment basis. It is not a set of laws or code of living as much as a cultural lifestyle which focuses on the daily needs of the individual and the nation rather than any “universal” speculation.

“Ababinili” is how the Great Mystery is “known” by the Chickasaw people. Ababinili personally created all things and personally instructed the Chickasaw people on “how to live long and healthy lives:” In Chickasaw tradition Ababinili has extensive talks with various parts of “his” creation regarding the relation of mankind to Creation and how Creation and mankind each ought to behave in each case.

“Spider Woman” is the creative agency among the Hopi who personally created the four “colors” of mankind. “She” attributes to the Sun the power of Creation of all things and origin of all spiritual wisdom and in this way the Sun becomes the living manifestation for the Hopi of the Great Mystery which is personally “known” as Sotuknang: This may sound similar to Constantine’s adaptation of Jesus as the physical embodiment of the Pagan Sol Invictus in Christianity but it would be a mistake of similarity of APPEARANCE only. In ALL other regards it is a wholly independent concept which acknowledges real-life physical interdependence and relationships between the real physical Sun and all things in the web of Creation as opposed to allegorical symbolism prevalent in the MidEastern or African national (ethnic, not political) religions.

In Hopi tradition, life is defined as a process of change and prevailing and persistent human concepts across time are known as distinct “worlds”. This concept of life as a process of change is so prevalent that a person is acknowledged as a new identity each day and there is no such thing as a static personal identity upon which to create such static speculative religious concepts as an eternal Heaven or Hell as a “final destination”. The spiritual teachings to the Hopi attributed to Sotuknang are functionally equivalent to those of the Great Mystery as “known” by all other Turtle Island nations in that they specifically guide the individual and the nation as opposed to creating the speculative religious framework for universalism, conquest and domination enshrined in a ritualistic faith or dogmatic religion.

Source:  Wikipedia… More

by David P. Ball: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground,” advises a proverb commonly attributed to the Tsistsistas (Cheyenne). 

“Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors or strong its weapons.”  In the country today known as Canada, indigenous women have always been at the forefront of defending their lands and cultures—from the iconic 1990 standoff between Mohawk warriors and the Canadian army near Oka, Quebec to Elsipogtog First Nation’s ongoing anti-fracking battle near Rexton, New Brunswick.

In the most recent Assembly of First Nations elections two years ago, an unprecedented number of Native women campaigned to lead the body representing 633 bands. This week, women’s decades of campaigning for a national inquiry into missing and murdered women has hit Parliament once again.

On International Women’s Day, Indian Country Today Media Network highlights just some of the women leaders, artists and advocates at the forefront of change across Canada.

Ellen Gabriel

Twenty-four years ago, Indian country exploded with unrest that has shaped Native politics in Canada in a way no other event has since the 1960s. The spark was the quiet town of Oka, Quebec’s attempt to expand a nine-hole golf course in 1990 atop a Mohawk burial ground and into the pine forest that’s sacred to the community of Kanehsatake. Their outrage ignored by authorities, women from the community set up a small blockade on the road. But when the provincial police force and even Canadian army was deployed, the blockade transformed into a months-long armed standoff that saw Native warriors from all corners of Turtle Island to draw a line in the sand, flooding into Mohawk territories, blocking major bridges along the U.S. border, setting police cars ablaze, and seeing railway blockades across the land in solidarity.

Women remained the decision-makers behind the blockade, and one 26-year-old became the face and voice of Kanehsatake for Canada. Ellen Gabriel, whose traditional name is Katsitsakwas, was chosen by her community at the time to represent the blockade.

In the decades since the so-called “Oka Crisis,” Gabriel has continued her fight for her people. She became the president of Quebec Native Women, and went on to protect her language and culture through Kanehsatà:ke Language and Cultural Center, where she works to this day.

Two years ago, Gabriel entered the spotlight once again, challenging incumbent National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, in a race centring on standing up to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and pushing for Indigenous self-determination. Her campaign was unsuccessful, but Gabriel told the aboriginal news site Windspeaker that her goal was “to bring back the voice of the people.”

“In 1990, Aboriginal peoples asserted our sovereignty, and we were criminalized for doing that,” she said. “We are at a crossroads right now, whether we will be totally assimilated and whether we will have the ability to be self-determining people… We’re still dealing with the challenges of how to de-colonize our relationship with Canada, but also to decolonize the one we have with each other.”

Gabriel received the International Women’s Day Award from the Québec Bar Association in 2008 and has also received the Native Women’s Association of Canada’s Golden Eagle Award, and a Jigonsaseh Women of Peace Award, for her ongoing advocacy work.

Michele Audette

Gabriel’s successor at Quebec Native Women, Michele Audette, has since gone on to become the president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC).

NWAC has carried the battle cry for a national public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women for decades. Until 2010, when the federal government slashed its funding, NWAC maintained a growing database of missing and murdered women that held the government’s feet to the fire and raised public awareness of a historic crisis that affects almost every community. As an advocate for aboriginal women across the country, the mother of five hails from an Innu community in northern Quebec and fought against sexist laws in Canada’s Indian Act that arbitrarily stripped many Native women of their Indian Status based on who they married. Women successfully fought to have those laws changed in the 1980s.

“My heart beats, of course, to denounce the violence in our communities, and across Canada, for Aboriginal women,” she toldWindspeakerafter beginning her work at NWAC. “[I’m] always passionate for Aboriginal women’s issues. I think it’s going to be until my last breath. I’ll be fighting, working and doing stuff for my family and for aboriginal people.”

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Since capturing the attention of a generation with hit songs like “Up Where We Belong” and “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie keeps not only packing her rock music with lyrics both politically challenging, romantic and beautiful, but also continuing to pioneer her distinctive digital artwork, and supporting education efforts about and for indigenous people.

Born in Piapot Cree First Nation, in Saskatchewan, the 73-year-old Cree artist now resides in Hawaii, but continues to tour aggressively and show her conceptual artwork—what she terms “digital beadwork”—across the continent, and promoting herCradleboard Teaching Project, a program to convey accurate information about Native peoples through educational systems.

“It’s still art, but it’s art with a different tool,” she told Indian Country Today Media Network in a phone interview. “For me, it’s very similar to music: You do what you want to do, there’s aren’t a lot of rules.

Sainte-Marie was profiled in the 2008 documentaryBuffy Sainte-Marie: A Multimedia Life,which traces her roots from the Prairies to the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene and to today’s groundbreaking artwork. She brought indigenous self-determination into the public consciousness with songs likeBury My Heart at Wounded Kneeand, on her most recent album, Running for the Drum,she continues to advocate for her people with songs like “No No Keshagesh,” a warning to those destroying the Earth.

Sainte-Marie was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, and her music has been celebrated with a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in 2010, and a Canadian Gemini Award.

Bridget Tolley

Hailing from Kitigan Zibi First Nation in Quebec, Bridget Tolley has carried the torch of missing and murdered women for more than a decade.

Long before she co-founded Families of Sisters in Spirit, a national advocacy group on the issue, the Algonquin grandmother of five was galvanized to fight for justice and change after her mother was killed by a police car. It turned out that the policeman investigating the death was the brother of the officer responsible for it,Rabble.careported at the time.

Her passion for social change has seen her speaking at massive rallies on Parliament Hill, in government committee hearings and frequently in the media. But she believes that today’s indigenous women are still at the frontlines in a struggle that goes right back to the foundation of the country.

“Aboriginal women and families have been on the frontline all along trying to expose violence against indigenous women and its deep-seated roots, as well as to bring about change,” she told Indian Country Today Media Network in 2012. “It has been more than 519 years that our women are still resisting colonial violence against us, our people, our nation and our land. It is the longest social movement in North America. To end violence for all people, aboriginal women must be at the epicenter of the solution.”

RELATED:Events Commemorating Aboriginal Female Victims of Violence

Eriel Deranger

Though Canadian rock star Neil Young garnered attention for himself and his cause with a tour of Canada early this year—raising more than half a million dollars to help a First Nation fighting oil sands development—the concert series would not have been possible without one woman’s persistent work behind the scenes.

Eriel Deranger is not just the spokeswoman for Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a community in the heart of Alberta’s oil sands that has seen drastic rises in rare cancers linked to petrochemicals. The 34-year-old activist, mother and former Prairie region director for the Sierra Club is also the face of a generation fighting to put the brakes on climate change and the destruction of indigenous territories. Working for countless hours to pull off Young’s controversial tour, Deranger gave a stirring speech beside the iconic singer that was not broadcast on the major news networks, but captured the energy and eloquence of a young woman who is no stranger to activism.

On stage alongside Young on January 12, Deranger spoke of Alberta’s tar sands as “runaway development,” and said the crisis is not only environmental but also about fundamental indigenous rights.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Source: Indian Country

by Matt Toussaint:  This is a dance.  It takes two to transform…

The shaman and participant come together and in that convergence a new spirit is created.  It is a single energy, a single flowing spirit that moves in the direction of the intention for the healing session or ceremony.

When your dance partner is trying to perform the tango while you are dancing the samba, neither partner can continue as a duo.  There is a disconnection, a disharmony between what each of you is doing and what you think the other person is doing.  There has to be a common thread that weaves this dance together.  That thread is intention.  Intention unifies the movement.  It helps to focus and set the boundaries.  It helps you know what steps your partner is taking, and what steps you need to take in order to allow them to guide you on the journey.

The shaman’s job is to create the space or the container for this to happen.  They first open and then hold the space, guiding the movement by way of intention and supported through their invocations.  They maintain a spiritual connection that allows them to channel new energies into the space while cleansing and releasing energies or spirits that are ready to be purged.

At the same time, as the participant, it is your job to remain open to the energies that the shaman is calling; to receive them.  The more relaxed and calm in mind and body, gently focused, and free of resistance you are, the more receptive you can become.  Receptivity to the process is a cornerstone of shamanic work and helps facilitate its efficacy.  It is loosening the body and freeing the mind so that you can move in the space – follow the lead dancer – effectively.

In the same way that shamanism is co-participatory between shaman and participant; it is also co-participatory between the shaman and the spirits.  Just as you are being guided to relax and receive, the shaman is doing the same thing.  They are guiding themselves into a state of consciousness where they can receive the spirits and be guided on how to conduct the ceremony.  Without the spirits, none of this would be possible.  The shaman has to surrender to receptivity in the same way that you do.  This is the role of mediator between worlds that is often discussed in traditional shamanistic studies.  The shaman acts as the gateway between worlds: yours and the spirits.  Through this connection, an all-directional triangle of energy is created.  It looks and flows like this:

Source: Shamanic Evolution

The Olmec civilization developed in the period of the Lower and Middle Preclassic, spanning from 1500 BC to 100 A.D…

The name Olmec is translated to “people of the rubber country” and was awarded to them in 1929. It refers to the culture developed in southern Veracruz and northern Tabasco, in the territory of modern-day Mexico. Regrettably we do not know their actual name nor do we know what language they spoke since the written records left behind by this influential civilization has not been deciphered.

Even though the Olmec civilization is surrounded by numerous mysteries, researchers believe that all the classical cultures of Mesoamerica originated from this mysterious civilization.

The ancient Olmecs achieved an incredible degree of development, totally incomprehensible if we consider that we know nothing of their origin nor their roots. The Ancient Olmecs knew about animal domestication, beekeeping, and extracted a substance with hallucinogenic properties from a frog native to the gulf of Mexico. This practice was also shared by shamans in the Yucatán peninsula and islands in the Caribbean.

Their stonemason skills were something noteworthy, achieving incredible constructions and monuments, like the giant Olmec heads, before the Aztecs, Mayas and other civilizations of the Americas. The question that has baffled archaeologists and other researchers is how? From where did the ancient Olmecs obtain their knowledge and where do they come form?

Many researchers today have tried explaining the Olmec civilization and their advanced knowledge in many fields. The inability to answer almost anything about the Olmecs has led numerous researchers to suggest that these ancient people have a very mysterious origin, one that points to an otherworldly connection.
The only “reasonable” explanation that would lead to the understanding of such complex advancements in cultural and technological development is that these ancient people had contact with civilizations more advanced than we can ever imagine. The Olmec culture was inherited by other great Mesoamerican civilization such as the Maya and Aztec.

At the most important ancient Olmec sites such as La Venta, San Lorenzo, Laguna de los Cerros and Tres Zapotes, researchers have found the most important discoveries that could lead to the understanding of this ancient civilization. Olmec art has numerous forms, the most important archaeological findings are the giant heads, but there are also altars, thrones and stele that are believed to narrate important historical events of the ancient Olmecs. The ancient Olmec religion revolved around supernatural deities, they worshiped the jaguar-gods, crocodile and snake gods.

The giant Olmec heads are one of the most important symbols of this ancient civilization. They were able to transport rocks weighing over 20 tons which points to incredibly technology that would allow them to move these giant blocks of stone across rivers, jungles and mountains. No one has been able to logically explain how they managed it.
Researchers believe that the ancient Olmecs had a very profound understanding in geology, which has allowed them to reuse materials for different purposes. It is believed that some of the Olmec heads were actually altars that were “reused” and redesigned.

Their knowledge in geology allowed this mysterious ancient civilization to literally “terraform” certain regions. The San Lorenzo plateau is one of those examples. It is considered one of the most important architectural projects in ancient times. The entire region was “modified” to the liking of the ancient Olmecs. This project involved the removal of tons of Earth and rock that allowed the construction of giant terraces, walls and monuments, literally transforming their surroundings into a sacred area for their inhabitants. The question that still remains is, how did ancient man achieve this… thousands of years ago?

The truth is that researchers have no idea of ​​their origin or their language or their religion. As a cultural manifestation, the ancient Olmecs spread our from the Gulf where they expanded to all Mesoamerica, reaching the Maya in the South, the Totonac culture in the North and even the Nahua in central Mexico.

By Olmec influence, all other cultures developed in Mesoamerica, but the origin of the Olmec is still a mystery that researchers cannot seem to explain.

This ancient civilization is noted for their sculptures of giant heads, which have become one of the most profound mysteries for researchers. Today, researchers have not been able to decipher the way on how these giant heads were built, and possibly reused.

History tells us that the ancient Olmecs did not have knowledge of the wheel, but a finding by American archaeologist Matthew Stirling in the 40s tells an entirely different story. At the archeological site Tres Zapotes, Stirling unearthed numerous children toys, one of those consisted of a dog that had wheels on it. Does this point to the fact that the ancient Olmecs did in fact have knowledge of the wheel? It would be hard to believe that “the wheel” would have been only used for the amusement of children.

If the ancient Olmecs did possess the knowledge of the wheel, is it possible that they had other technologies that were ahead of their time? If so, did this “lost technology” allow them to achieve incredible feats that are causing confusion among archaeologists and researchers today?

Other important enigmas about the ancient Olmec civilization is their origin. The Negroid features on some Olmec sculptures has caused great confusion among researchers. The giant Olmec heads seem to depict people who are not native to the Americas, but Africa. Does this point to the fact that the Olmecs cam from a different continent? If so, how did they do this?

Among other representations of the ancient Olmecs we find other strange features such as bearded faces, aquiline noses and thin lips, which do not correspond with any Mesoamerican racial type, something that mysteriously, can be also found in other ancient sites in south America, like Puma Punku.

What does this tell us about history? Is it possible that, as many researchers suggest, history as we know it is completely wrong?

Source: EWAO

by Lisa Charleyboy: Mystics say the Native American practice of smudging, or purifying a room with the smoke of sacred herbs, can help clear negative energy from a space…

And the apparent benefits are steeped in science—when burned, sage and other herbs release negative ions, which research has linked to a more positive mood.

by Alanna Ketler: Before the Europeans came to America, it is estimated that anywhere from 1.2 million to 12 million Native Americans inhabited the land…

The population of the Native Americans was reduced to 250,000, due to mass murder, genocide, imported diseases, slavery and suicide. There is no question about it, these people suffered a great tragedy. One could argue that it is the most devastating thing to ever happen to any population of people in the history of the world. Yet, little to no attention is given to this tragedy. One has to wonder, why?

Not only were the Native American people killed, but much of their customs, traditions and spirituality were lost along with them. Perhaps this was another reason for the genocide? These people were truly connected and in tune with Mother Earth, often referred to as the Keepers of the Earth. They taught to “walk lightly upon the Earth and live in balance and harmony.” Maybe, if more of the Native Americans were alive today the Earth wouldn’t be in as much turmoil as it is. We can all benefit from adopting some of the ancient spiritual teachings from the Native American elders into our daily lives.

10 Pieces Of Wisdom & Quotes From Native American Elders

“The Great Spirit is in all things: he is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us.” –Big Thunder (Bedagi) Wabanaki Algonquin

“The first piece, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the Universe and all its powers and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” –Black Elk – Oglala Sioux

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” –Cree Indian Proverb

Go Forward With Courage

When you are in doubt, be still, and wait;

When doubt no longer exists for you then go forward with courage.

So long as mists envelop you, be still;

Be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists

-As it surely will.

Then act with courage.

-Ponca Chief White Eagle

Treat the Earth well.

It was not given to you by your parents,

It was loaned to you by your children.

We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors,

we borrow it from our children.

-Ancient Indian Proverb

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” –Chief Seattle

May the stars carry your sadness away,

May the flowers fill your heart with beauty,

May hope forever wipe away your tears.

And above all, may silence make you strong.

-Chief Dan George

“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore, among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent, or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to civilized property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.” –John (Fire) Lame Deer Sioux Lakota

“Oh Great Spirit, help me always to speak the truth quietly, to listen with an open mind when others speak, and to remember the peace that may be found in silence.” –Cherokee Prayer

“Peace and happiness are available in every moment. Peace is every step. We shall walk hand in hand. There are no political solutions to spiritual problems. Remember: if the Creator put it there, it is in the right place. The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears. Tell your people that, since we were promised we should never be moved, we have been moved five times.” –An Indian Chief

Source: Collective Evolution