Mythperceptions: the Night Sky and the Mystery of Chaco

While camping at Chaco Culture National Historic Park recently, I attended a fascinating presentation on archeoastronomy by Park Ranger G.B. Cornucopia.

Archeoastronomy is where study of ancient culture meets study of the stars.  Though it suffers as a discipline of ill repute among scholars of hard sciences such as physics and traditional astronomy, archeoastronomy offers the mythically minded a never-ending source of wonder and inspiration.  It may also be the only discipline that can solve the mysteries of Chaco Canyon:  Why was this vast complex of ceremonial structures built over a period of 300 years, beginning some 1200 years ago, where no known civilization had previously existed?  Why are there so many architectural features that reveal themselves only twice a year?  Why was it so suddenly abandoned, and where did all the people go?  I will leave it to you to visit Chaco and answer these questions for yourself, but here’s what I found in my own limited field study.

First, there’s all those kivas, which, through contemporary Native American culture, we associate with places of sacred ritual.  Chaco has more kivas than we have stores at an outlet mall—and those are just the ones that we’ve discovered.  Many more kivas undoubtedly lie beneath the desert floor, hidden from view by the ever-shifting sands of time that eventually bury all of man’s worldly endeavors.  Most of the kivas we’ve unearthed at Chaco are small, capable of holding only a few dozen people; however, a couple of the Great Kivas are truly immense, with seating for hundreds.  But who’s to say these people were sitting around, waiting to have their religion handed to them like we do?  I mean, who would trek hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere, braving some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, just to sit there and listen to someone sermonize?  Not me, man!

And I don’t believe the Chacoans did either: I think they rocked the house.  See those square structures on the floor of the Great Kiva?  We believe those are the remains of foot drums, massive stone drum shells that were likely covered with planks of imported wood to amplify the seismic sound of celebrants doing the beatific stomp.  I think they took and ate the mescaline host, drank from the common cup of psilocybin wine, and arose as one to dance their bliss.  Put your ear to the ground today and you can almost hear the reverberations still resounding from their hippy-hippy shake.

 Then there’s all those windowless rooms with doors so small as to be completely impractical for anything but darkness and seclusion.  Some scholars have suggested they may have been used for storing grain.  Yeah, right.  What else are you going to do after a night of non-stop ecstatic dancing but offer some horizontal prayers to the gods and goddesses of fertility?  We should be sampling those rooms for ancestral DNA, not wasting our time and grant funding in search of nonexistent pottery sherds…

Finally, there’s the sky above.  It was during Ranger Cornucopia’s presentation on the night sky that it all came together for me.  He’d been projecting pictures of spiral petroglyphs lit with but a single ray of sunshine that appears only at dawn on the equinox.  He showed us the so-called Supernova Pictograph that I myself would photograph the following day.  Chacoans were clearly fascinated by the night sky, and they felt compelled to incorporate their understanding of astronomy into the earthly environment around them.  Then the Ranger put up his concluding slide, an inscription of Chuang Tzu and a picture of the night sky over Chaco Canyon.  Kokopelli danced and played his magic flute in the eastern sky, a constellation so huge that our own Orion was but a small part of this pied piper of the night. 

I mistrusted my eyes.  I wondered, Is Kokopelli a constellation?  This was no childish stick figure like the Big Dipper.  The Kokopelli that I saw in the stars on that stucco screen had dimension, contouring, and shading—a level of detail that requires many more stars than can ever be seen in hazy, humid skies or near any sources of light pollution.  It requires an extremely dry atmosphere at high elevation, well removed from all population centers.  It requires, in fact, a place like Chaco, circa 850 A.D.  Could it be that other peoples have seen more elaborate and far more sophisticated figures in the night sky than we?  After my hike the next day, I tracked down Ranger Cornucopia, and I asked him about it.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his chin in thought, “Kokopelli is one of a class of mythical figures known as the humpbacks, and there are two recognized humpback constellations.  Neither one is in the vicinity of Orion though…”

We pulled up Cornucopia’s slide from the night before on his computer.  “See?” I exclaimed, motioning toward the monitor.  “There’s his flute pointing down at the horizon; those are his legs, and here are those wacky protrusions that are always on Kokopelli’s head and back!”

“Hmm…” the Ranger intoned.  “I’m not sure I see it, but you can pretty much see anything you want in the stars.”

Okay, so my discovery will apparently not make next year’s issue of Archeoastronomy.  For me though, it illuminates the Hopi creation myth in which Kokopelli calls the people, who emerge as ants from the underworld.  Where else could he do this but from the eastern sky?  And who are the people but those planets so soon to rise like ants from the underworld, the realm below the horizon?

You need not accept my theory, but you can trust me in this:  Once you’ve seen that funky humpback blowin’ his horn in the night, all you’ll wanna do is dance, dance, dance!