Children of four want to know where is the switchto turn the moon on and off (17).
-R.D.Laing, The Voice of Experience
I awake in the middle of a dream a couple hours before dawn. My body must still contain the memory of yesterday's resolve because I throw off my covers before I am conscious of the thought that today is the autumnal equinox, and I want to greet the sun as it rises above the trees surrounding the Indian mound complex called Fort Ancient. I had been there two months ago for a short visit on my way south. Today I plan on staying the day. Knowing I can arrive before the sun, I prepare for the hour's drive through suburbs and farm country.
I leave the Dayton suburban neighborhood where my parents moved to fifty years ago, where I lived as a child, where my mother still lives. I head south toward Cincinnati, then east on Interstate 71. Only a couple miles from Exit 32 is the mound complex. I arrive at the parking lot in front of the small museum and gift shop, and I wait.
I'm not waiting for anything in particular, not even the rising of the sun. There are still a few bats flying about seeking insects. Somewhere in the trees a couple hundred feet from the parking lot an owl is calling. I realize I am waiting for the sounds of the end of summer.
The Hopewell Indians 2000 years ago must have listened for these sounds. They had their solar and lunar observatories; they knew the measure of the stars. By many signs they knew when the day and the night were equally balanced. I speculate that they knew when they, themselves, were so balanced. They also must have known so much more than we know of the sounds signifying that balance, the time of summer's ending marked by the birds and insects as well as the sight of the sun, moon, stars, flowers, and the leaves of the trees.
The sky clears, but the radio news had forecast rain and more cool weather. I walk into the park, making my way from the northern section through the narrow middle into the southern. Walking through the narrows confirms what I had suspected about the shape of this enclosure. The chill moves me along to the edge overlooking the river a couple hundred feet below. I walk the mile and a half back to my car, crawl into the back seat, cover myself with a blanket, and I fall asleep.
When I awaken, the sun is high in the sky; the clouds have yet to return, proving the weatherman wrong again. I drive out of the lot, my being there and leaving when I do probably puzzling the young woman collecting money at the park entrance. I park along the road and walk down to the river below Fort Ancient. I have come only to listen. The day is warm enough for the insects, and they have begun their singing. The locusts fill the sound around the water. The gray grasshoppers, the Carolina locust, Dissosteira carolina, flutter by a few feet over the ground. The field I walk through was not a field then, but somewhere nearby there were cleared grounds that attracted grasshoppers. Two thousand years ago the same sounds were heard and recognized as a sign of another summer ending.
The ending is all embracing: I walk into the high pitched death chorus of the red-legged locust. Red-legged and short-horned, it is very common; however, very unusual are these end-of-the-season mating calls. The cricket cries out for life, yet through a process of metamorphosis it will soon die out of its present life form and into another. Near to this time of the year, Thoreau heard the crickets singing, and it disoriented his senses, producing in him a nearly mystical experience:
As my eye rested on the blossom of the meadow sweet in a hedge, I heard the note of an autumnal cricket, and was penetrated with the sense of autumn. Was it sound? or was it form? or was it scent? or was it flavor? (111)
Perhaps this is the death the cricket sings of: our normal discriminations-sound, sight, smell-merge into one. We are confused but somehow comforted. The sound the cricket makes is out of place because it is out of time. The sound is strange, and the sound is familiar.
What is strange in our experience is not problematic because of its strangeness. Such experience comes to us with a sign attached: Pay attention, I'm important. It is, instead, the familiar which poses the greatest challenge to us because of the ease with which we accommodate ourselves to experience modified by theory rather than remain essentially alive to our senses.
How to recognize and appreciate what is most familiar? I believe that the peoples who inhabited this place had not this problem. I believe they were somehow one with their bodies in ways we can only scarcely imagine except when reminded of times like those Thoreau recorded in his notebook. I believe it was easier for these people, perhaps it was the only way of living for them, because they never experienced distance, separation, alienation the way we have, the way we necessarily have. I believe we have been estranged, as the poet Charles Olson exclaimed, from what is most familiar. But what is most paradoxical, and comforting, is that the alienation is from the very thing allowing us to overcome this alienation-the written word. Writing has condemned us; writing is salvation.
I walk back into the park from the river below. I sit in the middle, the small area between the northern and southern enclosures. Writing is alienation; of this there is little doubt. It isolates us from the communal voice inherent in every act of conversation. Writing projects an audience for the language we set down on paper, and yet that audience is always distant. The audience is never the audience present while writing. Never is there any assurance that the audience is other than projections of our imagination, ghosts we hope will come to life through our dead words upon the page.
And yet we believe that writing is union, a bridge across space and time, as real as the one spanning the Little Miami a couple hundred yards from the mounds. Without that faith, that the imaginary bridge is real enough to support us, everything we write is a lie. And so is the life supporting the writing.
I think of writing, and I think of the sounds that surrounded me, that held me as a point in a field of living spirit in the space by the river. I think of writing as an act of faith, as a religious act. I think of writing as union, writing and the cricket provoking Thoreau into a rearranging of sense experience as profound as Rimbaud's process of becoming a visionary through "a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses" (xxx). Thoreau prepared himself for such visions through writing; his love of nature made possible through his writing. And it was an ardent love: his notebooks contain over two million words.
And it is through writing that I can see the cricket become the Ojibwa bebukowe, the humpbacked grasshopper man, who becomes kokopelli of the Hopi, the locust-hunter, flute player, lover. The sounds in the field have placed me in the field with the Native American Tricksters, Nanabush or Manabozho, and the Roman god Mercury and the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth-all gods of commerce, medicine, and the secrets of initiation, of shamanism, all gods of pictographs, gods of writing.
There is a connection with these gods and with Fort Ancient, the enclosure the least imaginative have called a defensive fortification, the enclosure that none I know of have seen for what is the most obvious, the most familiar. Fort Ancient is a birthing place, a place of twins, place of the uterus and afterbirth. Fort Ancient is the home-place; Fort Ancient is placenta.
Named for its fortified walls, and once fancifully compared to the American land masses-North, Middle, and South Americas-it can be more accurately seen as a birth place. The walls of the enclosure suggest the convoluted folds of the placenta. The northern enclosure with its opening at the top is a fallopian entry way. The small mound at the rounded end is a seed mound, both the beginning and ending of the rebirth of the tribe.
I imagine the journey initiates took down this passageway from the mound into the large northern enclosure of many acres. Hundreds of fires along the walls sparkle the light like the shimmering of afterbirth. Here the shaman assembles those about to undergo rites of initiation. These rounded enclosures are topological equivalents to the shapes found in the engraved birch bark that record the Ojibwa mide´wewin society initiation ceremonies. The mide´ songs tell the story of the passage of the gods and the heroes, but it is also tells the passage of those undergoing their own psychic journey to seek healing power as they enact the drama passed on to them by beings already full with power.
Initiates who participate in this symbolic rebirthing are given a migris shell, a model of the vagina. One of the songs corresponding to the migris shell pictograph enforces this connection with its repeated refrain: "My body is like unto you" (Mallery I 241). The shaman power figure in this song is Otter, and his song is accompanied by glyphs indicating water, both the surrendering and awakening to the principal non-resistance: "I am floating down smoothly (241)".
It was Otter to whom the Great Spirit gave the secrets of the Mide´wiwin. He pitied the Indians living in sickness and distress and gave to Otter the secrets of healing medicine. Otter is the diver at home in the waters; and as he rises, breaking surface for breath, he provides a resting place for the tribe in its migrations (Grim 151). The myth, then, links tribal search for home with healing; the shaman of the mide´ rites provides a way for the tribe to arrive at a place where physical and psychic needs merge. And this place is placenta.
...
FALLING WOMAN
There is an Iroquois tale called "The Woman Who Fell from the Sky" describing the creation of the universe and the beginning of the human race. The story connects us to the outer world of sky and earth, but it also connects us to the inner-our bodies, the universal uterine journey.
The setting is of another world above the rim encircling the sky. A young woman marries an older man, a wise man, shaman; perhaps he is her father, or perhaps she finds a man other than her husband to mate with. The important point is that she violates taboo. She is, in her own way, a trickster disrupting the tribal certainty that leads to complacency and stagnation. It is she who takes the responsibility for the breakthrough into a different consciousness. Her breaking the bonds holding the society in place also uproots the world tree, and the woman is flung down through the opening in the sky.
The animal spirits break her fall. The ducks fly below her easing her down to the waters. In effect, she is a cosmic "egg," containing the seed of new life which must attach to a place of nourishment. It is the earth she needs, and her needs are the needs of all. Animals volunteer to dive down for her to seek the earth; finally, it is muskrat who rises dead to the surface but in whose claws there is enough dirt for the shaman to re-make the world. The earth grows as she walks upon it, and turtle volunteers to support the new land upon his back. The resulting harmonious place becomes Turtle Island.
Then she gives birth to a daughter.
Years later Wind impregnates this mother of all. She gives birth to twins, the larger and first born the tribal hero, the other a hardened, cruel being called Flint who in his hurry to be born cuts his way out from under the arm of the woman killing her and leaving grandmother as guardian of the race.
These twins are common to many cultures' creation stories. They are also recognized as integral to principles uncovered by the founders of modern psychology. Freud in a letter to Jung describes this twinning as having a physical basis, psyche built upon soma:
it¼occurs to me that such pairs consisting of a noble and a base part (usually brothers) are a motif running through all legend and literature¼.These ancient motifs are always being reinterpreted¼but what is their original source?¼The weaker twin, who dies first, is the placenta, or afterbirth, simply because it is regularly born along with the child by the same mother. (Laing 115)
Jung in his reply agreed, saying: "There are things whose only explanation is intrauterine¼" (116).
R.D. Laing sees these suggestions as validating his theory that the intrauterine experience is more basic than the phallocentrism of the freudians. To explain the primacy of this experience, Laing offers an account by Mick Csaky who re-lived a pre-birth experience while undergoing sensory deprivation in a tank of water simulating the uterine experience:
He floated, naked, on his back, in thickly salted water of blood temperature, slowly revolving in total darkness and total silence¼.He lost all his coordinates. His body dissolved and he fell "down to earth in a cloud of raindrops. It was as clear and simple as a schoolbook diagram: the water is drawn up from the sea by the sun and falls back as rain from the clouds into the sea or onto dry land."
He fell softly like a cloud, onto the rock of a canyon covered in the red dust, and little by little seeped down among the crevices. He slipped past fossils and strata of glinting crystalline forms¼.Time departed. He began to feel he was not alone¼.
"With a startling rush of recognition I cried out `John!' as I knew it was my twin brother John. We were floating together in the womb. The emotional impact of the encounter moved me greatly. I lay suspended like a jellyfish, with tears flowing freely" (148).
Laing speculates, and it is here after this long detour that I return to the Iroquois story, that Csaky's is a genuine experience not an hallucination:
If Csaky's intrauterine experience of his twin can be a re-experience, there is no firm rationale to prohibit the speculation that the experience of being a cloud falling, landing and subsiding into the earth is a replay of how it felt to fall, land and to subside into the endometrium.
If it were not so far-fetched, one would be tempted to entertain the thought that even such feelings as falling like a cloud gently onto red dust on rock, and sinking in, could be a replay of when he landed as a blastocyst on the surface of the endometrium and sank in through crevices in the rocks of columnar epithelial cells. (149)
I am no psychologist, but my readings of mythology teach me that it makes more sense to be "tempted" by Laing's doubtful explanation than to accept the phallic certainties of freudians. Instead of being fantasy, this memory of a cosmic journey we have all undertaken appears as the most likely explanation for the Iroquois myth and the most likely explanation for the enclosure which is by no means a fortification but is modeled on the most ancient of enclosures, the womb.
...
One octagonal outline embankment, according to the Whittlesey, Squier, and Davis rendering done in 1837-47, encloses fifty acres and attached to it by a banked pathway, like an umbilical cord, is a circular enclosed area of twenty acres. (149) -American Dawn
This is how Louis Brennan describes the Newark earthworks, but he could be writing about Fort Ancient. And it would be more appropriate since the enclosure in Newark has little of the uterine shape of Fort Ancient. The banked pathway attached to the upper enclosure suggests the umbilical; it may also be fallopian. I imagine it is both. I refuse to choose between the two related and equally suggestive possibilities, for it is the either / or logic that has kept the Fort Ancient enclosure from being recognized for what De-coo-dah said of it long ago-Moon City. It is not the place of the great battle as he believed; it is the feminine, the place of ritual, the place of the shamans, the re-birthing center.
There are pictographs of the Trickster / Creator Manabozho that show him wearing crescent shaped horns and holding a long umbilical serpent, uniting the moon and the serpent imagery. The horned-snake figure is a common one in early Indian art and in the stories of more recent tribal cultures. This serpent and moon connection indicates a refusal to split the psyche along lines of gender. The archaic consciousness is holistic not dualistic, and the figure who best embodies this wholeness is Manabozho, Trickster, Creator, and giver of the Great Medicine.
Manabozho is the culture-bearer, creator, and trickster because he consciously lives the pre-birth experience. He is the one who lives his other, his twin, or he lives in awareness of the other to teach that our split condition is not our real one. Appropriately, a legend attributes to him the origin of menstruation, as if the monthly reminder of blood associated with the moon is a gift recalling for us the blood of birth which joins us all in communal experience.
This uniting experience of birth is coupled with the resulting inevitability of the shared experience of death. And it is death that is also intimately associated with Manabozho, with Manabozho and his twin who is also the placenta, as the enclosures at Fort Ancient remind us.
This story goes that Manabozho had a younger brother who was a wolf. His brother dies, killed by underwater monsters. Manabozho dives several times under the waters. He succeeds in winning concessions from the underwater forces, sub-aquatic, sub-terranean, sub-conscious. They offer to return his brother to life. He refuses the offer. His grief is genuine, but he doesn't want his brother not to die. The younger brother's death is necessary for all of life to develop. Manabozho turns down immortality for his brother and for human beings so that they can have, instead, the rites that allow for real power, spiritual rebirth instead of the mere prolongation of living.
Manabozho's gift of death exemplifies all of his trickster qualities. It is his bitterest joke as well as his most profound and most playful. It is his denial of life to his little brother, the placenta that is also the avenue of life. What appears to die turns out to be in reality the opportunity for rebirth. Life becomes the way of dying; death the way of living. It is the shaman's way, and it is the lover's way, the uniting of these seeming opposites, the way of little deaths into life, the breaking of ego consciousness through love-making. And through these little deaths of the ego, it is also the buddha's way.
It's the buddha's way, the buddha's way. As I drive away from Fort Ancient through the twisting, turns of the road, I think "It's more than that." I think of this phrase as the car radio, in between selections of early rock and roll, announces that over seven per cent of the population believe that Elvis is still alive. "It's because of his twin," I say out loud. His twin who died at birth. Elvis never attained completion with his stardom. All the glitter, the sequined suits, the alcohol, the drugs were inadequate attempts to connect with that twin. And the people sense it: the hero can't die without that union.
I return to the Miamisburg mound before stopping back at my mother's place for supper. As I sit at the top of the mound and look out over the atomic weapons plant, I meditate on this phrase like it is a mantra, the buddha's way, the buddha's way. This breaking of the ego is necessary, but there is something else
more necessary. There is love. There is also the act of writing, where in its genuine fullness and completion the ego is surrendered to language itself. And there is something else. There is something. There is the Indians' way-Nanabush, the Trickster, Rabbit's way. It is each person's way. It is Christ's way.
In his discussion of the trickster Hare cycle, John Bierhorst, folklorist and collector of Native American myths, gets caught up in the controversy about origins, how the Indian stories might have been influenced by Christianity. He writes that "Christian elements may be detected in such a myth, and in fact the Winnebago who converted to the Peyote Religion around the turn of the century openly identified Hare with Christ" (221-2). This identification is understandable, and, more than that; it is completely natural.
Hare is Christ. Christ is Hare. The experience that joins them, that joins us to them, is common to us all; it is the experience of life in the uterus, life before bifurcation, cutting, splitting into warring selves. R.D. Laing explains it this way. He recounts the story of one of his clients experiencing two months of withdrawal from the normal functions of living. The man does little but sit or crouch on the floor. There he experiences new and revealing dramatic insights into his situation:
He looks on in bafflement as he becomes the Evil Serpent, Adam and Eve, and the Tree of Life, Christ and Judas, the self he has lost, his own double, his own ghost, a placenta without its foetus, the severed connections between them all, all in one.
The realization comes to him that he will not get out of what he is in until he becomes fully as a snake with its tail in its mouth, a complete intrauterine organism, before the umbilical serpent became evil, when Judas and Christ were blood brothers. (128)
This is the way. All the ways lead back. The serpent way, before the serpent became evil. It was Judas' way, only he was too caught up in remorse to see it, or if he saw it he was too unforgiving of himself to believe it. Instead he sought to re-connect himself to the uterine self through death. As the story goes, after he betrayed the Christ in himself, he betrayed his brother with a kiss, and they found him hanging from a tree with an umbilical rope around his neck, choking him, separating him from his breath, his in/spiration.
My next trip to the Indian Mounds will be to one only a couple hours away, to Adams County in south-central Ohio. There, coiled on a bluff above Brush Creek, waits the most impressive earthen effigy in the Americas, the Great Serpent Mound.
Works Cited
Brennan, Louis A. American Dawn, a New Model of American Pre-History. NY:
Macmillan, 1970.
Laing. R.D. The Voice of Experience. NY: Pantheon, 1982.
Mallery, Garrick Picture-Writing of the American Indians (Two Vols.). NY: Dover,
1972.
Rimbaud, Arthur The Illuminations. NY: New Directions, 1957.
Thoreau, Henry David The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Vol. 8, Boston: 1906.
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