Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands

1. The Enchanted Valley

Chapter 1 T H E E N C H A N T E D V A L L E Y We saw the Great Spirit’s work in almost everything: sun, moon, trees, wind, and mountains. Sometimes we approached him through these things. Was that so bad? —Walking Buffalo, Every Part of This Earth Is Sacred For most living creatures, certain places are special. Deep in our primate memory, we can recall a time when we cautiously made our way to a favorite pond or stream. There, life-giving water awaited us. Or maybe it was at the end of a day in the forest when we scurried about, looking for a hiding place to sleep, secure in some enclosed and protected space. These were special places, and as we developed as a species, our special places became sacred. Indeed, as our experience and explorations continued, we found physical settings that evoked all kinds of feelings—peace and serenity, pleasure and power, or a merging with nature. We learned that certain places like the caves at Altamira, or the peaks of Mount Shasta and Sinai, or the rivers of the Ganges and Amazon could bring us closer to the transcendental. We declared these places magical or sacred and built either on them or near them— churches, temples, and shrines. There are many kinds of sacred space and many reasons for 11 declaring a space sacred. Some places are sacred because they inspire us to great thoughts or transcendental feelings in their beauty or majesty. Yet other places manifest the spirit world in the unusual rock formations , plants, or animals that are found there, thus triggering in us a sense of mystery that can only be explained by the divine. J. Donald Hughes summed it up in the following way: “Sacred space is where human beings find a manifestation of divine power, where they experience a sense of connectedness to the universe. There, in some special way, spirit is present to them” (Hughes quoted in Suzuki and Knudtson 1992:152). The first step then, was to mark those places that were sacred. Where sacred space revealed itself, we built incredible structures like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, and countless other marvels. In essence, these structures identified and celebrated those places where the material world and the spirit world overlapped or merged into one another. In such places, priests, medicine men, and magicians were able to transcend the boundaries of the material world and normal consciousness and enter the world of spirit. As explained by Nigel Pennick, “where the boundaries between the material and non-material, the living and the dead, past, present, and future, are thin or confused, are the places where shamanism, the oracular arts and sacred rites are best performed ”(Pennick 1989:106). The Hopewell, too, had their sacred places where they made contact with the spirit world. And it was in those places that they built their ceremonial centers, geometric earthworks, and burial mounds. By looking at how such man-made features relate to the surrounding land, we can surmise that the Hopewell found the sacred manifested in many of the same places that humanity has found special since the beginning. Such places include the locus of intersecting physiographic areas and biotic zones, near certain rivers, at or near river confluences, near special outcroppings of rock, and on certain hilltops. As we will see, there is something special in the immediate area of each and every Hopewell earthwork, something special that suggests the sacred, or the transcendental . 12 p h y s i c a l pa r a m e t e r s intersecting physiographic and biotic zones Sometimes it happens that an entire large-scale area is special. Shangri-la and the Garden of Eden come to mind. But closer to home, the Grand Canyon, the Niagara Gorge, and the Shenandoah Valley are also areas that evoke feelings of specialness. I mention these places in particular because what they have in common is that they are valleys of one sort or another. We like valleys. We enjoy their scenic views and cherish their promise of serenity. Perhaps the feeling goes back again to a primate sense of protectedness in space that is enclosed, whether by mountains, walls, or other kinds of boundaries. So, too, it might have been for at least one group of Hopewell people who centered their culture...