CIRCLES AND SQUARES AND MEDICINE WHEELS
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2008, 8:58 PM
Subject: Circles and Squares and Medicine Wheels
ID: 262779

up here in the north country -- i came across a book with a powerful and deep breath of spirit --

when i get back to a stronger computer, i will ocr this complete introduction, all of it is worth reading a few times...

but today, i took a little time just type in by hand the essential elements of this discussion of Circles and Squares

which today i see -- as the absolute foundation of the most central and core issue of the "emerging new paradigm"

what is this "new paradigm"?

it is many many things -- but one of those things -- is that it is Whole Vision -- rather than the fragmented pieces of understanding that rule our western world today...

if we are going to respond to the call offered by Al Gore in his recent speech on global crisis -- or fully vitalize the vision of the new politics called for by Barack Obama -- we are going to master this new paradigm, this emerging new ontology of categories and wholeness...

not pieces, not little "bandaid solutions" -- but whole, inclusive, integral conceptions, grounded in earth and being, including all voices, fully embracing all of knowledge and mind and humanity...

this book, that i have found myself reading

is entitled "One is the Sun" -- by a lady author, Patricia Nell Warren, published in 1991, after 8 years of research, and a life lived in the region where the book is set...

It is -- about native/indigenous culture, and concerns many themes -- among them, the role and power and mystery of women -- and why and how some cultures have "hated women" -- or seen women as evil --

but the part that attracted me at first, and the part i wanted to send here -- is about the Circle and the Square, and how they fit or don't fit, and the meaning of these images --

In my opinion -- this is the core of the contemporary mystery.

This simple little ontology and metaphysical mystery, I believe, is the essence of the spiritual/conceptual breakthrough our souls are reaching for --

***

Just a fast review of some of the essential issues, clear enough I hope to be worth reading carefully...

One is the Sun, Patricia Nell Warren, Ballentine Books, New York, 1991, from the introduction, which provides some history and review of the actual novel itself, which is set in the mid 1800's -- around 1857.

*

Now, their faces, grainy and weathered like old cedar fence posts, wore thoughtful expressions and they studied their visitor.

The old couple were highly self-educated, with a river of information and life-experience that gathered streams flowing from both Europe and America. But their learning had escaped the notice of the university professors, and it had taken years for the young woman to find them. She had learned enough, and understood the seriousness of her quest enough, to bring a pouch of tobacco as an honoring gift.

So there she sat, with her bright eyes and her college degree, her tape recorder and her fresh box of blank cassettes, ready to talk with them about the "old days".

"Who built the mounds in the Deer Lodge Valley?" she had asked them.

By the 1980s, these little hillocks were so eroded that few in the state had ever though of them as human-made. Yet there they were -- scattered over a flat grassy prairie east of the Clark's Fork River. Now they were riddled with gopher holes, over-grazed by sheep, and the breezes that wafted over them carried the roar of passing trucks and cars on nearby Interstate 90.

....

"Ahey ... yes. Those mounds," offered the old man, "were built by a circle of people who called themselves the Black Lodge. Or sometimes the Deer Lodge. The building took place in the late seventeen-hundreds, or thereabouts."

Added the old woman:

"The last chief of the Deer Lodge was a woman named Earth Thunder. She came there in around 1857. A few years later, the Deer Lodge was destroyed."

The old man had gotten up and gone to the stove. There, he poured coffee and set three steaming mugs on the kitchen table.

"But," he continued, smiling, "if you want to understand anything about the Deer Lodge, or the times those people lived in, you can't just sit here and take notes. If you do, you won't understand. You must sit yourself within a different kind of thinking."

"Here is a practical example," the old woman grinned, eyes sparkling. "Today, many people have a thinking that is influenced by the fax machine. A person can fax a letter from San Francisco to Berlin in minutes. But a person must fight to imagine a time when a letter took six months to travel that far."

"When it comes to philosophy," added the old man, "the person who lives in the square mind of today will have a hard time imagining what the world is like for people who see all Life as Circles. Many of our scholars today have this problem constantly. When they study the so-called primitive peoples, or the peoples of ancient times, they believe that they understand the Circle mind. But they underestimate that their own thinking is square. So they translate everything through the square. Do you understand?"

"Uh -- kind of," said the young woman, frowning. "Well, not really."

...

You have come with respect, asking a serious question. We will tell you the story of the Deer Lodge. ...

"Our song begins in a year that as called 1857 by the Skunk people," said the old woman.

"The white-skinned people of North America were often called Skunks by some of the western tribes. This was because they had heard so many whites call each other by the derisive name of 'polecat'.

---

"Because of these different points of view, our vast and beautiful region of the North American continent was seen very differently by the Skunks and by the tribes.

"The two peoples even gave differing names to this region -- names that revealed much of the history and thinking of those peoples.

"Among some native peoples, the region was known as the Wyoming. The name could be translated as 'Land Where the Mother Goddess Is Loved." Other people called it the Wakananda, or the Manitouba. These, too, are names for 'Mother Goddess.'

"At one time, the vast radius of the Wyoming reached clear from the Southwest desert to the Canadian muskeg, and from the Sierra Nevada summits east to the Mississippi. By 1857, however, because of white-skinned incursions, it had shrunk to a small ragged disk in the area known today as Montana.

"However, to the many thousands of white-skinned emigrants, the same identical reach of Earth was 'the Golden West.'

"How was it possible for human beings to draw their lives from the same space of windswept prairies, sunny mountains, shadowed canyons and clean rivers, and yet see it with such radical differences of mind?

"Yet there was a huge paradox in the profound differences between Skunk thinking and Wyoming thinking. Many

"The Skunk image of the Golden West lay between two invisible lines that they called boundaries, drawing these across the Earth in their imaginations. To the north, running across vast prairies, was the boundary of a political image that they called Canada. To the south, meandering along a river they called the Rio Grande, was the boundary of another political image called Mexico.

"The Skunk people liked squares, and straight lines."

**

As the old man stopped to roll and light a cigarette, the old woman took up the song again, saying:

"To the human who studies Life deeply, the Circle comes before the Square.

"In geometry, only the circle makes it possible to draw a perfect square. And the Circle is always female - - a symbol of the moon-cycle of the woman, of the womb of the woman, that births all humans into Life. Round is also the Earth, who births all Life, and all the countless cycles of that Life. Round is her orbit about the Sun.

" In ancient times, the knowledge that can be extracted from the marriage of Circle with Square -- mathematics, writing, astronomy, medicine, geography and many others, was taught, and carried through the western world, by the great minds of the round temples.

"But in more recent times, Skunk religion and science had brutally severed its understanding of the Square -- which is male -- from the Circle -- which is female. In their minds, these people gave a lonely and sterile supremacy to the Square.

"And so, to the believers among the Skunks, Life was symbolized only by the square -- whether it was a 'square meal', or the 'foursquare gospel.' In the dictionary and the thesaurus, the word 'square' is synonym for goodness, justice, balance, straightforwardness, stable tradition.

"An honest look at the North American native peoples reveals that many of them hated females in the same way as did many Skunks of 1857. The customs and the beliefs of some of our brown-skinned ancestors show the same mix of ignorance and superstition as do the customs and beliefs of our white- skinned ancestors.

"However, there was one major difference.

"The Skunk attitudes were forged, like the iron torture-tools used on the bodies of women, by the hammers of a single great empire and a single powerful religion. This religion enforced every tenet of its belief through the civil government, the schools the penal code, the military.

"But in recent centuries, the many swarming native peoples and cultures of North America had never been crowded together within a single enforced foursquare mind. Mainly they had all pursued their destinies as independent circles, or leagues of circles. They warred with one another, but made little attempt to impose beliefs on one another. The Holy Roman Empire had no counterpart in North America.

"Consequently, there were tribes and bands of North American Indians where the Circle was still honored as the womb that births the Square.

"There, women held equal power with men in every field, from healing to education. Some of these tribes even had true democratic government, a thing unknown in Europe since ancient times. Temple- schools, in the form of circles of stone, were openly built on the American earth, and openly used for education and healing, at a time when such a thing was prohibited in Europe."

*

The old man poured himself more coffee, and took up the song.

"This bloody past touched everything in the Skunk world -- even the surveyors' art. Since all things female were see and enslaved and owned, the Earth too was seen as owned. The Skunks of 1857 preferred to divide their maps up into squares called sections, that measure one mile by one mile. Each square enclosed six hundred and forty acres, also a square unit of measure. In this way, their images of land ownership could be seen on paper.

"But to the tribes, the Wyoming could not be owned in this way. And though She was wild, she was far from 'unknown'. She was as familiar to them as the mother's breast is to the child's lips. The land was long trodden by their own feet, with a rich web of trade routes that rayed in all directions from its center at the Great Salt Lake-- even into the northern tundra and the Mexican mountains. In their minds, the shimmering spiderweb of roads formed a Circle, instead of a Square.

...

"Why were these North American tribes such a different breed than the ones in Central and South America, who had been so successfully yoked by Spain and Portugal? Perhaps it was because the northern tribes had experienced democratic government -- whereas the Indians of Central and South America were inured to slavery by their own native tyrannies.

"Many writings about the native peoples have tended to idealize them at the expense of the Skunks. However, the fact is that both the Skunk people and the Wyoming people were human beings -- neither bad nor good. More often than not, they got their feet tangled in the lariat of Life, instead of swinging it freely to capture destiny.

"Being humans, many of the native peoples wrote histories splashed with the same bloodstains of wealth and power as many Skunks. That they expressed their lust for power in Circles, instead of Squares, only goes to show that even the most noble teachings can be used for ignoble ends!"

***

(last words of the introductory section:)

The afternoon was passing.

For a few minutes, they fell silent, while the young woman put another cassette into her recorder.

Then, as the recorder clicked on, the old man continued:

"By 1857, the Mayan pioneers had lost their visibility as a people, and their southern blood coursed in the veins of many northern tribes. Their Mayan language was spoken of simply as 'the old prayer language.'

"But the learning that they had brought into the Wyoming could still be identified. This body of knowledge became known in the north as Medicine Wheels.

"For a long time, the teachers of these Wheels were greatly loved and respected among the northern peoples. However, the teachers also found bitter enemies in the north -- namely, those who owned slaves and despised women.

"The Wheels are a way for human beings to learn about themselves and their Mother Planet.

"Even mathematics -- that source from which all human knowledge rays out -- can be learned as a Wheel. There are elementary Wheels, for teaching children to see how Life Herself adds and subtracts, multiplies and divides. There are sophisticated Wheels for studying the human mind. There are Wheels of healing. There are Wheels for navigation, government, engineering and many other things that humans always need to do.

"The Wheel teachers loved the Wheel so much that they established an actual geographical wheel. There were four Medicine Lodges -- powerful camps of teachers and students, located at the four cardinal directions of the compass wheel. Different things were taught in each of the four Lodges. Today, you can still find the words for red, black, white and yellow in many western place-names. These are the colors that the southern temples had assigned to the four directions on the Wheel. There is the Colorado River, the Yellowstone River, the White River and many others.

"But, in the north, the Wheels were no longer translated into calendars of solid gold, round pyramids of stone, copal incense and shimmering quetzal feathers, as they were in the south. Instead, they were renewed into wild things of the Wyoming: into campfires, the stone bowls of Medicine Pipes, sweetgrass, leather teepees -- and circles of stone on the prairie.

"Invasion by Europeans meant new cycles of the old wars for the northern descendants of the Mayas.

"White-skinned settlers steamed across the Mississippi by the tens of thousands. Priests of the white- skinned religion built their first missions in the West. As the danger grew, the Medicine Wheel teachers had to fight, withdraw, regroup, rebuild. Certain families of the neighboring tribes still protected them. Yet their circle of influence grew smaller, and yet smaller.

Around 1800, as the new enemies closed about them, the teachers of the Wheels regrouped on last time.

"The last stand of the Great Teaching Wheel was located in a beauteous and rich country that is known today as our Montana.

"The south lodge was called the Red Lodge. It stood not far from the flowing hot waters of the great Fire Hole. The town of Red Lodge holds its memory on the map today.

"On the north rim of the circle, the White Lodge stood, braced in the winds of the high plains, on the Milk and White Clay rivers at the Canadian border.

"To the eat, the Yellow Lodge put up its teepees where the Yellowstone River sparkles in the morning sun as she flows east into the Missouri.

"And the Black Lodge -- sometimes called the Deer Lodge -- stood safe in the Deer Lodge Valley. This beautiful mountain basis is situated on the headwaters of the Columbia River. Through this valley ran the northern leg of the Salt Road, on its way to the Slave Lakes in Canada.

"These four major Lodges, like planets, had their moons in the form of smaller satellite Medicine Lodges scattered about the area. A few of their names would also find their way on the Skunk maps of paper.

"But as the eighteen-hundreds advanced, even this last circle began to be breached.

"As the Lodges disappeared, and the Wheel teachers were killed, and the knowledge was lost, the native peoples of the Wyoming began to sink to their own Dark Ages.

"It was fully as dark as the age of ignorance that had flooded Europe, when the ancients' learning was destroyed by the church."

*

As the tape recorder clicked off, the Sun stood just above the western mountains.

With the robins gone and every berry eaten, the ash tree had lifted her branches higher. She seemed to vibrate with excitement, like an eager child waiting for the first snow.

The young woman looked out at the setting sun, and ponderingly said, "Many of the things you tell me are not in the history books."

Busy washing their mugs at the sink, the old man said dryly over his shoulder, "A history book can give you the measure of the minds of its writers. And," he added, "of what they decided to leave out."

The old woman smiled. "The robins will dream with their crops full of berries tonight," she said. "Tomorrow they will begin their long journey, following the Sun."