Monday’s Total Eclipse is likely to be the most recorded event in human history. Millions of people arrayed along the shadow path from Oregon to South Carolina will watch and photograph the amazing spectacle that is totality. I’ll be among them. Millions more will watch the partial eclipse and never really understand what they have missed. If you have the opportunity to share in this experience but are not planning to go — I urge you to reconsider. Traffic will be crazy - the weather will be hot —consider packing some food and water and going anyway and try to get as close as you can to the center of the shadow path. If you can be there, you really don’t want to be left on the sidelines for this.
Archaeologists and Ethnologists know that similar historic and prehistoric total eclipses were of religious and political significance and prompted American Indian witnesses to record and respond to what they saw. Among the clearest evidence that Indians paid attention to total eclipses can be found in the Winter Counts, annular calendars kept by tribes living on the Plains during the 18th and 19th centuries.
On a special buffalo skin or deer hide, a pictograph was drawn marking a memorable event for each year. The pictographs start in the middle of the hide and spiral outward in a counterclockwise direction with a new entry made for each year. A particularly memorable event on the night of Nov. 12-13 1833 was recorded by all the different keepers on all the winter counts. The Leonid Meteor shower was so intense in 1833 — estimates suggest that 240,000 visible meteors were visible that night — that 1833 became known as ‘the year the stars fell’ — and that event allows all the Winter Counts to be cross dated. www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/...
In the summer of 1869 a Yanktonai Sioux band was camped near Ft. Peck in what is now eastern Montana. On August 7th they witnessed a total eclipse there. At that time the keeper of that band’s Winter Count was a man named Lone Dog, and he used a representation of the daytime sky during totality of that eclipse — a black circle and 2 red stars — to mark that year. As seen in the simulation shown here, during that eclipse above and to the left of the eclipsed sun, the planets Mars and Venus were visible during totality.
On January 1, 1889 a Total Eclipse visible across the western U.S. proved to be a religious experience. It provided an opportunity for an adept Northern Paiute man named Wovoka to embark on a remarkable spirit journey. When the eclipse began, Wovoka noticed and immediately fell into a trance during which he had an out of body religious experience. His spirit left his body and traveled to the above realm where he had an audience with the Great Spirit. An account of Wovoka’s spirit journey was recorded in an interview a few years later by the Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney books.google.com/.... According to Wovoka, “When the sun died, I went to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died long ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people” Thus began the final revival of the Ghost Dance — a religious movement that held the promise of environmental and cultural revitalization.
Wovoka’s experience was similar in many respects to that of an earlier Northern Paiute Ghost Dance Prophet, a man named Wodziwob . Wodziwob also entered into a trance sometime in 1869 during which he learned that “ Supreme Ruler – was then on his way with all the spirits of the departed dead to again reside upon this earth and change it back into a paradise. Life was to be eternal and no distinction was to exist between races. The timing of Wodziwob’s spirit journey is unclear, but it may well have happened during the Aug 7, Total Eclipse. Wovoka’s father was a disciple of Wodziwob so the similarities are more than a coincidence — they appear to be part of a pattern of belief.
Evidence for the political significance of Total Eclipses can be found in the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy was one of the world's oldest democracies. The original five members — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca struggled to form their confederacy and after years of negotiation and consultation finally consolidated their pact by the acceptance of the Seneca — who finally joined in response to a sign - a solar eclipse. — ratical.org/… The timing of that event seems problematic. Some researchers have suggested that the best eclipse match was an event on August 31, 1142, which seems two or three hundred years too early.
The Iroquois Confederacy was an important influence on the founders. The late Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), was aware of the connections between the Iroquois principles of governance and the U.S. Constitution and entered that into the record in 1988 www.senate.gov/.... Senator Inouye’s resolution notes that George Washington and Benjamine Franklin were among the constitutional framers “known to have greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.” One of those concepts, The Great Law of Peace, was especially significant, and inspirational, to the Founding Fathers indiancountrymedianetwork.com/....
Monday’s eclipse may not spawn a new religion or inspire a political revolution or peace, but it will be an awesome event. I hope many of you will be able to join in the experience and that where ever you watch from, that the skies are clear.