Native America

So scholars and indigenous people themselves have shown us the remarkable similarities in the religions of people across the Americas. Let me give you just six examples. In almost every one of these religions, there is some worshipping of the sky, the sky in terms of its height. The sky in terms of the energy and powers that are in the sky. Not only that, but there's almost everywhere in Americas some kind of sun worship. Sun worship is because the sun is so powerful. It burns, but it also is crucial, they understand, to their own agriculture and to the lives that they live. Thirdly, and I think most outstanding, is the lunar worship that you see. And the reason that lunar worship, or the worship of the moon, is so essential to these cultures is it is from the moon that they got a sense of calendar. It's the passages of the moon in which people discovered the calendar, they discovered the repetition of the lunar cycles, and they began, throughout the Americas, to measure some of their own human lives and their ceremonies on the passage of the moon. The fourth outstanding symbol that is so important to almost all of these people is the power and meaning of water. Sacred water not only is something that is fertilizing, but it became an example of potential, out of which so much life comes. Fifthly, I think sacred trees are absolutely central to almost all of the Americas. Even in places where there are not that many trees, the idea of a flowering plant, that part of the earth which regenerates itself, shows up in the iconography, in the prayers, and in many of the symbols that you see in these places. And then, finally, I think the relationship with animals. Absolutely fundamental to the way in which American Native peoples think about themselves, identify themselves. With eagles, with jaguars, with ocelots, with spiders, with coyotes. These animals are not just something that's out there in nature, it's something in which human beings always came to understand that they had intimate relationships with. And I think you see in these six symbols patterns that were shared and fundamental to the lives of indigenous people from the earliest records that we have until today. Scientists are very impressed with the similarities that they find throughout the symbolic systems of settlements in North America and Mexico and in South America, and it's raised the question as to where did this similarity, not only in their thinking, but in the way they designed their communities, come from? How far back in history do we see this type of common symbolism? Some of the common symbols that are so outstanding is what we call the symbolism of the center. That is each of these communities is not only organized around some important ceremonial center, but they're monumental, they're huge. A great deal of human effort was put into building them, into designing them, into worshipping at them. What's also extremely interesting is that in every one of these cases, there's a notion of sacred caves. These sacred caves are not just places of darkness and danger, they're the places of creativity, out of which ancestors come, into which shamans go in order to get special messages that then organize the way the community worships and believes. There's also, in each of these cases, some profound connection with what takes place in the sky. These people were definitely stargazers, and they watched not only the patterns of the sun and the moon, but Mars, what we call Mars, the Pleiades, Venus, and other celestial objects and patterns. And what they did is they organized themselves in terms of time and space in relationship to the order of the sky. And they felt in each of these places that they had the ability to not only perceive what went on in caves and on hills and in the sky-- they could not only perceive it, they could replicate it in each of these communities. And this type of symbolism seems to have been shared throughout the Americas at different times and in very interesting ways.