Chief Arvol Looking Horse Calls for Unity

All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer: Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, calls on people from around the globe to gather at sacred places on June 21 and join in prayer for the healing and protection of Grandmother Earth.
 

June 21, 2022
 

We warned that one day you would not be able to control what you have created, that day is here. Now we must unite once again to create an energy shift upon Grandmother Earth. She cannot take any more impact from all the selfish decisions being made.
 

We have come to that place in this time upon Earth, to now make a stand together. To unite -- each in our own sacred life-ways we have chosen to walk, whatever religion or belief, go to your sacred spaces and join us in these special prayers for the Earth on June 21st. It has been proven we can create miracles when we unite spiritually.
 

Many white animals have shown their sacred color throughout the world now, and they continue to communicate that we are at the crossroads. We have walked through two years of losing many relatives through a terrible disease, and so have the animals and plant life also continue to suffer. The imbalance of Mni wic'oni (water of life) causing droughts and fires to severe flooding is everywhere, and I feel more suffering is to come from all these poor choices that are being made.
 

I humbly request a time from each of the two legged in this world to send a prayer to heal our precious Earth and the balance of Mni wic'oni to be restored. Begin to prepare in your homelands to unite -- All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer -- for the sake of Grandmother Earth, our source of life not a resource.
 

In a sacred hoop of life where there is no ending in no beginning.
Chief Arvol Looking Horse
19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe

 

Source: Last Real Indians

5,000-Year-Old Drum Discovered in Britain

A Stonehenge-era chalk drum is the "most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years," according to the British Museum. The 5,000-year-old drum, discovered within an ancient children's burial site, is going on display for the first time. It will be unveiled, six years after its discovery, as part of the "World of Stonehenge" exhibition at the British Museum.
 

The drum was found on a country estate near the village of Burton Agnes in East Yorkshire, England in 2015 when a routine excavation had to be carried out so the owners could erect a structure. During the routine excavation, a team of archaeologists with the independent company Allen Archaeology found an ancient burial site. Within the burial site were the remains of three children, aged 3 to 12, whose bones had been intertwined for millennia.
 

"They were cuddling," according to Mark Allen, the founder of Allen Archaeology. The drum was placed above the head of the eldest child, along with a chalk ball and a polished bone pin. Archeologists do not believe the drum was used as a musical instrument despite the name. It was more likely a piece of sculptural art, a talisman, or, perhaps, a toy for the children. The grave is a rare find, because ancient people in Neolithic Britain would usually leave bodies for cremation or to be eaten by crows.
 

And the drum is so significant because it is "one of the most elaborately decorated objects of this period found anywhere in Britain and Ireland," the British Museum said. The carvings on the drum, which show spirals and triangles, feature a "butterfly" motif. They are artistically similar to other objects found at Neolithic sites in Scotland and Ireland, Wilkin said, suggesting that prehistoric communities were in communication with each other despite significant geographical distances.
 

"This drum is particularly intriguing, because it basically encompasses a sort of artistic language that we see throughout the British Isles at this time, and we're talking 5,000 years ago," project curator Jennifer Wexler said. The discovery comes more than 100 years since the unearthing of the Folkton Drums. Three similar chalk drums were found in the village of Folkton -- around 15 miles from Burton Agnes -- in 1889. "We've been waiting for over 100 years for another one of these amazing objects to come up, and for it to come up with children -- again -- is astonishing," Wilkin said.

The Lost Art of Resurrection

An excerpt from my memoir, Riding Spirit Horse: A Journey into Shamanism.

 

Like a golden luminous jewel, Palenque perches above the lush tropical rainforest in the foothills of the Chiapas Highlands of southern Mexico. Humid air hangs heavy in this jungle acropolis overlooking the coastal plains of the state of Tabasco. Shrouded in morning jungle mists and echoing to a dawn chorus of howler monkeys and parrots, this temple city has a serene, mystical atmosphere. In antiquity, the Maya city was known as Lakamha, meaning "big waters." Tranquil spring-fed streams meander through the city and the temple summits offer spectacular views of the ruins and surrounding jungle. Flourishing in the seventh century, Palenque is an architectural masterpiece of unsurpassed beauty and spiritual force.

Palenque's most prominent structure is the Temple of the Inscriptions. The elegant temple crowns an imposing eight-stepped pyramid 75 feet above a great plaza. The temple gets its name from hieroglyphic inscriptions on three stone tablets, known as the East Tablet, the Central Tablet and the West Tablet, on the structure's inner walls. These large carved tablets emphasize the idea that events that happened in the past will be repeated on the same calendar date. The edifice was specifically built as the funerary monument for K'inich Janaab' Pakal, also known as Pakal the Great, ruler of Palenque in the seventh century.
 

Deep in the heart of the pyramid, Pakal's remains were found in a stone sarcophagus, wearing a mosaic jade death mask and elaborate jade jewelry. The intricate carving on the top of the seven-ton sarcophagus lid itself is an iconic piece of Classic Maya art and was crucial to understanding how the ancient Maya viewed death and rebirth. The magnificent bas-relief shows the cross-shaped World Tree -- which manifests in the dark night sky as the Milky Way or "White Road" to the Underworld -- and Pakal's relationship to it in death. The king is depicted at the moment of his divine resurrection in the unen or infant form of the lightning deity K'awiil, ascending from the Underworld on the starry Milky Way road to paradise and eternal life.
 

At Palenque, the Maya carefully encoded instructions for gaining eternal life in their architecture, art and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The Maya believed that the real purpose of our lives is to grow ourselves into godlike beings of power and beauty. Survival of the personal aspect of the soul was the goal for Maya shamans. They believed that there are two souls. Every human being has a "life soul," one that is linked to the body and that, should it depart the body, would cause death. It remains within the body until the moment of death. There is also a second soul, or "free soul." The free soul can roam free from the body without harming the person. It corresponds to the dream or astral body. Upon death, it journeys to the pool of souls from whence it may reach back to us and communicate with us through portals to the Underworld -- caves and pyramids.
 

The resurrection of the free soul was what the ancient Maya shamans hoped to achieve. The Maya believed the soul to be regenerative to its core; ultimately its purpose is to regenerate itself. The human soul manifested from the Otherworld paradise through the portal jaws of the great Vision Serpent. If it succeeded in growing into its divine potential by nurturing itself through education and ecstatic bonding with the gods, it could recreate itself after death wearing its own individual "face," then dance forever on the surface of the infinite otherworldly sea. The lightning-serpent energy that fueled the soul's resurrection came from the rain deity K'awiil.
 

The Maya shamans believed death is "behind the times," caught up in a previous and less advanced era, lacking knowledge of the art of resurrection. There is a dramatic difference between the idea of resurrection and a belief in the soul's immortality. Resurrection -- raising up again -- means that something has truly died and then brought back to life. Immortality, on the other hand, assumes unbroken continuity of the soul's existence after the death of the body.
 

The ancient shamans of Palenque built a resurrection generator on a large elevated plaza in the southeast corner of the city surrounded by jungle covered hills. Archaeologists call this ch'ulel "power plant" the Cross Group or Temple of the Cross complex. It is made up of three pyramid temples arranged in a triangular pattern. The shaman architects who designed the Cross Group believed they had discovered the earthly site of the three hearthstones of creation. In Maya cosmology, a triangle of three stars in the Orion constellation represents the hearthstones of the cosmic fire the gods had set to begin the present world age. Using geomantic divination, they detected the location of the invisible stones and built the temples over them, forming the shamanic infrastructure that powered the resurrection process.
 

The Temple of the Cross is the largest and most significant structure. They placed it on a hill at the northern apex of the cosmic hearth. On the inside back wall of the temple sanctuary, they installed a carved stone tablet depicting the branching World Tree at the moment the Maize God lifted it to the sky. At the western corner of the triangle, they constructed the Temple of the Sun and erected a tablet on the back wall portraying warfare, human sacrifice and a shield adorned with the Jaguar Sun God. At the eastern corner of the hearth, they built the Temple of the Foliated Cross honoring the deity Unen K'awiil, a personification of young maize, and placed within it a tablet showing the World Tree as a maize plant. It depicts King Pakal, wrapped in his death shroud, rising up from the Underworld in his "resurrection body."
 

The shaman-astronomers arranged the pyramids so that as the night sky wheeled through its yearly cycle to reenact the events of creation, the three temples would engage this celestial pattern and reactivate the sacred time of that first awakening. On August 13, a date the Maya associate with creation, the night sky goes through a cycle from dusk to dawn that recounts the story of the transition from the third world into the fourth world when humans were created. During that evening, when the stars and constellations took up their creation-resurrection positions, and the glowing Milky Way/World Tree rose in the heavens, the temple complex came alive with Otherworldly forces.