Of Darkness Deep & Beautiful

Image: Ryan Hutton (Unsplash)

Dark and starry skies are an earthling heritage that goes back millions of years. These days many in urban cultures don't even recognize the Milky Way when they see it.

According to Astronomy Magazine, darkness is healing for the world. It is only when the sun goes down and the blackness of night tiptoes in on its velvet paws that certain chemical reactions can take place that help cleanse the air of pollutants.

Trees, too, need the absence of sunlight (and the absence of much of our artificial light) to rest through the night. If they don't get this, their health can suffer as a sleep-deprived animal can suffer. It keeps turning out we Earth beings aren't so very different from each other after all.

In my experience, the deep darkness of winter nights offers some of the best stargazing opportunities of the year. Though often cold, sometimes downright frigid, the stars of December, January and February are unparalleled in their vivid beauty. I often wonder if I might actually enjoy Artic winters more than I might think. Round-the-clock night-time skies - who could beat the view?

Look up the English word "dark" in any thesaurus and you'll find all sorts of foreboding synonyms (the word "light" or "white" has the opposite). But actual darkness isn't terrible at all - it's a beautiful setting for some of the most spectacular displays revealing our place in the cosmos. Given the sheer volume of ancient observatories around the world, our ancestors seem to have been fully aware of this.

This time of year in particular, the time of the Winter Solstice, brings home for me both how much knowledge we have lost in these modern times and how vastly intricate our ancestors' understanding of the world was.

The Winter Solstice is likely one of the oldest holidays in human history, at least in the northern hemisphere. And numerous sites around the world mark this celebration from Stonehenge to the Nazca geoglyphs. In recent years scientists have also discovered stone circles in the Great Lakes that they believe to be ancient observatories likely marking such celestial passages as the solstices and maybe also the equinoxes. Now under the waters of Lakes Michigan and Huron as well as in the Straits of Mackinac, these stone circles would have been built some 10,000 years ago given that the lakebeds of today would have been dry, having not yet filled up with the water of the glacier melt as that massive iceform retreated.

Although not an expert in ancient star knowledge, I've led classes on the subject as an avid amateur researcher in the field. These lectures here, taken from my "Indigenous Star Knowledge" course, focus on some of the observatories built by Native peoples thousands of years ago here in this hemisphere. We take a look in particular at their relation to the Solstices. From the Sun Dagger in Chaco Canyon to the medicines wheels in the northern Great Plains, the intricate knowledge people used to have of celestial affairs is awe-inspiring. You may want to be sure to watch the end of Part 3 as we taken an aerial view of the Nazca geoglyphs using Google Earth.

The deep, dark heart of the winter is upon us - enjoy those beautiful skies!