Faith Works 9-20-24

Faith Works 9-20-24

Jeff Gill

Intervals of reflection, looking back, looking ahead
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This week marks one year since the World Heritage List declaration added the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, including our own Newark Earthworks, to the global roster of enduringly significant sites.

On Saturday, Sept. 21, there's a program at the Great Circle Museum, off Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, to officially unveil a plaque marking World Heritage List status, putting us in a distinguished category of locations alongside Mammoth Cave and the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall and a series of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. We are the 25th World Heritage Site in the United States.

The unveiling and speakers are at 10:30 am on Saturday morning, with tours of the Great Circle afterwards, and at 1:00 pm I will be taking anyone interested "off site," as we walk north into Newark and look for "remnants" of the once four and a half square mile complex of interconnected geometric earthworks.

That walking tour takes about three hours and starts and ends at the Great Circle Museum, covering some three and a half miles, mostly of sidewalk and alley. I recommend you bring water, and a hat perhaps: very little shade along the way! But the route is mostly level, and it's no spoiler to tell you we will see a number of bits and pieces and fragments and remnants of the walls and pathways and mounds once dominant between Raccoon Creek and Ramp Creek.

There are events planned for October, around the Octagon open house during the day on Sunday, the 20th, and later that evening as we begin having moonrises along the core alignment of that element of the earthworks complex.

As I've been contemplating in the last couple of columns, it occurred to me that the Newark Earthworks have been around for about a hundred of the 18.6 year lunar cycles they mark (among multiple other functions, no doubt). As scholars have noted, the Native American builders in the Hopewell Culture era had to have watched and monitored and recorded the lunar intervals over some time, at least three full cycles, to have then built what they did at the Octagon. So I claim no precision around my hundred intervals marked silently by the geometric figures west of 30th St.

What I do know is that as I see many in my demographic cohort talk about how "age is just a number, and mine is unlisted," along with other age-defying exhortations, I find it bracing to think about how brief my own span is against the backdrop of these ancient works. Last week I referred to it as "humbling, and I would also say inspiring."

My religious faith is tied in many ways to events of two thousand years past, and I've heard preachers talk about "a hundred generations" between the time of Jesus and our own. We come from a generation, we see . . . what? Three generations or four pass us by, and we have some sense of the passage of time from them. But it is so partial, so limited; our awareness is of a small circle of illumination cast around the place where we currently stand.

There were some in our community who asked when tens of millions of dollars were spent to restore our 1876 courthouse: why not tear it down, and spend the same amount to build a new one, which might be easier to adapt and occupy into the coming century? It's an argument, and one I know our leaders did consider warily.

Their decision in the end, though, I think was wise. We preserve from the past to give us perspective in the present. The future will keep coming at us, but the newest answer is not always the right one. It helps to keep some ancient wisdom on hand.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been around a few generations. Tell him what you're glad to see past at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 9-13-24

Faith Works 9-13-24

Jeff Gill

When you are a generation, marking time
___

When I was talking last week about the span of generations, we were looking past the ubiquitous Baby Boom, to Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen Z.

They're now watching children grow up, kids who are definite "digital natives," always having known not just the internet but smartphones: Generation Alpha has been proposed for those born since 2010, a step into the Greek alphabet. 

Other than these demographic labels, how do we mark the sequence of generations? There's calendars on the wall, and having one up probably dates you right there. Some of us watch our hair turn white, others haunt cemeteries, but all of us note the passage of time by some mental map, using relatives perhaps as our benchmarks, grandparents past and aging aunts and uncles, warily gauging our own relative youth against those newer on the scene.

Which is where I find myself reflecting on the Newark Earthworks, and how the vast landscape constructed by Native Americans here some two thousand years ago can fulfill a number of purposes, both spiritual and practical, and maybe occasionally both at the same time.

As you may know, the central alignment of the Octagon, through where it is connected to Observatory Circle, points from the high mound at the southwestern corner of the earthworks along the symmetry axis of the double geometric enclosure, to a point on the northeast horizon that our moon only reaches every 18.6 years.

Now, the rise point of the moon swings back and forth, south to north again, like a horizontal pendulum from a set observation point, like the logically named Observatory Mound. The sun does the same back and forth, only it takes a year to make an arc from northernmost to southernmost and back again, solstice to solstice.

The moondance is more complicated, swinging back and forth in terms of the rise point on the horizon over 28 days. Then each 28 day cycle expands and contracts, with the peaks approached ever more nearly until the true maximum, then swaying back and forth, retreating progressively in the same stately pattern. So while there's a true northernmost, there are a number of moonrises leading up to and afterwards which are so close you can barely detect the difference. Call them a dozen or so in total when you could see the alignment at its peak, along the architecture.

In any case, you only get a handful of chances, themselves subject to clouds and fog canceling the viewing for all but a few, but once a . . . generation? A time or two to mark the cycle then 18.6 years to wait for it again.

When Brad Lepper pointed out the Hively and Horn archaeo-astronomical research which first revealed this alignment to us, we quickly calculated when the Newark Earthworks would witness it next. It was frustrating in 1989 to realize it had just peaked a couple of years ago, and the cycle was now narrowing. We worked and waited to 2005 & 2006, and had some limited opportunities to see the earthworks stand witness to the astronomical moments it was built to mark.

It has been my privilege to see two cycles of the Moon's movements, and as we come up to the alignments coming into view during the end of 2024 and through 2025, I hope to live into a third.

That's three cycles of what I realize is about a hundred that the Newark Earthworks have marked. Just a few ticks on this cosmic clockwork of light and shadow, walls and enclosed areas, negative space and vertical elevations. A fourth I am unlikely to experience in full.

These lunar cycles, so memorialized, are generations of a sort, placing us in time, as well as shaping space. Humbling, and I would also say inspiring.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware the clock is ticking. Tell him how you make the most of your time at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.