Sacred Indigenous Mythology
God is Red, part four (a) - with Taylor Keen
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Trigger warning—this conversation has the potential to make you mad. It also has the potential to wake you up. It carries great medicine, if you let it. If you are uninterested in such an affair, move on. If you are open and your heart is willing to see the many-selves dancing about, take a gander.
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Taylor Keen returns for the fourth installment of the God is Red series to explore indigenous mythology, storytelling, and our cosmic origins carried in ancient rock art and cave paintings.
This is Part A of a two part sub-series :D Stay tuned!
Catch up on the God Is Red series!
Episode 1: Stewardship or Sovereignty?
Episode 2: Sacred Indigenous Agriculture
Episode 3: Why The Mother Will Live On
Transcript
Taylor Keen: 1:53
Brother, if I may begin with a little blessing here to set our tone and our mind and our hearts. Creator Spirit, we thank you for this wonderful time of year. We're thankful for the birds, we're thankful for the birds, we're thankful for the berries, we're thankful for all the gifts that Mother gives us. Creator Spirit, we ask that our props be bountiful and that our pursuits be true to the heart. True to the heart, creator Spirit, as we frame our minds around the power of stories, spirit, will you fill our hearts so that we can share them the way that our ancestors intended? I hope.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 2:42
Taylor, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Me too. I didn't know this was something that you and, I hope, taylor, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Me too, I didn't know this was something that you and I shared. This have you for what I think is the fourth iteration of this series, which, uh, I have to. I have to say, everybody is loving it. So I don't know if we need to turn this into a yearly thing, or or what, but, uh, your words and the soul and heart behind them, I think, have helped many people, and so for that, thank you.
Taylor Keen: 3:29
Thank you for having me. Let me be a part of your community.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 3:35
Thank you for being a part, um, so much of the consciousness, I think, uh, around this modern world, uh, world that I think you and I to some degree occupy different aspects of Green climate, chaos, fighting, you know, world changers, people who give a damn. I guess Maybe that's our general community. I think so many of us look towards the innovations that bring us into the future and we so seldomly turn to those who hold the answers, because why would we do that? I think a lot could be said there, and I think that's also the power of story, and I don't want to get into it too quickly. And I think that's also the power of story and I don't want to get into it too quickly, but I think, to some very large degree, I think a lot of people think story is, to some degree, escapism Stories to get lost in stories, to daydream and dawdle and lull our days when we want to get away from the pain of whatever that surrounds us. But I don't think that's the full truth of story. Um, I think it's also here to wake us up, to startle us, to remind us, to remember us, not just to cause that remembering, but to literally stitch us back together again. Um, and so I think I think we have a lot to talk about.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 5:00
I obviously will talk much more in the Western European Irish mythology world, even in the ancient Gaul region of Southeast France, where I got to spend some time looking at caves and partnering with a couple organizations over there back in 2013 and early 2014. And you'll obviously approach it from your own perspective and so I don't know, where do you uh, that's that's kind of the outline, a very rough and improper outline. But where do you want to start? Um, I understand you've been traveling and looking and thinking about picture cave and the omaha traditions and the mississippian cultures all across the plains, sure, sure.
Taylor Keen: 5:41
I just got back from giving a little chat conversation in St Louis with the Society of Archaeology at the Institute of Americas and it wasn't a huge crowd because of the heat and protests and all of what's going on in all the big cities in America, but it was a really good crowd and I got a chance to talk about my first book, rediscovering Turtle Island, and to dive a little bit deeper into understanding the iconography of a lot of the Mississippian rock art and we got a chance to go out to a couple of really cool sites. One in particular was I believe it's called Washington National Park, but just a tremendous amount of beautiful rock art and, uh, it was a really good primer, um, for what is hopefully going to happen next month and that will be my visit. Uh, finally, after a lot of anticipation and waiting and confusion, um, but I get to go into picture cave uh, just just under a month from now and, um, for all of your listeners, it's such an important site to the ancestors of the degiha. Degiha is a word, means that, uh, we are from here, and it was an ancient way that the Omaha and the Ponca, the Osage and the Kansan Quapaw would identify themselves to one another when they were in their homeland, and Picture Cave goes back around a little over a thousand years ago and prior to that, the ancestors of the Degiha.
Taylor Keen: 7:49
I believe that the common name of the singular tribe was Honga, which translates as from the one whom that we all descend, and we came out of the Ohio River Valley and the Mississippi River Valley somewhere around 400 or 500 Common Era and then to begin to make our way down the Ohio, or Ohia is what we call it in Omaha.
Taylor Keen: 8:19
It means the river that we passed, the river that we passed and eventually came to the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi and began to move up the Mississippi to what is present-day St Louis, somewhere around 900 or right around 1,000, which was right near the beginning of the Cahokian explosion.
Taylor Keen: 8:49
It was a smaller village and was occupied for quite a long time beforehand, but around 900 it began to become more of a ceremonial site and besides the Ohio and the Mississippi you have the Missouri River close and the Illinois close as well. So it became a trading empire, otherwise known as the Cahokian Empire, and many peoples were there, including the ancestors of the Degiha, including the ancestors of the Degiha, and it's a matter of anthropological debate about when the Degiha split up. There's a lot of different interpretations, but it appears to me that all of the ancestors of Degiha were in the Cahokian sphere of influence, and somewhere in an undisclosed location is Picture Cave, somewhere 70 miles within St Louis. I don't know if they're going to blindfold me when I get to go in or what. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be legally obliged not to tell where it's at.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 10:04
Could I interrupt you, just for our listeners' sakes? I know you and I have talked extensively about this off air. Why, why is picture caves so concealed and you don't have to get into some of the deeper, deeper shadows of the thing but rather privately owned auctions, things like this, of course.
Taylor Keen: 10:22
Yeah, that's part of the saga of Picture Cave. The present and the previous landowner have wanted to remain anonymous, as is with the location, for reasons that I don't understand, other than the fact that they just don't want all the fanfare, I assume. But the previous landowners held it for at least 50 years and it had been somewhat looted. Anthropological pottery and stuff that was on the ground was taken. There were a couple of the stellas that were chipped away and left on the ground, but for the most part it's all of the rock art within. It is very much intact and, going back to the 1990s, a team of anthropologists approached the landowner and persuaded them that it was a very important site and eventually they brought in radiocarbon dating techniques and began to realize the antiquity of the rock art that is in there. The Osage Indians at the point of contact were still in the area, as I mentioned. The Degihau Siouans were all in the area, degi Haasuyans were all in the area, the Omaha's and the Ponca's split off and by 1500 were at another site called Blood Run, which is near the resort of Okoboji, up near the Iowa and South Dakota border, and it was very close to the Pipestone Quarries. Pipestone is very important to indigenous peoples for religious objects as well as a place to put iconography of all the mythology that we're eventually going to dive into here, and the same with the iconography of the Rockhearted picture cave. There was a beautiful volume that was edited by Carol Diaz-Granados and a lot of contributing work from her husband, jim Duncan, james Duncan and a whole host of others that came out in 2015. The book was finished some years before that, but there was some debate over royalties and whatnot with the landowners, but it finally came out and what is encased on the walls are the most incredible and important Suian stories, and unfortunately, the patron and the landowner passed away around 2020.
Taylor Keen: 13:12
The Osages sought to buy it and I don't know how much they bid, but it was not enough, and eventually the children of the landowner, being a fractionated estate, did what a lot of families will do and they put it up for public auction, and the auctioneers did their best to try to vet any of the landowners to ensure that it would be protected. The challenge with sacred sites in America is, if it's in private hands, they can do whatever they want to with it. They can protect it, they can destroy it, they can open it to the public. They can make it a private museum, they can do whatever they want to, and the Osages ended up making quite the public stink about this private landowner buying it out from underneath them, although what they bid was not anywhere close to what it sold for. It sold for $2 million and because of the public outcry the land owner decided that it was probably best to just close it off to everyone for a while. And again, we don't know the motivations or the reasonings behind, but we do know that it's protected and about the next three or four years it remained closed.
Taylor Keen: 14:39
And eventually Dr Michael Fuller, who has become a close friend and colleague of mine. He had done quite a bit of the radiocarbon dating of the site and persuaded the team of the landowner to allow him access back in to do further studies. They allowed a rock art photographer, mike Chervenko, to go in as well and they let a fellow friend and author of his name is PD Newman. Newman and pd writes on the use of psychoactive plants and all around the world, but became very interested in the role of entheogens psychoactive plants in ancient native america and he wrote about the use of Datura in Picture Cave and they were intrigued by his research and let him in. And in between Dr Fuller and PD, I begged and pleaded to try to get access and finally got an answer within the last few weeks that they're going to let me go in to let me go in.
Taylor Keen: 15:56
This site is so important because of the stories that are encased in the iconography and the rock art primarily earth pigments, red ochre, charcoal and, more importantly, it details the genesis, the creation stories of the Suian peoples. You have the first father, sometimes known as White Plume, first mother she has many names Earth Mother, mother, earth Mother, corn, the old woman who never dies, and that they were created by Earthmaker from the upper realm and put here and eventually they began to interact with some of the deities from the upper realm and the lower realm. Of particular interest is the great serpent Some call it Underwater Panther, but it is the creator of all life and the creator of water and the chief of all the water spirits in the underworld and begins to tell their story of their six children. The oldest male is known as Morningstar Some of the tribes, like the Ho-Chunk, call him Redhorn and the eldest daughter was Evening Star and she was the mother of the Celestial Twins. They also have many names Thunder and Lightning Stone and the Dark Wolf Lodge Boy Spring Boy and Wolf Lodge Boy Spring Boy and they had mystical powers. And the rest of the iconography of Picture Cave goes into detail All of the adventures of First Father and his compatriots Red Horn, the Thunder Twins.
Taylor Keen: 17:51
Ultimately, the primary story is about first father intrigued with the powers of the lower realm, him being from the upper realm sent down a spirit wolf into the underworld to explore and encountered a water spirit that was in the form of a beaver, and it claimed the spirit wolf for its own and ended its life. First father went down searching for his spirit wolf, encountered the water spirit and through some trickery, the water spirits engaged First Father and his compatriots into some sort of tournament game. Some of the stories say it was involved gambling, others say it was a game like stickball your listeners would probably understand the reference to one of the variants, which is lacrosse and it was a game that was taken very seriously and the losing team, typically including the captain, which was First Father, in this case the Water Spirits won the tournament and First Father and all of his compatriots were beheaded and eventually First Father's soulless body floated back up to the upper realm, to the moon lodge of his wife, and of course she was grief stricken and distraught but angry as well. Distraught but angry as well. And she summoned her grandsons, the thunder twins, and painted them for war, equipped them with powerful weapons, including a ceremonial mace and a spear, and instructed them to come back with the head of first father. And so they descended to the lower realm with their powerful weapons and the medicine of First Mother, battled the water spirits, killed the water spirit that had killed their grandfather, and not only regained the head and the soul of First Father but also subdued the great serpent itself and returned back to the upper realm and to the moon lodge of their grandmother.
Taylor Keen: 20:19
And in a story of typical Mississippian warfare and conquest, they brought their captive. And it was a longstanding custom on the plains that captives could meet any number of fates. One would be to be killed, to be tortured, or if the one who lost someone very dear, if they wanted to accept the captive to be put in the place of the one that was lost, and that they could do that. The Great Serpent, as with a lot of the deities, could take many forms, including a human form. His name was Snakehide, and First Woman accepted him to be in the place of her slain husband, and she did this because she knew that the Great Serpent had all the powers of the lower realm and the ability to grant life. And so she accepted him in the place of First Father and thus was able to resurrect First Father again. And so that is the bulk of the stories. There's many smaller adventures of the Thunder Twins and Redhorn and first father, but all those stories are encased on the walls of Picture Cave.
Taylor Keen: 21:47
So for Zoon peoples like myself, as a descendant of the inhabitants of the big city of Cahokia and perhaps had a big hand in taking these stories and mortalizing them by putting them in the rock art in Picture Cave, it's a terribly important site and to many on the outside it would appear that its future, its fate, is in jeopardy because it's in unknown hands. I truly hope that my visit and all of my research will help to mend some of those misconceptions or hurts, and hopefully we'll be able to help figure out a way to make sure that it's preserved and all the rest of the descendants can have access to it as well. I guess the big analogy and this is where you can come in, brother but not nearly as old as the rock art in Northern Europe, but it comes to mind. Some of the images are similar to the rock art at Lascaux and Chauvet and Altamira in Spain, the others are in France.
Taylor Keen: 23:04
You know more about this than I do, but in the end mythology is something that's just common to all human beings and the more that I learned about it, it appears that our ancestors at some point marveled at the stars, the creation around us, and in some cases took plant medicines to enhance that marvel and wonder, to enhance that marvel and wonder, and they created stories out of the stars they were looking at and that became mythology. And that's common to any of our ancient societies. At the base of all the mythos of Greek lore is the same thing looking to the stars and telling stories. And the same happened with indigenous peoples and the same happened with our ancestors in Northern Europe too.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 24:03
It's always interesting. I don't know, I have a very peculiar perspective on it as a modern man. When I was a junior in high school, which many of our listeners know, and I've kind of written a book on it uh, just minimally touching it, and so there's some details out there that I'll distance myself from now because it's not important. Uh, you know, but I became very sick and was diagnosed with some serious health issues and, um, you know, still struggle with those things today and uh, and so I find my my days some, just it. It takes enough of my energy to survive and get to the day and harvest some food and, you know, have have some sort of energy and uh, it's unique perspective that I get to live in. It's a blessing from this perspective, uh, from this uh way of looking at it, because I often find myself thinking without air conditioning, without modern heat, without stick frame homes, without industrialism and commercialism and globalism, satisfying a lot of my basic needs, if I didn't have those things, would I still be an artist if I had to actually struggle to survive? And I don't mean that pre-industry, pre the industrial era, really pre-Western expansion, in the colonial period 14 through 1700s that life was difficult, unbelievably and arduous, and it was just a struggle to breathe and survive and find water, like no, no, that's not the point. But the point is, if we take our modern luxuries away, would I still have the desire to be an artist, to paint, to tell stories? And that is always a very strong thought for me because I want to believe, yes, but on my worst days, when I'm feeling like you know complete crap, and it's hard enough for me to do what I need to get done, I don't know. I don't spend my time writing or dreaming or painting or doing storytelling, bardic activities. I just don't find myself doing that. And so my point in saying all of that is to say I think quite often and I have for over a decade now about what actually led your ancestors, my ancestors, to tell these stories, to go into these caves or into these large stone areas, to paint randomly.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 26:17
I think some of it is. I truly believe some of it is some of the things that are painted, especially in the areas of the Doron Valley, where general, like the heart of France, southeast of France, that I got to participate and study back in 2013. Some of the images are just. They're just aesthetically beautiful, it's just, it's just aesthetic beauty, it's, it's, it's marvelous, it's the heart of the creator, just putting what they see on the walls.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 26:42
I have to believe that something some of it is, is, is absolutely from that, from that impetus, from that vein, and at the same time, like Picture Cave is an example, like other aspects, let's say, of Lascaux that I can discuss here it's heavily purposeful, it's a story, it's a record, it's memory, it's something very important being handed. And so why, what impetus, what reason did humanity have to go into these dark places, you know, without fluorescent lights, lighting them up, to then mix these earth pigment paints, these ochres, these charcoal-based right, like you're saying, and then to just paint them on the walls, like what drove us to do that. I mean, obviously you and I could discuss this and I think you and I would have very similar beliefs on the walls, like what drove us to do that. I mean, obviously you and I could discuss this and I think you and I would have very similar beliefs on the matter. It's because it was important, it's life. Stories are life to humanity.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 27:43
I think stories are life to many things, but we know our stories because we know ourselves, and so I would say that stories are very important to humanity and, in my opinion, also what makes us human? Stories, no-transcript, that's, it separates us, but that's that's not very intelligent. Um, number one, that would also mean that when we don't make tools, we're not human, which is a negative that doesn't make any sense, doesn't make any rational or logical sense, uh, but it takes out the spirit, it takes out the community, it takes out the culture, it takes out her genes, it takes out the spirit, it takes out the community, it takes out the culture, it takes out our genes, it takes out everything else that makes us human, which I think is well encapsulated and collected by stories. It roots us, it grounds us into the ecotone. It's living like ecotones are living, these stories, and so I think these stories matter. But let me ground us back Before we leave the ideas of Picture Cave.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 28:51
I have wanted to ask, and maybe you have some thoughts on this matter that you can put some words to. So these indigenous peoples are going up these river systems, they land, they find a cave and they paint a story, they tell a story, they hold that story in the heart of earth, in this cave, right In this very deep and dark and sacred place. They put that story there. Why do you think documenting this story was important to these peoples a thousand years ago?
Taylor Keen: 29:19
In one of our previous conversations we were talking about my first book. We talked about the earth diver myth and the antiquity of that and the universal nature to so many indigenous peoples in the Americas today, and my research ties it back to Siberia. So we're looking at somewhere between 15 and 23,000 years ago now when indigenous peoples crossed over the land bridge at the Bering Strait, beringia, maybe in canoes, following the Kelp Highway. We don't know how long, but that story is still in Siberia, with additional variations over time. So we're talking about at least a 10,000 to 20,000-year-old story. So if we're looking at what was immortalized on the walls at Picture Cave at 1,000 years ago, who knows how old these stories are? The portions of my new book where my head's been of late is exploring the antiquity of the plains through DNA studies. I've really enjoyed a book by Dr Jennifer Raff called Origin about the initial peopling of the Americas and we look at ancestors of indigenous peoples coming out of East Asia and northern Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. I think if I would have to pin Dr Raff down, I think she would probably give an answer between 14 and 20,000 years of when the ancestors, through DNA genetics, could tie to indigenous peoples. It would be somewhere around that time period. And what I've been exploring more recently is trying to understand the parallels of the story that I shared with you to the stories of Mesoamerica, in particular from the Mayans, and much of which was encapsulated in the Popol Vuh. You have the three realms, and first father and first mother, and the thunder twins and stickball games, and there's no question, at least from a cosmological perspective, that the two are intertwined. And in this example, if you're going to compare the Mississippian stories to the Mayan, the Mayan stories are older. So, understanding the migration patterns, which were complex, because sometimes people just went south, sometimes they went south and back north, but all Indigenous peoples have a core value of we're all related and the reality is that all of us are immigrants to one degree or another, even to the Indigenous peoples who came here tens of thousands of years ago. We came from somewhere else and migrated here.
Taylor Keen: 32:36
But I'm trying to pin down as much as I can, the true origins of these stories and where it comes from, and at a certain point it becomes overwhelming. Trying to understand it all Offline. You and I have discussed the work of hamlet's mill, yeah, which is a massive volume, but it appears to me that so many of the stories are all the same and we've discussed this before as well. But is there a principia theologia? Is there an original story that all of humanity comes from? But the reason to tell these stories is, at a certain point our ancestors look to the stars, to the heavens, to what they knew about, where they came from, and we're trying to answer the most basic of human questions who are we and where do we come from? And I think that's the eternal quest of humanity overall.
Taylor Keen: 33:36
And these stories the rock art is a way to try to grasp that To me origin stories and placing them in rock art, in caves, in the womb of the earth, in the underworld, that was the birth of humanity. I think about that term. Often we use the term humanities, what it means to be human, but most often it seems to be best represented in parables and stories. It's at the foundation of all of the world's religions. Right, parables lessons life lessons what to do and what not to do, how to live life, how we're supposed to be as human beings, how we survive in the long term, 3.7 million years ago.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 34:23
Homo erectus is all over the globe you have about 1% of your genome is potentially Homo erectus. We do not have a sampled population of Homo erectus. We have a lot of fossils of ancient man. I mean we have habilis, naledi, homo erectus, obviously, neanderthal, denisovus, you know, sapiens, sapiens, sapiens. There's a lot of humans that science understands from the fossil record. So we don't have a sampled population of homo erectus. So we don't have a sample population of homo erectus, so we don't have a genetic set. However, about one percent of most humans alive today is believed by most scientists to be erectus, erectus dna.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 35:03
If stories can be passed, which we know, through blood memory, through genetics right. So uranized language would say blood memory, geneticists would say through the dna right, we see intergenerational linkages. We have mitochondrialrial DNA that passes the effects of feelings. We have, you know, regular DNA, paternal DNA you could call it that that passes the feelings but not the effects. So you know, we have all of these studies. We understand that genetics passes story in our understanding and the effects of these stories. What if this Principia Theologica, this one source, is because and this is totally out of left field, I get it, but let's play with it. I think it's interesting. What if that one source of this mythology, this common origin, isn't necessarily a common origin of culture? But what if it's just because we all have erectus in us which is seven, eight million years old, and not that we all came from erectus, but that erectus has been bred into us, or that we have bred with erectus. Does that make sense? It does. Have you ever thought about these things?
Taylor Keen: 36:05
I do think about these things. It's something that all goes back to storytelling. Right, we're all intrigued and, at points enthralled with good storytellers. If there was anything that I would ever aspire to be remembered for, it would be to be a storyteller For indigenous peoples of the Americas. Stories are everything. Everything begins and ends with a story. The hero's journey we can talk about Joseph Campbell.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 36:42
Yeah, he'll have to live in this conversation, that's for sure.
Taylor Keen: 36:46
You know, it's just like looking at the stars. We're all enthralled with looking at the stars. It stirs something within us that often results in amazement and wonder, and I think that's encased in our DNA. I think that's a part of how we become human. Stories unlock those feelings in us and perhaps unlock things within our DNA. We've discussed this as blood memory, but it allows us to have the ancestors speak to us. Your mind and heart is in the right place. You're trying to do difficult, good things. Then I do think that the ancestors speak to us, and they speak most prominently through story.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 37:34
It is interesting that one of the first steps of colonization is the distancing or bastardization of story. Your book, your first book, rediscovering Turtle Island, you did touch a little bit about this. I think you called it the founder's dilemma. But like in Thomas Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia I don't know what query it is or what chapter he calls them queries he mourns the eradication of indigenous or Native American sacred sites and cultures around him. I mean for a moment, a sentence or two, he does mourn it and then he says comma and then there's a, you know, dependent clause that follows a sentence of his mourning his morning that says for they passed too quickly for us to document their stories, or something like this. Basically, like who cares? I wish we just had their stories or their language or something you know who cares about the people and their culture and the stories themselves, but I wish we could document it for posterity. So I'm not speaking positively about the affair, but the point is that the early stages of colonialism, of a culturalization, a forced culturalization of of genocide, even right, is to separate the tellers and the listeners from the truth of that story, the living eco tone of that story.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 38:48
I'm thinking about my own culture here in in in Ireland. Um, you know, we had an ancient oral story was documented in about 900 to 1100 Common Era by a whole network of Catholic monks. And it's interesting is why I begin my latest book, the Mythological Retelling of the Plain of Pillars, which is a retelling of the Catmach Turd, the Battle of the Plain of Pillars. I guess you could translate that as the Second Battle of the Plain of Pillars, battle of Mortura. It also goes by, but I begin the book saying that this is not the mythology that our modern mythologists see as gospel. This is not the mythology that we read, that we look at as truth because modern, you know, modern Irish people in modern, modern mythologists even Joseph Campbell I've seen do this he holds the mythology and it talks about the Partholonians who came from Greece that settled the Island of Ireland, or Aaron or Eru, as the first inhabitants. Like these are the first inhabitants and they call them the Partholonians because these are Catholic monks and what comes before Catholicism is Rome and what comes before Rome, which is Greece, and so we had to come from Greece. These are ancient peoples, they had to come from Greece. So you have this like Western imperial mind that just can't let things go. But also, we're the great-granddaughter of Noah and in the very beginning of our story, our ancient ones, our first peoples, if you will, were just great granddaughters of Noah because they were Catholic. Somehow we got to Greece, somehow we went from Palestine to Greece and it doesn't matter and became Greece. And then we settled and whatever the point is, it's heavily biblicalized, it's heavily, you know, catholicized or Christianized or whatever you want to call that. And we lost the old stories, we lost the old language, and it's at that point, about 900 AD, that you started to see the complete eradication of Oum, the old language of old Irish, and it's now been brought into the Proto-Indo-European language set. The Latin language set has some Greek characters in it as well.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 40:48
My point is the Roman conquest, which is also the Christian and Catholic conquest of Northwest Europe, is also the eradication of our stories. To separate these two things and to eradicate language, you see, the same thing that your ancestors had to experience in the colonization and genocide of not just the Western Hemisphere, north America, but also the Great Plains more particularly. First, remove their stories. Second, remove them from their lands. Third, take away their language and acculturalize them, you know, into the dominant tongue, into the dominant mode of thought and to the dominant culture. And so I think one thing that's interesting about cave art if we can circle back to that real quick is its permanence.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 41:29
When an indigenous person stands, let's say when you, taylor Keene, as an Omaha, stand in Picture Cave, your relationship to that story is entirely unacademic. I'm not saying you leave academics and research and radiocarbon dating at the door, that you become not an anthropologist or archaeologist or geneticist or anything like this, that those scientific disciplines don't have relevance. But the story is actually alive, right, it's regrounded in its ego tone, and as soon as our stories and mythologies become regrounded in the ego tone, they actually, I think, start to have their own power like they, they are reborn, they have power once again, which is interesting, um and and so maybe I said something else that you think that you wanted to discuss, but I'll end with the idea of I'd be interested, when you get to go into picture cave, how you feel, or if you have very similar feelings that I did when I was in Glasgow and Grand Loc and La Cabrielle and others in ancient Gaul or modern day France. These caves they're womb-like, yeah, they're womb-like Granite.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 42:36
Yeah, there is rock art that are not located in caves, but the biggest stories often inhabit the deep, dark, dank, moist, womb deep into these cave systems and I just cannot buy the narrative. I've seen archaeologists or different anthropologists push forward this narrative. I just can't buy it that these ancient peoples painted in caves so that the art was only protected. That was the service that the cave provided protection from the elements.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 43:10
I don't necessarily buy that for multiple reasons, the first of which and I'll go through this very quickly because it's not that important, but the first of which is in an oral culture and a hunter-gathering culture, permanency is not seen as a virtue. So, number one, I just refuse to believe that an impermanent, oral, hunter-gathering, migratory society, that some idea of permanency of this played that big of a part, uh. And then two, you would have to look at the logic of the thing, because very few drawings exist towards the mouths of caves. Even the remnants of fading drawings exist towards the mouth of caves. The biggest murals, the biggest paintings, the biggest portraits, the biggest stories are documented very deep, uh, in very dark recesses of these cave systems, which doesn't necessarily speak to, I think, what these anthropologists are discussing about just pure utilitarian huge part of all mythology.
Taylor Keen: 44:09
So many spiritualists across time have spent time in caves. Right, we can look to the Bible, we can look to the Americas, we can look to Europe, but there is something about the hero's journey of traveling to the underworld and being in the womb of Mother Earth. The gates are portals to another realm. I think it's a form of rebirth and ascension. To go into a place like that and then come back out. It just feels really powerful.
Taylor Keen: 45:04
And I've not been in Picture Cave yet, but I imagine it's going to be an incredibly emotional and spiritual experience, probably overwhelming. I'm trying to just anticipate how I would approach it. If I could, I would go in with a torch and just try to take it all in and watch all of the images dance in the flickering firelight. I don't know if that would be allowed or not, but at the very least I'm going to try to find some sort of LED lamp that mimics that. So I wouldn't damage anything, but it's got to feel like going back at least a thousand years and experiencing those feelings. But something about the journey to the underworld that seems very, very powerful.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 46:00
It's very Christian, I think, to see the underworld as a dark, evil place. But I think Christianity and the religions that surround it, so the general Judeo-Christian Islamic faith, I think they're pretty isolated in that fact. Trying to think of my readings of Joseph Campbell and just my studyings of my own life, I can't think of many cultures with the spirituality against the underworld, the idea of this world, the underworld, the other world, the above world, I mean there's certain spirits that might occupy them at certain times, that maybe would be pushing or pulling to humanity from coming or going, nothing that's outrightly evil, right. So in Christianity, the Judeo-Christian faith, you have heaven, which is up, and hell, which is down. You descend down into hell and to some degree when you're descending into these caves I anticipate a conversation following your entrance and your experience and your time in picture cave but you descend down into these caves and you can't but feel like you're descending down into this, I mean otherworldly.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 47:00
Well, I mean it makes sense why. You know, in Western European cultures, especially Irish cultures, we have these very sacred wells where the water comes from the cave systems and comes up to the surface to meet us. Like these are very sacred and ancient places, the water spirits that actually flow from the undergrounds, the underworlds that have community and communion and communication with us in that very watery and wet way. Why do you think oral cultures decided to write these things down? Does that make sense, like? Let me ask you a very particular question why did the ancient peoples of Picture Cave not develop a written language but developed Picture Cave? What about that form of human expression lasting on the walls of caves, beyond the singular moment of, let's say, an oral telling of story mattered?
Taylor Keen: 47:47
Coming from tribal cultures that are based on the oral tradition, it's the recounting of the stories that has so much power. We often leave a lot of these stories for certain times of the year, to be told during the winter. I think that had to do with how we began this conversation. Life was a constant struggle, but now and again you had some leisure time and that was the time for stories and it made you appreciate them even more. But there's something equally, if not more, important and powerful than to bring artistic beauty to those stories in a place of permanence. To me, picture cave, and all those artists who took those stories and immortalized them into the rock art there were doing something very powerful and sacred, and I think that they knew that, that it served as a place of teaching, with lots of variations of stories over time, because the rock art at Picture Cave didn't happen all at once. It happened in stages and I think it was. You know, those who were granted the right to do it had to be master storytellers and had to truly understand the whole scope of what they were doing, and it became sort of a hall of records.
Taylor Keen: 49:21
It's a question I get asked often when we're discussing ancient civilizations. I define civilization as where storytelling fades into religion and where you have massive food systems to feed all those who come to hear the stories. A lot of European thought comes around. Civilization means writing down of things. Indigenous peoples of America documented things in a different way, wasn't that we were incapable, um or not wanting to document things? We just did it in a different way.
Taylor Keen: 50:08
But taking those stories and putting them into rock art or building the incredible earthen works works as living word, structures involved very complex mathematics.
Taylor Keen: 50:21
So much of the mounds from the Mississippian era were not just geometric like a lot of the stone works of Mesoamerica. Many of them were algebraic and had strong notions of mathematics. What better form of civilization and thinking do we have than mathematics? You're a mathematician, it's precise, it doesn't lie and you can document all of that into it. And when you look at the complexity of the mound builders of the Mississippian area to go to these places and to see the beauty and the precision and to go even further to trying to interpret the archaeoastronomy, you knew that peoples were looking to the stars very carefully and documenting what they saw and turning those into stories and into earthen forms, in many cases to perform ceremonies around important times of the year. We just passed the summer solstice always a sacred time and, um, just something very powerful to me about taking the earth, the flesh of them, of the mother, and turning them into monuments and temples yeah which is a very artistic and an incredible expression of human labor.
Taylor Keen: 51:59
To visit some of these earthen works, like Cahokia or any of the mound works around outside of Columbus, ohio, just breathtaking, I mean. You'll see six-foot earthen walls that run for two miles, a gathering place that could have held hundreds of thousands of people. It's just mind boggling to think of the effort that went into designing and executing. You know how many basketfuls of earth on people's backs did it take to do all those?
Daniel Firth Griffith: 52:35
It's just mind boggoggling, mind-boggling okay, we'll uh cut this episode right here. The uh conversation is about to take a turn into some deeper genetics and to uh really some uh exploration of some caves and uh some new details, and it goes on for another hour and a half, and so, instead of forcing you to listen to a two and a half hour episode, we're going to cut this into two, and so stay tuned. Hopefully, the next week we'll have the next episode out with Taylor Keene, so I guess it'll be the second part of the mythology sub series within the main series. God is Red, and so stay tuned.