A reading list for cooler days.

 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

With the weather turning cooler here in New Mexico, my thoughts are beginning to turn toward hunkering down before a fire with a glass of something warming and a good book. And since I've been blogging quite a bit lately about things like anthromorphism and animism and how Native Americans' concept of history and religion is different from Europeans' -- not to mention this idea that there's more than one god -- I thought it might be helpful to give y'all a short reading list. Just in case you're stuck for something to do, one winter night, and decide to find out why this crazy woman keeps saying the stuff she does.

But seriously, each of these books has stuck with me over the years. As I often recommend them to others, I figured I might as well put them all in one place on the blog. So here you go: some of the books that have shaped my current thinking. I'm not posting links because y'all know how to search Amazon and/or inquire at your local library.

Animism: Respecting the Living World, by Graham Harvey. Harvey has studied the way Native peoples throughout the world relate to beings that most Westerners think are devoid of life. I quoted from this book on my post about sentient balls of moss back in 2020.

The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind, and the Self in Nature, by Emma Restall Orr. I also mentioned this book in that blog post about glacial mice. Orr is a Druid and a philosopher; the text is denser than Harvey's, but her ideas about animism are intriguing, particularly when she talks about how trees must communicate, although clearly they have a different language than humans do. 

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard. Speaking of trees communicating, Simard has discovered how they do it: via a network of fungi in the soil. She started on this journey of discovery when she began to wonder why seedlings planted to replace clear-cut forests often don't make it. The answer: old trees supply nutrients and other types of support to young and ailing trees, and when the old trees are gone, that support -- that wisdom -- is gone, too.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes beautifully, arguing that scientific knowledge could -- and should -- be enriched by indigenous wisdom. 

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. These two authors put paid to a whole host of ideas about human progress that were basically invented by Western Europeans to convince themselves that they -- we -- represent the pinnacle of civilization. For one thing, that timeline about how humans progressed in a straight line from hunter-gatherers to farmers? It's bogus. Totally made up. It's as true as the idea that "savage Indians" couldn't have been smart enough or advanced enough to build cities like Cahokia or Teotihuacan, or massive earthwords like those in Ohio, so they must have been constructed by aliens, or maybe one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The Mound Builders, by Robert Silverberg. Those Hopewell culture structures have recently been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which puts them on par for cultural importance with Stonehenge, the Acropolis, and the Great Wall of China. (This pleases me inordinately, as my Transcendence series features some scenes at the Newark Great Circle Earthworks.) Silverberg usually writes sci-fi, but this book is nonfiction. It doesn't get into the archaeoastronomy that's built into the mounds; instead, the author writes about how European settlers "discovered" them and how Western science finally got around to investigating who built them and why. 

God is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria, Jr. I read this book years ago. It's billed as the seminal work on Native American religious views and their relation to Christianity. I think it was the first time that I was introduced to the idea that Christianity, as a source of the belief in human exceptionalism, is responsible for so many of our culture's ills, including genocide and environmental damage. Deloria wrote the book in the early '70s. With climate change whacking us upside the head, it might be time for a re-read.

A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, by John Michael Greer. If you're wondering why polytheism makes sense to educated people like me, read this book. It delves into the philosophical underpinnings of the belief system and demonstrates why polytheism is as rational a way of seeing the world as is monotheism -- or atheism, for that matter. I've heard that Greer has unfortunately turned Trumpy in recent years, but this book was first published long before, in 2005, and remains an excellent introduction to polytheistic thought.

So there you go -- eight books to get you through the winter. Enjoy. And if you read any of them, let me know what you think.

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These moments of bloggy reading recommendations have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

The Great Transcendence giveaway.

I promised last week that there would be a giveaway this week. So here we go.

It's hard for me to believe that so much time has passed since the idea for the Transcendence trilogy germinated in my mind. It started with a random stop at the Great Circle Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, in the summer of 2016, and ended at my desk in our old apartment in October of last year. During that period, the events I wrote about in Mom's House came to a head. You could say the Transcendence books were as transformative for me as they were for Maggie.

But enough about me. Here's the scoop on the contest:

I'm giving away two -- count 'em, two -- sets, signed (naturally), of the trilogy, which is comprised of:

Maggie in the Dark
Maggie on the Cusp
Maggie at Moonrise

Down below is the Rafflecopter thingy, which you all know how to operate by now. The contest is live as we speak; you have until midnight Saturday, July 7th, to enter. I'll announce the winners next Sunday, July 8th, at the usual time. Anybody anywhere can enter -- I'm pretty sure I can front postage to wherever in the world you are.

The question I want everyone to answer is a sort of preview of the next series, which is on my mind because I wrote the first words of the first draft of the first book today. Alert hearth/myth readers know this series will have something to do with river gods. But my initial idea is expanding as we speak, and may end up involving more than just the element of Water. So please let me know in the comments what your favorite element is -- Earth, Air, Fire, or Water -- and maybe a little bit about why, and I'll see whether I can work any of that into this next series of books.

Oh! The prizes!

One each of these can be yours! Enter below!

As always, the usual and customary rules apply:

1. Friends and family may definitely enter.
2. Winners of previous contests may win again.
3. There will be a winner. I am getting these books out of my house, one way or another.
4. As always, the judge's decision is arbitrary, capricious, and final.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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These moments of bloggy Transcendence have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

What is Maggie transcending?

Big publishing news this week: Maggie in the Dark is out!

Big hugs to those of you who have already picked up a copy. I know the book is a bit of an unknown quantity; I haven't talked much about it, other than mentioning that it has something to do with the giant earthworks that the Hopewell and other ancient Native American civilizations built in the Eastern and Midwestern part of the United States.

As it happens, the series doesn't have a whole lot to do with the earthworks themselves. But archaeologists have speculated that the Newark Earthworks in Ohio were built to mark the passage of time -- not just of seasons or years, but of the moon's transit across the heavens on its 18.6-year cycle -- and they've further speculated that ceremonies were held when the moon appeared to stand still, at the northernmost and southernmost points in its cycle. Presumably, the thinking goes, the ceremony or ceremonies may have involved an effort to renew both the moon and the earth. So the idea of renewing the Earth was one of the jumping-off points for me, when I began planning the series last year. As Transcendence is the series title, it makes some sense that someone may have to transcend something in order to accomplish Earth's renewal.

Renewal was a theme in the Pipe Woman Chronicles, too. The whole thing was put in motion by White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, who believed monotheistic religion was preventing humanity from becoming all it could be. Her solution was to send all the gods and goddesses back down to Earth to knock heads and persuade everyone to behave. But that turned out to be harder than it looked. The peace that Naomi and Joseph fought so hard to attain in the first five books was almost constantly under attack. In the end, the gods couldn't solve every problem. Humans still had to save themselves.

Pixabay

Where the Pipe Woman Chronicles went for a global renewal, the Transcendence trilogy is much more personal. Here, the gods don't show up on anyone's doorstep; they send messages by way of mysterious strangers, gut feelings, and dreams. The main character, Maggie Brandt, meets an elderly woman named Granny at the Great Circle Earthworks. Granny charges Maggie with -- you guessed it -- Earth's renewal. Maggie's journey is a personal one, done face-to-face: she must revisit turning points in her life by visiting the people who were involved in them, and she must then repair the damage she did back then. Her reparations are sometimes more painful to others than the original wounds, but like surgery, they're necessary for healing. It's not easy. To make matters worse, she's going largely by gut instinct; her only road map is the copper turtle effigy she found when she was a child.

Another aspect of the series is that several of the characters are elderly women with memory problems. That's no accident. I'll talk about that next week.

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For the next few days, the Kindle edition of Maggie in the Dark is available at Amazon for just 99 cents. Please feel free to stop by and pick up a copy, if you haven't done so already. And thanks in advance!

Oh, and one more thing: If you know of anyone who might enjoy the Pipe Woman Chronicles, please let them know that they can get a copy of Seized for free at Instafreebie. Thank you! And I hope your friend will thank you, too...

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These moments of bloggy transcendence have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Rounding the Great Circle.

When I was a little kid, studying Indiana history in school, there were a few lines in our textbook about some Indians called the Mound Builders. They lived in southern Indiana and they built mounds. Probably burial mounds. But they were gone now, and nobody knew who they were or where they went. Dead Indians in a burial mound didn't sound all that exciting to me, growing up amid giant sand dunes next to a Great Lake, so I pretty much forgot about it.

Then last weekend, enticed by a sign for something called the "Great Circle Earthworks," I made a detour off I-70 in the middle of Ohio. I figured it might be a hippie colony or something. What I found was a monumental remnant of those Mound Builder Indians, and it pretty much knocked my socks off.

The Great Circle Earthworks is part of a larger complex known as the Newark Earthworks. It's located in present-day Newark and Heath, Ohio (the Great Circle is in Heath). The Newark Earthworks were designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006, and it's been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status.

The builders are known to us as the Hopewell culture, and they constructed the site between 100 and 500 AD. Another monument on the site, the Octagon Earthworks, was designed to line up with the northernmost point of the moon's rise -- a cycle that takes 18.6 years. Some sites on the intarwebs have made a big deal of the fact that the Newark Earthworks are in line with the Pyramids in Egypt -- which sounds really cool and woo-woo-ish until you realize that moonrise would be on an 18.6-year cycle in Egypt, too. I mean, I don't know enough about the pyramids to know why their site was chosen and how their orientation was settled on. But I'm pretty sure the whole "chariots of the gods" theory has been debunked multiple times by now.

What it did put me in mind of, however, was Ireland's Newgrange -- a structure that's thousands of years older (it was built around 3200 BC) and that's oriented to catch the first rays of the rising sun on the winter solstice.

Anyway, I spent most of my time at Newark Earthworks at another of the site's major structures -- the Great Circle Earthworks, the one that lured me off the interstate. Behind the placard in the photo just above is the entrance to the Great Circle. The circle itself is 1,200 feet across, and that mound you see at the entrance is 14 feet high. The mounds taper in height toward the back of the site, where they drop to four feet high. And there's a five-foot-deep moat that begins just inside the entrance and circles the ring of mounds on the inside. At least it used to be a moat; centuries of tree roots have cracked the clay bottom of the trench so that it no longer holds water.

Keep in mind that the builders used rudimentary digging tools and baskets to move all that earth.

The Great Circle is no burial mound. This was a ceremonial site. There's another mound in the middle of the circle that archaeologists have named the Eagle Mound. When the circle was in use, a wooden structure sat there, with wings extending to either side. I could envision shamen conducting rituals at the site and using those screens to shield their secret activities from the attendees. In any case, the wooden structure was dismantled at some point and the mound that exists today was created on top of it.

Anthropologists say many Woodland Indian tribes view waterways as a way to reach the Beneath World -- the world of the spirits. Archaeologists speculate the moat was meant to bring the Beneath World into the sacred circle.

As I walked around the perimeter of the Great Circle, I was reminded of another site I visited in Ireland in April: Tara, the home of the ancient Irish kings. There, too, the visitor finds a series of concentric banks and ditches, and a sense of sacredness. But the Great Circle is more recent, and the experience I had there was more visceral than the one I had at Tara.

I'm told these types of mounds are all over Ohio. One of them is Serpent Mound, near Chillicothe, which I think I've heard of but have never been to. And there are those mounds in southern Indiana, too -- and Cahokia, the abandoned city in southern Illinois that's a thousand years newer than the Great Circle. I am seriously thinking about a trip to visit as many of these sites as I can. And you can bet one or more of them will turn up in a book at some point soon.

Have any of you ever visited any of these sites? Anybody got any travel tips?

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These moments of sacred-mound blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.