The Hopi/Extraterrestrial Connection: As Above, So Below.
Hopi Mother and Child
By Sean Casteel
http://www.seancasteel.com/TheHopiExtraterrestrialConnection.htm
Gary David has spent the last 30 years immersed in Native American culture and history. From the Black Hills of South Dakota to the desert of Arizona , David has sought after the mystical connection between patterns in the heavens and the cosmic arrangement of things on Earth that reflects the order handed down by the gods of antiquity.
David has produced two books dealing with his research into, among other things, the Hopi tribe of Arizona : “The Orion Zone: Ancient Star Cities of the American Southwest” and its sequel “Eye of the Phoenix : Mysterious Visions and Secrets of the American Southwest.” Both books cover different aspects of the many anomalies of the region.
The fascination with Native American culture began for David when he taught English at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and witnessed some of the indigenous ceremonies.
“Sacred ceremonies,” David said, “like the Sun Dance. I did some Sweat Lodges and the Sacred Pipe Ceremony. And I met a woman named Charlotte Black Elk, and she was talking about the idea that the Earth reflects the stars. As above, so below, that hermetic maxim. For instance, the Black Hills are kind of the center of Lakota culture, and it’s represented in the sky by a celestial buffalo. The buffalo is made up of various constellations.
“The backbone of the buffalo,” he continued, “is Orion’s belt, and the nose of the buffalo is the Pleiades and the tail of the buffalo is the star Sirius. So there is this great buffalo in the sky that reflects the Black Hills on Earth. There’s a direct relationship between terrestrial and celestial. This got me thinking about the idea of how various points on the Earth are reflected in the sky and how people try to build monuments or arrange their villages in a pattern that reflects the constellations.”
David made a trip down into the Southwest in 1987, visiting various ruin sites and other ancient Hopi sites and began to take an interest in their culture, which he is says is much different from the Lakota up north.
“The Hopi are agrarian,” he explained. “They’re farmers rather than hunters, basically. And they live in these ancient stone pueblos.”
David’s fascination with the Hopis led him to move there in 1994, and he has been studying the culture and attending various ceremonies ever since. His inspiration for his first book, “The Orion Zone,” came to him when he was watching a Hopi Kachina dance. The reader is perhaps familiar with the well-known Kachina dolls, but the term also applies to the native custom of wearing a Kachina mask as well as to the dancers impersonating a Kachina as part of the ritual.
“They use a single cottonwood drum,” David said, “and they dance in the village plaza. You see these dancers come into the plaza and they’re all multicolored and they have these bizarre masks. Some are circular and others might be dome-shaped or cylindrical, and they’ve got horns and feathers and hair sticking off the masks. Some of these masks, the eyes are bug-eyed, and others just have slits for eyes. Some of the masks actually look like space helmets, like something an alien would wear. You just wonder how these ancient people hooked up with this whole concept of Kachinas.”
David said that Kachinas are considered to be a kind of intermediary between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods.
“They’re like angelic figures in Christian culture,” he said, “basically benevolent beings that help the Hopi to get rain. The Hopi are very concerned with bringing rainfall to the desert, which is kind of a dicey thing anyway in Arizona . But these Kachina are just an amazing sight to watch against this background of earth tones and ancient pueblos, these bizarre-looking, almost alien-like creatures against this very ancient backdrop.”
When attending one of the Kachina dances on the Hopi reservation, having just read a book called “The Orion Mystery” by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, which theorized that the pyramids of Giza were patterned after the Belt of Orion, David said he looked up at the three primary mesas on which the Hopi have settled in northern Arizona and was struck by the thought that something similar may have happened there.
