Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Westering 12: Sun Temple Prophecy
Green Musings on Mesa Verde



Mesa Verde is mostly known for its well-preserved cliff dwellings, but there are even older ruins up on the mesa itself, earlier and more primitive, and archaeological windows into a peoples’ progression from pit houses in the ground to pueblo style dwellings above. Last came the cliff houses, for reasons no one really knows, but maybe the Pueblo Indians themselves, and they’re not really telling. And then came Sun Temple, curiously up on the mesa again.

It’s unfinished the experts think. And from appearances, it looks to be a structure built for ceremonial purposes alone. Thick walls, double kivas, polished stone. If true, it would make it the largest ceremonial structure ever attempted by the Anasazi. And then, everyone left the mesa. Does the existence of Sun Temple tell us any reason why?

All I can tell you standing on the crossroads, so to speak, at the junction of Cliff and Fewkes Canyon, is something of its power still remains. I can feel it in the air. Is this the power of a people becoming one with the power of the cosmos? If, as some think, there was a mini ice age that forced them off the heights down to the desert below, was this their attempt to call back the sun?

And what will western civilization’s be? Windmills tilting by the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass in Palm Springs maybe. Well, certainly not a spiritual construction, not at first at least. But something technological and sound of scientific principle. And bound for failure. Then will follow ecological disaster and the last chance attempt at something otherworldly, something more aligned with energetic principles of an awfully intelligent creation.

You see, no one’s saying that Sun Temple was a failure.

~Son Rivers 2008



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey. I have recently been in Mesa-Verde and it was awesome!

son rivers said...

I completely agree.