Big Horn Medicine Wheel

Big Horn Medicine Wheel

1) Arrangement of rocks resembling a 28-spoke wheel in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming; 90 feet in diameter

2) Used as calendar by the Plains Indians from about 1500 – 1700 CE

3) Used as indicator of summer solstice sunrise and sunset, with other alignments for the rising of certain stars (Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius)

4) About 50 similar circles exist

(a) The oldest is in Canada

(b) About 2500 BCE - the age of the Egyptian pyramids

5) The alignments are controversial as they could be due to chance

6) No evidence they are astronomical in design

(a) Why were they interested in those three particular stars?

As an archeolinguistic artifact, the Medicine Wheel tells how the first people on earth, (Uto-Aztecan) emerged as spirits out of the Underworld via a conduit topped by the large central rock cairn, to be driven by a spirit vectored force into an inwardly opening rim-touching cairn where they became born as human beings. Where an offset cairn lies 12 feet outside the Wheel's rim, the greatly feared evil ghosts of dead Uto-Aztecans were uplifted into the Afterworld in the Milky Way directly above the structure's central exit cairn.

The rim of the structure symbolized the cosmological horizon of the Milky Way. Four external rim-touching cairns symbolize the four preceding eras in the world's history closed completely in time; they could not be entered by either the spirits rising from the Underworld nor by the ghosts en route to the Afterworld. On the inside a rim-touching, larger cairn opens toward the central cairn via a spoked channel to symbolize the Fifth Era of Current Existence in which all humanity plays its varied parts. In this era the Underworld spirits become human beings living a normal life span.

The Wheels' rim measures 245 feet.