On June 3rd, my son started drawing a symbol, as far as I can tell, out of the blue, and there was something supernatural about the way he did it which forced me to take note. I kept thinking to myself that it was like a horror movie when a kid starts drawing the same symbol over and over and no one can figure out what it means until the big reveal later in the movie. He continued drawing the symbol exclusively for two days--and mysteriously, stopped right after I discovered a synchronous connection. It still gives me goosebumps, a month later.
My son's typical picture is a bunch of scribbles, but for two days last month he suddenly began, without a moment's hesitation, to draw a circle with a cross in it over and over again and then stopped just as suddenly. When I asked him what it was he told me that it was a window. So I looked around at the windows in the room where he started drawing them (the basement of a university building)--they were all rectangular with chain link wire through them on the diagonal. No circular windows to be seen for inspiration.
I was so fascinated that I looked for the symbol everywhere for a couple of days to try to understand where he pulled the image from and what it could possibly mean.
The first connection I found was a similar symbol on a newsletter from the Iowa City Public Library which was laying around the house with about 1000 other bits of mail and notes (The newsletter is called "Window"; and the logo is apparently inspired by the circular window in the lobby of the library. However, the logo was drawn with shadows/3-d effects so I doubt that it was his inspiration.). I'm pasting the brochure which my son may have seen, as well as a picture of the ICPL lobby with same window below. It is quite possible that my son got the idea by looking at the window as we walked out of the library--we are there a lot. It's just that we hadn't been there for a couple of weeks, and I'd never seen him draw this symbol before June 3rd, when he started fixating on it.
The second connection I made, and the one which resonated with me, was the discovery that this symbol he was making is a Native American symbol called a medicine wheel. I still don't know much about medicine wheels--how many tribes used them as symbols, how often the medicine wheel is symbolized by a circle with a cross, etc. However, I know that the symbol my son was drawing is the most common representation of a medicine wheel and I discovered that connection in a very interesting way--via a MOOC.
On May 27th, I decided to try a MOOC for the first time. I signed up for
Aboriginal Worldviews and Education on Coursera (note that the class was offered earlier this year, but is still open). In May, I watched just the introduction and didn't come back to it until June 6th. The second video lecture in the course was called "Medicine Wheel as an Organizing Principle" and I started it on June 6, at about 2 AM. It seems that there are many layers of meaning in the concept of a medicine wheel, but from the lecture I got that if you are standing in a place, there are four cardinal directions branching out from you, another looking skyward, another when you look down and observe your connection to the earth, and finally, a seventh direction when you look inward and come to learn about your inner spiritual being.
From that lecture, the professor links to a video about medicine wheels from Digital Nations and also to an interactive website called
Four Directions Teachings. From the Digital Nations video, I learned that the medicine wheel is often represented by native people by placing stones in a circle on the earth, with a central cairn of stones and spokes leading outward to a larger circle. The most common depiction, they say, is that shown in the image below right, with four spokes. The synch didn't dawn on me until after watching the introductory video on Four Directions Teachings, when I saw the
symbols representing the Cree people of central Canadian Plains, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region, and the M'ikmaq of the Northern Atlantic Region (that image is above). The Cree divide the medicine wheel into four regions to represent the four parts of the human being--spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental, and this symbol serves as a reminder to keep the four parts in balance on our journey through life, rather than focusing primarily on the physical and mental as we often do. It further symbolizes the temporal passage/journey through life, starting with birth and infant life in the Eastern quadrant (if the cross is drawn diagonally), childhood/adolescence in the Southern quadrant, adulthood in the Western quadrant, and old age in the Northern quadrant. Interestingly, if you follow the journey in a circular path, old age leads back to infant-hood, which is a reminder that the very old sometimes return to needing the same kind of assistance as babies, with eating, getting around, and using the restroom (but it's not seen as a negative thing, just as a reminder that it is a natural part of the journey through life).
So now, a month later, I am revisiting this symbol. Last week, I noticed that the symbol was inside a cross in the movie "The Secret of Kells" (a really beautiful and surreal movie which is on Netflix)--this is called the Celtic cross. According to the Celtic cross entry on Symbols.com, the Celtic cross was "common in the Scandinavian countries during the Middle Ages. According to Frithiof Dahlby (see bibliography), it was erected where an act of violence had been committed or an accident had occurred, and in front of farmhouses."
Then while Googling Celtic crosses, I found references to the "sun cross" which is name used for the original symbol which my son began drawing--there is an article on Wikipedia about them, which states that these crosses are "frequently found in the symbolism of prehistoric cultures, particularly during the Neolithic to Bronze Age periods. These terms 'sun cross' and 'wheel cross' are modern and hint at speculative interpretations in the context of prehistoric religion. The actual significance of these symbols in the prehistoric period is not known. From their ubiquity and apparent importance, however, the symbols have been adopted in various schools of Neopaganism, esotericism and occultism."
Symbols.com entry on the sun cross states that "The [sun cross] structure is one of the first non-pictorial graphs to appear when humankind was on the threshold of the Bronze Age. It is common on rock carvings. It appears in ancient Egypt, China, pre-Columbian America, and the Near East. From the facts available it seems as if is associated with the wheel, not so much with its invention as with its revolutionary effect on the existing society."
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