Time and the Ancients

At a time long ago when the world was dark, the Earth bare, and the sea with an endless sea, people developed a philosophy about the forces that surrounded them.  The Creation myths formed from the world around them into the beliefs of a people.  The inexplicable world became orderly through the beliefs and the attempted explanations. Answers to the rain, the wind and the celestial bodies.

12 Constellations form a ring in around the sky in a path that is called ecliptic. The Zodiac as we know it denotes the path the Sun travels through the sky.

Ancient people discovered that it takes a year for the \Sun to move through its journey through the Zodiac. They associated each constellation of the Zodiac with times of the year To them the months changed, the seasons turned and so went time. Centuries later they discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun and the illusion of the path of the ecliptic was false, however the signs of the Zodiac survived.

Calendars were created based on nature's cycles and the ceremonies, festivals and myths of the ancients were patterned after the gods that ruled these rhythms. The sky was the model in which they created their clocks and calendars. The sky, the Moon and the Sun were the most obvious markers and were used as early as the Ice Age.

The Egyptians developed a calendar as early as 4200BC which was used by other cultures as late as the Middle Ages.

The ancients had a respect for their celestial Gds and incorporated it into their myths.

Many of the structures that are found today, such as Stonehenge, the Mayan pyramids, and other circles found throughout the British Isles prove that the ancients used the sky for clocks and calendars. The ancients were sky watchers, the Mayans for example, observed the celestial objects as early as the 6th century BC to make calendars and recorded the pattern of eclipses in what is called the Dresden Codex.

The ancient peoples found order in the natural world if the sky. The order with its cycles was what they needed to survive and also to get in touch with the spirits.  

Religion has been a part of all civilizations of the world, at times controlling at other mysterious and imaginative, the human genius when it comes to a society's beliefs the ultimate goal the is to meet the needs of the people. 

The purpose of life is to achieve happiness.  We differ in our ethnicity, cultures, languages and religions, however, we are the same in our basic needs for peace and happiness.  Our world's problems arise when we lose track of the basic truths we are family, the human family, with our conflicts and superficial differences our hopes for happiness are the key to inner peace.

In humanity's history people and their societies have looked to religions a source of meaning.  Basic spiritual and ethical values come from religions and cultures.  Human society depends on te world's religions to play an important role in the basic values such as justice, compassion, honesty and forgiveness.  These truths causes the thread that ties the peoples of the world together making up the human world.

The more we understand each other's ways the more we lean from each other.

All major religions carry the same message, love and compassion.  The general concept remains the same . The respect of all faiths is the foundation of harmony between the different religions of the world and the different people which make up the world.  This is something which we all must aspire to ; a greater understanding among the peoples throughout the world.  

Diversity in people means diversity in traditions and religions.  Everyone has the right to make his or her own choice in beliefs.

Tolerance, understanding between the many traditions of the world with the 

Medicine Wheels of North America

Archaeologists have found hundreds of Medicine Wheels in the United States and Canada. They are assembled with a central pile of stones, radiating in a circular arrangement,that can be used to align to the sunrise at Summer solstice.

The monuments were created by laying stones in a pattern on the ground oriented to the four directions. Most medicine wheels follow the basic pattern of having a center pile of stones, and surrounding that is an outer ring of stones with lines of rocks from the center to the four Cardinal Directions, East, South, West and North..

One of the sites called the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming is the most famous and appears to be aligned to other objects in the sky as well as the Summer solstice Sun at sunrise.

There are many ideas about the origins of the wheels and the reasons they were built. They are being studied by astronomers and archaeologists alike. Scientists analyzing the formations have discovered alignments to different solar events, in particular, the sunrise and sunset at the Summer Solstice.

Medicine Wheels had many different uses and changed over the years from tribe to tribe. Some of them were used as burial mounds, some of them point to other Medicine Wheels or natural resources. Some evidence shows that some of the wheels were updated over the centuries to track the changes in celestial alignments.

One astronomer had a theory that some of the wheels were used as astronomical sites, which the people used to track sunrise or sunset, at a certain times of the year, marking certain auspicious days of the year.

Medicine wheels are thought to be used to mark the geographical directions and astronomical events of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, in relation to the Earth's horizon at that location. Ancient peoples believed that the medicine wheel in had great power.

They were sites for important ceremonies, teachings, and in as much were sacred places. Today, the Bighorn Medicine Wheel is still an accurate predictor for the summer solstice and is still used by various Native American groups.

African American Religions

The roots of African American religions in North and South Americas, including voodoo, li in the African beliefs brought by the slaves from Africa.  Because of the Arab and European slave trades between the 16th and 19th centuries millions of Africans were brought to the Americas a slaves, they carried with them their Gods. The Dahomey Fon, a people of West Africa worshiped a god they called Vodu.  This god was taken to Haiti and the name was applied to the religion as well as tTheir god Voodoo religion had a supreme god who could be approached through lesser spirits by rituals done by the Hungans and Mambos.  They also believed that the spirits of their ancestors were the living dead because they were both close to the living as well as the spiritual beings. 

African religion began in slave communities in the South before the Civil War and the Americanized Africans practiced Christianity underground as it was often forbidden by owners,  They worshiped outside of institutional churches.  The First church in North America to have an entirely African American congregation was the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1787.

In the 1830’s during the religious awakening in the South the slave owners were now bringing the Gospel to the quarters and this served as a form of social control and as a way to convert the slaves. By 1860, about 15 percent of the slaves were members of either the Baptist or Methodist church.

 The Black Judaism movements began in 1905.  Rastafarianism orginated in the early 20th century with the belief that Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in 1930; with the claim to have descended from David and Solomon, would lead the Africans back  to their country, much like the Exodus.

Religion has had a controlling influence in every known society and the creativity of the peoples shows in their beliefs.  Powerful and deeply seeded in the human brain makes religion inevitable.  Men need religions to fulfill their d