- A sign of life in the east would turn on its side and be surrounded by death, and one day the sun would rise in the west, bringing a second violent shaking of the earth even worse than the first. (The cross, a sign of life, was turned on its side to form the Nazi swastika, the symbol of the Japanese empire was the rising sun, and the earth’s “violent shaking” in the Second World War was indeed even worse than the first.)
- Gourds of ashes would fall from the sky, creating more ash from all living things in their path and preventing new growth for years to come. (The atom bomb fit that description perfectly. )
- The eagle would someday fly in the night and land on the moon. (In 1969 the safe arrival on the moon of the Apollo 11 spacecraft was announced by astronaut Neil Armstrong to the NASA control room with the simple words, “The eagle has landed.”)
- A house would be built in the east that would welcome all the peoples of the earth, and it would sparkle like the sun reflecting off the desert mica. (The United Nations, founded in 1945, moved its original headquarters from San Francisco to a shimmering golden glass monolith in New York City in )
- If we miss our opportunities after the first two shakings of the earth to come together as a human family of brothers and sisters—as we have—the earth will be shaken for a third time, more violently than ever before.
At the core of the Cherokee prophecies, though, is the belief that their souls come from the stars in the form of Starseeds to be born into the human race and bring light and knowledge, and that those same souls return to the heavens to become stars when they die. In fact, some Cherokee elders teach that all their ancestors were travelers from the legendary star cluster Pleiades, a cluster of stars that form the “eye” of the “bull” formed by the Taurus constellation.
The six stars of the Pleiades that are visible to the naked eye are said to be lost boys who, according to Cherokee myth, were severely punished by their mothers for returning home from playing later than their curfew allowed. The seven boys, deciding their angry mothers must no longer love or want them, ran away from home again, returning to the hills outside the village where they always played. They began to dance in a circle, for hours on end, chanting, “Spirits of our people, take us into the sky so blue. Our mothers no longer want us, and we wish to be with you.”
Back in the village, the boys’ mothers discovered their sons were missing and quickly headed to the hills to retrieve them. They arrived to see the boys dancing and chanting, and suddenly one of the mothers cried out, “Look! They’re leaving the ground! If we don’t hurry they’ll be gone forever!”
The boys were dancing above their mothers’ heads by the time their frantic mothers reached them. Each mother jumped in panic, trying to grab and hold onto her son, but only one was successful, barely getting a grip on her boy’s foot. She pulled him to the ground so hard that a hole formed where he landed and the earth closed around him. She fell to her knees beside him, weeping, and then looked up to see that the other six boys were dancing into the clouds and disappearing into the sky.
Legend says that every day for the rest of their lives the seven mothers, who never smiled or laughed again or knew another moment of joy, returned to the spot where they lost their sons. Six mothers looked to the heavens for their sons, while the seventh knelt to the ground, soaking the earth with her tears.
And then one day six mothers saw that stars had formed in the sky exactly where their sons had vanished. Those stars, they say, are the Pleiades. The seventh mother looked to the spot where the earth had swallowed up her son and gaped at the tiny pine tree than had begun to grow.
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