Last week's amazing "Contact at the Canyons" event included an opportunity to visit one of the petroglyph sites located within the boundaries of Zion Canyon Nation Park.
These petroglyphs are very striking and moving in their symbolism and left a deep impression on me and (I could sense) on others who experienced them with me.
The panels of glyphs were clearly conveying powerful concepts which appear to me to resonate with central messages of the ancient myths, including the cycle of taking on a body in this incarnate life, and the existence of a Higher Self from whom we can become estranged but with whom we can also recover our relationship and connection. There is also a decidedly other-worldly feel to many petroglyph images, as if depicting the practice of journeying to the Other Realm, the infinite realm, the hidden realm.
I believe it is difficult to declare with anything close to complete confidence what the intended message, meaning, or symbolism of any group of petroglyphs might be, because it is often very difficult to find multiple "data points" of confirmatory evidence which can help to positively identify the original intent.
When it comes to interpreting ancient myths, scriptures, and sacred stories, I usually remain tentative with interpretations unless I have more than one piece of evidence which helps confirm a specific celestial association. However, because ancient myths and scriptures are actually verbal stories (and sometimes written stories as well), they often do preserve multiple points of confirmatory evidence which in many cases will allow us to make celestial associations with a high degree of confidence.
With petroglyphs, we usually do not have that same level of redundant evidence.
However, there are a couple of petroglyphs from the site we visited which appear to have some parallels to constellations and heavenly features (features such as the beautiful Pleiades cluster), as shown in the short video I made above, entitled "Zion Petroglyphs: Celestial Connections?"
It would be interesting to spend more time at this site and contemplate it more closely in order to see if other possible connections begin to reveal themselves.
The site itself is located within one of the many fairly narrow slot canyons which run through Zion Park and which have high steep sides and a flat canyon floor. This particular canyon in which the petroglyphs are located runs north-south, and the petroglyph panels are arranged along the base of the western wall, such that they face towards the east.
It would probably be a valuable exercise for a serious student of these petroglyphs to visit the panel every day for a year beginning in the early morning, to see where the first rays of the sun might strike the glyphs on particular days, and to determine if there are any significant interactions between the artwork and the rays of light at various points of our annual cycle.
There is an important petroglyph site located in the county in California where I live, and which I have written about in several previous posts: Painted Rock in the Carrizo Plain. Some of this artwork appears to have clear parallels to specific constellations, although again I caution that with interpretations of petroglyphs it is probably always best to remain somewhat tentative. Previous posts about Painted Rock include:
- "The ancient wisdom of Painted Rock"
- "Painted Rock, the inner connection to the Infinite, and two competing visions of human existence"
- "Geology, mythology, cataclysms, and the world's ancient wisdom"
