Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey
Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology and Rock Art
Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay
 

In this book, Chumash elites observe celestial objects moving through the sky and conclude that they are intelligent beings. These objects are believed to influence earthly events such as wind, rain, and climate. The elites use their wits, knowledge, experience, and skills to interpret the roles of the sun, moon, stars, and planets as divine actors. Maintaining good relations with powerful sky entities and inhabitants of other realms is considered essential for a happy life. A secret society of intelligentsia works to maintain these relations through proper rituals, ceremonies, prayers, offerings, and devices such as a striped disc designed to align with the sun’s angles at sunrise and sunset during solstices.

​

This secret society serves as the repository of detailed knowledge about the sky realm. Its members' observations, insights, and knowledge shape rituals, ceremonies, stories, songs, dances, paintings, regalia, and daily life. The sky possesses its own geography, featuring celestial springs, mountains, ravines, and rocks, similar to those on the land, and the inhabitants of the sky are believed to lead lives similar to humans on earth.

​

The biological world is viewed as a cycle of endless reincarnations where matter is transformed but never created or destroyed. After death, a person's spirit attempts to ascend to the sky, visiting significant places along the way such as the Land of the Widows, enormous rocks that clash together, ravens that attack the soul's eyes, and a vast body of water that only the righteous can cross. Stars are considered places visited incorporeally. Ultimately, the human spirit reaches Shimilaqsha, the home for human spirits in the sky world, where it waits for rebirth. This celestial geography helps explain life, death, and the nature of existence, and reading the sky is woven into the fabric of the culture.The elites maintain a twelve-month calendar that functions like a zodiac. Each month has a name and is associated with environmental characteristics, and elite councils recalibrate the calendar approximately every five years.

​

When the Spanish arrive in Chumash lands, they establish missions near large communities. These are population centers with a thousand or more which exert political, commercial, and cultural influence over many smaller communities. The early Spanish marvel at beautifully carved wooden bowls, fishing and hunting tools, and expertly crafted Chumash canoes, but their primary aim is to expand the Spanish Empire and they have little regard for local cosmic conceptions. Colonization involves occupying not only the land, but the people’s minds, and no one stands in the way of the Spanish priests more than local visionaries and seers and their elite secret societies.

​

In Chumashian cosmology, the universe assumed its current form following a great flood that transformed the First People into birds, animals, plants, and inhabitants of the upper sky.  This book covers key festivals, such as those following the harvest and at the winter solstice, and of the association of the eagle of the sky with the sun and spirits of the deceased. The primary focus is on the relationship between elites and the sky, however the text also references other cultures, such as the Pomo, whose language is very different, but some of whose cultural conceptions are nearly identical. The book also discusses Yokuts, Western Mono, Acjachemen, Payómkawichum, Kitanemuk, Tongva, Kumeyaay, and Pueblo peoples. There is a discussion of bird sacrifices, which were not part of Chumash tradition.

​

The authors acknowledge that their work only scratches the surface of the topics addressed as they attempt to explain thoughts and experiences of people living in precontact California.