Since the first geological and then archaeological expeditions entered the region known as “Six Grandfathers” (in the original Lakota, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe) in early March of 4742 CE, heated debates have raged about the three “macrocephalic” rock formations on the mountain’s southeastern face. And not merely among academics.
In fact, controversy surrounds every aspect of the discovery, including the number of head-like stone features. The most commonly-held position is that there are three, but some claim to see a partial fourth. And others, especially among the thriving, even zealous, amateur organizations that have formed about the issue, insist that there were once six of them – basing their arguments almost entirely upon the otherwise puzzling name of the mountain, “Six Grandfathers.”
An entire cottage industry has emerged, seeking identities for at least the three “heads” that are most accepted among the believers. Their search focuses on the history and lore of the area known as Southern Lakota and on surviving records from the surrounding nations. Going from left to right, the “faces” on the mountainside are thought to represent Georg of Washington, a small principality, now submerged, that once dominated the low coastal swamplands of Yanquiland; Thomas of Monticello, who succeeded Georg as the ruler of Yanquiland; and Theodosius Roosevelt, a Yanqui warlord who, under the still mysterious throne name of “Nude Eel,” led a confederation of allied states to world domination in a global conflict against another powerful faction. His shadowy opponents, known to historians only as the Great Depression, were directed from the island nation of Nippon (or Nissan) by an obscure quasi-deified (and perhaps quasi-mythical) figure called “Hirohitler.”
Going even further, a tiny fringe minority of amateurs contends that the faces on the mountain were carved by hovering alien spacecraft using some form of laser carving tool. These hobbyists point to a genuinely serious flaw in the proposals made by those who argue that the “images” were produced by human artifice. The faces are, after all, suspended high in the air, far above the plain below. How would the primitive humans of the early MAGA era have created such images?
These, however, are minority views. Those advocating specific identities for the three head-shaped rock formations in Southern Lakota assume them to be deliberately-created faces designed and made by humans or by humanoid aliens. But the majority of experts publishing on the subject believe that they can be explained as the remarkable but entirely natural products of such well-understood erosive forces as wind, sun, snow, ice, and sand, assisted in some few cases by earthquake activity. They point out that in an almost infinitely large universe, and given virtually infinite lengths of time, virtually anything can and will eventually happen. And, in the case of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, it plainly did.
Critics of what is often dismissed as the “anthropomorphic” or “intelligent design” school point out that no other human sculptures are known to archaeologists that are even close to the size of the heads on “Six Grandfathers.” (Even the superhuman head of Abra Hamlincoln, retrieved from the ruins of the small temple in Washington that was built around it, is several orders of magnitude smaller than the proposed “heads” on Six Grandfathers Mountain.) Moreover, the ancient residents of Southern Lakota show no signs of having possessed the advanced technology that would have been required to create such artifacts. And, although the extraterrestrial-visitors theory is rarely even addressed by serious scholars, the few aliens who have visited our planet in recent centuries have not been humanoid in appearance, which seems to indicate that they would have had no interest in creating anthropomorphic facial images. The few acknowledged artifacts left behind by intergalactic visitors in the historical record (e.g., several portraits of females by the alien painter Pikasso) plainly favor representing their own species, which are distinctly non-human.
In sum, the overwhelming current consensus among scholars and specialists is that the three head-like forms in the rugged hill country of Southern Lakota are by-products of the same powerful but random natural geological forces that produced the Grand Canyon, the great pyramidal stone formations along the Nile, and, most famously of all, the so-called “Hollywood sign” above the ruined City of the Angels in Alta California.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
And here are some thought-provoking pieces that I’ve gleaned for you from the news media over the past few days :
- “Why As Few As 5% Of Americans Attend Church Each Week” I’m inclined to think that the 5% figure is too low, and am skeptical even of the relatively flattering (but still low) figure given for the Latter-day Saints.
- “Only For a Moral and Religious People” The title of the article comes from a comment made long ago by John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
- “Many women stay in religious groups that don’t let them become leaders. Here are three reasons why”
- “Opinion: A spiritual mandate for educational innovation” A statement written by the presidents of Brigham Young University, Brigham Young University-Idaho, and the Commissioner of Education for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the latter two of whom are General Authorities and members of the First Quorum of the Seventy
- “Perspective: What the rise of the ‘secular evangelical’ portends for faith in the public square: An opening exists for a coalition of diverse people of faith to wield influence in politics”
- “Perspective: I descended 1,400 feet into the Pinyon Plain uranium mine. Here’s what I learned. Wind and solar are important, but we need nuclear power, and American miners can deliver”
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