“Can you see it?”
Clouds alternate with patches of blue in the northeastern skies; the sun’s light around noon is filtered from overhead, obscured by more substantial layers of cloud cover. A crowd of visitors to the Octagon Earthworks is looking along walls so long they appear to converge towards the direction we are intently peering.
“We know the moon is rising, and my hope is we’ll get a gap in the clouds to let us see it shimmering out in silver from the blue background.”
That’s what I kept saying to the people who came out on a cool spring day on March 7, 2025.
Why the Native American builders of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were so interested in the movement of the moon, we may never know with certainty.
What we do know in Licking County, Ohio is that a section of the 4.5-square-mile expanse of the Newark Earthworks was built into a vast octagonal enclosure, attached by a parallel walled passage to a large circle, with a high platform mound at the southwest end of a “symmetry axis” aimed at a very particular point on the northeastern horizon.
That superbly defined spot is a northern maximum on a range of rise-points, a sort of horizontal pendulum of the moon’s movement at the moment of rising, over each 28 day sequence from a northerly rise to its southern extreme and back again, all within a month as we measure them.
Those pendulum swings expand and contract, though, with the absolute northernmost rise or extent of that range only being reached every 18.6 years. Last September 15, 2006 was the previous northern extreme, in the middle of the night, which didn’t matter because the public didn’t have access to the Octagon site anyhow.
Read more: After a long battle, the Octagon Mound opens to the public
In the wake of that season of approach and retreat, a number of moonrise viewing opportunities that were lost in 2005 through 2007, I said to myself and anyone who would listen: In 2025, we’re going to see this, and I’m going to invite others to come see it with me. That was some eighteen years ago.
An invited group of Native American leaders and a very quietly publicized event last October kicked off the current peak of the moonrise cycle. March 7 was the absolute northernmost — this cycle rising in the middle of the day — but in the fall we will have a few visually dramatic evening and night-time moonrises, still so close to the alignment the average viewer won’t see the difference.
But I wanted to keep a promise I made to myself in 2006, that the next lunar maximum I’d be present, with at least some guests on the now open-to-the-public site. So even as the weather for March 7 looked terrible, I shared my intentions, and as we gathered that morning, I announced my hopes.
After all, the next maximum north moonrise isn’t until Sept. 12, 2043.
So we all — over 70 of us — walked out into the enclosure, watching the blue rips in the grayish overcast migrate from north to south across the eastern skies. While photographers from inside the Observatory Circle prepared to take what pictures they could, we walked into the Octagon, then down the passage, and paused in the viewing area defined by the ancient walls and required by the more recent obstacles of tall trees.
We saw only clouds, but reflected on how these challenges were shared by the Native Americans in this area 2,000 years ago, yet somehow they gathered enough data to build these structures, pointing out the place of rising even when we couldn’t see it happen.
It was only later that afternoon I saw the moon overhead, as high in the sky as it will be in my lifetime, too; and it was only later I saw pictures taken from the middle of the circle, which showed our tour group between the walls, and the arc of silver shimmering out overhead, invisible from where we stood, but appearing if only for a minute to other observers at a different angle.
Through other eyes, I saw the moon’s rise that day. Somehow that seems appropriate. The earthworks are a tool to see, with the history and knowledge and wisdom of other eyes, recorded and marked for us to see in times yet to come.
Maybe even in 2043.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he looks forward to Fall 2025 and some public events at the Octagon with clearer skies.