Native American Medicine Wheel

The Medicine Wheel on this site comes from one book: The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology, published in 1980 by Sun Bear and Wabun. In the Author’s Note Sun Bear writes that the book grew out of a vision. He describes himself as the medicine chief of the Bear Tribe, a multiracial medicine society founded on an earlier vision of his, and Wabun, his medicine helper, as the one who worked with him in developing and writing down the teachings. The book opens with that vision: a bare hilltop, a circle of rocks laid out like the spokes of a wheel with a buffalo skull at its centre, and people in animal costumes coming up from the four directions to take their places, singing the songs of their minerals, their plants and their totem animals.

The authors are explicit about what the system is not. They write that they have not read or studied astrology, and that the information in the book does not, to the best of their knowledge, conform to any way of gaining self-knowledge used by any particular tribe in the United States: it is “a new way”, revealed to them at that time to help with the healing of the Earth Mother. The Medicine Wheel is therefore not the old zodiac of a Native nation but a modern teaching, by its authors’ own account, and ZodiAtlas presents it as exactly that, citing the book chapter by chapter.

The wheel has twelve moons, one for each month of birth. The first, the Earth Renewal Moon, begins at the winter solstice, usually on 22 December, and the Budding Trees Moon begins at the spring equinox. Each moon gives an animal, a plant, a mineral and a colour, and the moons go in threes under four Spirit Keepers, Spirit Beings who each bring one of the winds: Waboose in the North, Wabun in the East, Shawnodese in the South and Mudjekeewis in the West, Chief of the Spirit Keepers and Father of the Winds — the names, the book says, that the Chippewa people gave them. Each moon also belongs to one of four elemental clans, Turtle, Frog, Thunderbird and Butterfly, for earth, water, fire and air; the book stresses that these have nothing to do with the clans of kinship that existed in most tribes.

The moon of birth is only a starting point. The book insists that people are not limited by their starting position, direction or clan, and that to stay with one moon, one totem and one element is to become static and stop growing: the teaching is to travel around the whole wheel, learning from every position, and never to use one’s starting place as an excuse for weak behaviour. That is how the totem pages on this site should be read — as the book’s portrait of where you enter the circle, not as a fixed destiny.