Souls of the dead tracking across the sky

Mark Honeychurch - 8 July 2024

Craig wrote a couple of weeks ago about a couple of strange ideas he was introduced to at a Matariki event he attended - the idea that Matariki’s brightness can predict the future, and also an idea that the earth has apparently recently shifted on its axis by 20 degrees.

I experienced my own fascinating claim at a local Matariki event in Whitby, Porirua. There was a lot of interesting and appropriate talk about the Matariki event, and the stars and what they mean to Māori. But then one speaker told us that he had come up to the top of the hill we were on earlier than everyone else, to attempt to set up the sound system for our singing. And, when he had arrived at the top of the hill at just after 6am, he looked up into the night sky (he gestured to the North-East) looking for the Matariki stars. When he did this he witnessed the most amazing sight he’d seen - a string of lights tracking across the sky, followed by a second string of them. The only explanation he had was that it must have been the souls of recently departed people making their way to the next life, and he felt privileged to have witnessed this happening. We were asked to think of the people in our lives that had passed over in the last year, which was a nice thing to do, and then sang a couple of songs - but my skeptical brain simply couldn’t get over this fantastical claim I’d just been told.

I’m sure many of you have already twigged as to what it’s much more likely our speaker saw - Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, which are launched in groups and, soon after launch, before they take their final positions, travel in a straight line and are often clearly visible. My understanding is that their visibility reduces once they’re in place and they reorient their solar panels.

Of course, guessing that this was the real source of the lights isn’t enough - I’m not an armchair debunker, I’m a skeptic and I like to check my hypotheses. I didn’t say anything publicly at the time, but as soon as we were back down the hill I took out my mobile phone and looked online to see if there were any Starlink satellites passing overhead at that time. Sure enough, at 6:12am, moving from East to North-East, there was “good visibility” of Starlink:

Starlink-175 was a set of 22 satellites launched on the 23rd of June (24th of June NZ time), just a few days before our June 27th Matariki event. Here’s a video of the launch:

Our speaker was right that this was an amazing sight to see - a while ago I popped out of my house just to catch a glimpse of these satellite trails, as they’re pretty awesome to look at. He just misidentified what those lights were, interpreting them through his spiritual view of the world, likely aided by the feelings that would have been stirred in him by being there to celebrate this Māori special occasion.

I guess what was most disappointing was that, rather than privately asking people what they thought it might be, or looking online for an answer, he took his half-baked idea and confidently announced it to around 100 people, many of whom were young, impressionable children. If he’d just applied some due diligence first, his impromptu speech wouldn’t have been quite so disappointing for myself and many of the other attendees, and presumably misleading for some others.

I don’t want to diminish Matariki here, and I honestly think that it’s amazing that we now have a Māori celebration and public holiday in our calendar. Ideally I’d love to see all of our public holidays have some kind of local relevance, but I suspect it’ll be an insurmountable task, at the very least for removing or changing the Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter. I guess I just hope that, over time, Matariki finds its place as something that can be celebrated without the addition of people’s personal spiritual reckons, and maybe also without Christian karakia ending in the inevitable “Amine” (Amen) - after all, it’s not like we’re lacking in inclusive secular karakia that can be used at events like this.