cont (more at source): And this drama was at the heart of a place we now call Cahokia, ancient America's one true city north of Mexico—as large in its day as London— and the political capital of a most unusual Indian nation.

At that time all the stars and planets in the Northern Hemisphere's night sky were visible above Cahokia, situated in a broad expanse of Mississippi River bottomland just east of what is now St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia's people looked to the Morning and Evening stars for guidance and— inspired by ideas from Mesoamerica, possibly brought back from Cahokian rulers' travels or priests' vision quests— incorporated them into a religion that would displace traditions across the American Midwest, South, and Plains.