Well there's a first time for everything mate...
We have a saying "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile"
Gday!
Seven Spokes Perpendicular Realities
- Thread starter Kay Kim
- Start date
We have a saying "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile"
Gday!
Surprising info re Serpent Mound appeared in the Columbus Dispatch a few months ago:
Archaeology: Serpent Mound might depict a creation story
Serpent Mound in Adams County is the most iconic earthen sculpture ever created by the ancestors of North American Indians, but now it can be seen only through a kind of filter.
Why? It was damaged by looting and plowing before it was saved and restored in the late 1880s by Frederic Putnam of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. And Putnam’s restorations were influenced by what he thought the mound should look like.
He decided that the mound represented a serpent with an egg in its jaws. He believed it demonstrated a connection between Serpent Mound and various Old World cultures. Other archaeologists have documented parts of the mound that Putnam ignored, such as a wishbone-shaped earthwork that wrapped around the far side of the so-called egg. Evidently, Putnam felt this earthwork made no sense if the mound actually represented a serpent and an egg, so he didn’t restore it.
A new interpretation of Serpent Mound, based on American Indian mythic stories portrayed in a remarkable series of pictographs from Picture Cave in Missouri, is offered by James Duncan, Carol Diaz-Granados, Tod Frolking and me in a paper published online last month in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. We argue that images of serpents and other supernatural beings on the walls of Picture Cave help us make sense of those parts of Serpent Mound that weren’t restored.
One group of pictographs shows a serpent facing a humanoid female with her legs spread apart next to a large oval that might be the symbolic “toothy mouth” of the Great Serpent — lord of the Beneath World. Duncan and Diaz-Granados think this panel illustrates part of a Dhegiha Siouan creation story: the moment when First Woman mated with the Great Serpent in order to acquire his life-giving powers, which she then used to create all life on Earth.
Duncan, Diaz-Granados, Frolking and I believe that Serpent Mound incorporates these same elements: the Great Serpent, his oval “toothy mouth,” and First Woman (the wishbone-shaped mound). If we’re right, this iconic monument represents that key moment in Dhegihan and possibly other tribes’ creation stories.
Another image of the Great Serpent at Picture Cave shows two blocky projections along the side of his head. Duncan, Diaz-Granados and their colleagues interpret these as earspools. Similar projections on the side of Serpent Mound’s head, which Putnam also chose not to restore, might therefore represent the earspools of the Great Serpent. This Picture Cave pictograph has been radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1000, which is very close to the date of A.D. 1030 obtained for Serpent Mound.
All this evidence suggests that Serpent Mound was designed and built during the Mississippian period, when serpents and other dragon-like creatures dominated the artistic landscape in the same way that Serpent Mound dominates the Ohio Brush Creek valley. Whether it was built by Siouan people who later migrated westward, or other groups who shared a once-more-widespread genesis story, remains to be worked out. But it’s clear that the story told by Serpent Mound is an American Indian story — not some Old World story about a serpent and an egg.
Archaeology: Serpent Mound might depict a creation story
The Great Serpent (?) at Picture Cave
I guess it's an Atlantean story! Not helpful re the seven spokes tho.
FWIW - a cursory nosing around brought up interesting info re earspools/serpents:
In addition, such serpents commonly appear as the supernatural breath of precious earspools in Classic Maya iconography
Serpent earspools also appear in Aztec and Mixteca-Puebla art, especially with Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc — gods of rain and fertility
The Redhorn Panel of Picture Cave. In Warren County, Missouri, is a cave appropriately styled "Picture Cave."
At this time, Red Horn's first wife was pregnant and, finally, the old woman's granddaughter gave birth to a male child who was the very likeness of his father, Red Horn, having long red hair and having human heads hanging from his ears. Not long after this, the giantess also gave birth to a male child whose hair was likewise just like his father's. Instead of having human heads hanging from his ears, he had them attached to his nipples.
Redhorn had two sons who were just beginning to walk, when this [Redhorn's death] happened. One of them was just like his father and the other one had the man faces on his shoulders.
So these faces were also found on the breasts and on the shoulders. However, they remain paradigmatically ear ornaments. The word horušík probably comes from ru-šik, "to hang or suspend by hand." This would most often apply to earrings and earbobs, and so the word became specialized.
The Hočąk culture has traces of a time when įčo-horušikra, "the faces hung by hand from the ears," were a prized form of wampum.
The eye of the gods can be reborn on earth as Ear because light is strongly analogous to sound. In Hočąk symbolism sound stands for light. Wears White Feather, for instance, who is the star Sirius, has a living loon for his headdress, a bird that makes a loud call that expresses the brightness of the star. The fact that both light and sound are waves makes them radiate from a center outward in every direction. They vary in amplitude and wave length, and just as light is seen in colors, so sound is heard in pitch. This well appreciated isomorphism allows the ear to stand as a symbol not only for sound, but for light. Thus the offspring of the solar Eye of the World is Ear (Karṇa).
Redhorn created his animate earlobes. When he took his own saliva and rubbed it onto his earlobes, they came alive with human faces. In Hočąk saliva is į-ni, "mouth water." So by pun įni would mean, "to be born from the mouth." "That which is born from the mouth" (sound) therefore comes to dwell in the ear. The little heads symbolize sound itself with all its symbolic implications, as they are born from both mouth and ear. Outside Hočąk culture there are traditions that link the ear to the soul and its progress.
So the head worn on the ear is, or is at least symbolic of, the soul. That heads should be identified with souls is almost universal in scope and is widely found in both the Old and New Worlds.
In this charming account of the rebirth of the sky people on earth, we are told that babies born with earring slits give away their celestial origins. The hole in the ear symbolizes the hole in the sky. When the earring is in the hole, it corresponds to the soul that is in the sky; so when it is absent from the symbol of the sky, it is on earth. Therefore, when a baby of this nature is born, it is born with the symbol of the soul in the sky missing from the hole because it now has a terrestrial incarnation. The image-soul, now converted into symbolism by trading sound for light, is something that enters the ear. The soul has been "spoken" through the mouth of the sky, and "heard" on earth. The breath has been collected by the newborn as if it were a sound heard by the ear.
This last part from this link that has further very fascinating info:
The Redhorn Panel of Picture Cave. An American Star Map
