Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 9 - December 22, 2020
“read into” these original images a new set of meanings appropriate to fundamentally different Muskhogean contexts of beliefs and rituals.
Several frequently encountered images from Mississippian iconography are illustrations drawn from the widespread mythology of the progress of the soul after death. That argument has been presented in earlier articles on the “Path of Souls” and the “Great Serpent,” in which the familiar images of the winged serpent, the hand-and-eye, the skull, and the bone were identified as elements of the celestial journey taken by the free soul after death
at Moundville, where those particular images from the larger iconographic corpus are found clustered on pottery included in mortuary contexts. Their co-occurrence on bottles and their separation from other images helped identify them as participants in a single area of meaning, at least at Moundville. One other image shares space on a bottle in the Path of Souls cluster: a bird.
The bird on the Moundville pottery collection is not the Crested Bird, as will be seen, and similar iconic identification processes may reveal the same sorts of artistic freedom in the treatment of the Moundville bird.
The key characteristics, at least in distinguishing these two birds from each other, are the jagged feather crest and the hooked beak. The resemblance to the naturalistic class of raptorial birds has long suggested the name “Raptor.”
If it is correct that at Moundville the Raptor is part of the Path of Souls mortuary complex, where might it fit? In the earlier presentations I have argued that there was a widespread mythology of death across the Eastern Woodlands and Plains. That mythology saw the Milky Way as the Path of Souls and provided a description of the skyscape and the details of the journey. The commonality in beliefs, even to details, suggests that the mythological vision was ancient and widespread, but the variations in the ways in which the details are altered or rearranged argue for the development of regional
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One of the recurrent themes of the mythology of death is the necessity for judgment of the soul, an attempt to determine which type of outcome is called for, depending on personal characteristics.
This test/decision theme appears in several ways in the full Path of Souls complex, and it seems worthwhile to summarize here the material surveyed in the earlier article
One way in which this idea is symbolized is the image of a fork in the Path of Souls.
the Milky Way splits, and one path leads to an open gap before the main...
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The decision-making figure takes several forms. One is a fearsome image of a “brain-smasher,” usually a woman whose task is to destroy memory (and humanity?) by removing or smashing the brain.
The correlation of this Great Eagle antagonist on the Path of Souls (apparently restricted to the Alabama and Seminole) with the appearance of the Raptor on Moundville mortuary ceramics seems significant. When it is considered that the Alabama are in the group of likely descendants of the Moundvillians, the case is as complete as it is likely to be: for Moundville, the Raptor/Great Eagle was to be found as an antagonist on the Path of Souls, and mortuary ritual would likely have included grave goods which would enable the soul to negotiate or fight with the Raptor on the journey.
It thus appears to be a strong possibility that the Raptor on the Moundville pottery, regardless of its meaning in other places and other contexts, was part of a mortuary symbolic complex, related to the celestial realm and linked conceptually to the
iconic images of the winged serpent, skull, bone, and hand-and-eye.
the importance of regionalism in understanding the meanings of the images is underscored. If Moundville’s particular understanding and use of the Raptor are different from those of many other places in which the Raptor appears, then it becomes extremely important to seek meanings in the local context.
since it seems unlikely that the other Raptors in Mississippian iconography are completely unconnected with the Moundville Raptor, the importance of becoming clear about the number and types of meaning that may be embodied in each collection of images is underscored.
a general cognitive meaning, a local application, and the meaning of functional usage.
is not difficult to imagine, first, a general Raptor cognitive meaning in the realm of myth, a portrayal of a figure who is an important part of the cosmic structure and the religious life of Native Americans of many different ethnic groups. A second meaning is a local application of the Raptor, with appropriate additions to the local myths, that stresses the mortuary significance of the figure and indicates an eventual
personal encounter with the Raptor. A third: objects bearing Raptor symbols that are designed to help in the negotiation with the Raptor and/or indicate a special relationship with it and thus serve as a status or achievement indicator. In such a range of meanings, can any single understanding be considered the “explanation” of the symbol?
In the hundreds of artistic designs in the Mississippian iconographic corpus, more than sixty examples of swastikas are known to occur. The Sanskrit label “swastika” used in religious studies has been applied to this image because of its similarity to the ancient Indian symbol. Most of the Mississippian examples, however, are subtler in structure than the right-angle form of the ancient image, for most differ from crosses only in the slight curving bend at the end of the arms of an equal-armed cross.
The term that will be used here is “swirl-cross,” which seems a descriptive but politically neutral label.
the swirl-cross is an independent artistic motif. The examples from Moundville copper, in which the swirl-cross in a circle is the basic motif, are a powerful demonstration of the independence of the image. Two provocative fragments of engraved shell cups from Spiro suggest the same conclusion.
many of the swirl-crosses appear as inclusions in more complex compositions which are represented by numerous examples, thus providing a larger comparative collection for study.
Cox Mound.
The rayed circle surrounding the cross/swirl-cross has been interpreted by every writer on the subject as the sun, primarily because that is the intuitive meaning to which most observers would leap.
Waring was followed in this interpretation by James Howard (1968), who emphasized the ritual significance of the four-log structure of the sacred fire that is found at the center of the Creek square grounds.
But I did emphasize the separation of the two motifs (sun and fire), thus making the two phenomena the ends of a column which may serve as an axis mundi in the cosmological structure. Further, I identified the striped pole motif as a side view of the same column. In this view, the cross-in-rayed-circle becomes a two-dimensional version of what was understood as a three-dimensional reality
the cross still seems to be identifiable as a symbol of the Center, just by its form and its location in the center of more complex designs.
Four Crested Birds.
the four Crested Birds surround the central circle, which is a fenestrated swirl-cross with a dotted center.
What has been removed from the Cox Mound design is the looped square, which I identify as the symbol for the earth-island. The Spiro gorget is thus a reduction of the full cosmological design but not necessarily an alteration of its meaning.
Hull.
The swirl-cross stands in the center, surrounded by a circular band containing four hands-and-eyes.
The major difference, however, is that the interior band of four hands is replaced by a spider, with the swirl-cross-in-circle resting upon the body of the spider.
Within the spider gorget context, therefore, the swirl-crosses are a minority replacement for crosses in the McAdams style, just as the unique Hull spider variant has a swirl-cross that replaces crosses in the Hull array.
Nashville.
inquiry, however, since the presence of a swirl-cross is the focus here. Of the 108 examples of the Nashville style (including the nearby Springs style), 100 of them have a triskele in the inner circle. One gorget has only two arms; but seven have four arms, thus forming a swirl-cross.
These variants on the Nashville style, all with swirl-crosses, suggest that the triskele form of the Nashville style may be a local way of executing the swirl-cross, perhaps the result of a single group of allied artists or the distribution of their tradition.
Geometric.
The small sample provides only the tentative conclusion that in this group the swirl-cross may substitute for a center hole or cross
Human Figural. Two gorgets from Spiro bear a swirl-cross in the context of human figures.
Brain and Phillips (1996) place the gorget in the Hamilton style, which is found only at Spiro. “Paired figures are portrayed in ceremonial postures and regalia, and are arranged in a bilaterally symmetrical structure”
The Hamilton gorgets thus suggest that the swirl-cross may replace a cross in a circle, concentric circles, and possibly a raccoon. The swirl-cross here is also associated with motifs of the center: intertwined bands and striped pole.
the swirl-cross, used alone as an independent motif, may be worn by someone as an earspool decoration.
If it is fair to assume that the swirl-cross was not a symbol that could be used randomly, then it is worth noting that it has limited symbolic associations. In the collection surveyed, the following additional motifs occur on artifacts in conjunction with the swirl-cross: raccoon binding, raccoon skin, striped pole, masks, pendant forms, Crested Bird, tassel, neck beads, cyma, looped square, cross, concentric circles, rayed circle, spider, forked eye, hand, petaloid border, petaloid fan, paired figures, and rattle.
These instances of substitution have one element in common: they are nearly always located in the center. The majority of the gorgets in the swirl-cross group are concentric cosmograms.
The substitution of the swirl-cross occurs at the center of those gorgets. I read the center as the column which has the sun at the top and the fire on the earth, symbolized particularly by rayed circle motifs and the cross.
all the Hamilton-style paired-human designs may also present a central pole or panel which is the side view of the central axis. When the swirl-cross appears on the side of the axis (as in #38), it appears to be performing the same service as in the concentric cosmograms—it indicates a particular place or aspect of the axis.
If the cross represents fire, which is part of the axis on the Earth World, then what are the meanings of swirl-cross, triskele, and circle/dot/hole? To what aspect of the axis do they refer?
The Great Serpent is a well-known figure in both the mythology and the iconography of the Mississippian peoples (Lankford 1987:Ch. 4, 2007a). Sometimes it appears as a panther, sometimes as a serpent, and sometimes, as in many of these effigy bowls, as a creature bearing characteristics of both. The general concept refers to the amorphous figure(s) of the denizens and the Master of the Beneath World waters.
