Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World (Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)

by George E. Lankford

all levels of the Upper World are plunged into darkness when Hon-ga A-hui-ton’s gloriously shining head disappears from its accustomed place, for his head is Morning Star, the harbinger of the sun. His head is recovered when two of his relatives (variously identified as his sons or nephews) magically kill the victorious ball players with special arrows and return the heads of Hon-ga A-hui-ton and his slain companions. Hon-ga A...

The saviors of Hon-ga A-hui-ton are commonly called the “Hero Twins.” These holy “Star” men, the progeny of Sun and Evening Star, represent the two great divisions: the sky and the earth. Two leaders were chosen to help govern the people: one from the Tsi-Zhu “gentle sky” clan of the sky division and one from the “gentle Ponca” clan of the earth division.

Hawk (the elder brother of the “Hero Twins”), through the self-sacrifice of his twin brother, Thunder, becomes the new Morning Star

a peripheral survival of this epic was collected from among the Ioway and Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) people during the early twentieth century. The Dhegihans, however, preserve the poles and staffs and other imagery associated with the story, along with the ball game (Fletcher and La Flesche 1992:196–197).

the Omaha preserved two poles: the “Venerable Man” or “sacred pole” and the ancient cedar pole. The tradition is that the sacred pole is linked to the star that is motionless: Polaris, the North Star

The Classic Braden art of Cahokia often depicts the spirit beings and ancestors Hon-ga A-hui-ton (Hawk) and his two nephews/sons, the Hero Twins.

create, regulate, cleanse, and resurrect their stellar progeny and are first depicted in paintings and drawings in sacred places (such as Picture Cave in Missouri) just before the Cahokia florescence. They later appear in Dhegihan art as red claystone sculptures

engraved figures on marine...

copper repouss...

and cedar-wood sculptures covered with th...

Muskogean people place their origin in the Beneath World

The Seminole, much influenced by European missionaries, believe that they were made of earth by a supernatural creator

The Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee relate how conflict between two supernatural bein...

While the earth-diver set of oral traditions is well expressed among the Central Algonkian peoples, it is only a small ...

none of the American Indian groups in the Eastern Woodlands trace their origins to the stars, while ...

The Osage origin in John Joseph Mathews’s account is the sky-lodge of the sun. Only the ruling elite among...

the west or feminine side of the cosmos, we encounter a singularly powerful and complex spirit ancestor: Old-Woma...

This female figure never dies; she is the fecund earth; she is the mother of all beings. Her husbands are the “snakes”

and she is eternally in the embrace of three of them: the Great Serpent, the Missouri River; the Rainbow Serpent in the daytime sky; and the Great Sky Serpent, the Milky Way in the night sky.

In that story, the Great Sky Serpent fell into the primeval ocean. There he changed into a huge turtle that laid eggs from which the Quapaw hatched.

all accounts of the origin of the Dhegihans accept the fact that they came from the heavens. In the Dhegihan narrative, First Woman gives birth to the sun every morning and gives birth to all of her children. Likewise, she embraces all of her children as they come to her body, the grave, at the end of life.

she turns her body around and upside down just as the sun sets and the night begins. At dawn she returns to her original position in the throes of giving birth to the sun. On a daily basis the earth inverts at dusk and then again at dawn. This action puts the Beneath World on t...

portraits of elite women at the Osage Tribal Museum with stylized spiders tattooed on the backs of their hands.

The expensive tattoos related to the spider, who is another manifestation of First Woman, were especially important in Dhegihan Society.

feminine spider designs were widely distributed among elite first daughters

The spider asterism is in the constellation Orion (La Flesche 1975:360), and it is the place where “Old Woman Spider” waits to take “First Man” or his successors on a journey into the Beneath World

It also symbolizes First Woman, as Grandmother Spider, weaving the web or snare of life, the Middle World.

the appearance of the spider on a separate assemblage of shell gorgets found at Cahokia in western Illinois, at St. Mary’s in southeast Missouri, and at other sites

Unified dualism is an ever-present theme in Dhegihan cosmology, as represented in the following concepts: sky and earth, male and female, a refreshing rain and a powerful thunderstorm, sun and moon, day and night.

The axis mundi, the great unifier, forms a bridge between the sky with the male sun and Morning Star and the female earth with her attendant Evening Star. Joining First Woman—the earth and the mother of all things—was an unavoidable episode in a Dhegihan’s death and awakening.

suspect that the movement of Dhegihan ideology, art, and oral traditions impacted an enormous area, as may be judged by the extent of distribution of Classic Braden art objects throughout the Eastern Woodlands (Brown 2004:108).

The widespread use of pole symbolism—whether a red oak, a cotton-wood, or a red cedar—survived not only in archaeological features but also in sixteenth-century European illustrations by Theodor de Bry. While these poles functioned as supports and, more importantly, as pathways, they in turn connect to portals or gateways, enabling supernaturals and mortals to traverse the levels of the cosmos.

Unquestionably, early expressions of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere or MIIS (Reilly and Garber 2007:3–4) began early within the confluence region. Symbolism involving the longnosed maskettes, the imagery of Morning Star, is comfortably dated to AD 1025 by a series of AMS dates at Picture Cave

One goal of this chapter is to summarize the literature on Braden style readings and cast these into a larger picture. This task allows me to enlarge on a major theme of the Dhegiha and their close cognates—the centrality of death and rebirth as partly embodied in the Earth-Sky duality that is particular to these closely related groups.

The Braden art style is the name for the form of image-making that has come to be identified quintessentially with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, although we now realize that it is only one of several distinct styles composing this complex

engraved shell cups from Spiro

Eddyville-style shel...

Cahokia-style carved ston...

personification of different divine powers (that is, embodying spiritual powers in human form), the emphasis on the Birdman in the Morning Star cycle, Earthmother, and a common use of a stock of visual metaphors

Representations often taken for warriors are more comfortably interpreted as the cosmic combat of the four heroes against the forces of death

Its homeland was the American Bottom and neighboring lands together with a portion of the Prairie-Woodland borderlands within the Upper Mississippi Valley.

The Braden style has undergone secular changes over a span of 300-plus years. Early expression of this style has been radiocarbon dated at both of these two rock sites within the Emergent Mississippian period

falconoid symbolism in the form of effigy mounds has deep roots extending into the pre–AD 1050

Classic Braden expression of this style appears to have emerged at Cahokia by the Lohmann phase,

Late Braden expression is manifest in the following Sand Prairie phase

In the Late Braden style such distinctive features of Birdman as the hawk-billed human nose and the circular scalp lock make their appearance

The Omaha, Osage, Quapaw, Ponca, and Kansa are five “cognate” tribes that speak closely related languages and occupy the eastern margins of the Great Plains.

similarities are shared with neighboring groups in the Prairie-Plains (Hultkrantz 1973). La Flesche (1939) specifically referred to the Otoe and the Pawnee as having religious customs nearly identical with the Osage. All were composed of exogamous patrilineal clans organized into earth-sky social moieties aligned with a series of oppositions, including the south and north directions.

This distinctive organization of male descent groups is not found in tribes of the Great Lakes, East, or Southeast

The Dhegiha also define themselves in terms of an idealized dispersion within the Mississippi River Valley watershed. The Omaha take a name that means the “against-the-current” or “upstream” people, and the Quapaw correspondingly are the “downstream” or “with-the-current” people, referring to the Mississippi River