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

Along this “Road of Light” the souls of the dead journey to the Great Serpent...

The Great Serpent not only dwelt in the Beneath World as the master of beneath and underwater creatures but reigned ...

a netherworld being who could assume the form of a Great Panther. With its elongated tail, this Great Panther could roil the waters of lakes, rivers, and ponds into whirlpoo...

symbols and their contextual placement on objects can serve as mnemonic devices that cue storytelling memory. Thus such motifs aid the renewal of myth, ritual, and even history in nonliterate societies.

The image of the Great

Serpent on a pottery vessel very well may have identified the medicine it contained, while linking it with specific rituals that this supernatural controlled.

In a different interpretation of this imagery, Vernon J. Knight has proposed that such “monstrous” images as the Great Serpent functioned not only as communicative symbols but also as the instruments through which elites enha...

the encoding of images such as the Great Serpent is just as likely to be an effort to mystify and render hermetic a specific aspect of esoteric knowledge through symbolism obscure to the uninitiated. By manipulating such ...

The deliberate effort to obscure symbolism through the visualization of fearsome monsters heightens the power of the ritual practitioners who...

Located in west-central Alabama on the Black Warrior River, Moundville is the second largest Mississippian site, after Cahokia. Between AD 1250 and 1500 Moundville was a major center of artistic and craft production

Schatte also determined that winged serpents fell into ten separate stylistic groupings, each characterized by differences in body decoration and head and wing formation as well as in eye surrounds and other markings. These ten identifiable style groups may represent different functions within the corpus of winged serpent ideology.

each of Schatte’s groupings may function in a manner comparable to the imagery and ideology of the Virgin Mary within the practice of Roman Catholicism.

Each category of symbolic motifs forms a subset within the iconography of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Although all essentially represent the Virgin Mary, each possesses a slightly different ideological function within the overall cult and logically stimulates the recollection of particular narratives or events. The groupings that Schatte identifies, however, may also suggest the presence of an individual workshop or taller at Moundville, wherein a master ceramic artist supervised others who were producing winged serpent imagery.

Lankford argues that the function of the wing within the corpus

of winged serpent imagery is to signal that this composite being exists as a serpent in the sky realm

Hemphill engraved pottery excavated at Moundville shows signs of use, which strongly suggests that these vessels were not solely intended as grave goods. Perhaps containing sacred medicine, they were used in a variety of...

Both engraved and incised depictions of serpents, winged or not, figure prominently in the LMV artistic corpus.

this level of variation suggests the presence of individual workshops at LMV sites

In this instance, the intertwined bodies of two serpents create an aperture that ordinarily would be vacant space. Here, however, the anticipated vacant space encloses a four-armed swirl motif, a symbol that Lankford has identified as marking the underwater Beneath World

also suggest that in some instances the appearance of this motif signals the watery Beneath World in its aspect as the night sky.

intertwined bodies of two serpents, specifically rattlesnakes, that form negative spaces that may very well designate portals.

Given that the Rattlesnake Disk portal encircles the hand-and-eye motif, a known celestial marker (Lankford 2007a), while the Kersey site beaker bears a rattlesnake-framed portal through which the swirl-cross motif emerges, we have a thematically

consistent though stylistically different set of objects marking the Beneath World or more generally promising tran...

Thus, according to the long-established opinion of Roy Hathcock, the origin of the ogee itself is an “objective abstract version of entwined rattlesnakes”

Recently, however, Robert Sharp has suggested that the snake-ogee connection also derives from a natural prototype: the specific body markings of the copperhead, three species of which cover the entire Southeastern region in which ogees have been found

LMV potters and artisans produced images of the Great Serpent in its feline aspect. This particular depiction appears incised on beakers as well as on large open-mouthed bowls with three-dimensional images of the Underwater Panther, using his elongated tail to adorn the rim. LMV potters

Interestingly, the Great Serpent and its Underwater Panther variant are equipped with distinctive eye surrounds.

eye surrounds in some instances function as locatives. The two-pronged eye surrounds that have been said to identify supernaturals located in the sky also function that way in the symbolism of the LMV

while three or four-pronged eye surrounds mark supernaturals located in t...

The frontal Underwater Panther has a three-pronged eye surround, while the Great Serpent variant uses a double-pronged eye surround, rather than the wing motif, to identify its location in the Above World or celestial realm.

On the basis of the evidence presented thus far, the swirl-cross motif is signaling the viewer to understand that this winged serpent lies in the watery underworld, perhaps in its function as the night sky

This depicts a wingless, long-snouted, antlered serpent devouring an anthropomorphic figure. Interestingly, the snake’s rattles are replaced by the same scepter or war-club motif on the Richardson Landing vessel that was surrounded by the ogee-forming serpents.

imagery in the LMV clearly illustrates that this area also shared Moundville’s preoccupation with the Beneath World and the realm of the dead. LMV winged serpent imagery and symbolism, unlike Moundville’s, seem greatly concerned with the information that locative placement generated. Certainly the Underwater Panther imagery that was explicit in the art of the LMV was implicit in the art of Moundville. The two iconographic corpora are decidedly similar, but the LMV tradition was not copying the winged imagery from Moundville.

more likely scenario is that Moundville and the LMV culture shared a broad ideological system that was reflected in the templates used visually to manifest those things from the watery Beneath World that ordinarily could not be seen.

Stylistically, however, the artists and artisans of the Lower Mississippi Valley were more interested in representing a broader vision of the Beneath World, encompassing both its

inhabitants and the supernatural geography that ultimately became the home to all.

The Thruston Tablet—also known as the Rocky Creek Tablet—is among the most interesting and unusual artifacts ever found in the American South.

One side of the tablet (which we think of today as the obverse or front) is covered with engraved designs, consisting of many human forms arranged in multiple scenes. The tablet also has engraved images on the reverse, but these are faint and less distinct. The tablet is clearly Mississippian in age and probably dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries AD.

In The Antiquities of Tennessee and the Adjacent States (1890) Gates P. Thruston announced the discovery of an intriguing petroglyphic tablet in Sumner County, Tennessee, reportedly

found on Rocky Creek, “near the stone graves and mounds of Castalian Springs,” and published a rendering

In 1891 William H. Holmes published his own rendering of the Thruston Tablet, which was not based on Thruston’s line drawing and differed from it in numerous details of major and minor significance

A much more extensive analysis of the tablet was undertaken by William Myer (1928), Tennessee’s first professional archaeologist. Based on Holmes’s drawing, Myer interpreted the tablet as a storyboard: “the record of a war between the prehistoric

Indians at Castalian Springs and some other band.”

By far the most unusual treatment of the Thruston Tablet appeared in a pair of articles written by Ruth Verrill and Clyde Keeler (Verrill and Keeler 1961; Keeler and Verrill 1962). Initially unaware of the work of Holmes, Myer, and Parker, these authors produced a drawing of the obverse panel traced from Mallery’s photograph. They interpreted the images as portraying a battle fought between local Indians and Vikings.

The tablet has sustained considerable damage since the 1890s. For one thing, the surface has been eroded, especially on high spots on the stone, so that many of the details depicted in Holmes’s drawing and clearly visible in the Mallery photograph are now no longer visible.

Exactly when this damage and highlighting took place is unknown.

The damage we saw may well have occurred as a result of either surface exfoliation or careless handling over time.

Holmes’s drawing (1891) and Mallery’s photograph (1893) are currently the best depictions of the tablet in print.

Despite the quality of the Holmes and Mallery images and the subsequent damage, our recent examination revealed a few details that Holmes missed. The most important of these is the head of a fish on the obverse side. The body and tail of this fish had been drawn by Holmes, but their meaning was enigmatic until we found the missing head.

The reverse panel was a different story. The only published drawings were based on Parker’s inked photograph, which was a very poor depiction of images on the stone. So we created an entirely new drawing of the reverse panel, based on the photographs and notes we made during our visit to the museum