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Meaning of Serpent Mound still a puzzle

Wednesday, June 20 2007 @ 02:58 AM CDT

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By Bradley T. Lepper

Serpent Mound is perhaps the most recognizable icon of ancient America. The gigantic earthen serpent, eternally frozen as it uncoils, extends more than 1,300 feet along a bluff in northern Adams County.

Although it is clearly a snake, which makes it, to some extent, immediately accessible to modern visitors, the meaning of this particular serpent for its builders is not so readily apparent.

And this sense of familiarity can lead to overreaching interpretations, as when the Rev. Landon West foolishly concluded that the mound represented the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

In order to get some sense of what it might have meant to its original builders, George Lankford, an emeritus professor of folklore at Lyon College in Arkansas, has turned to an examination of the beliefs of the Native Americans whose ancestors would have been in a position to know.

Lankford's paper, "The Great Serpent in Eastern North America," appears in the book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, published this year by the University of Texas Press.

Lankford observes that the Great Serpent was "a major figure in the religious and cosmological understanding" of the Native American tribes of both the Woodlands and Plains.

It was a source of enormous spiritual power that people could invoke to aid them in hunting and in curing illnesses. Although it was primarily a creature of the Beneath World, it sometimes could appear in various guises in our world and in the overarching Above World.

Many Native American cultures associated the constellation Scorpio with the Great Serpent and the bright red star Antares as its eye.

Serpent Mound has an oval earthwork located at its head. This oval often has been interpreted as an egg clutched in the serpent's jaws. For Lankford, the oval represents the red, twinkling eye.

The cliff face, below the serpent effigy, bears an uncanny resemblance to the head of a snake, a fact that might have inspired its creators to build this earthen evocation of the chief spirit of the Beneath World in this location.

For more information about Serpent Mound, go to www.ohiohistory.org/places/serpent.

Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.

http://www.dispatch.com

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