The magnificent Great Serpent Mound is an earthen effigy with approximately 411 m (1,384-foot) long, five feet high, with an average width of twenty feet, its tail ends in a large spiral, representing a monstrous snake writhing in seven humps across a high, wooded ridge while disgorging an egg from its gaping jaws. This ancient structure which located near Locust Grove in the Ohio Valley, first reported by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis in "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" published by Smithsonian Museum in 1848. It has perfect proportions confirm the technical and artistic sophistication of its creators. Whoever they were, they thoroughly cleaned up after themselves. Even not a single trace of tools, implements or weapons of any kind were excavated in the Mound’s vicinity. In the early 1990s, archaeo-astronomers determined that the Serpent’s humps had been deliberately aligned with the rising of various significant celestial phenomena, including solstice sunrises. The site was never inhabited, having served instead as a ceremonial center.
The Great Serpent Mound is unique for more than the outstanding perfection of its effigy. It sits atop a singular formation. Within a circular area, four miles across, the local layers of bedrock have been broken into enormous cracks. Some of these blocks were forced steeply downward, others sharply upward. Early investigators of this feature concluded it was created by the upward pressure of a volcanic force from below that never quite reached the surface; hence, its description as “crypto-volcanic.”
The Mandan Indians, who were the earliest people known to have historically resided in the vicinity of the Mound, said it was built by a race which preceded them. They were powerful, even fearsome men, who were the descendants of survivors from a “great flood” in the Gulf of Mexico. Supposedly, the Mandan were not only forbidden to visit the Great Serpent Mound; they were not even allowed to look in its direction! Eventually, the Indians, finding conditions unbearable under the domineering mound-builders, migrated westward to the Missouri River.
Historically, researchers first attributed the mound to the Adena culture (1000 BCE - 1 CE). William Webb, noted Adena exponent, found evidence through carbon dating for Kentucky Adena as early as 1200 BCE. As there are Adena graves near the Serpent Mound, scholars thought the same people constructed the mound. The skeletal remains of the Adena type uncovered in the 1880s at Serpent Mound indicate that these people were unique among the ancient Ohio Valley peoples. Carbon-dating studies published in 1996 of material from the mound appeared to place the Serpent Mound construction as later than the span of the Adena. This suggested that a people subsequent to the Adena may have built or refurbished the site for their own uses and purposes.
Recently the dating of the site has been brought into question. While it has long been thought to be an Adena site based on slim evidence, a couple of radiocarbon dates from a small excavation raise the possibility that the mound is no more than a thousand years old. Middle Ohio Valley people of the time were not known for building large earthworks, however; they did display a high regard for snakes as shown by the numerous copper serpentine pieces associated with them.
Based on Frank Joseph's research, what is particularly remarkable about their scant memories of the Serpent Mound is that the Mandan tribe, of all the Plains tribes, preserved the most elaborate ceremony commemorating the Great Flood. Known as the Okipa, it was personally witnessed by a famous portrait artist and explorer of the early American west, George Catlin. Documenting the Okipa in words and paint, he described how an entire Mandan village reenacted the drama of the Deluge, wherein Indians daubed themselves with dyes from plant fibers to impersonate the red-headed, whitefaced survivors who arrived in a large, wooden vessel. Even this element of the myth was reconstructed and placed at the center of the village. The compound symbol of egg and serpent appears in the tribal culture of no Plains Indian nation, although several tribes in the south west, such as the Hopi, practiced ophiolatreia, or snake idolatry. Their memory of the Great Serpent Mound is highly Atlantean in the retelling. They claim it was raised by a related tribe, the Snake Clan, who escaped the destruction of their island homeland far out into theEastern Ocean. Remembered as “the Third Emergence,” their massmigration was made possible through the leadership of Pahana, the “White Brother.” He piled people and animals into fleets of large reed boats, which floated them to a new life in America.
Soon after landing, they set up a shrine to their serpent-god on the east coast in gratitude for their survival from the catastrophe. He was, after all, the spirit of regeneration, and they had escaped the violent destruction of their homeland. Migrating westward, they passed into the Ohio Valley, where they raised the Great Serpent Mound, naming it Tokchii, the “Guardian of the East,” to commemorate the direction from which they fled the Deluge. Descendants of the Snake Clan still wear seashells to memorialize their oceanic origins.
It is remarkable that the Hopi should claim descent from the Snake Clan, survivors from a lost island in the Atlantic Ocean and designers of the mound representing a serpent disgorging an egg, while the Greeks, separated from the Hopi by half a world and thousands of years, recorded that their ancestors were a “Serpent People,” the Ophites, from the Western Sea, and whose emblem was a snake with an egg at its mouth!
The Ohio mound’s prodigious size, together with the “egg” being spat from its mouth, strongly suggests that its creators intended to portray a comet ejecting the meteorite that excavated the same crater at which the effigy is located. In other words, the builders of the Great Serpent Mound must have witnessed the meteor-fall. The sky-serpent spitting a meteoritic oval as an obvious metaphor of the Atlantis catastrophe was found beyond the Ohio Valley.
Greeks of the Classical Age told of their Atlantean predecessors, remembered by them as the Pelasgians (the same “Sea Peoples” documented by Pharaoh Ramses-III’s scribes at his Victory Temple in West Thebes). The Pelasgians were said to have emerged from the Cosmic Egg disgorged “from the fangs of Ophion.” This oldest creation-myth in Greece held that Ophion (“Serpent”) was swimming alone in the primeval sea before the beginning of time, when Boreas, god of the north wind, accidentally dropped into the waters a seed. Ophion swallowed it, and soon after, the
Cosmic Egg sprang from his mouth. It seems clear that the pre-Greek story of Pelasgian origins is the same idea implicit in the Great Serpent Mound, perched on the western rim of an astrobleme. The “seed” accidentally dropped by Boreas, personification of tumult in the sky, was the meteorite that fell into the ocean, triggering the geologic upheavals from which the Atlantean “Sea Peoples” emerged as survivors and culture-bearers.
Until now, the dating of the design, the original construction, and the identity of the builders of the serpent effigy are three questions still debated in the disciplines of social science, including ethnology, archaeology, and anthropology. In addition, contemporary American Indians have an interest in the site. Several attributions have been entered by academic, philosophic, and Native American concerns regarding all three of these unknown factors of when designed, when built, and by whom.
Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 36: The Serpent Mound Mystery - "Whether New World or Old, Is There an Atlantis Connection?" written by Frank Joseph;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mound
Pics Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 36 page 36;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serpent_Mounds_sketch.jpg
The Great Serpent Mound is unique for more than the outstanding perfection of its effigy. It sits atop a singular formation. Within a circular area, four miles across, the local layers of bedrock have been broken into enormous cracks. Some of these blocks were forced steeply downward, others sharply upward. Early investigators of this feature concluded it was created by the upward pressure of a volcanic force from below that never quite reached the surface; hence, its description as “crypto-volcanic.”
The Mandan Indians, who were the earliest people known to have historically resided in the vicinity of the Mound, said it was built by a race which preceded them. They were powerful, even fearsome men, who were the descendants of survivors from a “great flood” in the Gulf of Mexico. Supposedly, the Mandan were not only forbidden to visit the Great Serpent Mound; they were not even allowed to look in its direction! Eventually, the Indians, finding conditions unbearable under the domineering mound-builders, migrated westward to the Missouri River.
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| Serpent Mound in Ohio Valley |
Historically, researchers first attributed the mound to the Adena culture (1000 BCE - 1 CE). William Webb, noted Adena exponent, found evidence through carbon dating for Kentucky Adena as early as 1200 BCE. As there are Adena graves near the Serpent Mound, scholars thought the same people constructed the mound. The skeletal remains of the Adena type uncovered in the 1880s at Serpent Mound indicate that these people were unique among the ancient Ohio Valley peoples. Carbon-dating studies published in 1996 of material from the mound appeared to place the Serpent Mound construction as later than the span of the Adena. This suggested that a people subsequent to the Adena may have built or refurbished the site for their own uses and purposes.
Recently the dating of the site has been brought into question. While it has long been thought to be an Adena site based on slim evidence, a couple of radiocarbon dates from a small excavation raise the possibility that the mound is no more than a thousand years old. Middle Ohio Valley people of the time were not known for building large earthworks, however; they did display a high regard for snakes as shown by the numerous copper serpentine pieces associated with them.
Based on Frank Joseph's research, what is particularly remarkable about their scant memories of the Serpent Mound is that the Mandan tribe, of all the Plains tribes, preserved the most elaborate ceremony commemorating the Great Flood. Known as the Okipa, it was personally witnessed by a famous portrait artist and explorer of the early American west, George Catlin. Documenting the Okipa in words and paint, he described how an entire Mandan village reenacted the drama of the Deluge, wherein Indians daubed themselves with dyes from plant fibers to impersonate the red-headed, whitefaced survivors who arrived in a large, wooden vessel. Even this element of the myth was reconstructed and placed at the center of the village. The compound symbol of egg and serpent appears in the tribal culture of no Plains Indian nation, although several tribes in the south west, such as the Hopi, practiced ophiolatreia, or snake idolatry. Their memory of the Great Serpent Mound is highly Atlantean in the retelling. They claim it was raised by a related tribe, the Snake Clan, who escaped the destruction of their island homeland far out into theEastern Ocean. Remembered as “the Third Emergence,” their massmigration was made possible through the leadership of Pahana, the “White Brother.” He piled people and animals into fleets of large reed boats, which floated them to a new life in America.
 |
| Sketch of Serpent Mound |
It is remarkable that the Hopi should claim descent from the Snake Clan, survivors from a lost island in the Atlantic Ocean and designers of the mound representing a serpent disgorging an egg, while the Greeks, separated from the Hopi by half a world and thousands of years, recorded that their ancestors were a “Serpent People,” the Ophites, from the Western Sea, and whose emblem was a snake with an egg at its mouth!
The Ohio mound’s prodigious size, together with the “egg” being spat from its mouth, strongly suggests that its creators intended to portray a comet ejecting the meteorite that excavated the same crater at which the effigy is located. In other words, the builders of the Great Serpent Mound must have witnessed the meteor-fall. The sky-serpent spitting a meteoritic oval as an obvious metaphor of the Atlantis catastrophe was found beyond the Ohio Valley.
Greeks of the Classical Age told of their Atlantean predecessors, remembered by them as the Pelasgians (the same “Sea Peoples” documented by Pharaoh Ramses-III’s scribes at his Victory Temple in West Thebes). The Pelasgians were said to have emerged from the Cosmic Egg disgorged “from the fangs of Ophion.” This oldest creation-myth in Greece held that Ophion (“Serpent”) was swimming alone in the primeval sea before the beginning of time, when Boreas, god of the north wind, accidentally dropped into the waters a seed. Ophion swallowed it, and soon after, the
Cosmic Egg sprang from his mouth. It seems clear that the pre-Greek story of Pelasgian origins is the same idea implicit in the Great Serpent Mound, perched on the western rim of an astrobleme. The “seed” accidentally dropped by Boreas, personification of tumult in the sky, was the meteorite that fell into the ocean, triggering the geologic upheavals from which the Atlantean “Sea Peoples” emerged as survivors and culture-bearers.
Until now, the dating of the design, the original construction, and the identity of the builders of the serpent effigy are three questions still debated in the disciplines of social science, including ethnology, archaeology, and anthropology. In addition, contemporary American Indians have an interest in the site. Several attributions have been entered by academic, philosophic, and Native American concerns regarding all three of these unknown factors of when designed, when built, and by whom.
Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 36: The Serpent Mound Mystery - "Whether New World or Old, Is There an Atlantis Connection?" written by Frank Joseph;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mound
Pics Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 36 page 36;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serpent_Mounds_sketch.jpg
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