Moroz 1

Doctoral Coursework

Pacifica Graduate Institute

Charlotte Moroz

The Serpent’s Travels, Above and Below

“It is in the form of a serpent, upward of 1000 feet in length, extended in graceful curves, and
terminating in a triple coil at the tail. The embankment constituting this figure is more than 5 feet
high, with a base 30 feet wide at the centre of the body, diminishing somewhat toward the head
and tail. The neck of the figure is stretched out and slightly curved. The mouth is wide open, and
seems in the act of swallowing or ejecting an oval figure which rests partly within the distended
jaws.” (Baldwin 13-14)

“It begins in the tail, in the tight fist of the triple-coiled spiral. The spiral opens then expands
through seven convolutions of the extending body, the body as a whole turning to follow the
distinctive curve of the ridge. Energy culminates in the broad triangular head, mouth seeming to
arch wide open, preparing to swallow an oval-shaped disk.” (Allen 400)

Evocative and mysterious, these descriptions1 and images2 of Serpent Mound in Ohio

send shivers through any sensing and feeling being and something deep in me recognizes the

grandeur and ingeniousness of this immense earth work. Perhaps, more mysteriously, the

symbology and mythologies emanating from this mound work in multidimensional,

interconnected ways which necessitate an expansion of consciousness to grasp. To explore these

multiple dimensions and layers, I will focus this paper upon the potential mythological

interpretations of the Serpent Mound in Adam’s County, Ohio, exploring its archaeological,

astronomical, and archetypal aspects.

I will ground my exploration in and against the framework of social anthropological

structuralism. Structuralism, stemming from social anthropology, is the “quest for the invariant”

or what is patterned in the Serpent Mound’s construction, iconography, and related mythological

narrative(s) and/or rituals, aspiring “to find what is common” (Lévi-Strauss 8-9). In

structuralism, myths function to “mediate’ ‘oppositions or contradictions,’” and “transformations

1
The first, recounted by John Baldwin in 1871, the second, by Chadwick Allen, trans-Indigenous researcher in
2015.
2
See Appendix.
 Moroz 2

are of the essence of sets of myth; for they demonstrate the continuity of the hard structural

core,” a useful basis for exploring oppositions inherent to the Great Serpent mythologies of

North America (Cohen 347). I would challenge that “myths tell us nothing instructive about the

order of the world, the nature of reality, or the origin and destiny of mankind,” as our exploration

of the Serpent Mound will serve as a prime example of the ways in which a structure encodes

astrological information by way of a mythology expressed in iconography and ritual, yet find

structuralism to offer a useful framework to explore how mythology informs us “a great deal

about the societies from which they originate” (Lévi-Strauss 8-9). Wherever the frame of

structuralism is too rigid, Andrew Tobolowsky’s “Mythic Vocabulary” can serve as a framework

companion, suggesting that mythology is fluidly shared as “elements of familiar mythic

corpora,” a “mythic ‘vocabulary,’” so to speak, that can be strung together in “like the elements

of a linguistic vocabulary,” but also “available to cultures in disassociated forms ” (4).

I wish to acknowledge, as we set out to explore this sacred and ancient structure and its

emanating mythologies, that the Serpent Mound has been predominantly studied by non-

indigenous scientists and scholars and, due to unexamined colonial, imperial, and racist biases,

we visit any study of this site acknowledging the disenfranchisement3 of indigenous peoples as

pertains to the significance and provenance of it. In the spirit of awareness and respect, I wish to

examine the Serpent Mound in ways which uplift indigenous voices and wisdom traditions, and

which honor the diverse indigenous origins of this magnificent earth work and the complex and

multidimensional history of its creation and ritual maintenance. Emergent scholarship, modeled

by Jay Miller in Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America belatedly center

indigenous knowledge as pertains to mounds and surrounding practices, as “outsiders, especially

3
Jay Miller outlines the many ways in which, in the study of earth works like Serpent Mound, “local tribes were
thereby denied their ancestry,” noting that, belatedly, “academia has confirmed this direct link after long debate,
testimony, and research (10).
 Moroz 3

academics, lack any fuller sense of cultural context” (Miller xvii). Chadwick Allen, too, presents

a trans-Indigenous mode of study in “Performing Serpent Mound: A Trans-Indigenous

Meditation,” which offers a model centering “Indigenous-to-Indigenous literary and artistic

contacts, interactions, exchanges, and collaborations in all historical periods” (Allen 411).

Let us first introduce Ohio’s Serpent Mound and its location. This great earth work is

“built within the drainages of the Great Miami and the Little Miami Rivers,” 573 miles from

Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa (Lynott 187). Serpent Mound ‘lies on a distinctively

shaped ridge above the Brush Creek Valley, but also on the outer edge of a fifteen-square-mile

area of "geological disturbance" bearing a "cryptoexplosion structure" created more than 200

million years ago by the impact of a meteor’” (Allen 404). Meaning “can be inferred from native

belief systems, arrangement within the groups, and the physical relationship to key natural

landscape features,” as Serpent Mound’s location within the rim of a crater, according to

indigenous wisdom, “called for special propitiation to hold down cosmic turmoil” (Birmingham

24; Miller 8). Though a point of academic contention, William Monaghan and Edward W.

Herrmann propose convincingly that multiple “radiocarbon dates from the base of Serpent

Mound fill … suggest that Serpent Mound was built twice: first during the Adena and then

rebuilt (or repaired) during the Fort Ancient period” (85). We shall explore responses from

indigenous research which may shed light on the question of the Serpent Mound’s age in future

passages.

What patterns of significance do we find in the serpent imagery of the Serpent Mound?

George E. Lankford helps us to map the “Great Serpent” throughout mythic traditions of the

Americas, finding patterned, though wide-ranging or “ambiguous descriptions” of the Great

Serpent—as winged, horned, land-bound, saving, devouring, underground and/or sky-dwelling—

but identifies a symbolic “hard structural core” in the its “set of clear roles”: as the “guardian of
 Moroz 4

the waters and, by extension, all that is beneath the surface of the earth … a single race of

manitouk that governs the waters,” “located not only in the water world, but also in the celestial

world (Cohen 347; Lankford 116). The iconography and mythology of the serpent in indigenous

traditions were “widely known in North America,” as well as “a set of astronomical beliefs

encoded in myths and iconography constitut[ing] a symbolic complex” (Lankford 107). Miller

suggests that “comets, asteroids, eclipses, and lightning bolts” signified instability and volatility

of the earth, and were “often imagined as dragons, snakes, and others emerging from the

underneath abyss” (7). Widening our gaze, the Great Serpent is cast in indigenous mythologies

as a crucial role as representative of the “Beneath World” opposing the “Above World,

“expressed most graphically in the stories which revolve around physical conflict between the

thunders (usually in bird form in these myths) and the Horned Water Serpent” (Lankford 124).

The practice of mound-building was based around receiving and ritually offering back song, and,

while conflict is generally the way stories of the Great Serpent are framed, would not the theme

of potential harmony, inherent to music and integration of forces, be an alternative frame for this

serpent mythology (3-4)?

Let us explore the Serpent Mound’s potentially encoded astronomical information,

principally grounded in “an important serpentine constellation … known in the European

tradition as Scorpio, “universally agreed upon by all [indigenous] informants and interpreters” as

Scorpio (Lankford 129, 131). Astronomical alignments are found pervasively among mounds in

the Mississippi Valley and, in the case of Serpent Mound, “there are several alignments that

appear unequivocal,” which include an “alignment through the oval embankment to the summer

solstice sunset” (Romain, Kindle Location 4163). Given this summer solstice alignment, it is

interesting to note that the constellation of Scorpio “disappears for the winter” (130). The “egg 4”-

4
Though this paper will not examine this iconographic pathway, Lankford notes a mythology pertaining to “a guard
on the road to the realm of the dead [who] deprives the recently deceased person who passes by of his brain by
 Moroz 5

shaped oval at Serpent Mound’s “mouth” has been much speculated, though it seems to point to

a “significant ethnoastronomical belief complex which cut across tribal and linguistic lines,” that

the “egg” could signify Scorpio’s red eye, located as the star Antares (Lankford 132). William

Romain in “Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern

Woodlands” points out that “many North American Indian legends tell of eclipses being caused

by a giant serpent or other animal who swallows the sun,” and, in addition to the summer

equinox, “propose[s] that the Serpent Mound might represent a solar eclipse” (Romain, Kindle

Location 4249). Releasing ourselves from the particular Judeo-Christian definitions of good and

bad, I would assert that an effigy mound which depicts a snake swallowing the sun depicts

neither good nor bad, but the awe and mystery of the world in which the earthling, the human,

finds themselves. Could this swallowing of the moon and underworld of the sun be a departure

from Western binaries and symbolize a merging or blending between seeming opposites?

Widening our lens, we find the Great Serpent involved in a larger astronomical context.

Herman Bender’s archaeoastronomical research points to “three reoccurring archetypical

elements” in “American Indian mythologies and traditions”: “the thunderbird or Thunderers,

giant serpents, and a cultural hero who may be half human and half animal, and, many times, a

‘Star-Being’ who is also a cultural hero” (103). This humanoid “Star-Being,” found in Bender’s

study of “Star Man” petroforms in North American Plains locations is, according to indigenous

“oral traditions, stories and beliefs based on generations of observation of the natural world,

especially those with astronomical events or direct links to celestial observations and the

development of a cosmology,” is the constellation of Orion, the “slayer who vanquishes a giant

serpent (Scorpius?),” holding “renewal ceremonies for human beings” (Bender 79, 105). Here

taking it out or smashing it,” a trope idea occurring “among the Penobscot, Huron, Iroquois, Ojibwa, Menomini,
Sauk, and Fox,” which a globe in the jaws of a snake could certainly accomplish (208).
 Moroz 6

we find, yet again, a supposed battle or interplay between mythological forces which connect and

describe location and movement of verifiable astronomical bodies, a blending between story and

science.

Lankford suggests that “the cross-cultural nature” of these astronomical beliefs and

knowledge systems “was probably due to the fact that it was rooted in an even more widely

accepted cosmology,” spanning across “different ritual organization, different languages,

different social and economic structure” (108, 134-135). How might the serpent iconography in

other sites in the Americas point to encoded astronomical belief and information complexes? The

Great Serpent iconography and related beliefs are, as we have seen, widespread in North

America and even from South America to North, “from Creeks to Inkas” (Miller 17). The Great

Serpent, often depicted as winged, is found in the Mesoamerican serpentine creature,

Quetzalcoatl, which played the dual role of underworld and sky diety (Lanford 132). In addition

to this presence of Great Serpent mythology, Mesoamerica held a “prominent Mesoamerican

belief that celestial figures have dual identities, one when they are seen in the Above World and

another when they are below the horizon, in the Beneath World,” the plurality of sky and earth

that remains at the Great Serpents’ patterned core (Lankford 205-206). Following Mesoamerican

cultural influences into the North America, Carolyn Boyd and Kim Cox, in The White Shaman

Mural, trace Huitchol Serpent iconography and mythology in a cosmology which, again,

presents a duality of sky and earth: “the earth was perceived to be surrounded by either two

snakes or one snake with two heads. It divided the heavens from the underworld, and the sun,

traveling its daily course across the sky, was consumed by this giant serpent when it set each day

in the western horizon” (109). In Huichol tradition, serpentine “cords” represented the “ecliptic,”

and Mayan tradition’s ecliptical iconographic representation was “formed by intertwined

serpents, arching serpents” (Boyd and Cox 110). This serpentine ecliptical cord “is the rainy
 Moroz 7

season/dry season serpent surrounding the world, binding both time and space,” seeming to echo

the mythologically held sentiment of the Great Serpent delineating the summer from the winter

equinox, the balance of the earth held in the changing of the seasons (Boyd and Cox 110). With

this attention to and sophisticated knowledge of earth’s rotations in space and time, it seems clear

to me that the mythologies of the Serpent Mound are linked to the human being in-tune with

celestial timing.

Some have wondered if, due to the pervasive Great Serpent mythologies and

iconographies across the Americas, whether any “solid evidence” might connect North American

mounds with Mesoamerican civilization. Recently and curiously, “a scraper made from

Mesoamerican obsidian has turned up in a collection of objects from Spiro's Great Mortuary,” an

earth work in the Mississippian style located in modern-day Oklahoma, which raises questions

about mound-building practice in “terms of contact with Mesoamerica” (Milner 236- 237).

While cultural objects are certainly an important aspect of connecting cultural practices and

beliefs, Roderick B. Salisbury, in Identifying the Construction of Social and Ritual Landscapes

in Northeastern North America, suggest that diffusion via ritual would be an archaeologically

“silent” but significant mode in which the Great Serpent mythology would express in vastly

distant parts of the globe, entering, perhaps, into the Serpent Mounds’ creation, use and

maintenance. Salisbury commentary on C. Renfrew’s four elements of ceremonial acts, which

include looking for ritual use of a space through signs of: “focusing of attention, a boundary area

between the material and spiritual worlds, the presence of a deity or spirit being, and

participation in ritual acts,” potential inspiration for future study of earth works such as the

Serpent Mound and related sites (Salisbury 196).

Structuralism and its “quest for the invariant” has certainly informed much scholarship

and study on the building of mounds in North America. Robert A. Birmingham offers a survey of
 Moroz 8

Madison and Four Lakes mounds that serves as a model for wider North American earthworks,

identifying Ohio’s Serpent Mound as outside the “effigy mound area” but affirming the

“widespread significance” of effigies evoking serpent iconography (31). Speaking to the

structuralist eye towards belief systems of human groups, Robert Hall suggests that “effigy

mounds form maps of ancient worldviews, beliefs, and even possibly social arrangements in the

form of three-dimensional landscapes” (qtd. in Birmingham 11). In short, the building and

maintenance of mounds seems to point to ritual and mythological bases which “emphasized

common beliefs, kinships, and ancestry” (Birmingham 11). It seems clear that these supposed

“belief systems” make up part of a multidimensional matrix of indigenous knowledge systems.

To challenge the Enlightenment era bias overlaid upon the study of mounds and their

builders and honoring the sophistication of indigenous belief systems, one only needs to look,

with the help of Jay Miller’s framing, to the defining characteristic of mounds: “dynamism” that

all at once represents kinship and cultural beliefs which constellate knowledge systems about the

earth and cosmos, as well as serve as the literal grounds for ritual which reify connection with

divinity, creation and the cosmos. Such earthworks, according to Allen’s indigenous

conversation partners, “exist not in isolation, but situated within three- and four-dimensional

(Indigenous) worlds; they define space, direct intellects and imaginations, endure and thus move

through time (Allen 395). “Constructed and re-covered,” mounds bely a comprehensive

astrological and terrestrial system of knowledge and mapping, “an obvious expression of beliefs

about this layered cosmos” (Miller 6).

Symbolic of this dynamism is the constant building and rebuilding of mounds, ever in a

state of construction and use, and “sometimes used by multiple cultures” (Romain et al. 213).

While archaeological research has predominantly attempted to decipher the exact date of any

given mound’s construction, it is clear that mounds are actively “enhanced by tribal rituals,
 Moroz 9

added soils, songs, and dances … specific to each builder community” (Miller 3). The mounds

are activated and active, as well: indigenous informants teach that “mounds are believed to be

resilient, holding reserves of power much like a charged battery releasing vitalities over eons”

(Miller 3). Looking to Serpent Mound, “the summer solstice sunset alignment suggests a balance

between these two opposing cosmic forces,” as “the serpent effigy symbolized the dark forces

which would include the moon, night, winter, darkness, and death; while the oval represented the

sun, daytime, summer, light, and life” (Romain, Kindle Location 4263, 4262).

A theme I found pervasive in the study of Ohio’s Serpent Mound is the shortcomings of

European-centered research models in holding the complexity and sophistication of earth works

such as this and the related belief and wisdom-keeping systems of its makers. While conflict may

well be part of the mythology of the Great Serpent, I would assert that themes of domination,

conflict and opposition may be potential archetypal biases of European-centric investigators and

my voice joins other scholars in suggesting we tune our ears to the voices of indigenous wisdom

and frameworks for understanding, as an indigenous focus leans into the integrative nature of

humanity’s role on planet earth, placing “humans at the point of intersection” between forces

(Lankford 116). Humans, as witness and intercessor between powerful forces of creation and

destruction, build mounds in a “continuous and sincere effort” to “hold the earth in place to

provide security, heart, and soul for their community” (Miller 17). Going beyond the baser

oppositions between forces, it seems clear that the builders of Serpent Mound held wide visions

of the cosmos and their place within it, performing rituals of music and dance, practices based

upon the premise of harmony, all with the objective to honor the immense forces which gift us

the dance of life and death, the dance between seasons, between night and day, offering a space

for integration and union. Perhaps the serpent is eating the egg at its jaws, perhaps Scorpius is

ingesting the sun, but is this not an image of union and blending, becoming the other or
 Moroz 10

opposite? What better metaphoric companion to the mound practices than music, which models

celestial timing, rhythm and harmony, all speaking not to the helplessness but to the vital role

humanity plays in tuning to and tuning the world above and below.

We may look to leaders in emergent models of study to bring respect, integration and

harmony to our study of the Serpent Mound, all factors which greatly increase our chances, as a

humanity, to glean the full, multidimensional truth about the structure’s origins and mythological

foundations. As an exciting, growing field, Indigenous artistic research methodologies shine a

light into exciting new models for investigation, led by American Indian writer and activist,

Allison Hedge Coke, whose poetry both channels and investigates the Serpent Mound,

“simulat[ing] the mathematic and geometric encoding of earthworks and their multiple

alignments with one another” and the “greater cosmos,” research that works towards the

mound’s “renewal and future reactivation (Allen 396). While Hedge Coke is listening to the

“voice” of the Serpent Mound, actress and playwright Monique Mojica, of Guna and

Rappahanno heritage, develops enactments and theater that “speaks the embodiment of place"

(Allen 398). Serpent Mound is embodied, as are we in our human bodies, so it follows, as both

surprising yet obvious, that disconnects in earth work studies can be remedied by embodied

study. The mythologies of this site are multidimensional and require multidimensional study, so

as to hold space for the sophisticated astronomical and cosmological wisdom contained in this

and other indigenous earth works. Perhaps we who seek to understand mythology are required by

the story to embody our research, like Mojica’s “embodied improvisation” model, coming to this

mythological tradition with humility, reverence, and open ears and arms to the lived experience

of its story (Allen 398).

Works Cited

Allen, Chadwick. “Performing Serpent Mound: A Trans-Indigenous Meditation.” Theatre

Journal, vol. 67, no. 3, 2015, pp. 391–411, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24582538.
 Moroz 11

Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, edited by F.

Kent Reilly, and James F. Garber, University of Texas Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?
docID=344325

Baldwin, John. Ancient America, in Notes on American Archeology (Classic Reprint). e-book,
Forgotten Books, 2019.

Bender, Herman. The Star-Beings and Stones: Petroforms and the reflection of Native American
cosmology, myth and stellar traditions. Journal of Lithic Studies, 2017, 4. 79-118.
10.2218/jls.v0i0.1918.

Birmingham, Robert A.. Spirits of Earth: The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four
Lakes, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3444981.

Boyd, Carolyn, and Kim Cox. The White Shaman Mural. Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

Cohen, Percy S. “Theories of Myth.” Man, vol. 4, no. 3, 1969, pp. 337–353. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2798111.

Fletcher, R. and Cameron, T. (1988). “Serpent Mound A New Look at an Old Snake-in-the-
Grass,” Archaeological Society of Ohio 38 (1): 55-61.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning (Heritage). 1st ed., Toronto, Canada, University of
Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 1978.

Lynott, Mark. Hopewell Ceremonial Landscapes of Ohio: More Than Mounds and Geometric
Earthworks, Oxbow Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2167194.

Milam, Keith A., et al. “Evidence of Maximum Age of the Serpent Mound Impact Event from
Shatter Cones.” Ohio Journal of Science, vol. 110, no. 3, June 2011, pp. 53–54.
EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.pgi.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=aph&AN=60635919&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Miller, Jay. Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America, Nebraska, 2015.
ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4012429.

Milner, George. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America: Second
Edition. 2nd ed., e-book, Thames and Hudson, 2021.

Monaghan, G. William and Herrmann, Edward W.. Serpent Mound: Still Built by the Adena,
and Still Rebuilt During the Fort Ancient Period. Midcontinental Journal of
Archaeology 1 January 2019; 44 (1): 84–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26599989.
 Moroz 12

Romain, William F., et al. “Radiocarbon Dates Reveal Serpent Mound Is More than Two
Thousand Years Old.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, vol. 42, no. 3, 2017, pp.
201–22, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26599959. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.
Romain, William. Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the
Eastern Woodlands (Ohio History and Culture (Paperback)). e-book, University of
Akron Press, 2000.

Space - Archaeology’s Final Frontier? An Intercontinental Approach, edited by Roderick B.

Salisbury, and Dustin Keeler, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2008. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?
docID=1114216

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press,
2015.

Tobolowsky, Andrew. “The Hebrew Bible as Mythic ‘Vocabulary’: Towards a New

Comparative Mythology.” Religions 11 (2020): 459. MDPI. Web.

Urton, Gary. Skywatching in the Ancient World: New Perspectives in Cultural Astronomy, edited
by Clive Ruggles, and Gary Urton, University Press of Colorado, 2007. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?
docID=3039877.
 Moroz 13

Appendix

Images of Serpent Mound:

Image 1:

Image source:
https://woub.org/2017/08/18/celebrate-quirk-of-cosmic-geometry-at-serpent-mound/
 Moroz 14

Image 2:

Image source:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24582538?seq=1