Abstract
The notions that the soul of the deceased flies to a land of the dead as a bird, or is carried there by a bird or bird-person, were foundational to the mortuary ceremonies of some societies from Illinois to Pennsylvania to Kentucky during Middle and Early Woodland times. There, some Hopewell and Adena peoples laid out corpses in the form of flying birds, built large stone effigies of flying birds or bird-human composites to accompany the remains of their dead, and constructed a mortuary building in the shape of a flying bird or a bird’s foot. These endeavors, described in the previous two chapters, bring to mind formally similar material creations of other precontact Woodland Indians. Striking resemblances include some bird-persons rendered on copper and shell by Mississippian peoples across the Woodlands; the renowned “Beaded Burial” at the Mississippian site of Cahokia, where two adults were laid on top and below a raptor-shaped bed of shell disk beads; earthen mounds made by Late Woodland Effigy Mound complex peoples in the shape of flying birds and sometimes holding human remains; and two large stone bird effigies, at least one of which contains human remains, constructed in Georgia during the Woodland period.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr. Mark McConaughy for calling my attention to the Rock Hawk and Rock Eagle effigy mortuary facilities in central Georgia, which are serve as productive comparisons to the stone bird effigies in the North Benton mound in Ohio and the Sugar Run mound in Pennsylvania. Robert (“Ernie”) Boszhardt kindly shared his 2010 SAA paper and PowerPoint on thunderbirds with me. I thank Dr. Kristin Hedman at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey for providing photos with views and details of the Beaded Burial from Submound 1 of Mound 72 at Cahokia, Illinois, that aided Rebekah Zinser in drafting Figure 12.1F.
Notes
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1.
The 13 dimensions of variation on which Strong’s (1989) typology of bird-persons is defined are: the proportion of human or bird elements; the presence or not and the eye or mouth position of forked-surround motifs; whether bird elements are articulated with human elements (a composite being) or not (a human in bird costume); whether one or both wings are shown (i.e., frontal or side view); whether wings are open or closed; whether claws are present instead of feet; whether claws are present instead of hands; whether legs are of human length or short; whether large tail feathers are present; whether snake elements are present; whether leg positions are for dancing, running, standing stable, or sitting cross-legged; whether wings are depicted swirling as in dancing or flying; and whether a trophy head is carried by the being.
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2.
A myth that charters a Menominee war bundle relates how the sun and the morning star created a bundle that contained parts of swift-flying birds, among other things, and endows warriors with the ability to travel fast and to escape by flying. The raptorial Thunderers delivered the bundle to a warrior who fasted, like the hawk that gave a feather and power to a fasting warrior in the Osage myth (Skinner 1913:97–101). Likewise, in practice, Menominee warriors would bind the skin or feathers of a bird from such a bundle to their heads or bodies to give them the power and protection of the Thunderers (Skinner 1913:106–117).
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3.
Some of these world-view themes and values were explicitly stated by the Osage (e.g., La Flesche 1939:10–11 cited in Brown 2007a:74; La Flesche 1925:234 cited in Brown 2007a:93; see also Brown 2007a:73); others are inferred by Brown (e.g., Brown 2007a:91, see also 71, 74, 91, 96).
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4.
The three bird-persons, Burial 41A, B, and C under Mound 25 of the Hopewell site, have some characteristics that superficially might link them to episodes of the Red Horn mythic cycle (Radin 1948) in which Red Horn and his companions lose a gambling match to destructive giants and are beheaded, and then Red Horn’s two sons—hero twins of a kind—retrieve the heads and bring Red Horn and his companions back to life. The antihero who beheads the heroes would be Burial 41A, who is accompanied by a gaming piece (a limestone cone) and has nearby an isolated skull and a mandible-maxilla set from one individual. The beheaded heroes would be represented by the isolated skull and mandible-maxilla. Red Horn’s sons would be Burials 41B and 41C, who are positioned alike with arms akimbo and in contrast to Burial 41A. As bird-persons, Burials 41B and 41C could have been viewed as Thunderers. Red Horn was a kind of Thunderer, and his two sons could have been, also, in a Hopewellian rendition. However, the resemblance between the mythic episodes and Burials 41A, B, and C stops here. All three burials have bird-person characteristics, whereas in the mythic episodes, the antiheroes are giants. In the mythic episodes, there are four heroes, whereas there are only two “trophy” individuals in the grave. Also, Burials 41B and 41C were possibly females (Case and Carr 2008:Appendix 6) rather than male hero twins. Burial 41A was also possibly a female.
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5.
The stone club comes from the Hopewell earthwork, unknown provenience. Ohio Historical Society, catalog no. A283/1054.
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6.
This reading of the depictions of bird-persons of the first category departs from the interpretations of Brown (2007a) and Knight and Franke (2007). They interpret the beings rendered in the artworks of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex as “supernaturals” rather than as Mississippian individuals costumed as those beings, and see the beings’ actions as episodes of a myth rather than as segments of a ritual drama in which the myth is enacted by Mississippian individuals. Brown forgets Strong’s (1989) and Phillips and Brown’s (1978:124–125, 127) distinction between depictions of bird-persons that have bird elements not articulated to the human body and suggest humans costumed as birds versus depictions of bird-persons that have bird elements articulated to the human body and suggest humans transforming into birds. All the bird-person images analyzed by Brown (2007a) have bird elements that are not articulated to the human body and instead are costume (the first category of bird-persons defined in the text).
It is important to distinguish between Mississippian artists having depicted a myth and them having depicted a ritual dramatic performance of the myth. The latter sociopolitically harnesses and experientially affects the multitude of people in the drama and in the audience, whereas the former does not. At the same time, it should be recognized that wearing costumes and masks can have the effect on the actor of connecting with, merging with, and/or becoming the being enacted, and of erasing the distinction between actor and mythic being, drama and mythic reality, and current time and past mythic time (Chapter 16: The Personnage; Fenton 1941:422; Gill 1982:69, 71–72; Holm 1972:11; Lévi-Strauss 1982; MacNaire et al. 1998:34; Waite 1966).
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7.
Given that Mississippian bird-persons had different referential meanings, purposes, and motivations than Early and Middle Woodland inhumations arranged like birds in flight, the partial difference in sex of the of bird-persons in the two suites is not core to the arguments here. Early and Middle Woodland inhumations laid out like a bird in flight were in number approximately equally male and female (Case and Carr 2008:Appendix 6.1), whereas almost all Mississippian bird-person images on shell and copper and as figurines are depicted without breasts and probably as males (C. A. Brown 1982; Follensbee and Buford 2014; Zejdlick et al. 2014). The known biological sexes of the Middle Woodland skeletons arranged like birds (Case and Carr 2008:appendix 6.1) are as follows (see also Chapter 10, Table 10.1).
Male, Male?: Hopewell earthwork, Mound 4, Burial 3, male, 25–35 years; Hopewell earthwork, Mound 25, Burial 45A, male, 35–45 years; Hopewell earthwork, Mound 26, Burial 6, male, 35–45 years.
Females, Female?: Hopewell earthwork, Mound 25, Burial 41A, female?, 41–45 years; Hopewell earthwork, Mound 25, Burial 41C, female?, 40–50 years; Seip earthwork, Pricer Mound, Burial 52, female? 40–44 years.
Undetermined sex: Hopewell earthwork, Mound 25, Burial 41B, female? with disagreement among physical anthropologists, 30–40 years; Hopewell earthwork, Mound 25, Burial 42, female? with disagreement among physical anthropologists, 30–40 years; Old Town, Porter Mound 15, Skeleton R; Ogden-Fettie Mound Group, Haystack Mound, Fo174, “Caped Burial”.
An Early Woodland skeleton laid out like a bird but with unknown sex is: Cresap Mound, West Virginia, Burial 54.
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8.
That the dark earths and sand within which the Beaded Burial was surrounded referenced the primeval muck and waters of the Below realms is supported by way of comparison to the case of the Central Altar of Mound 4 in the Middle Woodland earthwork of Turner. There, materials analogous to dark earths and sand around the Beaded Burial encapsulated the Central Altar: layers of black ash, black cannel coal, river sand, and waterworn rocks (Chapter 14: Meanings and Roles of the Four Composite Creatures). Many solid, complementary forms of evidence indicate that the plot of the ritual drama enacted at the Central Altar took place in the Below realm(s).
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9.
At North Benton, the inhumation, Burial 1, was built on a platform above the bird effigy, giving the burial a symbolic location with this world and/or the Above realm(s) with which the effigy bird would have been associated. However, the inhumation was completely enclosed in fine, clean, river sand (Magrath 1945:42), suggesting water and the Below realms. This seeming inconsistency (in my eyes) I do not understood. The inhumation, Burial 4, was placed in an aboveground stone slab crypt with a floor of fine, clean river sand, which would locate the inhumation symbolically in this world if the sand represented water. The crematory basin south of the central fireplace at North Benton had three layers of cremated bone which “alternated with layers of fine, clean, river sand which were evidently intended to keep the remains separate” (Magrath 1945:42). No interpretation of this arrangement is possible because the exact number and placement of sand strata are not clear. It is possible that deposits of river sand and its water association at North Benton served to separate and maintain pure or integral that which it bounded or surrounded, rather than to indicate the Below realms. I have gotten that sense with other Ohio Hopewellian arrangements involving sand. No other burials in the North Benton mortuary were associated with sand.
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10.
Burial 54, the inhumation laid out like a flying bird under the Cresap Mound, was placed on a prepared clay floor, 2–5 inches thick, which was constructed over an area that had been stripped of its dark humus soil horizon down to a gravelly subsoil. These lighter colored materials do not recall a dark Below realm like the black earthen platform upon which the Beaded Burial was laid in Mound 72. In addition, Burial 54 and the others of the first construction phase of the Cresap mound were contained within a circular ditch-and-post building that may have represented an axis mundi route to the Above realms, the implied destination of the Burial 54 bird-person. The Beaded Burial had no such surrounding structure. The primary mound above Burial 54 and associated burials, it is true, was constructed of dark damp earth, analogous to the dark blue-black clay that was placed over the Beaded Burial. However, without a corresponding dark soil below Burial 54 and its accompaniments, the dark damp earth above them is more fully analogous to the dark damp earths that were placed around and above Middle Woodland burials and that recall earth-diver creation mythology (Hall 1979; 1997) than it is to a surrounding darkness of the Below realm(s) formed with the soils placed above and below the Beaded Burial.
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The connection between the hero and his three companions in Submound 1 and the four headless and handless burials in Submound 3 was not made by Brown and is offered here. Also, consider the headless foursome buried in the Dickson Mounds cemetery (Chapter 4: Hall; references therein).
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The soil evidence of a Below realm setting of the chunkey game and beheading episode is not mentioned by Brown. His interpretation of the Below realm setting is preceded by, and presumably taken from, Hall’s (1989) study of the Winnebago Red Horn and Iowa Human-Head-Earrings mythic cycles. Hall (1989:243–244) pointed out that the episode in the Red Horn myth where Red Horn’s two sons recover the head of their deceased father, two of his companions, and fellow villagers is paralleled in plot by an Aztec myth and an episode of a Quiche Maya epic, both set in the Below realm. Hall also noted that an episode within the analogous Iowa Human-Head-Earrings epic involves the hero and his companions playing a ball game against a race of bears in a Below realm. However, the wrestling match and beheading episode involves a race of giants, who live in this world.
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The particular species represented by the bird effigies in the North Benton and Sugar Run mortuaries and by the mortuary building below the Eagle mound, in comparison to the species represented by the bird effigy in the Beaded Burial, are not helpful in distinguishing the relevance of Brown’s interpretation of the Beaded Burial versus the idea of flight of the deceased’s soul. The species identifications of the Woodland bird effigies are too varying and uncertain. The effigy in the Beaded Burial was a raptor in outline, and probably a falcon based on historic Osage and Winnebago narratives. The North Benton bird effigy, with its long neck and thin wings, was not a raptor. The short neck and triangular wings of the Sugar Run bird effigy suggest a falcon (McConaughy 2011:93) but the bifurcated “tail” could represent that of any of several nonraptorial and raptorial birds, including the barn swallow—the only option resident in the area (ibid., 83). The bifurcated “tail” could instead or also be splayed human feet, which would make the effigy a bird-human composite, such as a thunderbird (ibid., 83–84, 96). This identity would, of course, be relevant to an analogy to Red Horn, who was a kind of Thunderer (see text). The effigy bird constituted by the mortuary building under the Eagle mound had a short neck, which could indicate a raptor, but a short beak, perhaps a bifurcated tail, and wings of undefined shape.
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The orientations of the bird effigies in the North Benton and Sugar Run mortuaries and of the mortuary building below the Eagle mound in comparison to the orientation of the bird effigy in the Beaded Burial, are not helpful in distinguishing the relevance of Brown’s interpretation of the Beaded Burial versus the idea of flight of the deceased’s soul. The orientations of the Woodland bird effigies are too diverse to characterize them and use them as an indicator of the relevance of the soul-flight interpretation. The orientations of the Woodland bird effigies are: east (at North Benton), south (at Sugar Run), and up, then northeast or southwest (at Eagle mound). The bird effigy in the Beaded Burial, as well as both inhumations 13 and 14, were oriented southeast.
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A sixth possible indicator of the continuation of certain Hopewellian eschatological ideas and practices later among the Effigy Mound peoples is less convincing than the others but interpretively interesting. Both Hopewellian and Effigy Mound bird effigies sometimes were built on top of dark earth that could have expressed earth-diver creation mythology (Hall 1979:259–261; 1997:17–23; Rooth 1957) and its conceptual integration with mortuary practices and eschatological concepts, and sometimes were not. The floor of the bird-shaped charnel house under the Eagle mound at the Newark earthwork was built on top of an imported layer of black muck, and the Sugar Run bird effigy was built directly on a natural, dark A horizon. On the other hand, construction of the North Benton mortuary and bird effigy was begun by stripping off the topsoil to the lighter subsoil. Similarly, some Effigy mounds were built directly on the natural, dark topsoil, whereas others were begun by excavating out the humus layer in the animal shape of the mound to be built, or by digging much more deeply into the subsoil so as to produce a reverse cameo of the animal mound—the “intaglio” method (Barrett and Hawkes 1919:17–20; McKern 1930:459–460; see also Goldstein 1995:105; Rowe 1956:72).
Also, both Hopewellian peoples (Hall 1979:259–261) and Effigy Mound peoples (McKern 1928:275) sometimes built up mounds from mucky soils brought from a distance rather than from adjacent soils, again likely expressing the integration of mud-diver creation ideas with concepts about death.
The intaglio form, however, was unique to the Effigy Mound peoples. It was also harnessed and specialized for the particular expressive purpose of constructing images of beings of specifically the Below realms(s)—long-tailed panthers/water spirits—in which case the excavated basin was left open and no mound was built on top of it (Barrett and Hawkes 1919:19, note 11; Birmingham and Rosenbrough 2003:33). In Wisconsin, nine such intaglio constructions without mounds were known at the beginning of the 20th century, and all were panthers/water spirits (Barnett and Hawkes 1919:19, note 11). At the Indian Prairie Mound Group in Milwaukee county, bird effigies were built as mounds, while panthers/water spirits were built as intaglios (Birmingham and Rosenbrough 2003:33). No corresponding Hopewellian practice is known.
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Landes reported this information from Dr. William Jones’s unpublished field notes, which were taken soon after 1900 at Bois Fort, Minnesota. It is unclear whether Jones was saying that a human’s released soul could take various forms, including that of birds and other animals, or whether he was uncertain of the one form a human’s released soul might take—some kind of bird or animal. He also reports that the soul of a moose was thought to be seated in its dewlap and would leave a moose’s body as a bird like a “small swift hawk” (Landes 1968:190–191). The logic of this instance would argue against the hypothetical notion posed in the text, that is, that the soul of a human might have the form of the animal guardian of one’s clan, and instead for the idea that all humans and animals have souls of one form, that is, that of a bird.
The notion of human souls having but one form is hinted at by Hallowell (1960:34, 43), who states from an Ojibwa viewpoint: “all . . . ‘persons’—human or other than human [i.e., nonhuman animals, stones, and other things perceived to be animate and to have self-awareness and volition]—are structured the same as I am. There is a vital part which is enduring and an outward appearance that may be transformed under certain conditions” (ibid., 43). Hallowell does not say what the shape of the enduring vital part might be, however. Schoolcraft (1860:35) also reported the idea that humans in general have souls of similar nature, in the views of Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Woodlands and the Dakota: “The soul of man is seen, in these curious legends, to be thought immortal and undying, the vital spark passing from one object to another.” (He then goes on to talk about the different matter of the reincarnation of the soul: “This object of the new life in general is not man, but some species of the animated creation; or even, it may be, for a time, an inanimate object. The circumstances which determine this change, do not appear. Nor can it be affirmed, that the doctrine is parallel, in all respects, to the theory of the Samian philosopher [i.e., Pythagoras’s notion of reincarnation of human souls into the bodies of humans, animals, or vegetables]”.)
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Beyond birds, the only animals or other beings that have been reported to carry human souls to a land of the dead, in the views of Woodland and Plains Native Americans, are the horse, the otter, the Great Spirit, and the Wind or Four Winds (Chapter 6: Appendices 6.2, 6.4). These vehicles of a dead person’s soul vary among tribes rather than within a single tribe. Horse: Dakota Sioux (case Cas116), Blackfoot (cases Fein 056, 058, 060). Otter: Ojibwa (case Cas024). Great Spirit: Stoney (case Fein105). The Wind: Pawnee (cases Cas008, Cas068),
Four Winds: Osage (case Cas052). None of these animals or beings is among the kinds that the Effigy mounds depict.
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In the historic Winnebago Four Nights Wake, the soul of a recently deceased person was called to the ceremony and instructed on landmarks to follow on the path to an afterlife, challenges along the way and how to deal with them, and how to request things of certain spirits for the living (Radin 1970 [1923]:95–106). A year later, if the deceased had been a member of the Medicine Rite Society, a second ceremony was held. The deceased’s soul was called to be present and told about challenges along a path that leads to an afterlife restricted to Medicine Rite members (Radin 1945:257–264).
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A couple of qualifications to Hall’s (1999:51) cosmological interpretation of the Effigy Mounds seem reasonable. First, no Effigy Mound complex construction takes the form of a composite creature composed of the parts of multiple animals, such as the horned serpent or underwater panther (Barrett and Hawkes 1919:15), despite the commonality of such creatures in the cosmological lore of historic northern Woodland Indian nations. This pattern would suggest that the mounds probably were not built primarily to express the cosmos at large and its sky/earth-water dual division. Instead, what seems to have been expressed are the various clans that comprised Mound Builder societies, which in turn were named and organized drawing on only certain very select aspects of the conceived cosmos.
Second, more aspects of Effigy Mound social organization than their clans, and the dual-division organization of their clans like the cosmos, may have been expressed by mound constructions. Interclan phratry relations might also have been conveyed. At the Krantz Creek Mound Group, one mound was begun in the shape of a bear by digging a basin into the ground in that form and filling it in to produce a low mound of bear shape. This mound was then covered with a larger one in the form of a panther (Barrett and Hawkes 1919:19–20). Both bear and panther were categorized as earth-water animals by historic Midwestern Indian tribes, implying that the change in mound form was not meant to express the relationship between sky and earth-water divisions of the cosmos or between clans categorized as sky or earth-water. Instead, some other relationship between bear and panther, and bear clan and panther clan, was conveyed, perhaps a phratry relationship.
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20.
Rock art sites and artifacts with images of thunderbirds that are described by Boszhardt (2010) for the upper Mississippi drainage and that resemble Rock Hawk, Georgia, are as follows: La Moille Cave, Minnesota (Dudzik 1995:104); Indian Cave, Lansing, Iowa (Lewis 1936); Twin Bluffs, New Lisbon, Wisconsin (Ritzenthaler 1947); Tabletop/Chimney Rock, Jackson County, Wisconsin (Boszhardt 1996); the Adolf Link Oneota vessel from Red Wing, Minnesota (Ready 2006), the New Albin tablet, Iowa (Bray 1963:34); and the Hanson site, Wisconsin (Stiles-Hanson 1987).
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The circular enclosure surrounding the Rock Hawk effigy is 135 ft in diameter and has an area of 14,314 ft2. The Fairground Circle around the Eagle mortuary in the Newark earthworks is 1,190 ft in diameter and has an area of 1,112,204 ft2.
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Carr, C. (2021). Mississippian, Effigy Mound Complex, and Georgia Woodland Bird-Persons and Bird Effigies: A Comparison to Adena and Hopewellian Cases. In: Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44917-9_12
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