It seems like just yesterday that I was looking at photos from Chaco Canyon, pondering a possibility that some of those courses of stones just might be snake-like the way they were laid down.
Turns out it was just yesterday, and I heard a little about it throughout the day, a mixed bag of reactions on the Face Book page where I posted something about it, the page where I found some interesting photos { https://www.facebook.com/groups/1408175099455213/permalink/1702043543401699/}:
"Interesting; I am going to look at masonry courses more carefully now..." to "Not seeing a snake...!" and of course: " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia"
So, later in the day, I'm at the northeast corner of my
house. I'm focused on the missing drip stones and mortar, looking down where
soil meets stone. And I look up at this uppermost course of stones in the
corner that the sill rests on. Is it a repeat of a snake pattern of stacking
stones - a head-like stone (maybe natural, maybe chipped a little) and some
sandstone pieces that taper from thick to thin or is my mind just assigning
meaning to one more instance of pareidolia? "What we find depends on what
we are looking for," they say. "And one is an accident, two is a
coincidence and three is a conspiracy:"
John Normile photos from Chaco Canyon I kept looking at (off and on):
Above: the snake that caught my eye from the photo of a wall (below):
Paried O'Delia (as the Irish say) is the suggestion that there is an unintentional, non-existent, percieved pattern in something random, a happy accident apparently. When I looked again and again at this one, stone snakes on my mind (and knowing there's a great deal of snake imagery in other Southwest artforms, petroglyphs to pottery, past to present) I really did have to wonder if there might have been snakes on the minds of the builder(s) at this section of wall with different sized stones alternating in a rather artistic manner.
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