Waking Up for a Moment after the Winter Solstice...

      Perhaps the Great Snake that protects our house was not quite fully asleep yet, the warm wind and rain melting the snow, perhaps opening up the Spirit Being’s eyes… 

The wind took down most of the hemlock closest to the house, at the corner where I had started to restore it…

 

     Laugh at my superstitious belief if you like, don’t believe me that it is really Indigenous Stonework if you choose, but I know all that tobacco burned on clam shells, on capstones that I didn’t even realize were Big Snakes for years and years, kept and keep me on the good side of the Guardian Serpent…

Single Horn Serpent Being From Jerry Zani (RI)

Jerry Zani contributes many fine photos here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4585999861

Quite possibly, this segment of a larger row of stones, may be stacked to resemble a single horned serpent being found in other Indigenous art forms such as this petroglyph:

A Single Horned Snake in a Pictograph:

See also: 

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2016/02/adding-single-or-one-horned-horned.html

https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2016/12/horned-serpent-washington-ct.html

Another Day, Another Serpent Surprise (Nonnewaug CT)

 

        Another day, different light as well as weather conditions, I thought I'd catch another glimpse of a 'new" serpent I saw yesterday for the first time in these stones...

The snow didn't seem to enhance that snake very much at all.

This possible bear was pretty snow free, I thought...

 And I stepped back:

And that just may be another snake, up on what remains of the topmost course of stones...

That Guarding Serpent knows your intentions at the Nonnewaug Watch House...

Driveway Surprise Serpent (Nonnewaug CT)

 

Deer antlered snakes serpents

 

Such horned serpents are known as a-bich-kam (Algonquin) and che-pich-kaam (Micmac)

 

(Figure 10). Antecedents can be traced back to artifacts of the Mississippian mound-builder cultures (Lankford 2007), dating to a.d. 1200 – 1450, which depict various forms of horned serpents (Figure 9g), known in the Mississippian literature as “ Horned Water Serpents ” (Lankford 2007:110 – 119). Such horned serpents are known as a-bich-kam (Algonquin) and che-pich-kaam (Micmac) and among the Fox Indians it is known to cause illness and swelling of the limbs or jaw (Lankford 2007: 119 – 120)...North American horned serpents were associated with a watery underworld, winds, rain, diseases, and their cures, suggesting that the association between these supernatural creatures and illness and curing was widespread...

 …In consequence, these instances suggest either a widespread diffusion from Mesoamerica, or that horned serpents are reflections of an ancient and deep-seated stratum of Amerindian mythologies. Within Mesoamerica the melding of deer and snake are known from a series of languages where they appear as a compound of the words ‘ deer ’ and ‘ snake, ’ designating large snakes, especially boas ( Boa constrictor ) (Figure 10). The repeated occurrence of the ‘deer-snake ’ compound in a variety of Native American languages has been treated as a type of linguistic loan known as a calque, which is to say as a literal translation, rather than the adaption of a loanword directly from the donor culture (Campbell et al. 1986:553, 554; Smith-Stark 1994:20, 36). In linguistics it is stipulated that the grouping of terms and the concept behind particular calques originally stem from the language of one specific culture group and by means of literal translations are adopted into other languages as loan-concepts, implying that the particular social context of the exchange is a bilingual one. The most exhaustive study of the distribution of such calques in Mesoamerica (Smith-Stark 1994) found that ‘deer-serpents ’ are clearly represented in several languages (and language families), either as calques or as loanwords (Table 1)…”

 ‘Distribution of North American and Mesoamerican languages that exhibit the calque ‘ deer-snake ’ in their vocabulary and mythology. Archaeological cultures (Classic Maya, Mogollon, Anasazi and Mississippian Moundbuilders) are rendered in diagonal hatching. Findspots of the deer-snakes and horned serpents represented in Figure 9 are rendered alphabetically. Scale is variable in this UTM projection and the scale bar is computed in relation to the centre of the map.’

 Based on maps in Golla et al. (2007) and Kaufman (1994). Map drawn by Christophe Helmke. 

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231997323_Reinterpreting_the_Plaza_de_los_Glifos_la_Ventilla_teotihuacan

A Dam Serpent Surprise (Watertown CT)

Another Sort of "Water Wall"

   I took a little walk. I even stayed on the path until the hill turned steep, until the sound of the river called me to it – well, after I wandered off a little to look at the zigzag rows of stones still partially visible under the messy piles of stones dumped on them. I ended up by some of the last remaining rows of stones on that I’m pretty convinced are retaining walls for an Indigenous foot path – a causeway if you will.

   A “Colonial Construction related to the Cleveland Grist Mill” another person might conclude, but the Indigenous Iconography and other observations as well as location make me think otherwise. There is no reason I can think of any sort of practical purpose I can think of to build something like this a half mile downstream from the actual mill and dam. This is an early mill, for grinding grain, from sometime around 1700. For some time now, I suspect the dam to contain Indigenous Iconography very similar to the Indigenous stonework at my family home of the last forty years. Right in front of the house for example, the top course of stone closely resembles a European capstone, the stones were dressed so as to resemble big snakes.

 

   Refreshing my memory about the mill itself, I perused some photos collected by Watertown CT Historian Charlie Crowell and shamelessly lifted several photos. I was totally surprised to find this one:

 

   I took about my tenth look at this “new to me” photo and then made a crop of the now missing stonework to look for “snakes and turtles” in the stonework. Sometimes it seems to take that one effigy to come into focus before you just can’t stop seeing the others.

 

   Well now, so it would seem, the capstone on the top of the dam, over which the water flowed, very much resembled the capstone snakes here at home…