A Dust Up at Ohio’s Serpent Mound

My interest was piqued when a random post showed up on Facebook about a ‘dust up’ on December 20, 2020 at Ohio’s Serpent Mound. I don’t like snakes but decided to find out what exactly was this all about. Two groups were involved, a Christian prayer group and a Native American group both having some sort of vested interest in the Winter Solstice and the mound. The story goes that the Deputies were called to settle the dispute and I am happy to report there were no fatalities. It turns out this site is not only vintage, it is ancient and it is still actively a presence, so not bygone. This article tells us what the serpent mound is and why they are fighting over it: something to do with evil and something to do with artifacts. Read about it here.

Research took me down so many roads that I never imagined. It was mind boggling. People who plan tours have to make their information exciting. This travel website provides some good reading with all kinds of mythical information related to serpents, from Mexico to ancient Persia, including Ohio’s which is called the Great Serpent Mound. Even Canada is on the game. There is a Serpent Mound National Historic Site listed in Parks Canada directory of Federal Heritage Designations. Canada has determined their serpent mound is a burial site dating from 50 BCE to 300 CE. It actually is a group of six separate burial locations forming a serpentine shape that is approximately 60 metres long and almost 8 metres wide and 1.5 to 1.8 metres high. The site is open to the public and is within the grounds of Serpent Mounds Park on the banks of Rice Lake. I may decide to make a trek out there one of these years. Things are way more exciting in the US as compared to Canada and apparently there were mystery booms in 2014 at their Ohio serpent mound that is well documented by scientists and others who are still out there guessing what the heck caused those booms. I love a good legend about fairies and Greek gods and goddesses. Even Calypso is mentioned in this brief read on legends. (Today Calypso is part of the music culture of Trinidad).

Now for the serious stuff, we are talking United Nations here: The Ohio Great Serpent Mound is listed on the tentative list for being a UNESCO heritage site. UNESCO lists other similar sites. On that list they are called geoglyphs, which is they are effigy mounds in the form of animals or humans, also called intaglios and apparently they appear around the world.  The Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana (in Peru) is the only such site currently on the World Heritage List.  So there are serpent mounds in the Uffington Horse (UK), the Cerne Abbas Giant (UK), and the Serpent Mound at Loch Nell (UK), the Serpent Mound at Rice Lake (California, not Rice Lake in Canada), Effigy Mounds National Monument (Iowa), and the Blythe Intaglios (California).  The scale of the Ohio Serpent Mound “dwarfs all other securely documented effigy mounds and is larger than most of the geoglyphs in the world”.

Intriguing serpent stories are found in Egyptian lore and iconography and I should not fail to mention

the life force called kundalini found in eastern teachings. I even came across serpent information related to barber poles, those twirling red and blue poles outside the barber shops. There are intertwined serpents in the caduceus, the symbol of medicine used all over the world today (and later rod of Asclepius). Serpents seem to be pretty serious stuff to be connected with our health, although I would never want to meet a serpent in person. On the other side of the globe, Asian dragons, Japanese dragons, Vietnamese dragons and Chinese dragons tell a completely different story. There is some deep divine symbolism to the oriental dragons. Maybe they will bring us some luck in 2021.

So what started me wondering what people were fighting about on the day before the Winter Solstice has taken me down a long road of discovery! The posts on this blog are supposed to be short and sweet and I hope you enjoyed this one. There is much more information out there more than my brief mentions here.