Gottschall: A New Interpretation

by Richard L. Dieterle

Contents

The Interpretation

The Painting and Siouan Prehistory
The Battle of the Twins with the Thunderbirds
The Figures of the Twins
The Red Paint on the Image of Ghost
The Double Helix
The Rayed Orbs
The Nestlings
Great Black Hawk
Blankets Lost and Found
The Red Horn Figure and the Mother of the Twins
Bluehorn and the Pipe Smoker
The Seven Rays of the Orbs
The Seven Helices of Ghost's "Apron"
The Turtle Figure
Conclusions

Comparative Material

The Beaver Twin
The Double Helix
The Rayed Orb

Links
Stories
Themes
Notes

Debate and Discussion (now found in a separate file)

The Painting and Siouan Prehistory. The Gottschall rock shelter (not quite a cave) is located near Muscoda, Wisconsin, in Iowa County which is in the southwestern part of the state,¹ an area that came to be within the Hocąk hunting grounds, sometime after the ill fortunes the French visited upon the Fox nation. However, prior to the Sauk and Fox invasion of ca. 1640, the area may well have been occupied by the Hocągara. The site contains about 40 pictographs. One of these, Panel 5, is of special interest, since it is a single composition that almost certainly deals with mythological themes. Panel 5 is also known as the "Red Horn" panel on the basis of its interpretation as an incident in that demigod's adventures on earth. It is this interpretation that I wish to reëxamine.

Panel 5 can be dated, it is said "confidently," to the Xᵀᴴ century A. D.² This has certain immediate consequences when trying to associate it with any social group, especially one defined by language, since language and material culture have only a low degree of correlation. It is difficult to proceed on the issue of the antiquity of the Hocąk nation, since glottochronologies done on Siouan have come to absurdly divergent conclusions, bringing into question the methodology itself. Springer and Witkowski have calculated that Hocąk has existed as such since about 1500 A. D., when it and the kindred Chiwere peoples (Oto, Ioway, Missouria) separated from one another.³ However, Grimm has calculated the date of Common Winnebago-Chiwere at 1000 A. D., an incredible half millennium older!⁴ How much further back in time one can go before the language spoken by the predecessor people becomes unintelligible to modern Hocąk speakers is an open question. What is said of the language can also be said to an unknown degree of the mythology. The stories of the Chiwere people show considerable divergence (indeed even within that language group), suggesting that the stories of the Common Winnebago-Chiwere peoples may have been significantly different from the daughter stories existing today. The problem deepens as we recede into ever more remote regions of the past. The divergence of the Dhegiha Sioux speaking tribes (Omaha, Ponca, Osage, Quapah, and Kansa) from the Winnebago-Chiwere is dated at ca. 1000 A. D. by Springer and Witkowski, and 1 A. D. by Grimm. At that depth of time, it becomes very difficult to say anything about what stories may have existed.

However, some stories should remain stable over long periods of time, since they address an immutable subject matter. It is this fact that explains how myths from widely separated and completely isolated places can be almost identical. One of the stories about Bluehorn, for instance, is very close to a medieval Irish story about CuCulainn and CuRoi MacDairi (see the Comparative Material to Bluehorn's Nephews). The explanation for their convergence despite immense spatial separation can be used to account for similarities between stories separated by huge expanses of time. Allegorical stories that are about, say, stellar phenomena may be highly stable, since their subject matter is not very likely to change. Allegories about the same thing, given the constancy of the rules of interpretation that define allegories, would necessitate similarities in the stories. A story about a stable phenomenon could even arise more than once in history, as well as in more than one place, rather like the emergence of phytosaurs and crocodiles during the course of geological time.

We also may have to consider that the dating is wrong, despite high degrees of confidence in the date proffered. If this is the case, then scenes reminiscent of stories in the current repertory may date to a time in the not too distant pass, a time close enough to our own that these stories have passed down to us essentially unchanged.

We are able to show the whole of Panel 5 by the kind permission of the authors and Prairie Smoke Press, the publishers of The Gottschall Rockshelter, an Archaeological Mystery.⁵ The pictographs of this panel were meticulously traced by Mary Steinhauer.

The Battle of the Twins with the Thunderbirds. The characters portrayed in Panel 5 do indeed correspond to familiar characters in Hocąk stories, and the central actions of this panel fit rather nicely a particular story. This is the tale of the battle of the Twins with the Thunderbirds. This is but an episode in a whole panoply of adventures in which the Twins go someplace that their father has forbidden them to visit. There exist several versions of this story. A lesser known version is found in "The Lost Blanket," a story in which the Twins travel the world looking for a mink blanket that was stolen from one of them. In their travels to forbidden places they find something unusual —

One day they came to some incredibly steep cliffs, so they said to each other, "Let's climb these odd looking cliffs." When they finally reached the top, there, unexpectedly, were two bird's nests. In each was a nestling still covered with down feathers. "Look," they said to each other, "these nests have birds in them." They stood there gawking at the nestlings. They noticed that one had blue feathers under his wings. They said to each other, "Those will become beautiful feathers when these birds grow up — imagine what the adults must look like." Then they said to one of them, "So what do they call you?" He replied, "My parents have named me 'Breaks the Tree Tops'." They kept saying to each other, "Now 'Breaks the Tree Tops' is a strange name." Then they asked the other bird, "And what do they call you?" He replied, "My parents have named me 'Smashes the Tree Tops'." "The name 'Smashes the Tree Tops' is certainly an odd one," they said to each other. "Well, now, Breaks the Tree Tops," they said, "about when do your parents generally come home?" "Oh," he replied, "they will come whenever we call them." The boys said, "Well then, go ahead and call them." So Breaks the Tree Tops said, "All right." He called them by singing this song:

Come back and see us,
Come back and see us;
The Twins who are traveling as if crazy over this earth,
Have come upon us.
Come back and see us.

Thunder could be heard on the horizon. The Twins said, "Smashes the Tree Tops, you call them too." So he called them by singing,

Come back and see us,
Come back and see us;
The Twins who are traveling as if crazy over this earth,
Have come upon us.
Come back and see us.

When the birds spoke of them as "crazy," the younger brother got angry. Just then, with a loud thundering noise, the parents showed up. They were not alone. There were many that came flying, and now they were about to land. The boys said to one another, "There sure are a lot of pigeons here! Let's see if we can kill a few." The boys chucked stones at them and in this way they knocked a few down. The birds tried as hard as they could to kill the boys, but nothing they could do would hurt them. Werakirakuni! right in the middle of the fight, there unexpectedly was a bird wrapped with the boy's mink blanket. The boy knocked him down with a rock, and snatched the blanket off his body. The birds said, "We had better call it quits before they kill every one of us!" So they stopped attacking the Twins. These birds are the ones that they call "Thunders."⁶

In the "Lost Blanket," the Twins are said to have fought the Thunderbirds with stones, but only later do we discover that they killed the Thunderbird nestlings. In most versions, this is the story's focus. For the related Ioway tribe, the nestlings are pictured as little winged men, four in number, whom the Twins (Dore and Wahrétua) put in an otterskin bag. The Ioway Twins are attacked by lightning, but instead of fighting back, they merely find clever ways of avoiding being struck. When they take the Thunders home to their father, he is horrified and orders the boys to return them to their nests.⁷ In this unpublished version of the Hocąk tale, "The Twins Disobey Their Father," Jasper Blowsnake goes into some detail about the confrontation between the Twins and the Thunder nestlings.

(21) Then they used to be at the lodge. Now again he told them, "My sons, over there in a southern direction, (22) there is a hill whose cliffs are covered with red cedar, that hill is a hill of frightening aspect. Do not go over there," he said. He went hunting. As soon as he had gone, a little later the one who has a stump for a grandmother said, "Flesh, right away your father ordered us to go south to the hill. Right away we will go." Flesh said, "Koté, instead father forbade us." "Koté, again it is very good, so let's go right now. If you don't, I'll cut you with my beaver teeth," he said to him. "Okay, then I will go," said Flesh. They left. They reached that hill. They were all over that hill. Afterwards, they did not learn a thing. They went to the very top. There were four birds with bare stomachs there. "Korá Flesh, there are four things here." (23) He asked one of them, "By what name do they call you?" he said to him. The one who has a stump for a grandmother said it. That bare-bellied bird said, "They call me 'He who Strikes Trees'," he said. "Korá, you're a great one that they call 'He who Strikes Trees'. You that speak, even I am not called 'He who Strikes the Trees'," he said. He kicked him with his toes. Then again another one he asked, "You who are also smart, what do they call you?" "And what should they call me? They call me 'He who Breaks the Tree Tops'." Korá, you're a great thing that they supposedly call 'He who Breaks the Tree Tops'. Not even I myself am called 'He who Breaks the Tree Tops' and he kicked him with his toes. And again said to one of them, "You who are also smart, what do they call you?" he said to him. "What are you called?" "They call me 'Storms as He Walks'." When he had said this, "Kará, you're a great one whom they would call 'Storms as He Walks'. (24) Even up above I am not called 'Storms as He Walks' and he kicked him with his toes. He kicked him so that he rolled off. He spared the last one left. Again he said to him, "Also, what do they call you who are so smart?" he said to him. He said, "What did my older brothers tell you their names were as you were kicking them?" he said to him. "Koté žigé (come on now), it would be very good if you told it. If you don't tell it, I'll squash you," he told him. And that bird said, "What should they call me? When I was named they called me 'Rains as He Walks'." "Kará, what a great thing you must be that they would call you 'Rains as He Walks'. Up above, even I myself, they do not call 'Rains as He Walks'," he said and he kicked him with his toes. He kicked him so that he made him go rolling along. (25) And he said to them, "What do you say to cause your parents to come?" "When we call them, they always come back." "Then say it." Then they said it. They called their parents. They said,

We see, we see;
The Twins go about the world crazed;
They have come upon us, they have come upon us!

After that, he kicked them. They got angry. "Because you are crazed upon the earth, you are in the wilderness atop a hill." At the horizon they made roaring sounds. "Koté žigé (come on), say it." "When we say it, you start kicking us." "Koté, if you don't say it, I will squash you with my feet." Again they said it. They summoned their parents:

We see, we see;
The Twins go about the world crazed;
They have come upon us, they have come upon us!

The clouds fell dark. "Say it again." "When we say it, you kick us." "Now say it! (26) If you don't say it, I'll squash you." They were afraid of him. They said,

We see, we see;
The Twins go about the world crazed;
They have come upon us, they have come upon us!

"Because you are crazed upon the earth, you are in the wilderness atop a hill." After they said it — korá! — a great many of them were coming. Immediately, again for the fourth time, he had them say it. They objected, but

We see, we see;
The Twins go about the world crazed;
They have come upon us, they have come upon us!

"Because you are crazed upon the earth, you are in the wilderness atop a hill," he said. He kicked him with his toes. Right away as they had returned, they were already, even now, struck at. They squashed those bare bellied birds. Right away a great many came. "Flesh, your father used to call them 'pigeons'. That's what kind they are. Let's knock down pigeons." They did a lot of pigeon bashing. Flesh was the very first one killed. "Flesh, knocking down pigeons is such a pleasure, yet you're sleeping," he said. He got up. (27) Once he did, he did a lot of pigeon bashing. In trying to kill them they also did very much, but they were killing pigeons. Then when they knocked down one of the pigeons, they would clap their mouths and give a mighty shout for themselves. These pigeons would continuously come down lower and lower. These twins would go down lower and lower too. They were killing many of them. They were knocking them down. Then they killed the one who had a stump for a grandmother. The pigeons did it. Flesh said, "Koté, get up, while knocking down pigeons is proving so pleasant, you're sleeping, get up. "Ho," he said. Having gotten up to some extent, he started in again to fight the pigeons. They killed Flesh again. "In truth, kode, while the pleasure of knocking down pigeons is going on, you're sleeping," he said. He got up. "Ho," he said. Right away they started knocking them down. (28) They frequently knocked down pigeons. Having struck one of them down, they would give a shout. As a matter of fact, they killed the one who has a stump for a grandmother. Flesh said, "Koté, while such pleasantries are going on, you're sleeping," he said to him, and he got up. Their father, while he was hunting in the area, the Thunders started coming back. Mightily they started to return. He knew of it. He knew immediately that his sons were rushing back. "Hoxhó my sons, at last you will be killed." These Thunderbirds gave up, because they knew they were not going to kill them (the Twins).⁸

There are many other Twin tales of the fight with the Thunderbirds.⁹ The scene in Panel 5 seems to fit the incident that we might describe as "The Battle between the Twins and the Thunderbirds." Under this interpretation, the two human figures to the far left are the Twins, the two small birds, one of which is upside down, are the Thunder nestlings, and the large bird is, as has been suggested by Bob Salzer et alia, a full grown Thunderbird.¹⁰ The figure behind this Thunderbird, ought to be their father, but I think that this is probably an auxiliary figure pertinent to myth of the Twins, but not integral to the action. The same is true of the pipe smoker, who is at sufficient remove from the other figures that it is less tempting to include him in the action. The turtle figure above is a problem for this interpretation, but not an insurmountable one. More will be said on these alleged auxiliary figures as the interpretation progresses.

The Figures of the Twins. The two Hocąk Twins are known as "Flesh" and "(Little) Ghost." The latter is sometimes not referred to by name at all, but by an elliptic description (for reasons of taboo?), as "the one who has a stump for a grandmother." Radin simply adopted the name "Stump" as shorthand. The received interpretation sees these two figures as Giants and the mythic incident as the lacrosse game between Redhorn and his allies and the Giants and their confederates, with the pipe smoker being outside the scene.¹¹ Giants are said to be four times larger than ordinary men, but this is not reflected in the painting. However, it is possible to put too much emphasis upon scale, inasmuch as perspective is not a salient feature in pictographic art any more than it was in, say, medieval Western art. Size may have something to do with power as much as physical dimensions (a paradigm in ancient Egyptian art, for instance). Just the same, why are the two figures on the left not identical, if they are meant to depict the Twins? The answer is simple enough. While the Twins were very similar, they were not actually identical. The youngest Twin, Ghost, was smaller, yet he was significantly stronger than his brother. He was also more audacious, and it was he who started the confrontation with the Thunderbirds. Therefore, the smaller leading figure should be Ghost. By exclusion, then, the trailing figure is Flesh. Ghost had another singular feature: beaver teeth with which he occasionally threatened to bite his brother. This may explain the painted design on Ghost's mouth area. Just below his nose and extending down his chin is a solid coloring which seems to indicate facial paint. The Hocągara have a name for this area of the face, pųc´, being defined in one sense as, "the area of the upper and lower jaw from under the nose down to the chin."¹³ This paint pattern has a fair resemblance to the light patch under the nose and extending to the chin of beavers, as we see in this Audubon painting below:

This pattern of coloration on the pųc shows somewhat better on the beaver to the left. The Hocąk call the chin portion of the pųc the "hair-jaw," hi-rap. The same word, rap, that denotes the jaw also denotes beavers. So the jaw is the "beaver," perhaps for the same reason that female pubes are so called in colloquial English. The beaver also has a line that separates dark hair above from lighter hair below. This line extends from the bridge of his nose to his ear, rather like the paint or tattoo lines seen on the Twins in Panel 5. The pipe smoker of Panel 4 has such a line as well, only it divides an upper light colored area from a lower dark space. It is not clear why Flesh would exhibit this line, so it may not have anything to do with beavers, although it is an interesting correlation in this context. The beaver affinities express Ghost's relationship with wood. His grandmother is a stump, and in one version he was buried or abandoned at the foot of a tree. [For the identity of one of the Twins with beavers, see Comparative Material below.]

The two Twins are said to have only single eagle feathers as headdresses, and Ghost does have what appears to be an upright feather as part of his head gear, but he also has a ribbon-like pair of trailing streamers as well, which is beyond what is said of them in the Hocąk literature. The Flesh figure seems to have numerous wide ribbon-like streamers as his headdress, but it is harder to make out a single eagle feather, although one might be present. Given the age assigned to this painting, it is not a significant divergence; indeed, we do not know how essential the lone eagle feather was among Hocąk variants, since it is only mentioned in one of them. Originally, they were said to have turkey bladders or mammal placentas as headdresses. There is no hint of such head gear in the pictograph. Flesh is dressed in leggings, whereas Ghost seems to have more elaborate apparel consisting of an oval disc over his chest (which we can probably call a "gorget") and something which might be described as an "apron" just below it. His figure is cut off too high to know what he is wearing below his waist. In addition, both he and his brother are wearing some kind of long hair or fringe ornament on their left arms only, apparently the same item as is worn on the figure at the extreme right of the composition, only in that person's case, the ornament (and bowstring guard) is worn only on the right wrist. Some of these accouterments can be seen in Hocąk garb as late as the XIXᵀᴴ century. In a painting of a Hocąk warrior of the Elk Clan by the name of Little Elk (Hųwąnįka), we see many similarities to Ghost's costume. This rendering of Little Elk was made by George Catlin in the 1830's:

The gorget suspended over Hųwąnįka's abdomen by what appears to be a leather strap, has a good resemblance to the rather schematic oval worn slightly higher on the "Ghost" figure. Only a little below Ghost's disc is some kind of rectangular "apron" with vertical, double helix designs and fringe on its lower border. This matches nicely the apron worn by Hųwąnįka, although the latter is not shown to have any decoration on its surface. It can be seen from the painting that it, like its counterpart from Panel 5, is worn above the level of the breach cloth. He too is wearing a headdress with a single eagle feather, although it is not oriented upright as it is with Ghost. Some of the depicted costume elements are seen even more pronouncedly in this Catlin painting of The Crow (tribe not identified) seen below at the left:

He too has the gorget and the "apron," and furthermore, he has a wrist band with a fur suspended from it, a style very similar to that of most of the figures in Panel 5, who may have rawhide strips or strands of hair instead of fur. He too wears this on his left arm only. Like Flesh, he has a band on his upper arm, although in the Catlin painting, The Crow has two such bands. However, he also has a number of ornaments (strips of some kind) hanging from his upper left armband only, a feature also found in the depiction of Flesh. The subject of the Catlin painting is wearing his gorget bare chested, just like Ghost in the pictograph. This painting of recent vintage shows that such a style of dress is purely masculine, as pictures of women show them clothed from head to ankle in dresses. So it is highly unlikely that this is a depiction, as has been suggested, of Redhorn's female lacrosse opponent (known in one source as "Pretty Woman"), even if we allow the unattested supposition that she dressed like a man, since an oval gorget like the one depicted on Ghost would rest pretty uncomfortably on a woman. Another Catlin painting of Four Bears, a Mandan warrior from the 1830's (shown above right), depicts him wearing an oval form of the gorget, demonstrating that an oblong variant was extant this recently.

The Red Paint on the Image of Ghost. There are two sets of things painted red on the image of Ghost. One area, which we have explored, is around his mouth; the other is a pair of streamers or ribbonlike structures that form part of a headdress of some kind. The streamers seem to be of light material since one of them at least curls over on itself as if blowing in the wind. The obvious candidate would be horse's hair, but that is ruled out, since we are told that the painting dates from the Xᵀᴴ century A. D. It could be dyed human hair. However, the suggestion of the archaeologists that this is a woman and that "her" hair is red is a gross misperception precipitated by forcing a thesis. Not only is the figure a young man, but it must be pointed out that the hair on top of his head is not painted red, so clearly he can't be called "red headed." The streamers are bound up with the upright feather that constitutes his otherwise rather minimal headdress. Knotted headdresses with an upright eagle feather and a trailing streamer are found in Mississippian culture, at the Spiro Mound in Oklahoma they are seen in Braden B and C phases.¹² Some of these are shown below in comparison to the headdress of Ghost at Gottschall.

The tonsures of the Mississippian images are similar but not identical to those of Gottschall. The first example shows a knotted headdress with an upright feather attached to it and a streamer following behind.¹⁴ This may be what we are seeing at Gottschall. Instead of a solar-like disc with a double helix emanating from it, the Mississippian image shows a double helix looped around the eye. A simpler version is presented in the second example, where the knot is not in evidence (due to the simplicity of the drawing).¹⁵ Its streamer may be of human hair. As in the case of Ghost, the feather and the streamer are affixed to the hair. The third example shows the typically more elaborate version of this headdress characteristic of Mississippian culture.¹⁶ However Ghost's headdress was made, what seems important is that the artist went out of his way to paint it red. What does the literature on Ghost say about a red headdress? To answer this we must understand the meaning of the headdress in the Twins Cycle.

In a transparent allegory, Ghost sojourns awhile with Flesh then suddenly departs carrying away his twin's arrows (mą, also meaning "winter, years, time"). He also causes Flesh to forget everything about the period of their togetherness. When Flesh's father (the Sun) helps Flesh reunite with his twin Ghost on a longer term basis, he has to find a way to prevent Ghost from escaping into his preferred medium of water. This is done through a headdress. The device could have been affixed almost anywhere, but the head was chosen as the preferred site. It is the head that carries the greatest magnetism for the soul. It is said that when a fallen warrior's head is taken by his enemies, the ghost follows after it causing the man carrying its head to stumble (symbolic death and therefore symbolic revenge), a terrifying experience when understood as a confrontation with a hostile supernatural force. Nevertheless, whoever takes the head has some command over the soul associated with it and can at least direct the ghost to serve as a guide to his departed kinsmen when they must walk the road to Spiritland. Why is the head such a repository for the soul? In ancient Greece, and throughout the world among traditional cultures, the psyche has a special attachment to the head because it is there that the essential fluid of life, the muelos (μυελός), that constitutes marrow in the bones, is found in its greatest concentration.¹⁷ The brain is thought to be a massive assemblage of muelos and therefore the seat of the psyche. The Hocągara have a similar conception of the brain. Their word for marrow is wa-horugóp, which is a descriptive term meaning, "that which is scooped out."¹⁸ This is in reference to the marrow of animal bones, which must be scraped out to be eaten. The brain is called, nąsu horugóp > nąsurugóp, which is to say, "the (wa-)horugóp of the head."¹⁹ The soul's seat is the innermost part of a person's being, which in this case is literally the innermost reaches of a person's bones. Even people eaten by Giants can be brought back to life by taking the bones of the Giants who had eaten them and grinding them up into a powder, then yelling something that would frighten a human being, such as, "Run, the enemy is upon us!" (cf. The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father, Partridge's Older Brother, Grandfather's Two Families, The Woman who Loved Her Half-Brother) The same procedure used by a powerful spirit over the bones of the deceased when completely reassembled, will have the same results (The Raccoon Coat, Redhorn's Sons, White Wolf). This formula is based upon the relation of the word nąǧi(re) meaning "to be frightened, fear" to nąǧi, "soul." By instilling fear, one instills the soul back into the bones. Once this happens, they come back to life. In the reverse process, when the nąǧirak meets Spirit Woman on the path to Spiritland, after feeding the ghost, she cracks open his skull, which is his final death. So it is little wonder that where the wahorugóp is most concentrated is the place most associated with the soul. This is why it is a head-dress that is most effective in governing the actions of the soul. In the more modern stories this headdress is made of an inflated turkey bladder. The turkey is the bird of the arrow (mą), and therefore the bird of time (mą). This is because the turkey's feathers make up the vane of the arrow, its "wings," and give it the power of flight and accuracy. Rušewe, the Chief of Birds, the turkey that chases after the Twins, is the bird of the arrow of time. It is time that dogs the steps of Ghost and Flesh, and as we mortals all know, leads to their final separation. In this context, though, the turkey headdress keeps Ghost and Flesh together, since it was inflated with the breath of their father. The Hocąk verb meaning "to breathe," ni, also means, "to live." By a fortunate homonym, ni also means "water," the special abode of the soul. However, it is the ni inside the bladder that keeps the Ghost from escaping his companionship with Flesh, as every time Ghost tries to escape into the water, it bobs him right back up. The bladder is an organ of the bird of time that expels and repels water, the medium of the wild and free ghost, and insures that it must reside in the lodge of this earth with Flesh. It commands the lifetime which is the union of ghost and flesh. [For another discussion of the same subject, see The Gottschall Head.]

Now, just like the artist at Gottschall, the father of the Twins (Sun) goes out of his way to paint this life-giving bladder of breath-and-life the color red. Why do Ghost's headdresses in story and mural get painted red? The turkey bladder, which is usually filled with one kind of ni, water, that the ghost likes to inhabit, is now filled with another kind of ni, breath, which the ghost is made to inhabit when it is joined with the flesh. Now Ghost must inhabit the ni of the body: the breath (ni), muelos (wa-horugóp), and perhaps the blood (wa'į). The headdress is what forces Ghost to create life in the flesh, so it is painted the color of blood, the color of life. As we have seen, the color black symbolizes death. It is the color of the shadow, the manifestation of the nąǧirak outside the body; it is the color of darkness, the counterpart of unconsciousness. So black is also the color of mourning. The Nightspirits are the cause of darkness, and it is to them ultimately that the present Black Bear Subclan traces its origins. The Nightspirits who bring the darkness are the eastern opposites of the Thunders of the west, whose color, emblematic of lightning, is red. In The Roaster, when the humans contest the Giants in a mortal struggle, the Giants paint themselves black, the color of death, whereas the humans paint themselves the color of life, red. In Chief and Red Man when the red of the sky symbolic of the hero is extinguished, so too is his life. In the former case his death is made known in the sky when it loses all traces of red clouds and turns completely black. The association of life and vitality with the color red is seen in traditional dress, where only young people were allowed to wear red, the color co (blue/green) being the color of the elders. When a member of the Medicine Rite treads the Road of Life and Death into Spiritland, there are many things along the way whose color reminds him of the promise of eternal life. The second hill that he comes to is entirely red; at another place he sees a field of red rocks; in yet another spot he encounters red willows and reeds; and finally, he gazes back to see a valley covered by a red haze. However, the matter is complicated. The color red seems to be associated with the ghost (wanąǧi) itself. This is why the guardian of the gate to Spiritland in the west is Red Bear. The red bladder of ni that keeps Ghost from parting from his brother Flesh, recalls quite obviously that other red ni that is intimately bound with the seat of the mind (na'į), and that is blood (wa'į). The seat of the mind is the heart (nącge). It is here where most of the blood is concentrated, and which is in close proximity to the blood-rich lungs which cause the ebb and flow of the breath (ni). In the heart reside all the emotions and all the desires and wants of a person. When the Green Man (Bluehorn) replaced the heart of a deer with one fashioned of dried earth, it was said that ever after deer were skitterish because they had no moisture in their hearts. So the force of willful emotion is tied to the blood.²⁰ In another account of the sojourn of the soul to Spiritland, the wanąǧi comes to Spirit Woman who then applies to him the latest medical technique of the XVIIIth century — she cups him. In this procedure, a heated cup is placed over the spot where the patient is to be bled. The function of the heated cup is to draw the blood up to the surface. There the sanguinous humour is bled off. So Spirit Woman takes the spiritual body of the ghost and removes its spiritual blood, which we are told leaves the wanąǧi free of all earthly wants and cares.²¹ It may now progress to Spiritland without anything holding it back. This shows us that it is the blood that makes the heart the seat of the mind. So to show that Ghost is sojourning with Flesh and that he is not in the bloodless condition of the departed soul, his head is graced with the color of blood and of life. The head, the seat of the life soul, is given the color of blood, the seat of the mind and of consciousness, to remind us that he is bonded to his twin brother Flesh, expressed in the fact that it is he who always takes the initiative and backs it with that force of emotion that exposure to blood must necessarily give him.

Now we must consider why the area around the mouth, the pųc, has been painted red in the depiction of Ghost. In the Hocąk language, the mouth has a special connection to the life force. The word for mouth is i, which is nearly identical with its nasalized version, į, 'į, meaning "to be, to become; to live, be alive."²² Since nothing in the world of religious thought is considered a matter of coincidence, but everything is pregnant with meaning, the seeming coincidences of homonyms and assonances are an expression of hidden meaning and were put into existence by the machinations of spiritual forces. So the mouth is in word intimately tied to life, to existence. Whether such ties existed in the Xᵀᴴ century is not critical to the thesis, since the mouth is the α and ω of breath, where it exits and enters. This breath is the carrier of life, and it ceases to ebb and flow only at death. It resides in the lungs and heart where the blood is most concentrated. Thus the ghost or soul is strongly associated with the blood and breath, and therefore also with the heart, lungs and mouth. So the region about the mouth of the dead is often painted the color of blood and life, red. In the Hawk Clan, or Warrior Clan as it was also known, sometimes the mouth was surrounded with a red circle. In pictographs the empty circle itself, as we shall show below and in detail in the Gottschall Head, denotes life. In time of war the paint was dispensed with and in its place the real article for which the red paint stood was used in its place — the circle was painted with human blood.²³ In the Deer Clan Origin Myth it is said,

And he took red paint and said, "My brother, I am going to paint you. They will recognize you at home, for this is the way we are. Hereafter, all those men who are to live after, they also will all be doing like this. The story (worak) will be that he did the painting in just this way," he said. And he blackened his forehead with charcoal, and they streaked the corners of his eyes with red, and the chin and front of the throat he made red. And they dug a grave. There they buried him.²⁴

The Bear Clan also paints the entire chin of the deceased red, the relevance of which to the Ghost figure at Gottschall was appreciated to some degree by Salzer.²⁵ As we have seen in the discussion of the Gottschall head, the chin is a special area that expresses the life force in the form of beard growth. As we saw above, the chin is called hi-rap, "the hair jaw," the word for jaw (rap) also denoting beavers, so that the whole jaw becomes "the beaver" by homonym. The picture of Ghost at Gottschall has the red paint, symbolic of the life principle and therefore the soul, painted in the pattern of the beaver's coloration around its pųc or snout in order to show the water-loving affinities of the ghost, an affinity indulged in the flesh by its special associations with blood and wa-horugóp (marrow).

The Double Helix. All three of the humans on the same plane have something that has been described as a "forelock." This is another odd idea inspired by the slightly later Mississippian culture, where forelocks are quite pronounced, but by no means this pronounced. In the illustrations below, the rayed discs and the twisting lines emanating from them at the point of attachment have been aligned in the same direction for Ghost, Flesh, and their presumed mother.

In the depiction of Ghost, the first two lobes of the entwined lines look as if they were forelocks, but they are not drawn in exactly the same way as the rest of the strand, which reaches all the way to the ground and attaches to an inverted bird. Some forelock! The entwined lines either attach to the first two lobes or pass behind them, originating in either the disc or what looks very much like a Mississippian wooden cone.²⁶ On the other two figures there is no ambiguity. The entwined lines originate in the rayed disc. In the case of Flesh, one of the rays is even below the attachment point. When this is appreciated, we realize that the entwined lines have something to do with the rayed discs or orbs.

In some ways the entwined lines resemble a length of chain, except that the links seem to be slightly oval in the vertical direction. When seen this way, it inscribes a two-dimensional view of a double helix, a crossing double spiral. This pattern, especially when connected to a superior disc, is highly significant. One place where we see the vertical ascending double (parallel) helix is in the plains Indian sign language. The sign for the concept conventionally translated into English as "medicine" is shown in the inset. This is not the sense of "medicine" applying to physical remedies, but the sense that expresses sacred power.²⁷ In sign language this concept is expressed by forming a "V" with the index and middle fingers, then moving the hand upwards in a circular, clockwise motion.²⁸ It may be observed that the tips of the fingers inscribe a double spiral. The advantage of the sign is that it expresses the concept in three dimensions with the inclusion of motion. The sign at once expresses duality, circularity, and vertical motion. In Hocąk thought, for instance, creation is from above. The earth itself was cast down by Earthmaker (Mą’ųna) from above, and its seas were his tears of loneliness that fell from on high. Offerings to the spirits in the other direction are made by sending the articles through the smoke hole of the lodge in which the rite takes place. Some offerings (such as tobacco) are placed in the fire, which is the "messenger of the spirits" since its smoke rises to the upper regions carrying the offerings to the spirits. So there is a double pathway of creation and effect, both upward and downward. This is the duality of the motion, the two strands of the basic rope, the double helix of an axis mundi that ties the mortal and immortal worlds together in a binding medium through which power is communicated. But this communication is also a circle in other ways. The circle is a perfect figure with neither beginning nor ending. When Hare attempted to win immortality for human beings, he did so by walking in a circle around the world or around a central fire; but when he looked back, he broke the perfect circularity of his Vision for humanity, and in so doing, shattered human immortality in the flesh. The double helix expresses the circle in motion. When Earthmaker created our world, he not only sent it downward, but his act of holy creation imparted a circular spin to it, so that it was in constant flux, the flux of infinite circular creativity. To render the earth quiet and stable, Earthmaker had to anchor it in place. In the Medicine Rite description of the journey to Spiritland, the departed ghost ascends to the world of his deliverance, the realm of Earthmaker himself, by climbing up a ladder whose right side is "like a twisted frog's leg." This staircase to heaven is a static representation of the double helix of transformation, with the progress of soul ascending in conformity with this pattern, being transmitted to the realm of Spiritland to be transformed (see the Commentary to "The Journey to Spiritland"). This has an interesting exemplar in the Micmac petroglyph shown just below to the left. The caption reads, "Stars and lines said to represent the Milky Way, the 'Spirit Road' of the Micmac Indians. Micmac Incised style; ... Kejimkujik Lake, Nova Scotia."²⁹

This is not a realistic representation of the Milky Way, but a symbolic rendering of a road of supernatural power, a connection between worlds like the twisted frog's leg of the Hocąk Medicine Rite, the rotating, double helix pathway to the Otherworld. Note that the star embedded in the Milky Way has a single helix "power line" descending downward, just like Gottschall has the double helix descending downward from each of the solar-like discs. Two more examples of the "double helix" design are found from the Great Lakes region. The one above right is described as an "unidentified abstract symbol," and the more diamond shaped one on the right is from the Cliff Lake paintings.³⁰ Other examples are found in the Southwest and in Missouri.³¹ This "diamond chain" motif, as it is called, may not belong here, but is close enough in form to be worth mentioning. These last two have much the same orientation as those at Gottschall. Similar examples come from the living tradition of the contemporary Lakota, whose linguistic branch is thought to have separated from the Hocąk, Chiwere, and Dhegiha around 700 AD. The Lakota still use a minimal representation of this same double helix pattern (see insets). The fundamental unit of the structure is often represented as a triangle. However, the Keeper of the Star Map among the Oglalas reminds us that

the Lakota image of a star is not a flat two dimensional triangle, but rather a cone, a vortex of light slanted down. The inner true shape of the stars and the sun is an inverted tipi. Later that same week, a friend, Chris Horvath, told me [Ronald Goodman] he'd been taught by Leslie Fool Bull, a leader in the Native American Church, that the tipi is part of an image of sacred above and sacred below. They are reflections of each other. He made this drawing

x

Sacred above grandfather and sacred below grandmother represent the two cosmic principles which together form a unity, restoring a oneness to the One, and always and the only One — Wakañ Tañka. The Oglala star map ... is both a star map and an earth map. The complete symbol which embodies this complex knowledge is two vortices joined at their apexes.³²

The two vortices joined at the apex form a symbol called kapemni. This term does more to express the truly dynamic and kinetic nature of the double vortices than its two dimensional counterpart might suggest. The stem is pemni, which means "twisting." The prefix ka- is used "for a class of verbs whose action is performed by ... the wind." The word in origin must have denoted the actions of tornadoes and dust devils, but is now used to express their general twisting motion. In the Oglala story of Iron Hawk, it is a whirlwind that sucks the hero Red Calf up through the hole in the sky where his father Iron Hawk is being held prisoner.³³ This motion, expressed by two "V" shapes in mirror image of one another, recalls the Lakota "medicine" sign (see above). So the kapemni symbol

... is referring to two vortexes (two tipi shapes) joined at their apexes, and turning. ... Mr. Norbert Running, Medicine Man and Sun Dance leader on the Rosebud Reservation, explained that the Sun Dancers create with sacrifices and prayers an invisible tipi (or vortex) of praise as they dance around the holy tree at the center. Sun above, Sun Dancer below, and the connection between them is prayer."⁴⁵

So the kapemni is a whirling set of vortices through which the upper and lower worlds communicate with one another. An act of supernatural power, such as a sacrifice or prayer can actually generate a kapemni. The double helices that we see in the Micmac petroglyph and at Gottschall are nothing more nor less that a series of connected kapemni. The kapemni certainly appears to have evolved out of what is called a "power line." This term is found in the literature on plains pictography, of which there are numerous Lakota examples. Sometimes, though less frequently, it is represented by several straight lines emanating from the head of a supernaturally powerful person, such as a medicine man. More usually, however, the rays take on the form of sine waves, as we see in the Lakota pictographic symbol meaning "medicine man" [inset].⁴⁶ The term "rays" is appropriate, since such depictions attempt to capture an invisible power, a supernatural force, that radiates outwards from a sacred nodal point. It is a person's or object's holiness expressed as an invisible field of supernatural potency. The sine wave is the two-dimensional representation of a twisting motion, since it is of the nature of radiating supernatural power to configure itself in this circular form, the circle being an exemplar of perfection. We see such a "power line" emanating from a star in the Micmac pictograph above. More importantly, we have relatively modern pictorial evidence of both the power line and the kapemni double helix that are reified in the form of concrete ritual artifacts.

A rather late survivor of the Mississippian culture, the Timucua tribe of Florida, was visited in 1564 by a French expedition under Laudonnière that had the foresight to bring an artist with them, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. He painted numerous scenes of Timucuan life which found themselves published in engravings done by the Flemish artist Theodor De Bry in 1591. De Bry's engraving of Le Moyne's "Trophies and Ceremonies after a Victory" is seen below.⁴⁷

They elevated their "trophies" on seven poles. Of particular interest are rigid strands (vines?) that spiral down the poles, connecting the top of the trophy to the ground. The trophies are meant to be the surviving physical attachments to which the souls of the slain warriors remain fixed. The arm, scalp, and leg probably represent respectively, executive power, spirit, and motion. All the poles save one have single helices (spirals) or power lines that send down the spiritual power of the slain enemy warriors inherent in their appendages to the sacred earth of the victorious tribe. The scalps, which are a kind of synecdoche for the head as a whole, may be taken to represent the spirits of the departed warriors, whose powers now redound to the victors. The top knot, as can be seen, has been untied, and the long strands of hair have been allowed to spread out like wings. The result is similar to a κᾱρύκειον | caduceus (see below for the caduceus). The six poles on the right have a chiastic order: [a] hand, [b] scalp, [c] leg, [c] leg, [b] scalp, [a] hand. The last pole to the left is surmounted by a scalp, and represents an asymmetry. The poles are arranged in a semicircle, one complemented by the semicircle opposite them made up of the seated people, so that the whole forms a circle, with the quick and the dead opposite one another. The shadows show that the poles are arranged in an east-west axis. It is likely that the left extreme pole surmounted by a scalp is at the western extreme of the sequence, since that is where the spirit represented by the scalp goes at death (following the setting or "dying" sun). In the center of this circle of life and death is the priest opposite whom is found the drum, said by the Hocągara at least, to be the Messenger. The priest, a messenger himself, is communicating with the world of the Spirits, and is therefore appropriately placed in a Centre in Eliade's sense of the term.⁴⁸ The poles also exemplify this notion of Centre. The number seven can be arrived at by taking the four compass directions on the ground, and adding the directions of up and down. The seventh "direction" is the center itself. The central pole of the seven is flanked by three poles on either side. It alone has the form of a double helix kapemni. It represents the Centre of special vertical communication that unites the spiritual Above World with the Below World of human affairs. As the staff of the Messenger, the caduceus has this same form. It is surmounted by wings, the power of locomotion for those beings who travel in the up/down axis, the same axis along which the communication of sacrifices and blessings are exchanged between humans and the Olympians. Among the Timucua, the pole is surmounted by the leg of one of the dead who is now walking to Spiritland. His locomotion is homologous to that of birds, and his ghostly leg is now like the wings of a bird, propelling him to the Above World of the spirits. The “other” seventh pole, the one on the extreme left representing presumably the west and therefore also this upper Spiritland, is surmounted by a scalp, the embodiment of the dead man’s own spirit. It is this spirit that leads the way and is the peripheral counterpart of the leg of the Centre. Like a caduceus, this pole of the Centre has a double helix, reflecting its special status as a conduit of power that operates in both directions, the upward direction of sacrifices and offerings, and the downward direction of blessings. This double helix looks very similar indeed to that portrayed in the Gottschall pictographs. The hoped for discharge of power is also in the same direction, from above to below. In the case of the Gottschall Twins pictures, the discharge of the force isn't a deposit of supernatural power into the earth, but a violent expression of its power to destructive ends. This kind of kapemni power is hinted at in rituals from the Mississippian cultures in the context of war: "... they strike with fury and vengeance the spiral-striped war pole — a symbolic axial conduit between the Sun and the sacred fire."⁴⁹ There the spiral strips are a surface counterpart to the strands seen in the 1564 painting. The painting illustrates the ideal representation, which is three-dimensional. This three-dimensionality can only be suggested in the two-dimensional medium used at Gottschall. Nevertheless, among the Timucua we have a clear example of the spiritual power of the Above World of the sun expressing itself through the rotating vortex of the kapemni, which appears to be what is happening in an equally warlike context with the Children of the Sun at Gottschall.

Additional examples of the vertical, double helices come from older phases of the Mississippian culture, specifically from the Spiro Mound in Oklahoma (see the illustrations below). The first example is a fragment of a gorget showing the double helix arising directly from the head. It could represent a headdress of this design, but that seems rather less probable than its being a pictorial expression of a medicine path connecting the head (a place where the soul resides), with the celestial spirit abode. Even as a headdress, it probably retains the same symbolic significance.⁵⁰ The second example is a Greek cross within a petaloid circle. Draped over the cross bar of the cross is what looks like downward spiraling drapery in a double helix pattern. The cross, like the more elaborated swastika, is typically a symbol of the center, the bars of the cross forming a kind of reticle that precisely defines a geometric center, the meeting point of the arms. The center defined by the arms of the cross also forms the center of two concentric circles that surround the cross. Outside these circles are what appear to be flower petals, the whole giving the impression of a sunflower. The result suggests a symbolic representation of the sun, here seen as the center of a vortex whence emanates the double helix that descends to earth in ever widening bands, as if in perspective. The double helix as a "medicine path," here emanating from what appears to be a symbolic representation of the sun, is similar in conception, albeit in a very different artistic style, to its counterparts at Gottschall.⁵¹ The petaloid circle containing a cross is widely distributed in Mississippian culture, where the cross is sometimes modified into a swastika, representing a rotating motion, rather like the solar-like object surmounting the head of Ghost at Gottschall.⁵²

The third example is of a similar double helix rendered in a different artistic style, with sets of parallel lines in a more elegant counterpart to the Micmac pictograph above.⁵³ In this gorget design, two men are facing one another and each is holding his own cauldron out of which the helices ascend. Each cauldron is shown as if it were transparent, the rotating lines curving together at the midpoint of each cauldron, and contained in this loop within each cauldron is a Greek cross. Therefore, the third example is something of an inversion of the second. The cross here marks the ritual Center (in Eliade's sense) here on earth, and the double helices ascending, represent the supernatural path by which the spiritual essence of the offering rises to the spirits above. This may function as a symbolic representation of the spiritual essence of the rising smoke or steam said to play the same role. The fourth example, which is broken at the top left, clearly depicts a ceremony of some kind, with one high ranking individual handing a cauldron off to another. Between them and beneath the cauldron stands a column decorated in a series of vertically ascending "targets" of three concentric black circles each. Emanating from the cauldron is a vertical double helix made up of four black lines separated by three white lines, which is the same as the "target" pattern on the supporting column. Although the left side is broken off, the right side is intact and appears to terminate in a wing tip. Just short of the wing tip is a slightly oval rattle striped with three white lines against a black field, the same pattern followed by the other aforementioned lines. A forked structure surmounts the top of the rattle, and below the oval is a handle.⁵⁴ The double helix of this work of art looks very much like the Micmac design reoriented to the vertical axis. It would seem to represent a creative vortex which reëxpresses the metaphysical function of the column itself, whose "target" designs may also represent vortices as seen from above or below. In fact, the Lakota have the exact same "target" symbol which they identify as the kapemni vortex pair as seen from above.⁵⁵ Since the double helix vortex emanates from the cauldron, it may represent the "spirit path" taken by the presumed offering contained in the cauldron. That the "targets" and the vertical helix may represent two perspectives on the same thing is reinforced by the large ceremonial ornaments worn by each of the men holding the cauldron. The one on the left appears to have attached to his back a swan or goose of about four feet in length, extending down from just below his shoulder to the back of his knee. The corresponding figure on the right has a large circular device, a more elaborate "target" of six black concentric circles, the last third of which is cut off to fit on his back. The outermost circle has a series of elaborate rays which have a zigzag pattern to them that point back to the center of the concentric circles. This gives it a solar appearance. It is of a piece with the other "targets" and the oval rattles in front of the double helices. All these may represent the sun as a creative vortex and the terminus of a spirit path (as the star is in the Micmac example above). The vertical path and its motion is captured in part by the swan or goose, which is a bird that traverses the vertical worlds and can therefore symbolize motion along this path. His head is pointed upward and his wings are spread, so he recalls the winged double helix above the cauldron and the column. The effect of the column, the double helix with its winged termination, recalls not only the water bird ornament, but the caduceus of Hermes, the wand of the divine messenger and herald of the gods who traverses the worlds in order to make communication among them possible. This is, indeed, the central purpose of an offering, to traverse these otherwise distinct and separate worlds in order to effect communication to their mutual benefit. The kilts of the two men in examples 3 & 4 are ornamented in different ways with the Greek cross, what the Hocągara called "the Earthmaker Cross." This may itself be a static representation of the Center also expressed by the target design. This would be similar to the swastika in its import.³⁴ [For more remote parallels to the double helix, the caduceus, and the Hindu svastika, see Comparative Material below.]

The Rayed Orbs. This double helix in the depictions of it in Panel 5 is not a forelock connected to the head, but in every case it is connected to the disc surmounted on the heads of three of the anthropomorphic figures. It has been suggested that this is a coronet or garland of some kind, perhaps on the model of that worn by the Thunders, who are said to wear a red cedar (waxšúc) garland on their otherwise bald heads. However, for historical models we should turn to the peoples who occupied this area from 1640-1735, before it was (re)occupied by the Hocągara. These are the Fox and Sauk nations, who are Algonquian speakers and therefore not related to the Hocągara or Chiwere peoples. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of commerce, not to exclude the commerce of ideas, among these tribes. For the rayed crown, we have an interesting example from this depiction of a Fox warrior by Lewis (Image 1):

However, what makes it somewhat unlikely that this is what was being depicted at Gottschall is the fact that the pictographic orbs are on edge in relation to a coronet. Nevertheless, the coronet might well symbolize the same sort of thing, if it is not just a decorative device. In the pictures above (Image 2) we have another Fox warrior, Tahcoloquoit, who not only has a coronet of a different sort, but has the Akron lines painted on his face very much like the sculpted head found at Gottschall. However, the most interesting example actually features the very orb under discussion (Images 3 and 4). It has been observed that the orbs on all the anthropomorphic figures have 7 rays, but there would be 8 if we extrapolated to the point where the orb rests against the crown of the head. In the portrait of the Fox chief Keesheswa, the disc with 8 rays is painted right next to his ear. It is probably a coincidence that this symbol is painted in the same blue-gray as the Gottschall paintings. It may not be a coincidence that the rayed orb is painted next to his ear. The ear is the organ of sound reception, and sound, because of its radiation in all directions from a center, is often a symbol of the cardinal points. Kings in the ancient Near East and elsewhere were said to be "Lords of the Four Quarters," a title bound up with the symbolism of sound and the ear. Since Keesheswa is a chief, this could be the import of putting this eight-rayed orb next to his ear. The brass ring, forward facing with a silvery hooked ray above it, does recall something of the rayed orbs shown in the Gottschall paintings. Nevertheless, in the paintings they are connected to double helices, which in the case of Ghost is itself connected to what is certainly an inverted bird. All this involves symbolism, so even if it were established that there were actual coronets or garlands of the sort seen in the Gottschall paintings, we are still left with the question of what their symbolism is in this context, a context in which one of them is not passive, but is involved intimately in the action taking place.

This disc, as it is surmounted on the head of Ghost and the other figures, is the source and terminus of the double helix, which is to say, supernatural power. The double helix is not the only thing emanating from the disc. Each disc is surrounded by rays. Such discs are found in pictographs of known meaning. In ISLan (Indian Sign Language), a disc formed by the index finger and thumb, as illustrated, denotes either the sun, moon, or star, depending upon which other signs are added. By itself, the sign means "sun"; if it is preceded by the sign for darkness (or night), it denotes the moon; if the sign is made and the index finger is flicked back and forth to indicate twinkling, then it denotes a star.³⁵ Such unities are seen in the Hocąk language. The word wi by itself means "luminary," but without modification, it usually stands as an ellipsis for hąpwira, the day luminary or sun. Hąhewira, "night luminary," is the word for moon, although when -wira occurs in a calendrical context, it will denote "moon" or "month," as in Hųc-wi-ra, "the Bear Moon." Wi-ra gošge denotes stars. All three are luminaries (wi) in Hocąk. In ISLan, "sun" and "star" are represented by discs, and "moon" by a crescent.

In pictographic writing, the luminance of two of these are represented by rays, the moon being represented by a crescent. The disc on the head of Ghost has twisted rays suggesting a counterclockwise motion, whereas that of Flesh exhibits straight rays. The double helix emanating from Flesh's disc does not terminate with another figure, but the double helix of Ghost extends down a good distance and terminates in a picture of an inverted "black" (solid colored) bird. In later pictography, the practice of inverting a creature and giving it a solid color has a known meaning. There are numerous examples from the XIXᵀᴴ century, as we see in the panel below.

Often it is enough to turn an animal on its back to indicate that it is dead. A set of instructions on how to make a pictograph makes this abundantly clear: "Death of an animal is indicated by the animal being shown in an inverted position, viz., upside down. In case of a deer being shown by a set of deer horns, reverse the horns to represent death. Where a bear is shown by the bear's paw, reverse the paw with claws up to represent death."³⁶ However, as we see from our examples, coloring it in and making it solid is another conventional way of representing the animal's death. The two figures at the end of the series of pictographs above, for instance, represent two dead people. So the inverted, solid colored depiction that we find in Panel 5 at the base of the Ghost figure would conventionally represent a dead bird, by attested pictographic values. We have seen that the double helix represents supernatural power, and it originates in the disc whose rays suggest spinning. The spinning disc represents either Ghost's own power as a stellar being, or his power as an expression of the sun, inasmuch as he is one of the Children of the Sun. So according to late pictographic conventions, what the depiction says is that "a man with solar/stellar connections, applied supernatural power to a bird, resulting in its death." This is what one widespread version of the Twins myth tells us happened: Ghost kicked to death a Thunderbird nestling, something that could be done only with immense supernatural power. Flesh, at this point, is not taking part, so his supernatural power is inactive, although present. It does not, therefore, terminate in a result. This inactivity is reinforced by the static depiction of the rayed disc, which shows no hint of action itself and his double helix does not come to ground in any object. When we examine the "apron" that Ghost wears beneath his oval gorget, we see that it is decorated in this same double helix motif. A series of such double helices are arranged in parallel vertical columns, and suggest in this design even more strongly the up/down directionality of the double helix. Its being surmounted, so to speak, by an oval disc, repeats the pattern of the solar-like discs that stand above and connected to the double helices that project down in front of the three humanoid figures. This is an artistic reenforcement of the theme of spiritual power that is particularly manifest and expressed in the figure of Ghost. It is absent in the figure of Flesh precisely because he is less powerful. [This subject is discussed further below under "The Seven Rays of the Orbs." For parallels to the rayed orbs or discs, see Comparative Material below.]

The Nestlings. The inset is a picture of the object being touched by Ghost's left hand, with an outline traced in red that suggests the form of a bird. This object is almost certainly a bird, and one a good deal smaller than the one to its right which has been identified as a Thunderbird. According to our stories, especially "The Lost Blanket" versions, there should be at least two nestlings whom the Twins confront. The pale green line traces the outline of what might be a stone, which is of interest since "The Lost Blanket" story says that the Twins fought the Thunderbirds with stones. The filaments that seem to extrude from the bird's outline might be either a representation of down feathers, or biological effluvia ejected from the impact of Ghost's left hand thrust into the center of its body with, as the green outline suggests, a rock. However, it is almost certainly the former, since Panel 3 shows what is clearly a bison whose hair is rendered in this same manner.³⁷ While "The Lost Blanket" story does not at first describe the fate of the nestlings, later on (as we shall see below) it states that they were killed by the Twins and made into headdresses. So the painting here is interpreted with no difficulty as Ghost killing two nestling Thunderbirds in succession, the first of which lies at his feet and the second of which is seen in the very course of its destruction. It may be that the young bird is merely being gripped by Ghost's left hand, but it would not be surprising if that Twin had executed the coup de grave from that side. There is more than one reason to think so. Striking a mortal blow with the left hand would demonstrate unusual power, since normally the left is the weaker side. As to flesh and spirit, we might expect flesh to be associated with the right, the familiar world, and the ghost to be associated with the left, the world of death and the Beyond. Also, given the moral priority of right as the "correct" hand to use in almost everything, the use of the left hand to commit an act of deicide seems very appropriate to one of the central messages of the Twins Cycle: that the supreme power given the Twins caused them to lose their moral constraints and to cross the boundary of right action into the realm of excess and moral error. The assault on the Thunderbirds was not why the spirits in general gave of their collective powers to create these beings of incomparable might, it was to do the opposite, to restore the balance of the universe and set things right. The Twins in their excess have gone Left when they should have gone Right. This reason for why the left hand leads the assault against the Divine Ones is reinforced by a similar inversion. A reexamination of the solar-like disk above the head of Ghost suggests by the forward curvatures of its rays, a counterclockwise motion. Conventionally, as we have seen, the ISLan sign for holiness or medicine describes the double helix of supernatural power as rotating clockwise. Inasmuch as the double helix is attached to a source that seems to be rotating the opposite direction, the helix can be presumed to be rotating to the left as well. If this is correct, it asserts that Ghost's supernatural power is bad medicine used in a counterproductive cause. Therefore, the projection of the left spinning double helix from its holy source on to the prostrate bird below is just another image of Ghost's left handed assault on the second nestling. The reduplication of narrative motifs is a cornerstone of mythology, and we see the same principle being applied in the pictographic representation of the present myth.

Another odd thing about these nestlings is that they have no feet. They could hardly be designed that way by nature. (The large Thunderbird is the same way, but that may be because the rock surface ran out before the feet were reached. On the other hand, it could have just been painted slightly higher up and depiction of the feet would have been possible.) Surely the lack of feet has some significance, but what could it be? Once again we can turn to recent plains pictography to get an interesting solution. There is a picture of a Dakota taking captive a Crow man and woman. It is a minimalist composition, practically a group of stick figures, except that the woman is identified by two round circles indicating her breasts. The woman is to the left of the captor, and the man is to the right. Also shown are the hands of the Dakota, but the hands of the prisoners are missing. Col. Mallery explains, "[The pictograph] shows a Dakota method of recording the taking of prisoners. ... It is noted that the prisoners are without hands, to signify their helplessness."³⁸ This same symbolism seems likely to be operating in the Gottschall exemplars. Since birds use their feet for grasping, they become the counterpart to human hands. The nestlings, and perhaps even Great Black Hawk himself, are helpless in the face of the immense power wielded by the Twins. To show this, their "hands" (talons) have been removed, indicating that the organs of executive power have ceased to function.

Great Black Hawk. In the inset, the picture of the large bird in Panel 5 has been isolated with the trailing human figure removed. The bar found across the face of this latter personage extends all the way to the avian figure, and therefore may be a part of it. Therefore, in this isolated view, I have left it attached as though it were. Accepting provisionally the hypothesis that this is a Thunderbird, mainly on the evidence of the forked pattern emanating from the eyes, can the addition of the "bar" add anything to our interpretation? Its situation is at the back end of the bird right next and above the part that seems to represent the tail feathers. It is hard to see it, therefore, as anything other than a tail itself, in the raised position that it usually assumes when a raptor lands with a braking action. When interpreted this way, it becomes, in conjunction with the other section also interpreted as a tail, a dual or "forked" tail. Such tails are found on a number of highly aerobatic species. Thunderbirds assume the somatic form of various species of birds. Their chief, Great Black Hawk, has the bodily form of a black hawk when he wishes to be in an avian modality. We must assume, for instance, that Little Pigeon Hawk, who is also a Thunderbird, must likewise have the avian form of the species recognized in his name.³⁹ So on what kind of a bird is the body of the large Thunderbird in Panel 5 modeled? The aforementioned tale "The Lost Blanket," gives an epilogue to the fight between the Twins and the Thunderbirds which supplies us with a good idea of what bird might be depicted here. The story relates how Ghost and Flesh climbed a hill and looking down espied a very large village.

(237) When they arrived there, they climbed it. Being a very high hill, they climbed it only with great effort. Sure enough, a great deal of the far off surrounding country was visible. "Korá, the village is the only place to go." This was a village bigger than the rest sitting there by itself. (238) "Koté, let's go there. About now let's take our time visiting there. Then we could take plenty of time at this place and not stop," he said. The older one said to him, "Hąho, we'll do that. Koté, you have spoken well," he said. Then they went over there. (239) They came down and when they arrived there, they saw them. Yet as they went over there, they just stood around watching them. And then they acted shy. They also went to speak to the chief. And as the chief was there, they went there to report it to him. "We have seen two boys who have the chief's children on their heads," they said. (240) He, the chief, said, "Go call them that I might have them bless me. Surely they will take pity on me," he said. And they went to call them. "Koté, you are called to the chief's lodge. There you should go, he says," they said to them. "Ho," they said. They went back there together with them.

(241) When they took them there, unexpectedly, they had the chief's sons, one apiece, on top (of their heads). Then the pipe and that which is mixed was placed there before them. The pipe they filled for them and one apiece was given to them. Then the chief said, (242) "Hąhą, you white spirits, bless me even though I have done what was not good, but when it came to heeding what I said, he (the one who stole the blanket) was not a good one. Therefore, I didn't even know. Thus, it is because we did to you what is not good. I know it is for this reason that you did it. (243) You must pity us as we are not equal to anything," he said. "What do they think we are doing here? We did it because we are fond of them. And besides, we were not abusing them by the way we did it. We thought that they were little birds. (244) We did not know that they were children." They gave their headdresses back to them. He thanked them. The chief was called "Great Black Hawk." What they had gone to there was a Thunderbird village. It was the chief's children that they had there, the little bird headdresses.⁴⁰ [Hocąk syllabic text of this passage with an interlinear English translation.]

So, in the version in which two nestlings are killed ("The Lost Blanket"), the story ends with the identification of their father as the Chief of the Thunderbirds, Kerejųsepxetega, "Great Black Hawk." In many warbundles, the black hawk has been represented by a sparrow hawk, but that is probably because the original black hawk, which was conspicuously black, had become exceedingly rare in Wisconsin. This original black hawk can be identified. Joseph LaMère, the older brother of Radin's primary translator Oliver, told a German anthropologist exactly what kind of bird that the Hocągara meant by a "black hawk" (kerejų-sep), and this was a kind of kite, what is now called the "American Swallow-tail Kite" (Elanoides forficatus), known in earlier times as the "Black Swallow-tail Kite."⁴¹ The forficatus of its scientific name refers to its forked tail. Concerning its scarcity, one man remarked back in 1854 that the American swallow-tail kite was, "at one time quite numerous upon our prairies, and quite annoying to us in grouse shooting; now rarely met with in this vicinity [southwest Wisconsin]."⁴² The coloration of this bird helps us explain an important feature of the painting. What's puzzling about the Thunderbird of Panel 5 is that its head and legs are not colored in, but the rest of its body is represented as being more or less a solid color. It happens that if we accept the depiction as a rendering of the story from "The Lost Blanket," and the identity of the father Thunderbird as a black hawk (as identified by Joseph LaMère), then we can see immediately from the inset painting of the American swallow-tail kite why the Gottschall bird exhibits the coloring scheme that it does. What this demonstrates is that the painting is consistent with the story of "The Lost Blanket" where Great Black Hawk is the father of the two Thunderbird nestlings that were killed by the Twins. The story says that the Twins encountered two nestling Thunderbirds. They tell them to call their parents, but when they do, they describe the Twins as "crazed." This makes the younger Twin (Ghost) indignant. It is he who presumably kills the nestlings, although "The Lost Blanket" does not explicitly say so; nevertheless, the other variants name only Ghost as the perpetrator. It is the parents who first arrived, but they were soon reenforced by a squadron of Thunderbirds. We later learn that one of those parents is their chief, Great Black Hawk. The large bird in the painting is consistent with being a black hawk. Thus far the painting is quite consistent with a depiction of the events as they unfold in the story of "The Lost Blanket."

It should be noted that black hawks are extremely gracile and are therefore very different in physique from the pudgy looking version of the painting. One reason for this is that the story emphasizes that the Twins have mistaken these powerful predatory birds for mere pigeons. Thus the artist, assuming that he has not been just careless in execution, has tried to give the Thunders a pigeon-like aspect.

Blankets Lost and Found. Whatever the age of the version of the Twins story portrayed at Gottschall, it almost certainly predates any version now extant. It is surely a Hocąk story. Yet the tonsures of all the male figures are not only unlike that of the Hocągara that we are familiar with from paintings of historical times, but it is somewhat different from neighboring tribes.⁴³ It superficially resembles the famous "Mohawk cut," except that it is shorter. Like the regional cut of the tribes in this vicinity (Fox, Sauk, Chiwere, and some Dhegiha tribes), all hair except for a narrow strip running front to back is completely removed. This appears to be the case with the figures of the Gottschall panel. However, there is one important difference that to my knowledge has no historical parallel. Thin strips of hair are shaved at right angles to the hair ridge every 4 or inches or so. This feature makes their tonsures unique.

Another interesting divergence is the headdress. Almost all those who in historical times adopted this regional style of tonsure also wore a red, deer tail headdress. All the Fox warriors shown above are depicted wearing such a headdress. In the inset we see a drawing in red showing a man with his head completely or almost completely shaven wearing such a headdress. This drawing is painted in part over the forehead of the Flesh figure. It is not that the deer tail headdress is not known among the Hocągara, but judging from paintings the habit of shaving the head in this fashion seems to have been rare among them in historical times. It therefore seems unlikely that the red painting of a man wearing a deer tale headdress with a nearly bald head is Hocąk. Nor would they efface one of their paintings with a picture of a foreign warrior. More likely, it is Fox or Sauk. If so, given that it is painted over, and therefore later than, the blue pictures, it is likely done by the Fox or Sauk during their occupancy of the area. This would mean, of course, that the blue paintings, those that depict the actions of a uniquely Hocąk myth, predate the Fox and Sauk incursion of ca. 1640.

The pictographs would therefore show the earliest version of the myth that we have. This would explain the tonsure as one that had subsequently gone out of style among the Hocągara, but continued on in a similar form in that area, most especially by the closely related Chiwere peoples. The red, deer tail headdress, however, which was so popular among the Fox, is not seen at all in the blue pictographs at Gottschall. Instead, we have headdresses that are simply unattested among any tribe of historical times as shown in the pictures that have come down to us. Indeed, for all we know, they might be mythical headdresses, much like the turkey bladders said to have been worn by the Twins at the insistence of their father. The headdress of Flesh appears to be a set of wide strips that look as if they are flowing with the wind. Ghost's is quite unlike this. His is rather like a ribbon, and therefore must be made of strands of hair, and is even painted in a different color (red). The only thing that looks like the headdress of Flesh is the long strip attached to the head of the adult Thunderbird, Great Black Hawk. Since cloth is not likely a common commodity at this time (prior to 1640), what looks like cloth must be its predecessor fabric, skin (fur). The version known to us as "The Lost Blanket," tells us that both Flesh and Ghost had blankets made of fur. Flesh had one made of mink, but Ghost had one made of the fur of mice. Given that Flesh's headdress in the pictograph is almost certainly of fur, may we not entertain the idea that this early variant had not missing blankets, but missing furs of a different design that were used in headdresses? In version 1, it is Flesh's mink fur that is stolen, in version 2 the fur or blanket is owned by both of them. It is stolen by the Thunderbird Sleets as He Walks (Wasuwohimaniga). However, in an earlier version it may have been the Chief of the Thunders who ended up with this fur and that this was the motive for the Twins attacking his children. A pale trace of this exists in an Ioway Twin myth, the counterpart to "The Twins Disobey Their Father." The Ioway say that the lesser Twin had possession of his brother's queue, his scalp lock. When the stronger Twin tried to persuade his brother to violate their father's prohibitions, his immediate object is to get back his queue, since apparently without it, he cannot act with full force (rather like Samson). Finally, he gets his brother to relent and give him back his queue. Among the Ioway, what is missing is part of the coiffure. The entire episode of the conflict between the Thunders and the Twins among the Ioway has been so radically altered that swans have come to replace the divine birds so that no theft can be attributed to the Thunders and no deicide can be attributed to the Twins. It looks as if among the Ioway the conjectured original lost fur of Ghost's headdress was replaced with lost hair from Ghost's own scalp. This would be a transformation from a myth of the Common Winnebago-Chiwere that did not demure from attributions of hubris and tales of the nemesis that followed, a theme that the Ioway came to think of as being just too sacrilegious.

The "Red Horn" Figure and the Mother of the Twins. Let us now examine the figure called "Red Horn" in the received interpretation. In mythology he is so-called because his hair is red and arranged in a long queue or "horn" (he). However, the name has a double meaning. In the story of the Brown Squirrel, the expression "red projecting horn" (Ae lo tto Ke doAo tt = he-pųjoge-šuc) is used to denote an arrow made from red cedar.⁴⁴ Such arrows, used for small game, have no tip of flint or turtle claw, but are merely sharpened to a point (a "horn").⁵⁶ In the story where Redhorn races against the spirits (The Race for the Chief's Daughter), he wins by turning himself into an arrow and shooting himself ahead of his competitors.⁵⁷ Therefore, Redhorn has a strong identity with the red-horn-as-arrow. This is reinforced by the fact that he also holds the position of Chief of the Heroka.⁵⁸ The Heroka are a diminutive race of hunting spirits, whose name means "Without Horns." They have a special identity with bows and arrows. Besides his queue/arrow, Redhorn is most noted for his earlobes or what he wears on them. He bears the title Įcorúšika, "Heads as Earbobs."⁵⁹ Where his earlobes should be are two little heads of a comic disposition, who grin and stick their tongues out at people. The received interpretation sees the right-most figure in Panel 5 as being Redhorn, and the activity he is engaged in is a contest with the Giants in the game of lacrosse. Part of the problem with this interpretation is that there are no characteristics of this figure that suggest that he is Redhorn at all. He has no human heads on his ears, he does not have red hair, the hair is not arranged in a queue (or "horn"). There is no arrow motif, and there seems to be no symbolic depictions of the Heroka. If the game is lacrosse, then where are the sticks, the ball, the goal? If it is a game, then why are "Redhorn's" friends not in humanoid form? It is hard to excel at lacrosse in an aviform body, since wings are not very handy in holding a stick.

Who then is this figure? It is certainly the most difficult to interpret, a difficulty compounded by the fact that there are three versions of the story that pertain to his identity. If we follow the standard versions of this tale, such as we find in the Twins Cycle and partly in Bluehorn's Nephews, then the figure is most likely the sun in his human form as the father of the Twins. In the Twins Cycle, the father is out hunting and hears the commotion of the fight between his sons and the Thunderbirds and thinks to himself that this time his sons have surely been killed. So it is natural to this interpretation that the figure on the extreme right be the father of the Twins. Inasmuch as they are the Children of the Sun, their father should be a form of the sun. On the other hand, in the Hocąk tradition, the sun is thought of as rolling a large brass disc about the welkin, a clear representation of the solar disc. In the left hand we see something like a disc, except that it is rather small and is definitely colored in, and is therefore dark. So the object in the left hand seems a highly unlikely candidate for the solar disc. The second set of variants belong to a version in which the guardian of the Twins is their uncle (hiték), who is identified with Bluehorn, himself called "the Red Star" in his guise as the Evening Star. These variants are The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun. There the father of the Twins is the uneuhemerized Sun in his form as the celestial deity. These stories have no battle with the Thunders, so they cannot be a guide in interpreting the identity of this figure. However, if it is interpreted as an adjunct figure, perhaps making reference to another myth by allusion, these variants offer possible candidates. In this second version, the Twins rescue Bluehorn's head from a mysterious person who cut it off in a duel. This spirit resembled Bluehorn in every way, and since we know that Bluehorn is Evening Star, his doppelgänger must be Morning Star. He is named in one variant only as Herešgúnina (the Devil), but that is only under the influence of Christianity, where Morning Star is called "Lucifer." So the figure behind the Thunderbird in the painting might be Morning Star, and the object that he is carrying in his left hand could be the head of Bluehorn, perhaps in a bag. This leads to a surprising result if we were to accept the suggestion of Hall, reinforced to some degree by Radin, that Redhorn might be one and the same as Morning Star. It may be noticed, for instance, that Redhorn's very name is a complement to Bluehorn's. Other things could be said for this identity, including Morning Star's association with the Heroka; but this line of conjecture comes to an abrupt end when we consider a number of other things: Heads for Earrings (Redhorn) is explicitly identified, along with two of his brothers, with fixed stars; and in Morning Star and His Friends, Heads for Earrings and Morning Star coexist in the same story! Furthermore, the list of the Great Spirits, excluding Bluehorn (Evening Star = Red Star), is given by The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head as: Trickster, Bladder, Turtle, Redhorn, Hare, Sun, and Grandmother Earth. Omitted is Morning Star, who, as we saw above, is certainly to be identified in that story with the Evil Spirit Herešgúnina. So in this story too, it would seem that Redhorn and Morning Star coexist as distinct personages. Redhorn, as Chief of the Heroka, is therefore one and the same as Herokaga. Yet in The Origins of the Milky Way, it is said that Earthmaker "dispatched Morning Star, Thunderbird, Wolf, Otter, Sun, Turtle, and Heroka" to aid the humans. Given that Heroka is Redhorn, here again he is found coexisting with Morning Star. Furthermore, in the story The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, the Twins never address Redhorn as their uncle, despite the fact that Morning Star is said to be Red Star's (Bluehorn's) brother in Grandfather's Two Families; nor do they carry his warbundle as nephews would be expected to do. How indeed could they even be on good terms with someone whom they tried to kill in other stories? This makes it unlikely for Redhorn to be a figure in a painting about the history of the Twins. The third, the zero-grade version, has been the closest model. This model is exemplified by The Lost Blanket, in which the Twins battle the Thunderbirds in a context in which no mention is made of their father or guardian. If it is the Lost Blanket version that we are seeing, or some variant of it, then the figure will not be involved in the scene at all, but will be adjunct to it, like the smoker or the "turtle."

However, what makes the Redhorn thesis most unlikely is that the figure in question seems to be a female. Her most prominent female features are her breasts, which are both large and perhaps even pendent. The vertical lines seem to be used to represent a shirt, one that terminates in fringe. The contour of her breasts are made to show through this shirt. Another female feature is long hair not arranged in a scalp lock nor tonsured in the way seen in Ghost and Flesh. Her hair terminates in a large "ball" or bun at the back of her head and neck (not shaped like the Mississippian occipital hair knot). Jipson observes concerning the Hocągara, "By the women the hair was worn in a roll on the back of the neck and held in place by bead strings or ribbons."⁶⁰ There appear to be no vertical feathers or other headdress elements attached to this hair bun, as would surely be the case if it were a male. An easily overlooked female feature is the pointed chin, which is so characteristic of women that it is often used as a forensic criterion for sex determination in skulls. What of the disc that surmounts the head? The rays on this disc are unlike those of either Ghost or Flesh. Instead of radiating directly out (as with Flesh), or spinning (as with Ghost), they hook upward, until the top-most set seem to form a crescent. Is it, then, Hąpwira (the day luminary), or Hąhewira (the night luminary)? The crescent-like rays seem to suggest the latter. In Hocąk thought, Moon is female. This might help explain why her fringe wrist ornament is on her right hand, the opposite from its placement in the depictions of Flesh and Ghost. That is the string hand for the bow, so it is important that such a dangling ornament be placed where it will not be entangled with the string, and that is in part why it is on the left wrist of the two male figures. On the female, as a very sign of her femininity, it would be placed on the opposite wrist because women do not shoot the bow and arrow. With respect to clothing, she also appears to be wearing some kind of skirt, although it extends only down to her knees. Her outfit is, we have to admit, rather less modest than female apparel in almost all tribes of the upper midwest, whether plains or woodland. Usually, a woman is completely covered from the base of her neck down to her ankles (or a bit higher) in what appears to be a single piece shirt-dress. However, in Mississippian sculptures, there are at least two women depicted, both of whom are wearing skirts that extend down to just above the knees, exactly as shown in this pictograph.⁶¹ In the painting of Panel 5, female dress is partly counter-indicated by the fact that the midriff is exposed. However, suppose that the artist wanted to depict fringe at the bottom of the shirt, and did it in the fashion that we see in this painting; then there is really no way that the shirt could have been represented in this fashion over the dress. The fringes would have disappeared into the background, so he brought it up short to prevent interference from a background.

So if the picture is not of the sun, but of the moon, then what part does the moon play in the action? The answer is "none." Like the pipe smoker in the lower right in Panel 4, or the turtle above, she may be outside the action proper, but not outside the world of the Twins. Indeed, it is quite possible, given the painting of the presumed part of the forked tail of the Thunderbird over her face, that the large Thunderbird was painted in later, there having been a gap between the portrait of the woman and the action involving the Twins. However, this hardly matters, since she is not involved in the action in any case. The painting of the tail over the face of this figure, whether interpreted as sun or moon, is consistent with the theology of the figures involved in the Twins myth, inasmuch as the physical manifestation of the Thunders is the dark cloud which often eclipses the sun or moon or any other astronomical body in the sky above. Thus the tails of the clouds as they pass by often occlude the face of the sun or moon, temporarily blocking their light and overshadowing their power. It is this basic fact that tends to align the beings of light against those who aggress against them. In the Mahābhārata of India, Arjuna, the incarnation of the storm god Indra, is pitted against Karṇa, the incarnation of Sūrya, the sun.⁶² The Aśvins, the Indian Twins, are the offspring of Vivasvant (the sun) and Saranyū (probably the dawn).⁶³ This proves to be equally true of the Hocąk Twins, save that their mother is the moon. In the story about Redstar's head, we are told the story of the conception. The council of the spirits convened to pool all their powers so that they could be concentrated in a pair of twin beings who were to have a special mission on earth. These powers were placed in a medicine bundle and given over to Sun. Then,

(60) When the sun stood straight up, he stopped there. The woman dug up potatoes there as she went along. There at that place he caused the earth to dry out. She was on the hill side there. As the woman dug potatoes there, thus did he make the earth very warm. Thus as she brought out potatoes with her hoe, many remained to be dug out. (61) The really big ones she kept. As she stood on the hill side digging potatoes basking in the sun, she liked it very much. When she was basking her buttocks, she liked it a lot. And so the sun warmed her up everywhere, and standing there turning her buttocks as he did it, she liked it greatly. (62) Also the sun, having taken her buttocks, he did it. And there all the holiness that had been gathered together and sent, he caused to enter into her. There, at just one time, the woman became pregnant, but afterwards she was not aware of it. And the woman liked it very much. She became happy in her mind. (63) Also here she got many of the potatoes. As she went along she also dug up great big potatoes. As she went along she obtained potatoes that were new. Also the potatoes were smooth. She made the bag that she brought with her full. When she got back to her older brother, she let him eat them. He was very delighted. He was very happy.⁶⁴ [Hocąk syllabic text of this passage with an interlinear English translation.]

In the version presented in "The Children of the Sun," it is said, "When spring came the sister [Moon] liked to sunbathe. One day when she was lying under the sun she experienced something and knew right away that she had become pregnant." This story concludes by saying, "They were the children of the sun because their mother had exposed herself to his light when she was digging for potatoes."⁶⁵ Certainly one way that she could present herself to the impregnating rays is to have been bent over digging for Indian potatoes in a short skirt which raised up to expose her genitals. The first passage seems to suggest this. The painting alludes to this episode not only by the short skirt she is wearing, but by the dark object in her left hand, which is of the right size to be a bag or basket, perhaps the kind known in Hocąk as a pąsép, "a black or decorated bag."⁶⁶ It is appropriately black because the Moon is most often associated with darkness. The Moon in a short dress carrying a bag in a panel devoted to the Twins would immediately suggest this episode to any knowledgeable observer.

The Twins, well known as the "Children of the Sun" must also be recognized as the "Sons of the Moon." Allegorical descriptions of the mating of sun and moon are commonplace in Hocąk mythology. This mating occurs as an apparent fact of visual astronomy. It is said that after the moon has become full, it begins to dwindle in size because the bad spirits eat away at it. When the sun and moon are about to come into conjunction, the moon has dwindled down to a thin crescent and has moved steadily closer to the sun until it reaches the place where it rises. After her thinnest crescent, she appears not to rise at all from the earth and instead to have united with the sun itself where it rises at dawn. After this she becomes pregnant with light and reappears as a crescent which not only grows ever bigger, but travels farther and farther from the sun. All this is acted out in one version of the Birth of the Twins. In this story, the husband of the mother of the Twins plays the role of the sun. He is out hunting when she is in perfect health. Her father-in-law plays the role of an evil spirit, probably the Morning Star. When he is alone with her, he says something cryptic — "Daughter-in-law, I look toward the center of the lodge"; or, "Young woman feels a tingling sensation in the middle of the lodge." After many acts of service, she finally hits upon what he wants: she strips naked and lies down at the center of the lodge (the place where the Fire dwells). This stripping off of her clothing is the gradual stripping away of her light until she has no light at all. This is done through the agency of the evil spirits, who eat away at her. This act is next symbolized as the father-in-law cutting her into small pieces and roasting her for his dinner. He consumes every piece of her and even drinks the soup. This is the moment when the Twins are born. But this birth is actually a form of death, since immediately the bad spirit separates them, the Ghost being cast away in water or a tree stump and the Flesh remaining in the lodge (symbolic of the earth). What we learn from visual astronomy is that the moon is in total darkness without even a sliver of light when it is in conjunction with the sun. In the Gottschall image, she wears an ornament that is in origin a bowstring wristband designed to deflect the snap of the string against the wrist when the bow is shot. On males, who shoot with their right hand, the band is on their left arm, as it is with the images of Flesh and Ghost. Since there is a sex coded distinction between right and left, she has her band on the opposite (right) arm, as if she were shooting left handed. The bow has an obvious connection with the moon, since it is so often in a crescent phase. Yet in this case, although the suggestion of a bow is alluded to by the appropriate wristband, the bow itself is missing. The reason for this is obvious — she is depicted with her bag for collecting potatoes, so the scene is that time at which she was the mate of the sun while she was sojourning on earth. This is the time of conjunction, when the moon looses its bow (crescent). So, although she wears the functional wristband of a bowman, she has no bow, since she is in conjunction (mating) with the sun. The double helix lines of power that emanate from her lunarized head-orb have been made very thick and dark. The presumption, along the lines of the present analysis, would be that the helix too is meant to reflect the darkness of her condition at the time of conjunction. Notice too that the helix terminates in her wrist where the bowstring band is situated. This may symbolize that her power is realized in the bow or even the bowstring, which when pulled back creates the crescent bow, a symbol of her pregnancy of light and the ascension of her powers. The crescent bow may also be alluded to not only by the crescent rays from her cranial orb, but the bending of her arm in the shape of a chevron.

One puzzle that is difficult to accommodate to this interpretation is the "chevron" designs placed right behind the eye of the female figure. In the far away Balkans, the chevron motif is associated with what Gimbutas dubbed, "the Mistress of the Waters, the Bird and snake Goddess."⁶⁷ In the midwestern United States, chevrons, especially about the eyes, are associated with Thunderbirds, and are thought to represent the forked shape of the lightning which these birds fire from their eyes. The chevrons may represent a depiction technique modeling that of mythology itself, the technique of repeating motifs. As we see, the forked tale of Great Black Hawk cuts across the face of Moon, just as clouds so often do in the case of the actual moon. The chevrons could represent not specifically lightning, but more generally Thunderbirds, and in so doing repeat the motif of the Thunder's partial occlusion of the face of the moon. However, there are a couple of complicating considerations. The first is that the depiction of forked lightning in the picture of the large aviform Thunderbird (Great Black Hawk) is radically different from that of the neat, straight, nested forked lines that make up the chevrons of the female figure. Secondly, when the dotted lines are added to the chevrons, the whole becomes tripartite. The tripartite form is like the motif identified as the "bisected angle," a motif whose meaning is disputed.⁶⁸ Some have connected this motif to snakes,⁶⁹ which in Hocąk thought do not have well defined relationships with the moon, at least not so that they could be described as "lunar animals." It has also been argued that this motif is connected with Waterspirits ("Underwater Panthers").⁷⁰ This result would be more appropriate to the moon, since she is a sister to Bluehorn, a Waterspirit. Bluehorn is not only a Waterspirit, but "the blue sky come to earth." In Bluehorn's Nephews his sister wanders through the wilderness fleeing from a man known simply as "Brave" (the sun) until, exhausted, she collapses on the hill in which Bluehorn lives. Esoterically, this is where the blue sky meets the earth, and the scene describes the setting of the moon on its journey in opposition to the sun and to its decline in the house of the sky where it is destined to journey back to marry with the soon to be tamed sun. So the moon has strong Waterspirit associations and the markings, which if tripartite, could express such affinities. Whatever the marking may stand for, the difficulty of accounting for this pattern can give no comfort to the Redhorn interpretation either. The raconteur of the Redhorn Cycle has Redhorn say from his own lips, "even though I am not a Thunderbird ..." So Redhorn is simply not a Thunderbird. Nor are Thunderbirds associated with red horns, either as hair or arrows; and even in their anthropomorphic form, they are never mentioned as having living heads on their earlobes. Also Heads for Earrings (Įcorúšika) is explicitly said to be a fixed star, as are two of his brothers. Thunders are not associated with stars, but with clouds. To suggest that because Redhorn's son received the Thunderbird Warbundle from the Thunders themselves, that he must be a kind of Thunder, is no more plausible than to suggest that because he was given the war weapons of Turtle by Turtle himself, that he must be some kind of turtle.

Perhaps the greatest point of contention (see Debate and Discussion) about this figure are the arrow-like geometric shapes that I have identified with female breasts. The Received Opinion would wish to identify them in some way with the faces that Hocąk literature says were on the breasts of one of Redhorn's sons. However, to make this merely possible a certain amount of cubist contortion is required. A woman once remarked to Picasso, the inventor of cubism, that her cubist portrait didn't look like her, to which he replied, "Someday it will." But given all the time in the world, there is no way that these geometrized breasts will ever look like faces. For the same reason, neither can they be seen as Mississippian "long-nosed god maskettes." However, designs very similar to these breasts are used as ornamentation in the Braden A style of Mississippian art at Spiro Mound and are in silhouette often compared to Mississippian tools and ceremonial artifacts. Some of these are represented in the sequence of pictures below. At the extreme left is the Gottschall pictograph followed by a Braden A incised shell from Spiro Mound. Included are three Mississippian flint tools for further comparison: a "spud," a drilled spatulate, and a hoe.⁷¹

Archaeologists have termed the design incised on the shell above a "spud-like figure." The word "spud" is defined as "a sharp spade-like tool used for rooting or digging out weeds."⁷² Phillips and Brown have this to say about these figures:

The cup represented by the two nearly joining fragments shown here is even more like the Akron Cup than the one just considered. Here, instead of the undulating forked-eye motifs superimposed on the Akron grid, we have figures closely resembling the "barbed and blunt-pointed" motifs likened by Holmes to certain perforated stone implements that have since been called "spuds" by Southeastern archaeologists [third from the left above]. Actually the figures seen here are more spudlike than those on the Akron Cup, in outline rather like some of the long-handled unperforated spuds from Spiro (Burnett 1945, pl 18).⁸⁷

The long handled "spuds" referred to here were in fact used ceremonially (probably as scepters), rather than as actual spuds. According to Holmes, then, the design before us does have an actual tool as its counterpart, hence its name.

Why would the breasts of this figure be designed like a spud, in this case a kind of hoe or digging stick? Such an identity can be rationalized to conform with the interpretation given here. Ex hypothesi, the figure whose breasts are shaped this way is the Moon, the mother of the Twins. She became pregnant with the Twins in the first place because she was bent over using a hoe (or digging stick) to extract potatoes, as it says, "Thus as she brought out potatoes with her hoe (reš'akra), many remained to be dug out."⁸⁸ The digging of potatoes has interesting implications when expressed in Hocąk. One of the words for root is honi’ąp, which also means, "to be animated, alive with"; another homonym is formed by the word rejų, which means both "root" and "descendant."⁸⁹ So by her implement, she causes a certain kind of food to appear, a food which is symbolically life, and specifically her own offspring. The hoe or spud is the vehicle by which the tuberous roots (honi’ąp, rejų) that are offspring (rejų) become animated (honi’ąp). What she collects she feeds to her brother, because these roots (the Twins) will sustain him and prevent him from dying. This recalls the story in which mother earth has the corn plant arise from her own breasts. In other stories of the birth of the Twins, the hoe is replaced with a sharp stick (was), a digging stick, and this as an instrument for producing food, has the same function as the breast (was). At a time before these puns came into existence, a spud as a rooting tool could be viewed as a vehicle of sustenance and therefore functionally like a breast. To stylize the breasts of the mother of the Twins so that they looked like spuds is to make an allusion to her role as a sustainer of her brother by the production of offspring who will keep him alive and make him whole again. Inside or outside Hocąk homonymous symbolism, her breasts here make allusion to her role as the great sustainer, the one who sustains her brother both by food (spud/potato) and by her offspring (breast milk/Twins). Her spud turns up food at the very moment when she is impregnated, so at the very instant that conception generates the somatic changes that result in the production of milk, her spud has turned up what will nurture and sustain her brother, the potatoes that allude to the Twins themselves. That her breasts should be stylized as spuds is in keeping with their role as instruments of sustenance in a pregnant woman, here alluding to the basic mission for which the Twins were conceived, the sustenance and restoration of her brother Bluehorn.

This interpretation is not wholly satisfying. It is a bit awkward to make the breast an analogue to a tool of extraction. The "spud-like figure" such as we see incised on the Spiro shell is far more pointed than the depictions of the presumed breasts. These breasts are in contour most like the spatulate tools, but these tools have their mysterious holes drilled in their hafts. Their contours fit a hoe rather nicely, but hoes are not known to have holes drilled in them, although this would not exclude hoes from being models for just the mammary contours. If we assume that the lines extending up from the lower, rounded part of the breasts are integral to them (giving them a more pendent look), then their design more nearly resembles the spud tool. However, in truth the lines seem to represent a shirt, and the lines terminating in the rounded part of the breasts are probably only designed to preserve their natural contours as seen under a shirt. These include the dots used as nipples, which were doubtless put there to make clear the identity of the outlines as breasts. Despite his commitment to the truly bizarre thesis that the breasts resemble long-nose god maskettes, Salzer describes them objectively in the following way: "The upper chest area has two pendant or shovel-like devices with dots in the centers. These could be part of the body decoration or might be an unusual way to illustrate nipples."⁹⁰ Hall, the author of the LNG maskette interpretation, takes these dots to be nipples, and identifies the figure with that son of Redhorn who had living heads on his breasts. The common sense interpretation would be that they are what they seem to be — breasts with nipples.

Wiga and Redbird Shown with Long Pipes

Bluehorn and the Pipe Smoker. So what, then, do we make of the figure in the lower right (Panel 4) who is seated smoking an enormously long pipe? Similar, long, undecorated pipes are known in recent times from the Hocągara [see inset]. In the excerpted passages about the conception of the Twins, the moon is referred to as "the sister." The sister of whom? To answer this question, we must go back to the beginning and ask, Why did the spirits assemble in order to create the Twins in the first place? The origin of the Twins lay in a cosmic crisis. One of the Great Spirits, known by the name of "Bluehorn" (Hecoga), had fallen victim to another and malevolent spirit. He had foreseen, as he lived alone with his sister in the wilderness, that the time had arrived when a man who looked just like him would come to engage him in mortal combat. In time they finally met face to face across Bluehorn's fireplace. The duel was extremely unusual. A pipe was taken out and filled, then the visitor would smoke first as custom dictates. This visitor, Bluehorn's doppelgänger, then drew in the smoke with such might that Bluehorn was lifted from his seat. When it was Bluehorn's turn to draw, he did the same. The struggle went back and forth, with each nearly being drawn into the fire. Finally, the malevolent spirit did pull Bluehorn right into the fire, whereupon he leapt up and cut off the Great Spirit's head. In some accounts he places the severed head behind his own, Janus-like, to become the Man with Two Heads.⁷⁷ In other accounts, he tucks it in his belt and courses through the heavens in broad daylight with it dangling for all to see. Since Bluehorn was the Evening Star, also known as "Red Star," this precipitated a crisis.⁷⁸ So the spirits pooled their resources and created a power to be transferred to the spirits that we now know as the Twins. Even though Bluehorn, the maternal uncle of the Twins, had lost his head, his body yet remained alive, and he was able to communicate by signs (the mind residing in the heart). In this way he communicated with his sister and his nephews the Twins. His doppelgänger would, of course, have to be Morning Star, but he is never named as such. In one variant that is clearly under Christian (French) influence, the opponent is the Devil himself, Herešgúnina.⁷⁹ This is because the Christians also know the Morning Star by the name "Lucifer," who is identified in Scripture as Satan, the opponent of God. So the choice of Herešgúnina is merely a reinforcement of the identity of the malevolent spirit with the Morning Star. In the end, of course, the Twins recover Bluehorn's head, and reunite it with his body, thus rectifying the imbalance of the cosmos.

So when we ask, "Who is the smoker in Panel 4 to the lower right of Panel 5?", the mythology of the Twins immediately supplies an answer: it is the uncle of the Twins, Bluehorn. What is alluded to is the very raison d'être of the Twins, the incident that cost their uncle his head. The Twins are said to look very much like their uncle(s). This is in reference to something not depicted in the panel: they are said to have flint knives running down their arms,⁸⁰ although not all Twins myths state this. In the painting, the smoking figure, presumed to be Bluehorn, has the same strange bifurcation seen in Flesh and Ghost. The Twins are shown with a line painted across the side of their faces about the mid level of the head, so that it crosses the bridge of their noses (at about ear level). The smoker also has his face painted with the bottom in one color all the way down his neck, and the top apparently unpainted.⁸¹ This painted bifurcation of the head also occurs at about ear level and extends across the bridge of the nose. An exception may lie in his jaw and perhaps upper lip not being painted. These are the same areas that are painted on Ghost. The suggestion that these are funerary designs is consistent with the identity of Ghost and with the immanent fate of Bluehorn.⁸² However, funerary painting on dead bodies is clan-specific, in this case the painting pattern most resembles that of the Bear Clan. Unfortunately, the associations of the Twins and their uncle Bluehorn is with the Waterspirits. The Waterspirit Clan of the Hocąk nation seems to correspond with the Beaver Clans of their closest cousins, the Chiwere people (Ioway, Oto, Missouria). Beaver names are bestowed upon members of the Hocąk Waterspirit Clan, and there is a Beaver sub-clan which is no doubt included in the Waterspirit Clan. So Ghost's affinities with the aquatic beaver associates him firmly with Waterspirit Bluehorn (Wakjexi Hecoga).

There are several things that can be said against identifying the smoker with Bluehorn. One is that he does not have the orb and double helix that the other anthropomorphic figures possess. There can be more than one reason for this. His identity is with a star, which is not generally represented in pictography with an orb. However, perhaps more importantly, Bluehorn in the smoking duel has lost his edge in holy power. He is destined to be defeated, and that may be the reason why, even though he is a Great Spirit, that there is no manifestation of his power in the form of orb and helix. Neither is there a depiction of his opponent, although it is fairly clear why this might be so. Apart from the added sophistication and subtlety that comes with allusion, as in the depiction of Moon in the absence of Sun, a representation of a malevolent spirit at a shrine center, where such paintings are meant to induce the deities to manifest themselves, would tend to induce the presence of the malevolent deity himself. This is probably the opposite of what is desired, so a depiction of this deity is omitted, and the duel alluded to in a highly context-dependent depiction of one of the smokers. A more striking omission, however, is Bluehorn's famous long queue, his blue "horn" or scalp lock. This is featured only in "Bluehorn's Nephews," a story that is superficially inconsistent with others in the Bluehorn collection.⁸³ In that story, his hair was separated into four queues while he slept, which seems to imply that he did not always wear his hair braided. It may be said, furthermore, of all the males depicted in Panel 5, none of them has the traditional scalp lock. This itself is as puzzling as the odd tonsure that they do have, including Bluehorn. The blue paint that goes down the neck of figure in Panel 4 may not be a coloration of a clean-shaven neck, but may well represent long hair.

Most of these objections can be at least rationalized away, although they should cause us to keep an open mind to other possibilities. Nevertheless, the conclusion that the smoker is Bluehorn opens up other possibilities of understanding. Why is the panel as a whole centered on the conflict of the Twins with the Thunders? Much of this has to do with Bluehorn himself. He is a very rich deity. Perhaps surprisingly, he is among other things a Waterspirit. The title of one of the stories about him (see Brave Man) is "Waterspirit Bluehorn" (Wakjexi Hecoga), and in this tale his actions are said to show "what happened when a blue sky came to earth."⁸⁴ In "Bluehorn's Nephews," the Great Spirit is betrayed and captured by the Thunders, who haul him off to their demesne, where they actually eat away part of his body (as clouds do the blue sky) before the Twins are able to rescue him. His separation from the Thunders is restorative and in time he is whole again. This is but one episode in an ongoing cosmic struggle between the Thunders and the Watersprits, two classes of spirits that are in constant conflict with one another. As nephews of a Waterspirit, the Twins can be expected to be antithetical to the Thunders, and this becomes the central theme of the panel, a panel painted in the very emblematic color of the Waterspirits, blue.

The Seven Rays of the Orbs. The history of the power granted to the Twins even shows us why the orbs all have seven rather than eight rays. In the story The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, it is told how the Twin's uncle, the Red Star (the Evening Star), also known as "Bluehorn," was beheaded by the evil spirit Herešgúnina. The Sun himself explains this to the Twins,

(83) Your uncle is one of the Great Ones (Xetera) here on earth. He alone is the good spirit. (84) Therefore, the Evil Spirit was jealous. He provoked your uncle with talk. Therefore, he did it to him. Therefore, he cut his neck in two with a knife there. The one who did it became very great. He does not leave the spirits in peace.⁸⁵ [Hocąk syllabic text of this passage with an interlinear English translation]

To remedy this reversal of fortune, the Good Spirits came together as this same story relates —

(38) Then Trickster, Turtle, (39) Bladder, Hare, the Sun, Redhorn, and their Grandmother (Earth), these very ones were the Great Ones (Xetera). Then Hare stood up and said, "Hehé, all you diverse spirits sitting here, I told you that I would point something out, therefore I told you to gather. (40) Knowing this, you did it. Of all the ones whom he (Earthmaker) created great here on earth, the Great Ones (Xetera) are eight in number. One of them is injured. That should not be, I thought. That is why I told you to gather here. The Evil One (Wowąkra) did this. Herešgúnira did this. I thought it should not be this way. You have done it. (41) One of the beings among the evils spirits injured the one that he (Earthmaker) created. It is possible to fix a thing or two, I thought. If we take up a collection and go take it to the Creator himself, and if there we ask him to take pity, if he is willing, then we can make him live. "Hąhó," they said. (42) They all answered nodding their approval. Then he did this. In the center of the lodge he spread out a white deerskin. Then he did this. He drew something from the seat of his heart. Much did it glitter. There on the head of the deer he put it. Then the light rested there like daylight. "Hąhą́ Kunu, you yourself ought to do it," he said to him. Trickster also did it. (43) As he did it, he made that sort of thing. Then he made one like what he had placed there. Then Turtle did it as well. Then he also made that sort of thing. When Bladder did it, he also made that sort of thing. When the Sun did it there, he also made that sort of thing. When Redhorn did it there, he also made that sort of thing. (44) Then when their Grandmother did it, she also made the same sort of thing. And when the others did it, they all made the same kind of thing, but they did less. They would always do but a small portion. Finally, they all finished up, all who were present. "Hąhą́," he said, when they were finished, "you will get these back again sometime. (45) Now, Horešgúniga [sic] has injured one of the Great Ones. That we might avenge him, you have added bits and pieces of your powers. It cannot be defeated. It's power is the same as Earthmaker's."⁸⁶ [Hocąk syllabic text of this passage with an interlinear English translation]

Bluehorn, the uncle of the Twins, was the youngest of the eight Great Spirits (Xetera, "Great Ones") created by Earthmaker's own hands. It was they, primarily, who had combined their supernatural power to form the bundle that would be given over to the Sun. When the Moon, living as a human being with her brother Bluehorn, was out digging for Indian potatoes, the Sun impregnated her with the contents of this medicine bundle. It is this power that was passed on to the Twins. Since, ex hypothesi, the double helix, the expression of "medicine" or supernatural power, emanates from the solarlike discs on the heads of Ghost and Flesh, it follows that these discs ought to be the source of that power. This power was in the possession of the Sun, who passed it on to the Moon, who then gave birth to the Twins, who manifested this power in their persons. Yet the orbs, whether those of the Twins or their mother the Moon, have seven rays. Seven is not an especially common Native American sacred number. Four, then multiples of four, particularly eight, are the most common sacred numbers. So how do we explain the existence of only seven rays? Since the disc represents the power which we know from the story to have been essentially the product of the Great Spirits, we might think that it would have eight rays to represent the collective of the eight Great Ones. However, one of the Great Spirits is Bluehorn himself. Consequently, when the medicine bundle that contained the power to be passed on to the Twins was created, only seven of the Great Spirits were then present to pass on their power. This is why the orb expressing the Twin's power has only seven rays rather than the expected eight. The picture of the Moon after her impregnation by the Sun with this great power, is therefore also shown with an orb of seven rays. These seven-rayed orbs remind the viewer of the missing element of power, the power belonging to the youngest and eighth member of the Great Spirits, whose tragic reversal is the very raison d'être of the Twins.

This also explains why the pipe figure, here interpreted as Bluehorn, does not have the orb surmounted on his head or the helices of power emanating from it. That orb and its power is that created by the Great Ones and their allies after the beheading of Bluehorn. At the time of the pipe smoking contest, Bluehorn had not yet suffered this reversal. In any case, he was never the recipient of the medicine bundle to which the Twins owe their power and indeed, their very existence.

The Seven Helices of Ghost's "Apron." As noted above, just below the large oval gorget that Ghost wears on his chest is a rectangular object with fringe emanating from its lower edge, an object that I have termed an "apron." Similar pieces of clothing can be seen in XIXᵀᴴ century depictions of Indians of many different tribes. This apron contains a design which proves to be identical to the pattern of lines that descends from each of the orbs over the heads of the human figures in Panel 4. These lines I have identified as "double helices" when considered from a three dimensional perspective. Here the helices occur below a circular gorget, the pattern being similar to that of the orbs and helices already noted. These orbs all have in common that they have exactly seven rays. One thing which, to my knowledge, has escaped notice, is that the "apron" on Ghost also has the same number of helices. This further connects the helices with the orbs. This connection is physical in two of the figures and probably in all three. The explanation for this is that the orbs represent the solar transmitted power (of the remaining seven Great Ones and their allies) used to impregnate the mother of the Twins (Moon) and to be expressed in her offspring as an overwhelming power capable of reversing the misfortune of the eighth Great One, their uncle Bluehorn. The helices are the "medicine path," the physical manifestation of the heliogenic power that had been passed to or through them. This is now made manifest in the apron of Ghost, where all seven helices are symbolically represented on an article of clothing. With the circular gorget above them, to which they point in their vertical orientation, the helices recall the history of the transmission of this power from the sun ultimately to the Twins themselves. Both Twins could have manifested this symbolism, but it is placed on the person of Ghost, perhaps not only because his is the most active and powerful, but because ghosts, unlike the flesh, are intermediaries between the realm of earth-bound mortals and the ethereal abode of the everlasting spirits. The birth of soul within the flesh, the creation in every human being of an image of the Twins, is effected by the intermediating power of the sun, so that in this respect the conception of the Twins mirrors the conception of every human being.

The Turtle Figure. We have saved for last the most problematic depiction found in Panel 5, the one called "Turtle." This certainly seems to be a turtle, although there are certain anomalies about it. It is impossible to decide which end is the head and which the tail. Also the legs — if they are legs — seem to be moving in opposite directions unless we take them to be in a galloping motion, which needless to say, is uncharacteristic of turtles. In the context of Twins mythology, if this is a depiction of a turtle, it is probably not that of Turtle himself, who does not figure prominently in their stories. So, where do we find turtles in the stories about the Twins? Well, it happens that the adventure that occurs just before the Twins encounter the Thunderbirds is precisely the one that mentions turtles. Here the father admonishes the Twins for disobeying him:

(74) "The first time I said this, you did it anyway. Do not do this sort of thing a second time. There is plenty of room in the world. It is there that you should go. (75) Don't go there. What I mean is a lake that lies to the south. Don't go there." "Okay," they said. (76) He had already gone hunting. Then immediately, "Flesh, your father told us to go someplace." "Kote, no he didn't. He forbade us." "Koté, let's go right now. (77) He told us to go." Finally, he persuaded him again. So they went. As they went, unexpectedly, there sat a perfectly round lake. "Koté Flesh, this lake is such a fine swimming place, let's swim here." (78) Then, unexpectedly, they encountered a great many leeches. They were very large. "Koté Flesh, they are called 'red turtles'. That is what they are. (79) Let's kill some. It is said that they always say they are delicious. They say it also of the soup." There they took their arrows and shot them. They started to become large. (80) They began to turn very blue. Finally, they were having a great time. They got very big. They killed Flesh. "Koté Flesh, why are you sleeping? (81) It's so fine killing red turtles," he said. Again before very long he was killed. "Koté, why are you sleeping? The many red turtles are now becoming such a pleasure," (82) thus he spoke and he stood him up. Thus they did repeatedly, standing one another up alternately. Finally, they got mighty large. Finally, one as big as the lake came out. (83) When it came out, it chased them. It was not like anything. It touched one of them with its very keen edge. Therefore, it would always cut their bodies in half. Still, in the end, they frequently made each other stand up, (84) but then again he would cut the other's body in half. Initially it was done by means of shooting arrows, but after awhile they did this: they used their own bodies and they would go right through it someplace. (85) Thus they did. There they killed it. They used their own bodies and it was not vulnerable there to the use of weapons alone. Going far away, they killed it there. (86) There they built a fire and ate a lot of "turtle." "Truly Flesh, it is a fat red turtle. It is really delicious," he was saying. When they were done, (87) they carried only a piece for their father and they went home. When they got home he said, "Flesh, when your father comes home he will be very hungry, and there will be a very fat red turtle cooked well by the time he gets home. (88) Let's cook it now." They went after water and boiled it. When it was cooked, their father came home. Right away, they told him what they had already done. "It's a fat red turtle," they said. (89) "Do not eat them. They are called 'leeches'. They are bad things. Go pour them out." After he said this to them, they helped each other carry it and (90) as they took it out, they were still eating it. Thus they did. When they returned, he washed the kettle. That man had an idea of their cleverness, and this made him uneasy.⁷³

Could not the depiction at the top of the panel be of a turtle-leech which lies dead in the background in allusion to the episode immediately prior to the conflict with the Thunders? The dead giant turtle-leech is unusual in having long slender legs, whereas leeches of the ordinary sort have no legs. The legs assigned the turtle-leech in the painting are not, in any case, the stubby legs of a turtle, but rather long, thin, equine-like appendages. The supposed legs (there might even be more than four of them), could actually be rivulets of blood.

Another interpretation is possible. In one source (Mąznį’ąbera), a Waterspirit is called a "turtle" (kecųk). The Twins usually conclude their adventures by killing such a creature, which proves to be the last straw for Earthmaker, who then recalls them.

Conclusions. In summary, what Panel 5 and its satellite, Panel 4, seem to be about is the cult of the Twins who are represented in the two young warriors at the left side of Panel 5. In the lower right Panel 4, we have a depiction of Bluehorn, the uncle of the Twins, whose beheading by his malevolent brother occurred before the birth of the Twins, and is the very raison d'ętre for their conception. This conception is alluded to by the presence at the far right of the panel of the mother of the Twins, Moon. She is dressed in a short skirt and seems to be carrying a pąsep, or black bag. In the stories, she is out digging for Indian potatoes, and having exposed herself to the sun in the process, she becomes pregnant with the Twins. Sun had been given a Medicine Bundle by the collective of the spirits in order that its contents of supernatural power be conveyed in the act of conception so that the Twins might be vested with a power transcending all spiritual beings, even Earthmaker himself. This was so that the Twins might succeed in restoring their uncle Bluehorn's lost head, a feat which they eventually accomplished. This is the story as told in The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun, and The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head. The left side of Panel 5 tells the story here called The Twins Disobey Their Father. This story in its several variants, describes the frightening excess of power wielded by the Twins, who first kill, then eat leeches whom they describe as "turtles." In this they have violated the prohibitions of the laws of pollution. They follow this with the action seen in the main part of the panel, the attack on the nestlings and the subsequent battle with the Thunderbirds. This is an act of sacrilege, an act that is the climax of their reckless use of power and which leads to their recall by Earthmaker. This part of the panel follows very closely the version set out in The Lost Blanket.

The result is actually rather puzzling. The mythology recorded by Panels 4 and 5 is uniquely Hocąk, as far as can be told. It is puzzling that it is so old (dated to the Xᵀᴴ century A. D.). Even the closely related Ioway have a rather divergent account of the Twins, omitting the important episodes of Bluehorn and his sister. Given that the myth is uniquely Hocąk, can it be likely that it has this degree of antiquity? The Xᵀᴴ century date was arrived at because the surface of the rock on which the paintings were placed had been sanded, and the debris of the sanding was found in a layer that could confidently be assigned that date. However, it might be the case that the sanding in question was not to prepare the surface for paintings, but perhaps to actually remove paintings that seem no longer appropriate, paintings of other peoples whose understanding of the sacred nature of the site was at variance with those who supplanted them. Perhaps it was sanded in order to be painted, but nothing was actually executed until more recent times. Nevertheless, the paintings could date back to the Xᵀᴴ century, but lacking any glottochronology worthy of the name, we cannot be sure whether at that time it could be called "Hocąk."

The town nearest the Gottschall site is Muscoda. It was built on the site of an old Hocąk village whose chief was known as "Iron Walker" (probably, Mąsmaniga in Hocąk).⁷⁴ No date is given for his village. So what could this site have meant to the Hocągara of the late XVIIIᵀᴴ and early XIXᵀᴴ centuries (or perhaps even earlier)? The paintings recall an episode in the conclusion of the Twins Cycle as told by Jasper Blowsnake:

(40) He went as the arrow that he shot and he pulled on the bow which went out with him. Now there he killed it [a Waterspirit]. Where they had killed it, they inscribed themselves it is said. There they ate the Waterspirit. When they got done eating, they painted themselves. (41) Then they also inscribed the Waterspirit there.⁷⁵

This is said to have taken place near DeSoto, Wisconsin. His younger brother Sam Blowsnake said that the Twins painted the picture in the blood of the slain Waterspirit on a steep cliff near MacGregor, Iowa (Paint Rock).⁷⁶ It is not possible to know whether the paintings at Gottschall were similarly ascribed to the Twins themselves. However, a rock shelter is a far cry from conspicuous cliffs overlooking the Mississippi. Gottschall may be well described as "secluded." It was believed that if one wished to obtain blessings from a certain spirit or kind of spirit, that there were locales where it was possible to get into touch with these beings. If one wished to be blessed by the Nightspirits, for instance, there might be a certain spot where this was more likely to happen than elsewhere.⁹¹ Since the Twins were said to have retired into a hill and were also known to have dispensed blessings to visions seekers, such places no doubt existed for them as well. It may be that Gottschall is such a place where vision seekers could expect to obtain blessings from the Twins provided that they had done all other things necessary to secure success. The ending of Sam Blowsnake's Twin Cycle makes reference to a spot sacred to the Twins, the very hill into which they retired. Earthmaker tells them why they must depart from active participation in the affairs of the earth:

(279) "You should not harm anything of creation, at least of mine, it is not right. You did something wrong. To begin with, you have killed many of my servants. (280) There on the hill with them, you have killed the featherless little birds. You have done this to these great ones. Thus you have done to them. They are called the "Divine Ones" (Thunderbirds). These, eho, were the children of the chief, to them you did this. (281) You have killed many good ones. And again recently, the last one has been killed. The Island Weight whom I made, he was one of them that you did this to. (282) Therefore, I did it (sent Rušewe) that you may not do it anymore. This is why I sent him. You have done other things. Many things you have done well. Only the two alone that I mentioned were not good. (283) Therefore, this I tell you, hąhą, you will live somewhere. And you may bless a human always from henceforth. Human-blessing is good. (284) Your actions have been great." Hąhą, and Flesh's brother said, "It is good." And they lie in a high hill in the east at the edge of the world, it is said. And there they are living now.⁹² [Hocąk syllabic text of this passage with an interlinear English translation.]

It is not likely that the Gottschall mound was imputed to be the hill into which the Twins retired. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that people identified more than one site as this famous hill, and we know that special places of communion with specific spirits could be located in more than one place. Any such nexus is what Eliade has called a "Center," a place where the spiritual and temporal worlds intersect, where there subsists an axis mundi enabling a special communication between these otherwise distinct worlds.⁹³ Here is a Center where the Twins live again under the vivid image that reminds the seeker of blessings that some powers are unwise to possess.

Comparative Material. The Beaver Twin — The beaver affinity of one of the Twins is found in a number of other sources. The Blackfoot Twins are called "Rock" and "Beaver." Beaver was raised in a beaver lodge by one of these animals. However, in opposition to what we find among the Hocągara, Beaver is said to be the "good" Twin.⁹⁴ On the other hand, among the Kitkahahki Pawnee, it is the younger, wild Twin who is said to have teeth "like a beaver," hence his name, "Long Tooth Boy." He is captured when an inflated animal bladder is placed on his head, preventing him from escaping into the water.⁹⁵ Among the Crows, the simile of sharp teeth is transferred to another aquatic animal when the aggressive Twin, Thrown in Spring, is said to have "sharp teeth like an otter."⁹⁶ Both Twins capture an extradinary beaver tail, so hard and sharp that they can use it to cut wood. With this beaver-weapon, they cut off the arms and head of Long Arms, whose hubris was to bar the hole in heaven with his outstreatched hand.⁹⁷ Among the northern Cree, the dynamic Twin, Che-che-puy-ew-tis, has a very strong identity with the beaver, as this episode from their Twin story shows:

One night, after many years passed, Che-che-puy-ew-tis heard his brother talking to someone outside and wondered whom it could be. In the morning he pulled back his brother's covers only to find nothing but a rotten log, which he cast outside. Then the same thing happened the next night, and when he pulled the covers aside, he found a bull frog in his brother's place. Che-che-puy-ew-tis decided to get his brother some female companionship, so he went out, and when he returned, he had with him two women. These he married off to his brother. However, one of the women became dissatisfied with being one of two wives, and set herself up on Che-che-puy-ew-tis' side of the wigwam. However, when Che-che-puy-ew-tis returned and saw the new arrangement, he was not happy, and decided to leave, at least for a time. He traveled a long way, hoping to find a suitable wife. The first night he met a deer, but he found her legs to be too long; the second night he met a bear, but her claws were too long and sharp; then he spent the third night with a porcupine, whose failings were obvious. The next night he spent with a Canada jay, but she proved too inquisitive. Finally, Che-che-puy-ew-tis encountered Beaver (Amisk), and she declared that she would like to be his mate, but the young man laid down a condition: she must always work hard and when they came to a creek, she must make a bridge of sticks for him to walk across. If she failed to do this, then the creek would turn into a wide river, and the two would be separated. One day Beaver could not make up her mind whether a certain course of water was a rivulet or a creek, so she made no bridge. When he returned, Che-che-puy-ew-tis was horrified to discover that a huge river now separated him from his beaver wife. He fell into mourning. One day he saw his wife, much to his surprise, happily swimming in the middle of the water, making herself a lodge. He called out, "My wife, we must not be separated!" She called back to him, and said that he should join her in the water. She said that it would not even be wet for him. And when he jumped in, much to his surprise, the water repelled right off his skin. So from that time on he lived with his wife as beavers do. In autumn, Che-che-puy-ew-tis showed his wife how to build a lodge that was really secure, by knitting together the twigs and by cementing the whole with mud. Then Che-che-puy-ew-tis informed Beaver about his brother, who might come looking for him and if he were to find her, he would surely kill her. So they made holes in the bank as means by which she could escape if she were attacked. Several months later, during the winter, his brother Mejigwis began looking for him. Finally, while hunting for beavers, he found his brother, just as his brother's wife escaped. He took his brother Che-che-puy-ew-tis back to his lodge. Che-che-puy-ew-tis strictly laid it down that Mejigwis was not to bring home the meat of a solitary beaver, but only of those that lived in groups, as Che-che-puy-ew-tis was afraid less he eat his own wife. His brother consented. Nevertheless, one day Mejigwis brought back a solitary beaver, but did not inform his brother of the fact. He boiled it and when it was done, he offered some to his brother. Che-che-puy-ew-tis at first demurred, since he feared that it was a solitary beaver, but his brother reassured him, "I shot just one of a group," he said. So Che-che-puy-ew-tis drank the soup and ate the meat, but no sooner had he finished than he suddenly turned into a beaver himself, and immediately jumped into the nearby creek. Thus the brothers parted forever. Che-che-puy-ew-tis still lives as a great old beaver, chief of the Amisk tribe, who imparts his wisdom to the beaver race so that they might escape extinction at the hands of hunters.⁹⁸ [previous episode of the Cree story]

The connection of the beaver to the Twins is even found outside the New World in the stories about the Greek Dioskouroi, who are greatly distant in both space and time. The lesser Twin, who was born of the same mother as his half-brother Polydeukes (Pollux), but of "mortal seed," is called by the name Kastor (Castor), which is Greek for "Beaver." He was mortally wounded while hiding in a tree. This "tree" is likely the Milky Way, next to which Castor is situated. His brother is of immortal seed, the son of Zeus and, like his brother, the offspring of Leda the swan.⁹⁹ They too have strong associations with water. In the counterpart myth among the Ioway, instead of the Twins fighting Thunderbirds, they fight swans,¹⁰⁰ the same kind of bird said to be the mother of the Greek Dioskouroi. The Hocąk Twins fight and kill Waterspirits, the same race of supernatural beings to which their own maternal uncle Bluehorn belongs.

The Double Helix — The entwining lines are a universal phenomenon. The best known of these is the kerykeion (κᾱρύκειον) or caduceus, the wand of the god of communication and commerce, Hermes (Mercury). The myth has it that the caduceus arose when he threw his herald's staff between two copulating snakes. Hermes is first and foremost a god of boundaries, which he has the power to violate, usually with impunity. In that respect, like the Twins, he is associated with excess. As Burkert says,

Hermes' epic epithet Argeiphontes was won with the help of this magical staff when he slew the many-eyed giant Argos who kept watch over Io in Hera's Argive sanctuary: Hermes first sent sleep into the many eyes of Argos and then slew him with the cast of a stone. This again breaks a taboo and inaugurates the festival of licence.¹⁰¹

So the caduceus can be used to put someone to sleep; and it is said that Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) are twin brothers. The Twins use the orb with the twisting lines emanating from it with a more powerful effect than Hermes produces with his caduceus, but the idea is much the same. As psychopompos, Hermes leads the souls of the dead; the Twins waken one another as from sleep when one or the other is killed. For them too, death is the brother of sleep. It has been argued that the caduceus is a kind of "cosmic column," an axis mundi, symbolizing the communication across the boundary that separates the divine from the temporal world.¹⁰² The similarity of the form of the caduceus to the orb and double helix of Gottschall is therefore probably also reflected in similar symbolic functions.

We see in the earlier Minoan double-ax motifs a symbolism similar to the caduceus and the orb and double helix of Gottschall. The two illustrations below show an iconic and symbolic representation of what is believed to have been a goddess of "life, death and regeneration" who dates back millennia into the Balkan past.¹⁰³

This goddess was originally in butterfly form, her powers of regeneration expressed in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar. Gimbutas believes that the head is a flower, but it could have other symbolic values. Yet even flowers are said to symbolize the solar disk. The picture above right is very similar to the caduceus with its helices not quite entwined, but touching each other to form diamond shapes around a central shaft.

The Rayed Orb — The rayed orb, especially one depicted as if in motion, finds an important analogue in the ancient Indian svastika. Its religious import is nicely summarized in the Indian Profile website:

"Swastika," a Sanskrit word, means literally "well being" which has many variables depending upon the application. As the serpent is the symbol of the creative, energizing force of the Supreme Spirit, the swastika is representative of that life-force being set in motion to initiate the cyclic workings of nature. Both images are thus closely inter-related. The ancient Vedic seers described the original cosmic creative process as "the churning of the milky ocean" ... This "churning" is represented geometrically in Tantric ritual as a four armed cross within a circle and the cross is meant to be imagined as oscillating backwards and forwards as in a churning motion. The forward movement clockwise is towards evolution while the anti-clockwise movement is towards dissolution. The circle represents the universe in its potential un-manifested state prior to creation and is called in Hinduism "Brahmanda." The Hindus also believe that the universe periodically dissolves and is then re-created. The period between dissolution and re-creation is known as "Pralaya," a time of rest between creative periods. A period of creativity is called "Manvantara" and both periods (i.e. creation and dissolution) constitute a "Kalpa" or a cycle of creation. ... This cyclic process of cosmic, periodic, involution, evolution and dissolution is symbolized by the forward and backward movement of the cross. The four arms of the cross are known as "the four arms of Vishnu," the Supreme Deity in Vedic times who later became the "preserver" in the Hindu Trinity. Vishnu's role is to maintain order, balance, and cohesion throughout the created universe. ... The created is sustained by continual opposition between two forces, i.e. attraction and repulsion which act and react via a process of flux that is mirrored in the activity of all nature from the breathing of plants, the action of the human lungs, biorhythms, the flow of energy in a dynamo, to the expansion and contraction of the Earth itself. It is the oscillating motion of the cross within the circle which symbolizes that opposition between positive evolutionary forces and negative dissolutionary forces that give birth to the swastika in both its configurations, i.e. right-angled or left-angled. The whole of creation is bound by this principle and by the ultimate balancing of these two polarities, "well-being" that is an ideal state without conflict, may be achieved. On a personal level, this ideal condition, as any individual knows, may at its best be only a sometimes thing during the course of day to day living. The point of eventual neutrality or perfect balance between the two forces, is equilibrium — thereby no existing conflict between negative and positive. If it were to become an actual consistent condition, the very purpose of life itself (which is innately felt by most individuals as growth towards an ideal or perfection, or total "order") would be pointless and the evolutionary process would cease to be of significance. The cross at rest symbolizes that final perfect balance or equilibrium — Pralaya.¹⁰⁴

In our Native American counterpart the opposition between positive and negative are reflected in both the direction of the spinning orb with its rays, and in the entwining strands of the helix that emanates from it. As is well known, the swastika is also widespread in Native America, but is not the only way of expressing the concepts that coalesce in its symbolism.

Links: Gottschall: Debate and Discussion, The Gottschall Head, The Redhorn Panel of Picture Cave. An American Star Map, The Twins, Bluehorn, Redhorn, The Sons of Earthmaker, Sun, Moon, Earthmaker, Thunderbirds, The Spirit Woman (Hinųkxop’ini), Waterspirits, Leeches, Turtle, Storms as He Walks, Bird Spirits, Great Black Hawk, Black Hawks, Herešgúnina, Giants, Ghosts, Morning Star, Pretty Woman, Celestial Spirits.

Stories: mentioning the Twins: The Twins Cycle, The Man with Two Heads, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Children of the Sun, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Two Boys, The Two Brothers, The Lost Blanket; about two brothers: The Two Children, The Twin Sisters, The Captive Boys, The Twins Cycle, The Two Brothers, The Two Boys, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Children of the Sun, The Lost Blanket, The Man with Two Heads, Bluehorn's Nephews, Snowshoe Strings, Sunset Point, The Old Man and the Giants, The Brown Squirrel, Esau was an Indian; with Bluehorn (Evening Star) as a character: Bluehorn's Nephews, Brave Man, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, Children of the Sun, Grandfather's Two Families, The Man with Two Heads, Sun and the Big Eater; cycles of other great soteriological spirits: The Trickster Cycle, Hare Cycle, Redhorn Cycle, Twins Cycle; stories about the individual sons of Earthmaker, see the following: Trickster, Turtle, Bladder, Redhorn, Hare, The Mission of the Five Sons of Earthmaker; mentioning Thunderbirds: The Thunderbird, Waruǧábᵉra, How the Thunders Met the Nights, The Boy who was Captured by the Bad Thunderbirds, Traveler and the Thunderbird War, The Boulders of Devil's Lake, Thunderbird and White Horse, Bluehorn's Nephews, How the Hills and Valleys were Formed (vv. 1, 2), The Man who was a Reincarnated Thunderbird, The Thunder Charm, The Lost Blanket, The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Thunderbird Clan Origin Myth, Story of the Thunder Names, The Hawk Clan Origin Myth, Eagle Clan Origin Myth, Pigeon Clan Origins, Bird Clan Origin Myth, Adventures of Redhorn's Sons, Brave Man, Ocean Duck, Turtle's Warparty, The Daughter-in-Law's Jealousy, The Quail Hunter, Heną́ga and Star Girl, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, Redhorn's Sons, The Dipper, The Stone that Became a Frog, The Race for the Chief's Daughter, Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father, The Warbundle of the Eight Generations, Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Origin of the Hocąk Chief, The Spirit of Gambling, Wolf Clan Origin Myth, Black Otter's Warpath, Aracgéga's Blessings, Kunu's Warpath, The Orphan who was Blessed with a Horse, Black Otter’s Sacrifice to a Thunder, The Glory of the Morning, The Nightspirits Bless Ciwoit’éhiga, The Green Waterspirit of the Wisconsin Dells, A Waterspirit Blesses Mąnį́xete’ų́ga, Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, The Big Stone, Pete Dupeé and the Ghosts, Song to Earthmaker, The Origins of the Milky Way; mentioning Great Black Hawk: Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, The Chief of the Heroka, The Boy who was Captured by the Bad Thunderbirds, The Thunderbird, Waruǧábᵉra, The Lost Blanket, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Redhorn's Sons, The Nightspirits Bless Ciwoit’éhiga, Black Otter's Warpath (head of the Thunders); mentioning black hawks: Hawk Clan Origin Myth (v. 2), The Dipper, The Thunderbird, Partridge's Older Brother, The Woman who Loved her Half-Brother, Waruǧábᵉra, The Boy who was Captured by the Bad Thunderbirds, Spear Shaft and Lacrosse, Morning Star and His Friend, The Coughing Up of the Black Hawks, The Stench-Earth Medicine Origin Myth, Heną́ga and Star Girl, Keramaniš’aka's Blessing, The Race for the Chief's Daughter; with Storms as He Walks as a character: Kunu's Warpath, Redhorn and His Brothers Marry, Redhorn Contest the Giants, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty; featuring Sun as a character: Sun and the Big Eater, Grandfather's Two Families, The Big Eater, The Children of the Sun, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, Hare Burns His Buttocks, The Birth of the Twins, The Man who was Blessed by the Sun; pertaining to the Moon: The Markings on the Moon, Black and White Moons, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, Sunset Point, Sun and the Big Eater, The Big Eater, Hare Kills Wildcat, Grandfather's Two Families, Berdache Origin Myth (v. 1), Turtle and the Giant, A Deer Story; about stars and other celestial bodies: The Dipper, Įcorúšika and His Brothers, The Seven Maidens, Morning Star and His Friend, Little Human Head, Turtle and the Witches, Sky Man, Wojijé, The Raccoon Coat, Sun and the Big Eater, The Big Eater, The Star Husband, Grandfather's Two Families, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Meteor Spirit and the Origin of Wampum, The Children of the Sun, Heną́ga and Star Girl, The Origins of the Milky Way, The Fall of the Stars; featuring Morning Star as a character: Morning Star and His Friend, Little Human Head, Bladder and His Brothers, Grandfather's Two Families; in which leeches occur: The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Seduction of Redhorn's Son, The Two Boys, The Stench-Earth Medicine Origin Myth, The Two Brothers (blood-suckers); in which Waterspirits occur as characters: Waterspirit Clan Origin Myth, Traveler and the Thunderbird War, The Green Waterspirit of Wisconsin Dells, The Lost Child, River Child and the Waterspirit of Devil's Lake, A Waterspirit Blesses Mąnį́xete’ų́ga, Bluehorn's Nephews, Holy One and His Brother, The Seer, The Nannyberry Picker, The Creation of the World (vv. 1, 4), Šųgepaga, The Sioux Warparty and the Waterspirit of Green Lake, The Waterspirit of Lake Koshkonong, The Waterspirit of Rock River, The Boulders of Devil's Lake, Devil's Lake — How it Got its Name, Old Man and Wears White Feather, The Waterspirit of Sugar Loaf Mounds, Lakes of the Wazija Origin Myth, Waterspirits Keep the Corn Fields Wet, The Waterspirit Guardian of the Intaglio Mound, The Diving Contest, The Lost Blanket, Redhorn's Sons, The Phantom Woman, Įcorúšika and His Brothers, Great Walker's Warpath, White Thunder's Warpath, The Descent of the Drum, The Shell Anklets Origin Myth, The Daughter-in-Law's Jealousy, Snowshoe Strings, The Thunderbird, Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp (v. 2), The Two Children, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, Earthmaker Sends Rušewe to the Twins, Paint Medicine Origin Myth, Waruǧábᵉra, Ocean Duck, The Twin Sisters, Trickster Concludes His Mission, The King Bird, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Great Walker's Medicine (v. 2), Heną́ga and Star Girl, Peace of Mind Regained, The Story of the Medicine Rite, How the Thunders Met the Nights, The Spiritual Descent of John Rave's Grandmother, The Boy who was Captured by the Bad Thunderbirds, The Shaggy Man, The Woman who Married a Snake (?), Hare Secures the Creation Lodge, Ghost Dance Origin Myth I, The Sacred Lake, Lost Lake; featuring Earthmaker as a character: The Creation of the World, The Creation of Man, The Commandments of Earthmaker, The Twins Get into Hot Water, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Lost Blanket, Earthmaker Blesses Wagíšega (Wešgíšega), The Man Who Would Dream of Mą’ųna, The First Snakes, Tobacco Origin Myth, The Creation Council, The Gray Wolf Origin Myth, The Journey to Spiritland, The Resurrection of the Chief's Daughter, The Seven Maidens, The Descent of the Drum, Thunder Cloud Marries Again, The Spider's Eyes, The Boy who was Blessed by a Mountain Lion, Hawk Clan Origin Myth, Fourth Universe, Šųgepaga, The Fatal House, The Twin Sisters, Thunderbird Clan Origin Myth, Elk Clan Origin Myth, Deer Clan Origin Myth, Bear Clan Origin Myth, Wolf Clan Origin Myth, The Masaxe War, The Two Children, Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, The Petition to Earthmaker, The Gift of Shooting, Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Stone Heart, The Wild Rose, Earthmaker Sends Rušewe to the Twins, The Lame Friend, How the Hills and Valleys were Formed, The Hocąk Migration Myth, The Necessity for Death, Hocąk Clans Origin Myth, The War among the Animals, Lake Winnebago Origin Myth, Blue Mounds, Lost Lake, The Hocągara Migrate South, The Spirit of Gambling, Turtle and the Giant, The Shawnee Prophet — What He Told the Hocągara, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, Ghost Dance Origin Myth II, Bird Origin Myth, Black and White Moons, Redhorn's Sons, The Reincarnated Grizzly Bear, The Blessings of the Buffalo Spirits, Death Enters the World, Man and His Three Dogs, Trickster Concludes His Mission, Trickster and the Dancers, Ghost Dance Origin Myth I, East Enters the Medicine Lodge, The Blessing of Kerexųsaka; featuring Giants as characters: A Giant Visits His Daughter, Turtle and the Giant, The Stone Heart, Young Man Gambles Often, Spear Shaft and Lacrosse, Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father, Morning Star and His Friend, The Reincarnated Grizzly Bear, The Old Man and the Giants, Shakes the Earth, White Wolf, Redhorn's Father, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, The Roaster, Grandfather's Two Families, Redhorn's Sons, The Meteor Spirit and the Origin of Wampum, Thunder Cloud is Blessed, Little Human Head, Heną́ga and Star Girl, Rich Man, Boy, and Horse, Sun and the Big Eater, The Big Eater, How the Thunders Met the Nights, The Origins of the Milky Way, Ocean Duck, The Blessing of a Bear Clansman, Wears White Feather on His Head, cf. The Shaggy Man; featuring Turtle as a character: The Mission of the Five Sons of Earthmaker, Turtle's Warparty, Turtle and the Giant, Spear Shaft and Lacrosse, Soft Shelled Turtle Gets Married, Turtle and the Merchant, Redhorn's Father, Redhorn's Sons, Turtle and the Witches, The Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, Trickster Soils the Princess, Morning Star and His Friend, Grandfather's Two Families, The Race for the Chief's Daughter, Kunu's Warpath, Redhorn Contests the Giants, Redhorn and His Brothers Marry, The Skunk Origin Myth, The Hocąk Migration Myth, Porcupine and His Brothers, The Creation of Man, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, The Father of the Twins Attempts to Flee, The Chief of the Heroka, The Spirit of Gambling, The Nannyberry Picker, Hare Secures the Creation Lodge, The Markings on the Moon (v. 2), The Green Man, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, The Coughing Up of the Black Hawks, The Petition to Earthmaker; mentioning Redhorn: The Redhorn Cycle, Redhorn's Sons, The Mission of the Five Sons of Earthmaker, Redhorn's Father, Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Morning Star and His Friend, The Spirit of Gambling, The Green Man, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, cp. The Cosmic Ages of the Hocągara; featuring the Heroka as characters: The Chief of the Heroka, The Red Man, The Oak Tree and the Man Who was Blessed by the Heroka, The Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth, Little Human Head, Morning Star and His Friend, The Claw Shooter, Redhorn's Sons, The Origins of the Milky Way; featuring Pretty Woman (or a Giant princess with red or yellow hair): Redhorn's Sons (red hair), Redhorn Contests the Giants (red hair), Redhorn's Father (red hair), The Hocągara Contest the Giants (red-yellowish hair), The Roaster (yellow hair), Morning Star and His Friend; mentioning pigeons: Pigeon Clan Origins, Thunderbird Clan Origin Myth (v. 1), Waruǧábᵉra, The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Lost Blanket, How the Thunders Met the Nights, Bird Origin Myth, Origin of the Hocąk Chief, The Creation Council, Hocąk Clans Origin Myth, The Creation of Man (v. 2), The Boy who was Captured by the Bad Thunderbirds; mentioning caves: Big Eagle Cave Mystery, Blue Mounds Cave, Silver Mound Cave, Heną́ga and Star Girl, The Woman Who Married a Snake, Little Human Head, The Waterspirit of Sugar Loaf Mounds, Hare Establishes Bear Hunting, Hare Recruits Game Animals for Humans, A Giant Visits His Daughter, Kunu's Warpath, Soft Shelled Turtle Weds; mentioning McGregor, Iowa: Oto Origins, Earthmaker Sends Rušewe to the Twins; about the (post-Columbian) history of the Hocągara: The Cosmic Ages of the Hocągara, The Hocągara Migrate South, The Annihilation of the Hocągara I, Annihilation of the Hocągara II, First Contact, Origin of the Decorah Family, The Glory of the Morning, The First Fox and Sauk War, The Fox-Hocąk War, The Masaxe War, The Shawnee Prophet and His Ascension, The Shawnee Prophet — What He Told the Hocągara, Black Otter's Warpath, Great Walker's Medicine, Great Walker's Warpath, The Chief Who Shot His Own Daughter, How Little Priest went out as a Soldier, Little Priest's Game, The Spanish Fight, The Man who Fought against Forty, The Origin of Big Canoe's Name, Jarrot's Aborted Raid, They Owe a Bullet, Origin of the Name "Milwaukee," A Waterspirit Blesses Mąnį́xete’ų́ga, Origin of the Hocąk Name for "Chicago"; mentioning the Ioway: Ioway & Missouria Origins, Pete Dupeé and the Ghosts, Keramaniš’aka's Blessing, The Woman's Scalp Medicine Bundle, Migistéga’s Magic, Little Priest's Game, A Peyote Story, Introduction; mentioning the Fox (Mesquaki): The First Fox and Sauk War, The Fox-Hocąk War, The Masaxe War, The Mesquaki Magician, The Annihilation of the Hocągara I (v. 2), Annihilation of the Hocągara II, The Chief Who Shot His Own Daughter, Little Priest's Game, Gatschet's Hocank hit’e (Extracts ...), Introduction; mentioning the Sauk (Sac, Sagi): The First Fox and Sauk War, Mijistéga and the Sauks, Black Otter's Warpath, The Annihilation of the Hocągara I (v. 2), Annihilation of the Hocągara II, The Blessing of Kerexųsaka, Big Eagle Cave Mystery, The Chief Who Shot His Own Daughter, Little Priest's Game, Gatschet's Hocank hit’e (St. Peet ...), A Peyote Story, Introduction; mentioning the French: Introduction, The Fox-Hocąk War, First Contact, The Shawnee Prophet — What He Told the Hocągara, The Annihilation of the Hocągara I (v. 2), A Waterspirit Blesses Mąnį́xete’ų́ga, How Jarrot Got His Name, Gatschet's Hocank hit’e, The Cosmic Ages of the Hocągara, Turtle and the Merchant; mentioning lacrosse: Redhorn's Father, Spear Shaft and Lacrosse, Morning Star and His Friend, Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Roaster, Redhorn's Sons, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, The Blessing of a Bear Clansman, The Shaggy Man, How the Thunders Met the Nights.

Themes: spirits meet in a council: The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, Black and White Moons, Holy One and His Brother, The Creation Council, The Children of the Sun, Hare Secures the Creation Lodge, Traveler and the Thunderbird War (v. 5), The Gift of Shooting, East Shakes the Messenger, The Descent of the Drum, East Enters the Medicine Lodge, South Enters the Medicine Lodge, The Blessings of the Buffalo Spirits, The Petition to Earthmaker, The Boy who would be Immortal; the Twins disobey the commands of someone with fatherly authority over them: The Twins Get into Hot Water, The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Two Boys, The Lost Blanket, The Two Brothers; a spirit has faces on each earlobe: Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father, The Dipper (hummingbirds), Įcorúšika and His Brothers, Redhorn's Father, Morning Star and His Friend, The Hocągara Contest the Giants; wearing the skin of a spirit bird: Holy One and His Brother, Hare Acquires His Arrows, Thunderbird and White Horse, The Boy who Flew, The Lost Blanket; someone kills Thunderbird nestlings and makes use of their feathers: Hare Acquires His Arrows, The Lost Blanket, The Twins Disobey Their Father; the war between Thunderbirds and Waterspirits: Traveler and the Thunderbird War, How the Thunders Met the Nights, The Boulders of Devil's Lake, The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty, Brave Man, The Lost Blanket, Ocean Duck, The Daughter-in-Law's Jealousy, A Waterspirit Blesses Mąnį́xete’ų́ga, The Thunderbird, Heną́ga and Star Girl, Waruǧábᵉra, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Waterspirit of Sugar Loaf Mounds; powerful spirits (who are brothers) set out for the Mississippi where they kill a Waterspirit: Trickster Concludes His Mission, The Two Children, Earthmaker Sends Rušewe to the Twins; men whose bodies are (partly) covered with pieces of flint: Bluehorn's Nephews, Hare Kills Flint, Hare Gets Swallowed, The Children of the Sun, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Red Man, The Chief of the Heroka; a Giant (Wągerucge) princess has her game disturbed by her attraction to a hero: Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Roaster, Redhorn's Father, Morning Star and His Friend, Redhorn's Sons; an old man has a disc shaped object which when rolled makes him the fastest man in any race: Sun and the Big Eater, Grandfather's Two Families; a man goes about the heavens with a severed head in his possession: The Markings on the Moon, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun; a man reunites the still living head and body of his relative: The Red Man, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun, The Chief of the Heroka; a being has red hair: Redhorn's Sons, Redhorn's Father, Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp (vv. 1 & 2), The Hocągara Contest the Giants, Redhorn Contests the Giants, The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father, The Daughter-in-Law's Jealousy, Heną́ga and Star Girl, A Wife for Knowledge, Eats the Stinking Part of the Deer Ankle; two men look (almost) exactly alike: The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Children of the Sun, The Green Man, How the Thunders Met the Nights, Redhorn's Father; somatic dualism: The Girl who Refused a Blessing from the Wood Spirits, Disease Giver, The Chief of the Heroka, Bear Clan Origin Myth, Wears White Feather on His Head, The Red Man, The Forked Man, The Man with Two Heads; multiple births: The Birth of the Twins, The Twin Sisters, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun, The Two Boys, The Lost Blanket, The Shawnee Prophet — What He Told the Hocągara, The Shawnee Prophet and His Ascension, The Two Brothers; bringing someone back to life by picking them up and putting them on their feet: The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Two Boys, The Shaggy Man; the youngest offspring is superior: The Mission of the Five Sons of Earthmaker, Young Man Gambles Often, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Twins Cycle, The Two Boys, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Children of the Sun, The Creation of the World (v. 12), The Race for the Chief's Daughter, Įcorúšika and His Brothers, The Raccoon Coat, Wojijé, How the Thunders Met the Nights, Eats the Stinking Part of the Deer Ankle, Sun and the Big Eater, The Story of the Medicine Rite, Buffalo Clan Origin Myth, Bear Clan Origin Myth (vv. 4, 7), South Enters the Medicine Lodge, Snake Clan Origins, Thunderbird Clan Origin Myth; heroes leave a lasting impression of their exploits on the face of a rock: Trickster Concludes His Mission, Earthmaker Sends Rušewe to the Twins; men who wear a single eagle feather in their hair: Redhorn's Father, Moiety Origin Myth, The Lost Blanket; a knowledgeable person tells someone not to go to a certain place because of the danger, but that person goes there anyway: The Twins Disobey Their Father, The Fox-Hocąk War, The Twins Get into Hot Water, The Two Boys, The Two Brothers, The Lost Blanket, Bladder and His Brothers, The Thunderbird, Eats the Stinking Part of the Deer Ankle; contests with the Giants: Spear Shaft and Lacrosse, Redhorn's Father, White Wolf, The Roaster, Young Man Gambles Often, Little Human Head, Redhorn Contests the Giants, Redhorn's Sons, Morning Star and His Friend, The Reincarnated Grizzly Bear, Sun and the Big Eater, The Big Eater, The Hocągara Contest the Giants, The Old Man and the Giants, The Meteor Spirit and the Origin of Wampum, Shakes the Earth, The Origins of the Milky Way, The Shaggy Man, Grandfather's Two Familiess; a nephew avenges the quasi-death of his uncle: Waruǧábᵉra, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head, The Man with Two Heads, The Children of the Sun, Bluehorn's Nephews; a woman digs for Indian potatoes: The Lost Child, The Children of the Sun, The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head; red as a symbolic color: The Journey to Spiritland (hill, willows, reeds, smoke, stones, haze), The Gottschall Head (mouth), The Chief of the Heroka (clouds, side of Forked Man), The Red Man (face, sky, body, hill), Spear Shaft and Lacrosse (neck, nose, painted stone), Redhorn's Father (leggings, stone sphere, hair), The Sons of Redhorn Find Their Father (hair, body paint, arrows), Wears White Feather on His Head (man), The Birth of the Twins (turkey bladder headdresses), The Two Boys (elk bladder headdresses), Trickster and the Mothers (sky), Rich Man, Boy, and Horse (sky), The Blessings of the Buffalo Spirits (Buffalo Spirit), Bluehorn Rescues His Sister (buffalo head), Wazųka (buffalo head headdress), The Baldheaded Warclub Origin Myth (horn), The Brown Squirrel (protruding horn), Bear Clan Origin Myth (funerary paint), Hawk Clan Origin Myth (funerary paint), Deer Clan Origin Myth (funerary paint), Thunderbird Clan Origin Myth (stick at grave), Pigeon Clan Origins (Thunderbird lightning), Trickster's Anus Guards the Ducks (eyes), Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp (scalp, woman's hair), The Race for the Chief's Daughter (hair), The Daughter-in-Law's Jealousy (hair), Redhorn Contests the Giants (hair), Redhorn's Sons (hair), The Woman's Scalp Medicine Bundle (hair), A Wife for Knowledge (hair), Eats the Stinking Part of the Deer Ankle (hair), The Hocągara Contest the Giants (hair of Giantess), A Man and His Three Dogs (wolf hair), The Red Feather (plumage), The Man who was Blessed by the Sun (body of Sun), The Man Whose Wife was Captured (v. 2) (body of the Warrior Clan Chief), Red Bear, Eagle Clan Origin Myth (eagle), The Shell Anklets Origin Myth (Waterspirit armpits), The Twins Join Redhorn's Warparty (Waterspirits), The Roaster (body paint), The Man who Defied Disease Giver (red spot on forehead), The Wild Rose (rose), The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth (warclub), Įcorúšika and His Brothers (ax & packing strap), Hare Kills Flint (flint), The Twins Retrieve Red Star's Head (edges of flint knives), The Nannyberry Picker (leggings), The Seduction of Redhorn's Son (cloth), Yųgiwi (blanket).

Notes

¹ Robert J. Salzer and Grace Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter: An Archaeological Mystery (St. Paul: Prairie Smoke Press, 2001) 3, 6, 56 (upper reaches of Morrey Creek); its location in Iowa County — Robert J. Salzer, "Wisconsin Rock Art," The Wisconsin Archeologist, 78, #1-2 (1997): 48-76 [70].

² Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 3.

³ James W. Springer and Stanley R. Witkowski, "Siouan Historical Linguistics and Oneota Archaeology," in Oneota Studies, ed. Guy E. Gibbon, University of Minnesota Publications in Anthropology, 1 (1982) 69-83.

⁴ Grimm, Thaddeus C. "Time Depth Analysis of Fifteen Siouan Languages," Siouan and Caddoan Linguistics Newsletter (June, 1985): 11-27.

⁵ Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, figure 23: 24-25.

⁶ "The Epic of the Twins, Part Two," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 42-58.

⁷ Alanson Skinner, "Traditions of the Iowa Indians," The Journal of American Folklore, 38, #150 (October-December, 1925): 427-506 [433-434].

⁸ Jasper Blowsnake, "Waretcawera," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks, Freeman Numbers 3850, 3896, 3897 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Notebook 67: 2-41 [13-30].

⁹ For other parallel stories, see "The Lost Blanket," Comparative Material.

¹⁰ Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 55.

¹¹ Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 23.

¹² Kenneth L. Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon (Kansas City: University of Kansas, June 1984) sv pųc´.

¹³ Philip Phillips and James A. Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, Harvard University, 1978) III.53, VI.B-2, Fragment A; cf. III.101.

¹⁴ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, VI.B-2.

¹⁵ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, III.101.

¹⁶ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, III.53.

¹⁷ Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) 96-100, 123-32, 236-8, 236; Weston La Barre, Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 49; Robert L. Hall, An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997) 30-31.

¹⁸ See Albert Samuel Gatschet, "Hocank hit’e," in Linguistic and Ethnological Material on the Winnebago, Manuscript 1989-a (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives, 1889, 1890-1891) s.v. wahúrukop, "marrow"; Thomas J. George, Winnebago Vocabulary, 4989 Winnebago (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, 1885) s.v. wahurugobera (wah-hoo-du-gobe-er-rah), "marrow"; Paul Radin, Winnebago Linguistic Notes, Manuscript 1800a-e (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, 1908-1909) wahurírugop, "marrow"; Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon, s.v. hųšéregorugóp (< hųšerek-horugop), "bone marrow" (a nonce), cp. s.v. horugóp, "to scoop out."

¹⁹ See Mary Carolyn Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago: An Analysis and Reference Grammar of the Radin Lexical File (Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, December 14, 1968 [69-14,947]), ss.vv. nąsu horugóp, nąsuragop, "brains"; Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon, s.v. nąsúrugóp, "brains"; James Owen Dorsey, Winnebago-English Vocabulary and Winnebago Verbal Notes, 4800 Dorsey Papers: Winnebago (3.3.2) 321 [old no. 1226] (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, 1888) s.v. nasúrugúbara, "the brain"; Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, ss.vv. nos’urogobenįk, nosųrogobenįk, "brains"; Charles N. Houghton, "The Orphan who Conquered Death," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Notebook 70, 1-52 [p. 2]: canąsúrogóbenįk, "deer-brains." The -nįk suffixed to many of these examples is a diminutive.

²⁰ Paul Radin, "The Blue Man," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) Notebook 55; Paul Radin, (untitled), Winnebago Notebooks, Freeman #3858 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) Winnebago IV, #5: 4-16.

²¹ Paul Radin, "The Two Friends Who Became Reincarnated: The Origin of the Four Nights Wake," The Culture of the Winnebago as Described by Themselves (Baltimore: Special Publications of the Bollingen Foundation, #1, 1949) 42 nt 42. Informant: John Rave (Bear Clan).

²² For i meaning "mouth," see William Wadden Turner, "Vocabulary of Indian Languages," in William Wadden Turner Papers, 1838-1859 (Washington: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution) Notebooks, Folder 7: 528-530, s.v. ee; William Lipkind, Winnebago Grammar (New York: King's Crown Press, 1945); Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v. i; i, "mouth," found on pp. 374, 375, 376 of Oliver LaMère (trs.), "Wakjukaga," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks, Freeman #3897 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, ca. 1912) Winnebago V, #7: 364-381; Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon, s.v. í. For 'į meaning "to be, to become," see Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v. 'į; and į́; with the meaning "to be," see p. 3 of Alexander Longtail (Sįcserecka), Buffalo Clan, "The Man with Two Heads," with interlinear translation by James Owen Dorsey, 4800 Dorsey Papers: Winnebago 3.3.2 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, October and November, 1893) Story VIII: 1 - 8. For į, 'į, meaning "to live, to be alive," see Lipkind, Winnebago Grammar; Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v. 'į; and Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon, s.v. į́. Cf. Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v. 'i, "to pass time."

²³ Radin, The Winnebago Tribe, 170-172.

²⁴ "Deer Clan Origin Myth," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks, Freeman #3899 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) Winnebago III, #19a: 1-13 [10-11].

²⁵ Radin, The Winnebago Tribe, 179-180. Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 42.

²⁶ Such a hollow wooden cone hairpiece is illustrated in figure 2-113o in James A. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center: The Archaeology of Arkansas Valley Caddoan Culture in Eastern Oklahoma, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, #29 (Ann Arbor: The Museum of Anthropology, 1996) 2.552. Mississippian cones were worn more to the side of the head, judging from surviving scupltures in which depictions of them are to be seen.

²⁷ Listed as synonyms of "medicine" are, "mysterious, unknown, holiness, luck, vision, dream, fortune, chance." William Tomkins, Universal Indian Sign Language of the Plains Indians of North America, 5th ed. (San Diego, published by the author, ca. 1931) 63.

²⁸ Tomkins, Universal Indian Sign Language, 36; George Fronval and Daniel Dubois, translated by E. W. Egan, Indian Signs and Signals (London: Oak Tree Press, 1978) 14.

²⁹ Klaus F. Wellmann, A Survey of North American Indian Rock Art (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1979) figure 909. Originally contrasted with white tempera paint, but the tracing given here is an inverse image with the matrix erased.

³⁰ Selwyn H. Dewdney and Kenneth E. Kidd, Indian Rock Paintings of the Great Lakes (Toronto: Quetico Foundation, University of Toronto Press, 1967) 18, Cliff Lake #263. Cf. p. 53.

³¹ For the diamond chain motif in the Southwest, see Alex Patterson, A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1992) 83. For the Missouri example, from First Creek, see Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, The Petrolglyphs and Pictographs of Missouri (Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 2000) 180. The diamond chain motif in the Southwest is believed by Patterson to be a stylized snake.

³² Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology (Rosebud Sioux Reservation: Siñte Gleska University, 1992) 18-19.

³³ Martha Warren Beckwith, "Mythology of the Oglala Dakota," The Journal of American Folk-lore, 43 (1930), #170 (October-December.): 388 and note 1, where she remarks that "in several of these stories the whirlwind is connected with the ascent to the sky ..."

³⁴ Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge, 31.

³⁵ Tomkins, Universal Indian Sign Language, s.v. "Medicine Man."

³⁶ Johann Theodor de Bry, America: das ist Erfindung vnd Offenbahrung der Newen Welt, 2d ed (Frankfurt am Main: Nicolaum Hoffman, 1609) part II, plate 16. See David H. Dye, "Art, Ritual, and Chiefly Warfare in the Mississippian World," in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (New Haven: Yale University Press and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004) 202, fig. 26.

³⁷ For the concept of the Centre and its associated symbolism, see Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Meridian, 1958) 81, 367-387; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1959) 40-42, 49, 57-58, 64-65; Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969) 42-43; William C. Beane and William G. Doty, edd., Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) 373; John Weir Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters: Myths of the Royal Father (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 18-22, 31, 39; Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames & Hudson, 1961) Ch. VII.

³⁸ Dye, "Art, Ritual, and Chiefly Warfare in the Mississippian World," 192.

³⁹ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, IV.126.

⁴⁰ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, IV.128. This is also shown in Jeffrey P. Brain and Philip Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 1996) 56, artifact Okla-Lf-S569. There's a bottle with a nearly identical petaloid circle around a Greek cross, see p. 192, artifact, Ga-Ri-H9.

⁴¹ Brain and Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast, 56, artifact Okla-Lf-S242. The same design as Ga-Ri-H9, but with a more swastika-like cross: p. 281, artifact Miss-Cy-K2. See also in Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, V.263: "Cross in Petaloid Circle Motifs with Spines."

⁴² Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, IV.126: "Confronted Figures Holding Steaming Pots." This is also shown in Brain and Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast, 57, artifact Okla-Lf-S110.

⁴³ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, IV.127: "Confronted Figures Holding Steaming Pot Above Decorated Panel." Also shown in Brain and Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast, 57, artifact Okla-Lf-S112.

⁴⁴ Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge, 32.

⁴⁵ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, IV.127. This is also shown in Brain and Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast, 57, artifact Okla-Lf-S112.

⁴⁶ Tomkins, Universal Indian Sign Language, 36 (moon), 50 (star, sun).

⁴⁷ Tomkins, Universal Indian Sign Language, 75.

⁴⁸ Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 19-20.

⁴⁹ Col. Garrick Mallery, Pictographs of the North American Indians. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 4 (1886): 241-242. This pictography was originally published in Eastman, Dahcotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux (New York: 1849) xxvii.

⁵⁰ Paul Radin, "Winnebago Tales," Journal of American Folklore, 22 (1909): 300-303.

⁵¹ Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Winnebago V, #2: 123-247 (syllabic text), 38-71 (English translation). A published translation can be found in "The Epic of the Twins, Part Two," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 42-58.

⁵² Emil William Lenders, "The Myth of the 'Wah-ru-hap-ah-rah,' or the Sacred Warclub Bundle," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 46 (1914): 409. For the American Swallow-tail Kite, see the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Edition. 2d revised edition. John Bull, John Farrand, jr., Amanda Wilson, and Lori Hogan, edd. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf (Chanticleer Press), 1994) 420-421, plate 317.

⁵³ A. C. Barry, Ornithological Fauna of Wisconsin, Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 5 (1854): 1-13.

⁵⁴ The nearest to this kind of tonsure that I've found is a Mississippian gorget engraving of a chunkee player. See artifact Ky-Ly-E1 in Brain and Phillips, Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast, 52-53. This is from western Kentucky. Cf. also Tenn-Sr-CS1, p. 53.

⁵⁵ Paul Radin, "The Squirrel," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) #21: 1 - 85 (see pp. 60 ff.).

⁵⁶ Only the big game arrow (mą kecąk šakókere) has a turtle claw point, although one kind of war arrow, the maį súra (or maínsok’ere), had flint fragment or sharpened antler for a head. The mą p’áuna is used for war and has a sharpened point, as does the bird arrow (mą p’axétera) which is usually made of hickory. The arrow referred to here would be the mą́sanc p'áų which had a sharpened wood point and was used for small game. See Paul Radin, The Winnebago Tribe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990 [1923]) 62.

⁵⁷ Paul Radin, Winnebago Hero Cycles: A Study in Aboriginal Literature (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1948) 115-118.

⁵⁸ Paul Radin, "The Chief of the Heroka," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) Notebook #33: 1-66.

⁵⁹ Paul Radin, "Intcohorúcika," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) Notebook #14: 1-67.

⁶⁰ Norton William Jipson, Story of the Winnebagos (Chicago: The Chicago Historical Society, 1923) 3.

⁶¹ See the "Keller Figure" carved of flint clay. This was from Madison County, Illinois, and dated to the twelf century A.D. F. Kent Reilly III,. “People of Earth, People of Sky: Visualizing the Sacred in Native American Art of the Mississippian Period,” in Richard F. Townsend, and Robert V. Sharp, Hero, Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 125-138 [133, fig. 16]. See also the kneeling female figure from Etowah, dated to 1325-1375 A.D. Adam King, "Power and the Sacred," in Townsend and Sharp, Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, 151-165 [154, fig. 6].

⁶² Indra vanquishes Sūrya and steals his wheel: Ṛg Veda 1.175.4; 4.30.4; 10.43.5; Indra stops the steeds of the sun: Ṛg Veda 10.92.8.

⁶³ Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 174-178.

⁶⁴ The original text is in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Winnebago V, #2: 1-123 (syllabic text), 1-38 (English translation). A published translation can be found in "The Epic of the Twins, Part One," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 24-41.

⁶⁵ "The Children of the Sun," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 75-80.

⁶⁶ Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v.; see Charles N. Houghton, "The Orphan who Conquered Death," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Notebook 70, p. 7.

⁶⁷ Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: Myths, Legends and Cult Images (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974) 112-151.

⁶⁸ Robert Salzer, "Wisconsin Rock Art," The Wisconsin Archaeologist 78, #1/2 (1997): 48-76 [53].

⁶⁹ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma.

⁷⁰ Kelvin W. Sampson, "Conventionalized Figures on Late Woodland Ceramics," The Wisconsin Archaeologist 69, #3 (1988): 163-188.

⁷¹ The drawings are from the website, "The Mississippian Moundbuilders and Their Artifacts" (http://www.mississippian-artifacts.com/). The spud is from Alexander County, Illinois; the drilled spatulate is of Tennesee greenstone from Hamilton County, Tennesee; the notched hoe is of kaolin flint from Jackson County, Illinois.

⁷² Answers.Com, s.v. "spud."

⁷³ Phillips and Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, II.15. Holmes says, "Three arrow-head shaped figures, two inches in length by one and one-half in width, are placed, one near the outer lip, another near the inner lip, and the third in the middle of the body, a little below the center. These figures are neatly cut and symmetrical, and resemble a barbed and blunt-pointed arrow-head. Near the center of each is a small circle, which gives the figure a close resemblancve to a variety of perforated stone implements, one specimen of which has been found near Osceola, Ark." William Henry Holmes, Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans (Washington: 1883) 179-305 [195]. See Plate XXIII (196/197).

⁷⁴ Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Winnebago V, #2: 1-123 (syllabic text) [p. 60].

⁷⁵ Marino, A Dictionary of Winnebago, s.v. rejų, rejúna, rejųwanina, "root, descendant"; Miner, Winnebago Field Lexicon, s.v. rejų́, "root."

⁷⁶ Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, 32.

⁷⁷ This is related in "The Epic of the Twins, Part One," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 24-41. See also, Phillip Longtail (Sįcserecka), Buffalo Clan, "The Man with Two Heads," text with interlinear translation by James Owen Dorsey, 4800 Dorsey Papers: Winnebago 3.3.2 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, October and November, 1893) VIII.1-8; and [1] "The Children of the Sun," in Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.75-80.

⁷⁸ Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.41 (§75), I.80-84.Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, Part II (Basil, Switzerland: Ethnographical Museum, 1956) 119, 125.

⁷⁹ Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.24-41.

⁸⁰ "Children of the Sun," in Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.75-80. Longtail, "The Man with Two Heads," in Dorsey Papers: Winnebago 3.3.2, VIII.1-8.

⁸¹ A painting of a Plains Cree man, Bro-Cas-Sie, shows this same bifurcated painting pattern across the bridge of the nose, red paint above, no paint below. George Fronval and Daniel Dubois; translated by E. W. Egan, Indian Signs and Signals (London : Oak Tree Press, 1978) #7, 76-77.

⁸² Salzer and Rajnovich, The Gottschall Rockshelter, ...

⁸³ "Blue Horn's Nephews," in Paul Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic. A Study in Comparative Literature, Part I (Basil: Ethnographical Museum, Basil Switzerland, 1954) 80-84.

⁸⁴ Paul Radin, "Wak'cexi Hecoga (Waterspirit Bluehorn)," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society) #66, Story 2: 1-13.

⁸⁵ Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Winnebago V, #2: 81-84.

⁸⁶ Radin, Notebooks, Winnebago V, #2: 38-45.

⁸⁷ The orginal text is in Sam Blowsnake, "Waretcawera," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Winnebago V, #11: 54-129. The published translation is found in Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.87-90.

⁸⁸ Radin, The Winnebago Tribe, 3, village #12.

⁸⁹ Jasper Blowsnake, "Waretcawera," in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks, Freeman Numbers 3850, 3896, 3897 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n.d.) Notebook 67: 1-41 [39-41].

⁹⁰ Salzer, "Wisconsin Rock Art," 51, says, "Modern research indicates that red-colored pictographs are indeed found in that area." No source is given.

⁹¹ See Radin, Winnebago Tribe, 405. In speaking of the tobacco offering made at the Thunderbird Warbundle Feast, it is said, "Wherever it is that the spirits have their gathering places there it is that the tobacco goes. The Thunderbirds have a tobacco-gathering place (tanióstohira nįgé), it is said. The Night Spirits have one also, it is said. The place that I spoke of as the one where Jobenañgiwíñxga was blessed, that is the tobacco-gathering place of the Night Spirits, Grandfather Jobenañgiwíñxga said. Up above there is also a tobacco-gathering place, it is said. And, again, on the earth there is a gathering place somewhere, it is said. Under the earth there is a gathering place somewhere also, it is said."

⁹² The original text is from Sam Blowsnake, Waretcáwera (the Twins Cycle), in Paul Radin, Winnebago Notebooks, (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, n. d.) Winnebago V, #11: 279-284. The published translation is in Radin, The Evolution of an American Indian Prose Epic, I.97.

⁹³ Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969) 27-56.

⁹⁴ Clark Wissler and D. C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1908]) 40-44.

⁹⁵ Leading Sun, "Long Tooth Boy," in George A. Dorsey, The Pawnee Mythology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1906]) 494-495, Abstract 41; cf. Thief, "Long Tooth Boy," in Dorsey, The Pawnee Mythology, 493-494, Abstract 40.

⁹⁶ Stephen Chapman Simms, "Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away," Publications of the Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Series, 2, #19 (1903).

⁹⁷ Gray Bull, "2. Lodge Boy and Thrown-Away," in Robert H. Lowie, "Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 25, part 1 (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1918) 85-94 [90].

⁹⁸ This is my retelling of the tale from Robert Bell, "The History of the Che-che-puy-ew-tis, A Legend of the Northern Cree," The Journal of American Folk-lore, 10 (1897): 1-8.

⁹⁹ Carl Kerényi, The Heroes of the Greeks, trs. by H. J. Rose (London: Thames & Hudson: 1959) 105-112.

¹⁰⁰ Robert Small (Otoe, Wolf Clan) and Julia Small (Otoe), "Dore and Wahredua," Alanson Skinner, "Traditions of the Iowa Indians," The Journal of American Folklore, 38, #150 (October-December, 1925): 427-506 [431].

¹⁰¹ Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1977]) 159.

¹⁰² Elmer G. Suhr, Before Olympos: A Study of the Aniconic Origins of Poseidon, Hermes and Eros (New York: Helios Books, 1967) 75-76.

¹⁰³ Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 187, figs. 152, 153.

¹⁰⁴ http://www.indiaprofile.com/religion-culture/swastika.htm