Mississippian Period Archaeology

While each Mississippian group is distinct, communities across the region share similar traditions and understandings about cosmography, or the organization of the universe as a whole system. In "How the World Was Made," a story documented in Myths of the Cherokee (1902) by James Mooney, Mooney describes the basic framework of the universe: "The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock." It consists of three worlds – the Above World, This World, and the Beneath World. Mississippian chiefs were believed to have the ability to transcend across these worlds to maintain order in the cosmos.

Iconography, or images and symbols that represent particular ideas, exist across Mississippian-era art and sacred objects. This iconography directly correlates to Mississippians’ belief in the sacred, celestial, beneath-world deities, and ancestor worship and is repeated across Mississippian sacred objects and artwork. Some examples include: 

• The depiction of a twisted central axis (or axis mundi), which represents smoke coming up from a sacred fire, reflects a layered understanding of the cosmos and connects the ordered Above World with the chaotic Beneath World. 
• Crested birds, representing the Above World, are shown in tandem with the four corners of the world. The sun, representing the female, is at its center. 
• Spirals set in a counterclockwise direction represent This World. Clockwise spirals that are depicted as Uk’tena, the great-horned serpent that guards the portal to the land of the dead, symbolize the Beneath World. 
  • Uk’tena can also be depicted with wings, making it an Above World being.
  • If Uk’tena has two forks by its eyes, it is representing the Above World; if it has three forks, it is of the Beneath World
• Selu, the bearer/mother of corn who is constantly being reborn, is depicted as an older woman holding a hoe or rising out of a doubleweave box, where the dead are. 
  • In Mooney's telling of "Kana’ti and Selu: The Origin of Game and Corn" (1902), Mooney describes how Selu was killed by her son and Wild Boy (a child born out of the blood of the game, which Selu had washed in a river, hunted by Selu’s husband Kana’ti) after the two saw her producing corn and beans from her body. Before she was murdered, Selu instructed the boys to drag her body in a circle seven times so that they would continue to have corn to eat. They only dragged her body twice, but it still produced enough corn for humankind.  
• A hand with an eye on its palm represents the portal to the Path of Souls, or the Milky Way. 
  • When the soul separates from the body after death it makes a final journey towards the west, the place of the setting sun. The soul must ultimately make a leap into the Path of Souls across the night sky. To reach this path one must enter the celestial realm through a portal at the edge of the Path, which is a constellation in the shape of the hand with an eye at its center. The constellation Orion is the bracelet on this hand.