Mississippi Gorget

The Mississippi Gorget

This shell gorget is an item found at a Mississippi grave site, where pyramids and mounds were a part of the culture. The gorget is always photographed as a kneeling personage; however, by placing a thread in the holes, the shell hanging with the correct orientation, it actually illustrates a falling figure with a net around his neck (as in Justin's photographed Maya vase, see Shooting Way) and wearing a long apron-like appendage. His strange bird-flight eye is looking upward (as the comet that continued on its way).

If the war-club is a torch, and the dead enemy is a headless volcanic god, the ax in the headdress and the strange bird-eyed personage can be explained as a flying god-form instead of a warrior with a decapitated head of an enemy. And there are several versions of the flying god, with the same type apron, but with wings. In other representations of this figure with the strangely shaped apron, the apron appears to be an integral part of the whole body. If this is the case, then the apron might signify the bee. . . .and its stinger. Burning ash falling from the skies in volcanic lands could be equated with the stinging of angry bees. Ash-like fallout from a meteorite with its supersonic whine could also be equated with angry bees. Since no one has ever heard a meteorite enter our atmosphere lately, we have no confirmation of this sound pattern.

Since each artistic endeavor depends largely on how the artist views his own world, the iconography may have been carried from the God K imagery of Mexico. The net around his neck, the flaming torch (in the hand instead of in the forehead as with God K) together with the ax cutting implement in his headdress indicate a god who has already lopped off the head of the volcanic mountain god. Therefore this flying god may be an after the event icon.

Since the artist knew very little about volcanoes, it was not difficult for him to imagine and draw out a god/person, instead of a god/mountain, just as the Tukano tribe of the Amazon River, created a smoke-reviving brother god with a reclining dead sister/wife instead of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccíhuatl. Neither tribe was familiar with volcanoes or how, with an eruption, the mountain can lose its head or how it sends black ash-filled clouds up to the heavens.

NASA Halley's Comet

The eye is similar in shape to another NASA 1911 view of Halley's Comet. To assume the American Indians, the Maya, the Inca, or the Aztecs did not or could not recognize a comet or a meteorite that was as bright as the sun when everyone else in the world reported a variation of this phenomena in their myths is awkward. Due to lack of manuscripts or stone monuments, the American Indians may have had a short memory for detail, but their religions speak of the Great Sun god who brought civilization, with special laws and customs that all people were to live by forever. These concepts were also attributed to Quetzalcoatl, the Sun God of the Mesoamericans. This is not proof positive that the comet was the intention of the artists, but it is a step in that direction.

A stone paint palette from Alabama, shows the hand of the sun god, with a blazing eye in the palm, surrounded by a ring of knotted, sacred snakes, both of which have a rattler's tail. The hand of god is found in the Nuttall in the middle of a star grid (Nuttall, p. 7), and with an eye in the palm is found in most of the Mayan monuments and codices. Two hands with an eye in the palm of each is also found on a war drum in the middle of Lake Texcoco.

It is apparent that the North American Indians liked to travel to sunny Mexico as much as we do. Either that, or the travelers who taught the Tukano Indians in the Amazon River Basin lands about Quetzalcoatl, Popocatepetl, and Ixtaccíhuatl, also roamed north of the Gulf.