Friday, December 30, 2016

Single Horned Serpent (Washington CT)

   There is a short cut back home to my house in Woodbury CT from the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington CT, but I always seem to take a wrong turn somewhere and find yet another scenic route. One of those times was back in January 2015 when I took these images of an interesting - and pretty massive - "stone wall."

Sometime in this last November, I had Matt Bua's "Talking Walls" with me at the DMV, and there at the bottom of page 49 was this photo: 
I had a sudden realization that this stone mound resembled a coiled up snake with a large oval cobble for an eye, the smaller thinner slabs stacked to resemble scales, sort of staring up at me from the page. My DMV number came up and I was soon out of there, headed home to look up the nomenclature of snake scales, called squamation or scalation.
Maybe not 100% accurate anatomically speaking, but it seemed the "feeling" was there, sort of like an "impressionistic realism" in an artistic style of stacking stones.
Would it work with that Washington Serpent, that oval cobble an obvious eye?

I went looking for a horned serpent with a forward facing horn, thinking maybe one of those uppermost stones might be a horn, and lucked into this image:


Added on 2/4/2022:








1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Hello. The water spirit pictograph from Darky Lake (now called Clear Water Lake) is located in Quetico Provincial Park, Ontario. Quetico is across the border from Minnesota and no where close to New
England. I have had the pleasure of seeing this pictograph in person, many times and have learned its representation and significance from the Lac La Croix First
Nation. Could you please explain the connection that it has with thr other photos on this page? Also, a similar creature is in a pictograph located in Lake Superior Provincial Park. Thank you.