It is commonly assumed that there were cultural and artistic influences passing both ways from North America to Mesoamerica. Two of these shared themes commonly pointed to are Quetzalcoatl/Kulkulkan and Sotuknango/Tlaloc. This column is to point out another theme that is shared between North America and Mesoamerica – the Two-headed Serpent, known to tribes along the northwest coast as Sisiutl. On May 1, 2010, I wrote about meeting Sisiutl as a young boy at Summer Camp. “As a boy at summer camp one year in the Pacific Northwest I found an India Rubber Boa in the woods. Far from being a harbinger of death and disaster, this peaceful creature was content to be wrapped around my arm and hung on for a considerable time, probably enjoying the body warmth. Surprisingly it made no attempt to bite, or even to uncoil and drop off until I later unwrapped it from my arm and released it back in the woods.”(Faris 2010)
In British Columbia, north of Vancouver, the ‘Nlaka’pamux people have named this mythological being Klu’biist and describe it as follows. “The ‘Nlaka’pamux people of the Stein River Valley north of Vancouver in British Columbia call it klu’biist and have recorded it in numerous pictographs at sites in their territory. In the first of the two illustrations this pictograph panel includes two images of klu'biist, one in the upper left, and a smaller one at bottom center. Many of the portrayals show klu’biist as a four-legged creature and native sources stated that it was a snake with a head at each end, but it could grow legs if it wanted to and then looked something like a lizard with a head at each end. Many of them believe that a sighting of klu’biist foretells a death. The ‘Nlaka’pamux people identify klu’biist as an actual creature that lives in their forests – the India Rubber Boa (Charina bottae) found throughout northwestern North America, and the northernmost member of the boa family. These 18“ brown snakes appear to have a head at both ends with a blunt rounded tail that is hard to distinguish from their real head end and looks amazingly like a length of rubber surgical tubing (York 1993).” (Faris 2010) Interestingly, the mythical version can sometimes have short legs as shown in the pictograph representations. The Rubber Boa (Charina bottae) is resident in the Western United States and Canada from British Columbia in the north to California in the south. A subspecies (Charina umbratica) is found in a small area of southern California. The personal encounter I described above occurred in western Oregon.
Berezkin (2022) argued that the peopling of the New World generally emerged from eastern Asia and flowed southward from the north, taking themes and cultural motifs with them as they went. “The same motifs in ancient and ethnographic visual art in the Pacific basin testify to the common origin of these traditions. The greatest similarity can be traced between ancient China, the northwestern coast of North America and ancient Peru, but analogies They are also abundant in India, Southeast Asia, the Lower Amur, the American Arctic and throughout nuclear America.” (Berezkin 2022:170) In this way the idea of a two-headed snake could have followed the human penetration of MesoAmerica from the north. This motif, which became the two-headed Sisiutl in the northwest coastal cultures of North America may well have led to the two-headed Maquizcoatl of the later Aztecs.
Book 11 of
the Florentine Codex by 16th-century ethnographic researcher by the
Spanish Francisan friar Bernardino de Sahagun shows
the double-headed serpent known to the Aztecs as Maquizcoatl (or bracelet
snake).
“Sahagun provides a wealth of information on the metaphorical significance of the double-headed serpent. In the illustration accompanying the text (figure 7.8A) a man encounters a maquixcoatl (‘literally bracelet snake’) A beaded bracelet in the foreground translates the first part of the name (‘bracelet’), and Sahagun describes the serpent as small and colored with black, yellow and red stripes as well as having two heads. He explains that if the serpent wrapped itself around a person's arm like a bracelet and stayed there, it was an omen of death.” (Umberger and Aguilera 2023:191)
“Book 11’s Nahua artist depicts the maquizcoatl as a double-headed, double-clawed serpent-like creature. It rests on the ground before a standing male figure. This double-headed creature, save the two set of claws, mirrors the depictions of the pectorals on the Rain God (above). The tlacuilo also labelled the animal pictographically by placing a three-piece jade bracelet on a tied red cord in the grass beside the “bracelet” snake. In the scene, the man reaches out with his right hand to indicate the maquizcoatl, and the blue speech glyph emanating from his mouth indicates that the man is speaking about (or with) the animal.” (Fitzgerald 2022) In both the ‘Nlaka’pamux version from British Columbia and the Nahuatl version from the Aztecs the two-headed serpent can have small clawed feet, although the living serpents that they are believed to have been based on do not. I find it to be significant that this detail is found at both north and south extremes of this belief.
Note that the translation of the name of the two-headed serpent of the Aztecs, Maquizcoatl, literally translates as ‘bracelet snake.’ Having worn a Sisiutl around my wrist like a bracelet for much of an afternoon as a young boy, as I related above, that passage jumped out at me. Not much of an omen of death as I write this approximately 70 years after the event.
So, here we have another likely example of a
mythological figure that migrated from the north to the south. Could this
belief be old enough to have arrived with the original populating of the
Americas from north to south, or did the idea later cross from Asian belief in
two-headed dragons and get passed southward. At this time it would be hard to
say.
NOTE 1: The double-headed serpent of the Aztecs is spelled variously as Maquizcoatl and Maquixcoatl in the quotations above. The spelling using the "z" is more phonetic, approximating the pronunciation of the name more closely.
NOTE 2: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Berezkin Yuri Evgenievich, 2022, Sisiutl, in Cabinet of curiosities 3(17), pp. 170-188., doi 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-3(17)-170-188. Accessed online 17 April 2024, Translated from Russian to English by Yandex.com.
Faris, Peter, 2010, Sisiutl – The Two-Headed Serpent, 1 May 2010, https://rockartblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Sisiutl
Fitzgerald, Joshua Dr., 2022, Rethinking the Double-Headed Serpent at the British Museum, 12 July 2022, mexicolore.co.uk. Accessed online 25 April 2024.
Sahagun, Bernardo Fray, 1545-1590, General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: The Florentine Codex. Book XI: Natural Things, Library of Congress, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667856/. Accessed online 25 April 2024.
Umberger, Emily, and Elizabeth Aguilera, 2023, Coyolxauhqui’s Serpents, in Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by Susan Milbrath and Elizabeth Baquedano, pp. 180-199, University Press of Colorado, Denver.
York, Annie, R. Daly, and C.
Arnett, 1993, They Write Their
Dream on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings of the Stein River Valley of British
Columbia, Talonbooks,
Vancouver.
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