Michabo of the Mounds Perhaps the single most compelling pieces of evidence identifying the Ohio mound-builders as Algonquian (see last post) are the artifacts depicting Michabo, the Great Hare Algonquian culture hero, found with burials in the great mound at the North Fork site (Hopewell Mound Group) west of Chillicothe. The principal example is an elaborate carving on a human femur of Michabo in shamans garb, shown in graphic 1, found next to the hand of a complete skeleton by Moorehead in his 1891 looting of the site. The identification of this as Michabo was made by Charles Willoughby in a 1935 article devoted to mound-builder depictions of Michabo. Willoughby correctly interprets this as a complex Algonquian depiction of Michabo as the vehicle or transformative form for afterlife travel, his face skull-like, equipped with a shamans deer antlers for navigational sensing (an intuition of magnetic fields?), and with bird parts to enable flight. The hare elements are the big floppy ears that droop down at the sides of the figures head, united by a skull-cap. That these are indeed Michabo elements is confirmed by a second artifact found on the skull of a different skeleton within the same mound, shown in figure 2. This is a headdress consisting of three copper plates connected by leather. Comparison with figure 1 shows that the headdress is virtually identical to the one shown in the depiction of Michabo. Optimal garb for making the afterlife journey obviously meant donning rabbit ears. Other headdresses of this sort were found equipped with deer antlers. We might suppose that both the large ears and the antlers were intended to aid in stellar navigation. Rabbit-ears are also included in a number of other mound-builder motifs, though they are seldom identified as such. For example, graphic 3 shows two copper cut-out artifacts also found by Moorehead at North Fork, neither of which has been identified as to motif. The top cutout, rotated counterclockwise, becomes a rabbit head, with the figure of a human with arms raised in the reverse pattern (the negative or cut-out space). This cut-out figure of a human with arms raised also appears in the bottom example, and in many other copper cutouts found in the mounds from different sites. To me, this signifies a person reaching to or offering himself or herself to the sky. Not only the specific figure of Michabo but the gestalt of these depictions are clearly Algonquian. For comparison, figure 4 shows a Powhatan Michabo-shamans cloak from the historic period, complete with deer skull and antlers, and depictions of Michabo the cosmic hero battling monsters on the celestial journey. There can be little doubt that the Ohio Valley mound-builders were operating within the same cosmic mindset. And by the way, the combination of a hare with deer antlers was borrowed for the Midwestern folklore figure of the jackalope (figure 5). p.s. While Willoughby got the Michabo ID and its Algonquian implications correct, I do not recommend his other interpretations. Willoughby was essentially a New England art dealer with little formal training in ethnology. He made enormous mistakes, including his description of Michabo as a god. Michabo was not a god, rather it was the form that all of us must take when we embark on the next part of the journey.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 19:04:10 +0000