The Elusive Water Panther Brad Lepper of OHS (whatever the letters stand for these days) has interpreted the so-called Alligator Mound in Licking County as a Water Panther (or Underwater Panther), and he has also suggested that Serpent Mound is a Water Panther, even though the two effigies look nothing alike. He bases the former interpretation on an Ohio River petroglyph that he says is a Water Panther, but which actually depicts a fisher (Martes pennanti) very clearly. So this begs the question: What did a Water Panther look like? There are very few depictions of what is known to have been intended as a Water Panther, which was not even so much a mythical beast as a metaphorical description of lake storms. It is incorrect to think that the Water Panther was a type of panther; panther for Algonquians was a metaphorical way of describing any great energetic force. Just as we have no particular artistic convention for depicting animorphic storms, the ancient Indians may have had no particular depiction in mind that held true for different communities at different times. Most of the alleged Water Panther depictions show composite animals with rattlesnake components and, like Leppers petroglyph, were probably not intended to be Water Panthers at all. However, there is a single prehistoric depiction of a composite creature from ancient Ohio that likely does depict a Water Panther. You are looking at it below. This etching on slate was excavated from the Feurt Village site north of Portsmouth by William C. Mills (of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society) in 1917. The photo is on page 380 of that very rare publication, The Feurt Mounds and Village Site, in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, July, 1917, No. 3. Described there by Mills as a mythical fish-serpent, this creature -- unlike all the alleged Water Panthers -- actually has all of the characteristics attributed to the Water Panther -- a panther-like face but a serpentine body adapted to swimming underwater -- with none of the rattlesnake features that connoted the celestial domain. The Feurt Village site is now dated to between 1000 CE and 1100 CE, making it the largest and earliest example of what used to be called Fort Ancient Culture -- a designation that no longer has real meaning. (It was neither a fort, nor ancient, nor a culture.) So lets take this beast as the nearest were ever going to get to knowing what southern Ohio Indians of about a thousand years ago thought a Water Panther might look like. That may not be much, but it tells us one thing for sure: Neither of the effigy mounds in Licking and Adams counties was intended to represent a Water Panther.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 23:46:19 +0000
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