Animal Representation in Mounds, Cave Art, and Team Mascots

The effigy mounds were built to represent "ancient 'ideology from the earth'," says Birmingham on p. 109, and are quite possibly "monumental representations of the same underlying belief systems encoded on Woodland pottery..." If this is true, then the animals (or animal spirits) pictured in the mounds have religious implications. In the ancient Indian mythology, there was an upperworld of the sun and sky, ruled by the benevolent thunderbird (p. 107), and a lowerworld of the water, ruled by "Underground Water Panthers" and other malevolent water spirits. The earth was suspended between these two worlds.

On p. 129, Birmingham says that the mounds were possibly maps of the Indian belief system--that the mounds were designed not only to explain the mythology of the three-layered world, but to actually balance those worlds harmoniously. These mounds, then, were integral to the life, death, and rebirth of the people!

The animal drawings in the Cave of Lascaux are a little different. As far as I can tell, not much is known about them. They could have religious meaning, but then again, they might not. All we know about them is that they are painted in the back of caves. The mounds, however, not only represented animals, but balanced the world in a specific, harmonious order. The pictures in the Cave do not have this same weighty, metaphysical importance.

Our modern-day mascots are similar to the effigy mounds, but only in one single, shallow way. Each mound animal represented a clan, Birmingham says on p. 116--and each mascot represents a team. But sports teams do not have any religious or metaphysical importance; the animal spirits that represented these tribes gave meaning, and order, and balance to the lives of the people who conceived them. Benny the Bull, on the other hand, does not do much for us other than dance at half-time.