Serpent Walls

We are all familiar with the old early settler Scott-Irish boundary walls.  Thousands of years before Europeans arrived in Nort America in large numbers, Indigenous people were stacking rocks to form walls as well.  The difference is these walls were formed to create an effigy of a serpent.  Some of these walls (older serpent walls) were in straight lines.  This was done to mimic the comets and meteors they were seeing at nighttime in the stars.  They saw these straight lines with a bright head in the sky as “sky serpents.”  They were considered as sacred signs from the Creator.  To honor these “sky serpents, serpent rock walls were created.

These serpent rock walls were also a warning to other people traveling through the area to “tread lightly” as this is sacred ground.  Serpent walls sometimes had rock art such as pictographs and petroglyphs placed on them.  Another purpose for serpent walls was they were sometimes intentionally placed to face the summer/winter solstice directions.  Serpent walls were used to tell stories as well and sometimes could even be used to tell prophecy.  I have seen them measure over a hundred yards long and as high as four feet tall.  You will find these rock features typically around burial grounds.

A serpent wall can also have either a triangular head shape depicting a venomous serpent such as a rattle snake, or they can have an oval shaped head mimicking a non-venomous snake such as a black snake.  Some serpent walls can have a rattle chamber giving more evidence to the venomous snake effigy.  I have seen multiple tail shapes with some of them completely straight, others with a slight turn, some with a “fishhook” shape and others that will almost double back on the serpent’s body.  One serpent wall at Bear Spirit Mountain when scanned with ground penetrating radar (GPR), showed a hollow chamber inside the body of the serpent with an “arch stone” over the entrance of the chamber.  This was a prayer chamber used by the Medicine Man/Woman to pray for the Ancestors.