Serpent Walls

We are all familiar with the old, early settler Scott-Irish boundary walls.  Thousands of years before Europeans arrived in large numbers in North America, Indigenous people were also stacking rocks to form walls.  The difference is that 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 observed in the night sky.  They saw these straight lines with a bright head in the sky as “sky serpents.”  They were considered sacred signs from the Creator.  To honor these “sky serpents, serpent rock walls were created.

These serpent rock walls also served as a warning to other people traveling through the area to “tread lightly,” as this is sacred ground.  Serpent walls sometimes featured rock art, including pictographs and petroglyphs, placed on them.  Another purpose of serpent walls was that they were sometimes intentionally placed to face the directions of the summer and winter solstices.  Serpent walls were also used to tell stories and sometimes served as a means to foretell 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 feature either a triangular head shape, depicting a venomous serpent such as a rattlesnake, or an oval-shaped head, mimicking a non-venomous snake, such as a black snake.  Some serpent walls can have a rattle chamber, providing further evidence of 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.