Smoking to God

Bowl Giver Pipe from the Hollywood Site

Since I haven’t been able to ride a bike and this whole heart valve thing has been dominating my life, I really haven’t written about much except my heart valve. I thought I might do an archaeo-nerd post for a change. Really, this combines archaeology with the study of meaning in ancient symbolism or iconography. What I want to write about is a particular pipe found buried in Mound B of the Hollywood site located in Richmond County, Georgia—near Augusta. The pipe was excavated by Henry Reynolds in the late 1880s as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Mound Builders project. The goal was to figure out who built all the earthen mounds dotting the landscape of from the Prairie Plains to the Atlantic Ocean. Back then a lot of people thought Native Americans were not capable of building complicated structures and making the elaborate things often found inside. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but Cyrus Thomas, the project’s director, concluded that the ancestors of modern-day Native Americans did, in fact, build the mounds and make the stuff found inside.

In the Eastern US, mounds have a very long history that goes back almost 6000 years. The mounds at the Hollywood site were built during the Mississippian period, which extends from 900-1600CE. Specifically, they were built sometime around 1250 to 1250CE. I am part of a working group of scholars that have been trying to understand the meaning of Mississippian period imagery for almost 20 years. That group meets every year in San Marcos, TX at Texas State University for the Texas State Iconography Workshop. Kent Reilly, director of the Center for Art and Symbolism of Ancient America, is the co-founder (along with James Garber) and director of the workshop. Two scholarly volumes have been published by the workshop (Ancient Objects, Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography and Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World) and a third volume including workshop participants was published to accompany an exhibition by the Art Institute of Chicago called Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South under the same title. In this blurb I draw upon the knowledge generated by the workshop and published in these works.

In order to make sense of the pipe from Hollywood, it is important to understand how Mississippian people understood the world and how it worked. Workshop participants as well as scholars who came before have reconstructed a reasonable model of this using beliefs collected by anthropologists and others from Native Americans over the past several centuries. Below is a drawing of that reconstructed Mississippian cosmos populated with symbols and imagery found on artifacts from Mississippian period sites.

Jack Johnson Drawing of the Mississippian Cosmos

It shows a cosmos conceived of as being made of three layers. This World is the world that people inhabit. It is a great island floating on the primordial sea. Above it is the Above World. This is thought of as a rock dome where the Sun, various bird-like beings and other forces live. This World is attached to the Above World by ropes or some other method at the cardinal directions. The third Realm is the Beneath World. It lies beneath this World and also under water. At night, the Beneath World rotates to become the night sky and then as the sun rises it rotates back down. While the Above World is generally a place of order and moral purity, the Beneath World is a place of chaos and death. The Piasa is an inhabitant of the Beneath World and sometimes called the Lord of Death. I’ve written about that guy before.

The layers of the cosmos are connected by a central pole or tree that extends from the Beneath World up to the Above World. It is thought of as a sacred center and in each realm that center is associated with a different symbol. In the Beneath World, it is the swirling cross. In This World it is the cross in a circle, while in the Above World it is the cross-in-circle surrounded by a bubble or petaloid pattern. The center in This World is marked by the sacred fire, often built from four logs pointing at the cardinal directions (making the cross-in-circle). The column of smoke it produces rises directly to the sun who is the keeper of moral order and an important inhabitant of the Above World. So that central pole or axis mundi can also be a column of smoke.

Georgia and Tennessee Bowl Giver Pipes

OK, so on to our pipe. This is one of at least four very similar pipes found in Georgia and Tennessee. They all depict a man holding a pottery vessel as he looks up. For this reason, they are called Bowl Giver pipes. The pot is the pipe bowl and a reed would be inserted into the man’s back to make the stem. It was a pipe for smoking, but not just any ordinary pipe.

Hightower Turkey Cock Gorget

In order to understand the meaning of this pipe, we need to jump to another set of Mississippian imagery from northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee. These are shell gorgets decorated in the Hightower style depicting what is often called the Turkey Cock theme. There are a bunch of these gorgets and they all show two birds standing on a flat surface, facing a striped pole. George Lankford has argued that this design actually presents a vision of the cosmos from the side. The birds are two of the four birds conceived of as occupying the cardinal directions—you only see two of the four because you are looking from the side. That striped pole is the center of the cosmos or axis mundi and you’ll notice in extends through the flat surface the birds stand on and also extends upward. That flat surface is This World. The Beneath World is below and the Above World is above it. Nifty, huh?

Earth Pot

So here is where it gets cool and here is where I give credit to my graduate student Johann Sawyer for recognizing something important. In some of the Turkey Cock gorgets, the birds aren’t just standing on a flat surface—they are standing on the rim of a pot. And that pot has some distinctive decorations, mainly what look like lines and circles. Funny thing, but actual pots with that same decoration have been found at Mississippian sites and when you draw out that pattern and flatten it out…it makes a cross with dots in each of the four quadrants. If you add the circle that is the mouth of the pot, then you have the cross-in-circle with four dots at the off angles or, if we are thinking directions, at the ordinals (NW, NE, SW, SE). If you remember, the cross-in-circle is the symbol for the center of This World. Johann calls this the Earth Pot because it is meant to represent the earth. So the birds standing on the rim of the Earth Pot is the same as the birds standing on This World or the earth.

Smoke Substitutes for Striped Pole

What extends down into the Earth Pot? The axis mundi does. This is even more fun. On one of the Turkey Cock gorgets the striped pole forming the center is replaced by a twisted rope-like thing that is smoke. This is called the principle of substitution—smoke substitutes for the striped pole. So smoke is forming the center of the universe and it is rising from the Earth Pot. Just like many Native Americans believe today—the sacred fire resting on the surface of This World connects it to the Above World. Cool, huh?

Do you want to see some more substitutions? Sure you do. In several instances, the whole Earth Pot is abbreviated and substituted with a band with two dots—representing the dots on one side of the Earth Pot—or all four dots plus the cross-in-circle—representing the lines on the pot. Also cool, huh?

Earth Pot Substitutions

Back to the Earth Pot. Smoke isn’t the only thing that comes out of it. Here are two images of two beings emerging from the Earth Pot. In one case they are split by the central axis and in another the second person is represented only by a head. These are the Hero Twins so common sacred narratives throughout North and even Central American. In North America, they play a key role in helping to create the world as we know it today. So, in a sense, creation happens out of the Earth Pot as well. This ain’t no ordinary pot…it’s a really important and powerful one.

Ok, so smoke rising from the Earth Pot can make the cosmic center and forms a means of communicating between This World and the Above World. I think you see where this is going. So, let’s go back to our pipe from Hollywood and also pull in the other three that make the corpus we know about. The guy from Hollywood is just holding a plain pot with no decoration. The other three guys are holding a pot that has four loop handles opposing one another on the edge of the pot. Those loop handles are three-dimensional circles just like the circles that mark the ordinals around the Earth Pot. So…these guys aren’t holding just any pot, they are holding the Earth Pot.

The Bowl Giver and the Earth Pot

Smoking pipes are common in Mississippian contexts. Some are fancy like these and others are pretty plain. It is clear that smoking was something Mississippian people did. In current Native American practice among people whose ancestors lived in northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee, smoking is still an important part of their culture, and that is because it is a fundamental part of religious practice. Tobacco smoke carries prayers upward to beings of the Above World—mostly the sun. More than just a carrier, tobacco is seen as a signal of a covenant or deal between the one saying the prayer and the ones receiving it. Prayers are no good unless they are accompanied by tobacco.

So, if we put all this together—archaeology, Native American beliefs, iconography, current Native American practice—then you get the idea that the Bowl Giver pipes are not just regular smoking pipes. They are objects involved in religious activities or ritual. They are a means of talking with beings of the Above World. The Earth Pot represents This World and the column of smoke rising from the center of This World is the central axis along which prayers and can be sent upward and other things can be sent back down. By the way, this use of archaeology, sacred narrative, and current Native American Practice to understand ancient imagery is the methodology of the San Marcos School of Iconography—named after the workshop I mentioned above.