Whirlwind of Power: Mississippian Tornado Iconography and Mythology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mississippian cosmologies were inextricably entangled with the sacred environment and landscape, often materialized through iconographic imagery and motifs. One example of such interwoven relationships may be seen in the imagery of other-than human beings; that is, preternaturals who control and often manifest themselves as weather phenomena. Examples of known weather spirits include Thunder Boy and Lightning Boy, Thunderbirds or Thunderers, and underworld water spirits, including Cat Serpents and the Great Serpent. However, one powerful weather phenomenon remains elusive in the archaeological record, although it frequently appears in ethnohistoric accounts as the provider and destroyer of life with the ability to transcend the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds, in addition to functioning as an axis mundi. I argue that through the supplication of a tornado deity, elites demonstrated their association with powerful weather phenomena. In this presentation I suggest that the Master of Breath, referred to as a whirlwind in the American Southwest, is a key deity in Mississippian weather cosmology, and that tornado iconographic references are visualized in rock art, ceramic vessels, and marine shell media.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33142