Saturday 11 March 2023

Rain cloud

A "mysterious" creature depicted on the rocks of North Eastern Arizona.  Holbrook area. Pic by Mike Davenport...

Mysterious...Not really...It's our old friend, the Big Horned God of Rain and Grain, with his holy animal, the Big Horn Sheep...

I wrote about this god in my post "Alosaka"...

He is basically a deified Desert Big Horn sheep, an animal calendar marker, marking the mating season of these wild sheep (Jul-Oct), which coincides with the Southwestern Monsoon season...


This is climate chart for Arizona...That spike you see in Jul/Aug/Sep is the monsoon...Only the most important annual event, the one that makes grain (maize) agriculture (and life) possible in Arizona...

So that explains the god's horns and the sheep. But what about the polkadots "dress" the god I wearing? Is this just fashion statement, or is this a symbol as well?

Now this dude is the god of grain, maize to be more precise. If you wanted to symbolically depict that, you could depict the god's body as a maize ear... Polkadots being maize seeds...


This dude is also s god of rain...And a common way of depicting rain is a rain drops, coming out of a rain cloud... Polkadots being raindrops...

The monsoon in Arizona is characterized by localised heavy downpours, called "micro bursts" or "rain bombs", and which have exactly the shape of the "polkadots dress"...

Which is why rocks in the South West of the USA are covered with mysterious legless creatures, which are linked with Big Horned sheep, or Horned snakes...

I talked about these dudes in my post "Horned serpent"...

So if you wanted to depict a "rain and grain" god, a "polkadots", maize ear/rain downpour shaped "dress" is a perfect symbolic choice. I think...

Here is another deified rain bomb cloud with bighorn sheep hornsAn amazing petroglyph from Utah, USA. Pic by Wayne David. 


To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...

1 comment:

  1. K. Lane. Pounding the ground for the thunder god: Sounding platforms in the Prehispanic Andes (CE 1000 1532). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Vol. 71, September 2023, 101515. doi: 10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515.

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