Hand of god

Two thousand years ago, someone carried a sheet of Appalachian mica more than 400 miles into Ohio, cut it into a human hand nearly a foot tall, then buried it inside a mound. I want to thank @MoundLore, an amazing account well worth following, for alerting me to this amazing object.

Why would someone make an object like this?

Ever heard of The Hand of God constellation?

Engraved shell gorget with hands and spider, from Spiro mounds, Oklahoma. AD 1250-1400...

What is symbolically depicted here? Apparently no one knows...So let's see what happens if we use animal calendar markers...

Spider: Oklahoma's main "spider siting season" is late summer through fall (Jul/Aug-Oct/Nov). This is because this is the brown tarantula mating season, when these giant spiders roam around looking for mates...

So spider as an animal calendar marker points at Jul/Aug...

So???

Spider is depicted in the middle of the sun. Jul/Aug is the hottest time of the year in Oklahoma...

Ok...What about the hands...Well that is very very interesting...and supper cool...

This is the so called "Hand Eye Symbol", the most famous symbol of the Mississippian culture. And the symbol whose meaning "is obscure, its true meaning has been lost in the midst of time"...

Let me again try to apply animal calendar markers to this symbol and see what "jumps out at us"...

This is te Moundville Disc - engraved circular palette with hand-and-eye motif and intertwined rattlesnakes with red tongues. Moundville, Alabama, A.D. 1300 - 1450...

Why rattlesnakes? In Oklahoma and Alabama, the rattlesnake mating season starts in Jul/Aug and lasts until Oct/Nov...Overlapping with brown tarantula mating season...And during that time rattlesnakes get intertwined (males fight for females)...

So I would propose that the hands circling around the tarantula on the Oklahoma gorget, are the same hands from "Hand Eye Symbol" on the Alabama disc, and that these hands are linked to something that happens in Jul/Aug...

Jul/Aug, the hottest time of the year. Hence fiery red snake tongues...Snake is a pure solar animal. It is in our world when sun is here (day, hot half of the year) and it is in the underworld when sun is there (night, cold half of the year)...

I talked about snake as the solar symbol from around the world in many of my posts...

Also I already talked about rattlesnakes as animal calendar marker for Jul/Aug used by Native Americans in my post "Snake dance" where I talk about the symbolic meaning of the Hopi ritual snake dance. Snakes as animal calendar markers for monsoon season in SW US...

Now, "there seems to be a common belief by people from different Oklahoma tribes descended from the Cississippian culture (ancestral to the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole), that the Hand Eye symbol is (somehow) related to the ascend to the Otherworld (Heaven)"...

According to their belief, to reach the Otherworld the soul had to undertake a journey along the Path of Souls, the Milky Way...

This is really interesting. I only the other day talked about the exact same "Highway to Heaven" from Egyptian mythology in my post "Nut":

During Jul/Aug/Sep it can be seen in the south/southwest, as towering vertical "river" in the sky...

Running parallel to the Nile and touching it far down south/southwest, at it's source...

Which is very interesting because Jul/Aug/Sep is the time of the annual Nile flood, and this is the same time when the Milky Way, the Heavenly Nile truly becomes the reflection of the Terrestrial Nile. Or is it the other way round? As above so below? At the same time the southward bird migration starts from Duat into Egypt...And Egyptians believed that birds were the carriers of the souls between this and the other world...

Cool? I think so...

Also, remember this?

One of Serbian names for Milky Way is "Jov's river". And in Serbian tradition, it is this river that a soul needs to cross to reach "The other world"...

And who do the souls meet on the bank of this heavenly river? Nikola, "patron saint" of boatmen...

I talk about this in my post "Jovanova struga"...

The Native Americans believed that the gate through which the soul had to go through to reach the Path of Souls (Milky Way) was in the constellation Hand...

This constellation is known to us in the West as Orion...

Interestingly, two things happen in the sky in Jul/Aug in Oklahoma:

Orion rises just before the sun...

Here is the same sky but with Mississippian constellations. Hand constellation rising before the sun...

I think this is the reason why we have an eye in the hand. It means: "constellation Hand visible just before the sun, rising with the sun, Heliacal rising of the constellation Hand (of god)"...

I talked about the link between Eye and Sun symbolism first in my post "Svetovid" about the meaning of the name of the Slavic sun god Svetovid...

Utu, Sun: 𒀭𒌓

According to this table, this means god, heaven + day = sun...

Did the god sign originally mean shiny thing? Did the day sign originally mean "eye"? 

If so: shiny thing + eye = to see = sun? 

Like Slavic Svetovid = light + to see  

And then I talked about it in my post "Sun eyes"

Skull with amber discs on clay in eye-sockets. Dated to the 4th mill BC. Latvia. 

One of many amber "sun" disc (obverse (sun cross), reverse (sun rays) and cross-section) made by the same culture...And Sumerian symbol for sun...

Sun + Eye = Sight

So in Jul/Aug, during the hottest time of the year, when tarantulas start wandering around and rattlesnakes dance, the Hand constellation rises with the sun. So far so interesting. But what does any of this have to do with the "ascent to the Otherworld (Heaven)"???

By "pure coincidence", this is also the time of the year when Milky Way, the "Path of the Souls", is in vertical position above Oklahoma, creating literal "Path from Earth to Heaven" which souls can use to "ascent to the Otherworld (Heaven)"...

Super cool, right?

So thank's to animal calendar markers we were (I think) able to decipher one of the most intriguing Native American symbols...

What a surprise...Again...Not...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...