A lot of heavy academic research is sometimes needed to feed popular-culture fantasy fiction worldbuilding. Crucial to my novel, The Big Cinch, was Picture Cave: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Mississippian Cosmos. Picture Cave documents Mississippi Valley prehistoric cave art. It also shares the story of the cosmos held sacred by the original peoples of North America.
Mississippian Spirituality
Many of the region’s indigenous tribes honored a spiritual entity that ruled the underworld. The “Underwater Spirit” or “Underwater Panther” is sovereign of caves, bodies of water, snakes, and creatures of the night. Most scholars now agree that the Mississippi Valley legend of the “Piasa” represents a version of the Underwater Spirit.
This photo book illustrates that Picture Cave itself is a stunning place, private property and fiercely protected. (And recently sold.) Numerous academics believe this monumentally important archeologic site should have passed to the Osage Nation’s control (the descendants of the Mississippians) and hope that at least that protection will continue under the new owners.
We come to visit you and your works to find what we can learn from you and retrieve what we’ve lost over the centuries. This we would like to preserve. So with your blessing we enter to help both us and our friends with this important project.
William Samuel Fletcher, Osage Elder. July 5, 2005, upon the occasion of the first visit of the Picture Cave Interdisciplinary Project to the cave.
Mississippian Mound Builder Complex
Picture Cave first came to the attention of archeologists at Washington University in St. Louis in 1990. Exploration and study of the cave was a long, complicated process. Researchers believe that ancient individuals traveled from at least a 100-mile radius to the remote cave. There they carry out rituals and paint the astounding images still preserved today, 1000 years later. This is the culture of the Mississippian mound builders exemplified by the great settlement of Cahokia. Picture Cave was, and remains, a sacred place.
Technical Challenges
The book places Picture Cave in context of cave and rock paintings in general as well as details the momentous tasks involved in this project. The bulk of the book, however, is on iconography, with images from the cave and other works as well as interpretation.
Mississippian Iconography
Contemporary Osage artists compare and contrast the Picture Cave images with their artistic heritage. A final section records the reactions of several elders of the Osage nation to visiting Picture Cave and their thoughts on the significance and importance on the cave.
An Object of Art
Picture Cave is an oversized, three hundred plus page “coffee table book” with dozens of color illustrations, diagrams, and charts on glossy paper. Thus, it is an expensive book. Every library, certainly every library in the Midwest USA need to own a copy, in my opinion, because the history contained therein is crucial to our understanding of the world in which we live. The nearby Cahokia Mounds is a World Heritage Site, and Picture Cave is at least as important.
If you enjoyed reading about Picture Care, check out some of my other art blogs: Reframing Portraits: Kehinde Wiley, Scrapbooking Through the Multiverse, and Making Comics by Lynda Barry.
The Big Cinch from Montag Press, is an award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown. Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions…
And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
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