165. Rattlesnake Disk
- Rainey Knudson
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
There’s another way of seeing the constellation Orion. For the Mississippian cultures that flourished in the South and Midwest from about 1100 – 1500 AD, the familiar wintertime constellation didn’t represent a warrior, but a hand: Orion’s belt was the wrist or bracelet, and the star Rigel was the tip of the index finger. In this version, the Orion nebula that forms the warrior’s sword was instead an eye at the center of the hand—a portal into the sky.
The Mississippian peoples, who lived in large towns with thousands of inhabitants, believed the dead proceed on an afterlife journey along the Milky Way. It was called the Path of Souls. The dead accessed that path through the hand constellation, often depicted on pottery and carved stone as a hand with an eye at its center.
It’s tempting to dismiss such cosmology as primitive, but if we think of the eye-as-portal as a symbol for a wormhole, suddenly this symbolism snaps into contemporary focus. This disk, or palette, comes from the Moundville archaeological site in northwest Alabama, found when a farmer turned it up with his plow sometime before 1883. It’s thought that the disk might have been a surface for mixing paint or even preparing hallucinogenic plants for rituals. The disk shows two intertwined rattlesnakes framing the hand-and-eye—are they supernatural figures symbolizing some aspect of the afterlife? We don’t know—so much is unknown about this civilization that flourished and declined before the arrival of Europeans.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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