Horned Serpent

The Horned Serpent is a great water serpent with horns found in the traditions of many Native American nations, a powerful being of rivers, lakes, and the world below, often opposed by the Thunderbirds.

Overview

"Horned Serpent" is not one creature with one story. It is a name scholars use for a widespread family of beings in Native American traditions: huge serpents, usually horned, that live in deep water or beneath the earth and hold great power. Each nation has its own names, stories, and teachings about them, and many of these are sacred. The entries below are examples drawn from published records, not a single shared myth.

In Different Nations

• Cherokee: The Uktena, a serpent as thick as a tree trunk with horns and a blazing crystal crest, recorded by James Mooney in 1900.
• Muscogee (Creek) and other Southeastern peoples: John Swanton recorded stories of horned snakes and of the "tie-snake," a water serpent that drags people into the depths. Pieces of a horned snake's horn were prized as powerful medicine.
• Seneca and other Haudenosaunee: Stories collected by Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt describe horned serpents in lakes and rivers that could take human form and even marry people, and the fire-dragon Gaasyendietha.
• Anishinaabe (Ojibwe and related nations): Great serpents, sometimes called Mishi-ginebig, live alongside the underwater panther in the lakes of the Great Lakes region.
• Dakota and Lakota: Water beings called Unktehi are opposed by the Wakinyan, the Thunder beings.

Related horned or plumed water serpents also appear in the Southwest, such as the Avanyu of Tewa-speaking Pueblos. Their stories belong to their own traditions and should not be merged with those of the East.

Appearance and Powers

Horned serpents are usually described as enormous snakes with horns, sometimes with glittering scales, crests, or wings. They rule the waters and the underworld, can cause floods or drownings, and often hold medicine or crystals of great power. Many traditions set them against the Thunderbirds, beings of the sky whose lightning strikes at them. Hewitt's Seneca sources said these serpents feared the Thunderers and hid in deep water when storms came. Because they are dangerous and sacred, stories about them were in some communities told only in winter, when serpents sleep.

In Ancient Art

Horned and winged serpents appear in the art of the Mississippian culture, about 1200 to 1450 CE, engraved on pottery from Moundville in Alabama and on shell cups from Spiro in Oklahoma. The folklorist George Lankford has argued that the Great Serpent and the underwater panther may be two forms of the same ruler of the Beneath World, who also had a place in the night sky. Such links between ancient art and recorded stories are scholarly interpretations, and they are still debated.

Related

• Uktena: The Uktena is a great horned serpent of Cherokee tradition, as thick as a tree trunk, with a blazing crystal crest called the Ulûñsû'ti on its forehead, and so dangerous that even seeing it could bring death.
• Gaasyendietha: Gaasyendietha is the fire-dragon of Seneca tradition, a powerful serpent-like being identified with the meteor, which lives in deep lakes and rivers and flies between them trailing flames.
• Piasa: The Piasa is a monster once painted on the Mississippi River bluffs near Alton, Illinois, described by Jacques Marquette in 1673 as a horned, scaly creature with a human-like face and a long tail.
• Sisiutl: The Sisiutl is the double-headed serpent of Kwakwaka'wakw tradition on the Northwest Coast, with a serpent head at each end and a human face in the middle, a being of great danger and power linked to warriors.
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Sources and Further Reading

• George E. Lankford, Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America (University of Alabama Press, 2007)
• James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Government Printing Office, 1900)
• John R. Swanton, Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 88 (Government Printing Office, 1929)
• Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt, Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths, Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Government Printing Office, 1918)

Cite this entry: “Horned Serpent,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/horned-serpent.