http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2010/05/woodbury-man-claims-to-have-found.html
“At dawn, when the grandmother stared into the dark âsĭ (Women's Moon Lodge), she saw that her grandson shape-shifted into a giant horned serpent, or Uktena, curled up like a fetus within the cramped space. With human legs and deer head attached to a reptilian body, the partly transformed snake boy slithered through the settlement to a deep pool at a nearby bend in the river, where he disappeared under the water. Being a medicine person like her grandson, the grandmother eventually entered the pool too (Mooney 1900:304).” - Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-98. Part 1, Government Printing Office: Washington D.C.
J. Loubser includes the quote in The Socio-Economic and Ritual
Contexts of Petroglyph Boulders in the Southeastern United States. His paper can be read here:
Or in part here: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/02/mooneys-deer-head-uktena-and-some.html
Fig. 2: Representation
of nested townhouses on the southeastern Indian landscape.
"The Cherokees believed that thunder was a horned snake within the rain
which connected the sky vault, the human-built houses on earth, and the
underground or underwater townhouses (Mooney 1900:481)."
