About Cohokia's Implicitly Eschatological Social Structure

There are many threads to study for clues to the circumstances of history that have led to the end of civilizations. Select historians have on occasion sought for a methodical abstraction of factors in end of civilization studies. Abstraction of factors causing the end of civilization could lead to the development of research analysis devices to prevent the end of the present civilization.

Perhaps the effort of historians like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler amongst others to discover historical cycles is wasted. Though cycles of growth, decay and collapse of civilization may seem to exist because of common historical courses providing the appearance of a cycle, it may be illusory, and abstract analysis thus extracts significant yet not historically determinative events.

The mystery of the Red Horned man revolving around the burial at Mound 72 at Cohokia is such an indicator event of history that may lead or mislead abstract analysis of end of civilization interpretations.

Cohokia was the mysterious pinnacle of pre-Columbian American civilization within the area that would become the United States. Located in the Mississippi flood plain in the area of present day St. Louis, Cohokia was a civilization comparable to those of ancient Mesopotamia. With tens of thousands of people living in an advanced society that exploded into construction suddenly about the year 1050 its phase of being lasted only a couple of hundred years. It some respects the mysteries surrounding the decline and fall of Cohokia resemble those of the rise and potential fall of the modern day United States of America.

Reading an excellent book on Cohokia by the scholar Timothy Pauketat, the archeological history of Cohokia is uncovered methodically. Eventually we reach the circumstances of the excavation and explanation of the fabulous mound 72 and its contents that were laid out so carefully with site of the central plaza and the 130 foot tall pyramid known today as Monks Mound.

What may be learned and abstracted from the contents of mound 72-a vast ceremonial burial with hundreds of bodies of social class selections cast in human sacrifice to honor the pair of headless male twins buried on top of each other at the center, within a Toynbean context providing evidence for the end of civilization at Cohokia is entirely speculative. Philosophy is often a speculative endeavor however, with that we are comfortable enough.

Philosophy before the rise of science commonly was the speculative art of cosmology, government, being, thought and mind. Parmenides of ancient Greece was an excellent theoretician who would be comfortable with contemporary cosmological contemplations about space and what the Universe exists in. Aristotle developed classical logic and categories for scientific thought. Philosophy continued as a developer of science until philosopher scientists such as Isaac Newton continued on with science as a more specialized branch. Then philosophy largely turned toward subjective analysis and epistemology as its essential concerns.

Heraclitus and Parmenides of ancient Greece were also interested in theory of mind, and that continuity of philosophical work continued until the 20th century with Jean Paul Sartre writing existential works developing rationalist exposition begun by Rene' Descartes. Since Leibnitz and later Frege developed symbolic logic, philosophy has moved further toward analytic philosophical analysis of language and the subjective relation to the objective or real world. Faith of course is a bridge by the subjective to the objective and temporal world with a belief that the Creator of the Objective and subjective experience content will recreate and resurrect the individual soul.

We return to the topic of the Red Horned man at the heart of the mystery of mound 72 at Cohokia. Seemingly the burial events of the headless twin men surrounded by four headless and handles men in another cluster, with an intricate pit of 53 young women sacrificed with their heads on brings us to wonder of the symbolism and meaning of the event that occurred as a special process at Cohokia. Because the sacrificial motif was constructed at the permanent core of the short lived civilization it is important to know what the meaning was of the bodies placed within view of the Temple at the top of the 3rdlargest pyramid built in pre-Colombian America.

Cave paintings from Wisconsin and in Cohokia provide clues to the identity of the headless male VIPs. One was probably the Red Horn and the other his alter ego.

Cohokia was a matriarchal society that evolved in social power perhaps through developing the sports game of chunky that spread over much f the range of the eventual United States. Chunky fields and equipment made in Cohokia were as common as NFL stadiums of today-or more so.
Cohokia may have developed its owner from the architectural and astronomical creativity that made the civilization boom from a simple agrarian foundation alternatively. Perhaps wandering pre-Columbian travelers from Europe or New Foundland arrived with special knowledge, or a few people from Meso-America arrived with development plans.

Mound 72 occurs within a tremendous Woodhenge of ancient cypress logs. The layout of corpses and clumps of special arrowheads within pointing north west and south east were made to coincide with the annual solstices This is not unlike the Irish mound at Newgrange and numerous other sites in the Americas. The burials are a rich and lavish affair for the time, with tens of thousands of beads in a cape coat included along with valuable shells.

Cohokia was an oddity for the land that would become the United States. It was the first known, actual civilization amidst a land of more rural and levelheaded people without such an extravagant cosmology-human sacrifice and cult worship focus in honor surrounding the matrilineal political-social structure. I should say that if Cohokian development was stimulated by the arrival of knowledgeable Albs, the demise of the society following their deaths (few in number) or merger into the Cohokian race was inevitable as the knowledge brought had been spent and was not reinforced or added to by the parent society very distant. A two hundred fifty-year life span of Cohokia would be about right, yet their may darker and other answers to the mysterious rise and falloff the first American civilization.

The Red Horned man was known as he who-wears-human- hands for earrings. Some suspect that there was a real historical person that inspired these mythic legends around tribes from the Iowa/Sioux to the Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin and others. The description of the talking heads in Pauketat’s book and faces that appeared on the suspended ears, hands or heads of the Red Horn man read like something that could have been in Ken Kesey’s ‘The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test’ set in Vietnam instead of Missouri. The Red Horn man’s alter ego brother-he-who-spits-seeds is also a mystery.

One might initially interpret the Red Horn man as some kind of horny, sex crazed ultra warrior-killer. Because of his evening star alter ego twin that spits seeds, we might think of him as a horny butch bisexual warrior of demonic power. As Christians we might be reminded of the prophecies regarding the big horn and little horns of the Biblical prophecy. As Americans we might be reminded of the demise of George Armstrong Custer and his twice awarded medal of honor brother at the Indian battle of the Little Big Horn, and perhaps also reminded of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky blue dress seed spitting saga in the line of four bad Presidents of the United Sates slumping the U.S. economy and the present era of a federal effort to homosexualize the military under Defense Secretary Gates with such apposite morphology for the effort.

In the matriarchal political hierarchy of Cohokia the concept of two headless, witless, hedonist male objects of fetish sacrificed as the role of males as chunky players and impregnators of female rulers gains credibility as an end of civilization cycle. Toynbee and other historians have noted the rise of female power in politics and an end of civilization phenomena. Though the U.S. House of Representatives had Nancy Pelosi as the Majority Speaker and Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State simultaneously until the last election Nov. 2nd, that does not comprise a hierarchy of matrilineal supremacy for itself and the year 2012 may pass without and end of civilization event in the United States.

It is interesting to compare the expansion of homosexual marriage polities and witless males, sports like chunky and football in Oregon, Massachusetts and elsewhere with that of Cohokia and the end of civilization. Red Horn and his brother may not at all represent bisexual gloriousness actualized as manhood pets of a matriarchal Cohokian polity. Like many ruling elites of other societies the Cohokian elites occasionally purged rivals to fill an office opening. The burial of so many young women surrounding the headless males may have been a process of eliminating a rival female ruling line for political ascendency. Maybe the twins buried at the center were simply symbolic service studs sacrificed as compensation for the unfortunate women dispatched to the bureaucratic hierarchy of the underworld.

Payton Manning playing for the Indianapolis Colts may be the all-time best quarterback in football history, yet that does not bring us to the all time Red Horn and his twin of the dark side at Mound 72. Payton does have a brother playing for the Giants of New York, and Giants figure large in the Red Horn mythos warring against the good. One wonders if national geography helps develop the construction of recurrent mythologies in discontiguous social structures.

Recurrent elements of the end of civilization may not be found in the pyramid at Cholulu or that of Cohokia, but within our own subjective and thoughtless over-use of natural resources while games playing and stupidly devoted to cultic bureaucratic political structures.
Determinist disasters in European, Chinese and other civilizations may provide insights to how the end of the first American civilization at Cohokia may hold clues to patterns for the approaching of the second America civilization if any.

The end of the second American civilization could occur as early as the 2012 election season if we place credibility in economic and deficit forecasts, reliance on foreign fossil fuels, illegal immigration, La Migra’s control of just 23% of the U.S.-Mexico border or the Mayan calendar’s conclusion in 2012. On the bright side, Mayan language was spoken by the designers of the Gregorian calendar.

http://www.hotcakencyclopedia.com/ho.Gottschall.html cave paintings and a new interpretation of Red Horn & Brother

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popol_Vuh Mayan epic. compare similarities of the brotherss to Red Horn and his brother.