Culture
American Folklore
Location
Ohio, United States
Key Figures
The Serpent
Images via Wikimedia Commons
The Myth
The story as told by the culture
No written record from the builders of Serpent Mound survives. The mound speaks entirely through its form: a serpent, 1,348 feet long and roughly 3 feet tall, its body curving in seven deep coils along the edge of a plateau overlooking Brush Creek. At its western end, the serpent's open jaws appear to be swallowing an oval shape — variously interpreted as an egg, the sun, or a frog.
The serpent is a universal symbol in the mythologies of Eastern Woodland peoples. The Underwater Panther and the Horned Serpent are powerful figures in the cosmologies of the Shawnee, Miami, and other peoples who inhabited Ohio in later centuries. Whether the builders of the mound intended the same associations is unknowable — but the form is unmistakable. This is a serpent. It was placed here deliberately. And its head points at the summer solstice sunset.
The oval in the serpent's jaws aligns with the setting sun on the summer solstice. Additional alignments with solstice sunrise, equinox sunrise, and lunar standstill positions have been proposed, suggesting the mound functioned as an astronomical instrument — a calendar built into the earth in the shape of a living thing.
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Myth types
The Place
The physical location today
Serpent Mound sits on a plateau above Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio — deep rural Appalachia, roughly 75 miles east of Cincinnati. The site is managed by the Ohio History Connection as a state memorial. A paved path follows the serpent's length, and an observation tower provides an overhead view.
The hilltop itself sits within the Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion Structure — a geological formation roughly 4.5 miles across, likely caused by a meteorite impact approximately 300 million years ago. The builders placed their serpent on the rim of an ancient impact crater. Whether they knew what lay beneath them is one of the site's many unanswerable questions.
Visit information
Access
State memorial — small entrance fee
Nearest city
Hillsboro, OH (20 miles north)
Notes
Best visited on the summer solstice for the jaw/sunset alignment. The observation tower is essential for seeing the full form. Rural area — limited services nearby.
The History
What archaeology and scholarship tell us
Dating Serpent Mound has been contentious. Earlier attributions placed it with the Adena culture (circa 800 BCE-100 CE), but radiocarbon dating of charcoal from within the mound in 1996 yielded dates around 1070 CE, coinciding with the Fort Ancient culture and — notably — with the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066 and the supernova of 1054 (which created the Crab Nebula).
Some researchers have proposed that the mound was built in response to one of these celestial events. If the 1070 date is correct, the serpent swallowing a cosmic object takes on a specific and startling meaning.
The mound was first surveyed by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis in 1846. Frederic Ward Putnam of Harvard's Peabody Museum raised funds to purchase the site in the 1880s, preventing its destruction by farming. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and is on the U.S. Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Approximately 1070 CE (disputed; possibly much older)
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