Blog Question for Week #2

The animals represented by the effigy mounds strike me as being very different from both the paintings we saw in the Lascaux Cave as well as the our own use of animals today. This is because I really did not see religion in either of these, whereas I believe that the Indian mounds are very religious symbols. The main reason that I believe the Indian mounds to be religious is because they seems to be an attempt to understand the unexplainable, which I believe to be the most important aspect of religion.

The reason that the mounds were built was to try to make a connection with, or understand the things that they could not explain. This fits in very well with Geertz’s definition which says that religion is “a set of symbols” (the animal-mounds) “which establish long-lasting moods and motivations in men.” These mounds obviously had long lasting effects because they were very intricate and would have taken a long time to build. The book makes many references to the idea that the Indians believed in god-like animal spirits as well as some sort of afterlife. It seemed like they tried to explain acts of nature, like lightning, by attributing it to higher beings. Similarly they could not understand why birds could fly, which is probably why birds became associated with the idea of the upper world. This lends to Geertz’s idea that religion seems to attempt to answer the questions about our “general order of existence.”

Although the cave paintings were also of animals, they seem to lack the same importance. The paintings were not often viewed whereas the mounds were not only frequently seen and used in ceremonies, but also needed a lot of man power to create which shows that it must have had a special meaning for the entire group. The symbols in society today cannot be compared to the mounds because we do not look to the Chicago cubs to explain the meaning of life.