Here’s our detective work so far in chronological order…
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Indigenous Spirals
In my quick search for symbols and meanings for these specific tribes, I found nothing.
I did learn that UNC Chapel Hill has a dig site in Hillsborough of at least one Occaneechi village. This is close to the Eno. They definitely found pottery and some old, European goods, but there were no twig spirals from what I could find.
When I did a new search for the spiral symbol and indigenous people, sites came up connected to tribes in the southwest. The symbol is found on cave walls and pottery – there were no spirals on the pottery found in Hillsborough, only on the pottery out west.
This was mostly from jewelry sites so I don’t know how true it is, but they listed Navajo, Zuni and Puebloan. The spiral according to these sites seems to represent wind in one legend. Water and creatures from the water in another.
Since these southwest tribes never lived near the Eno River, I decided to look up more about the spiral symbol in general. Turns out the symbol is thousands and thousands of years old and appears in every culture all over the world.
On a tiny scale, it’s the double helixes of our DNA. On a huge scale, it’s the shape of the Milky Way galaxy. Our fingerprints are even spirals. There’s an Egyptian hieroglyph spiral, a Celtic spiral and they found one that was carved in ancient Greece. Those bizarre Nazca lines in Peru that you can only see by plane have a spiral in them. They were even found at a Paleolithic site. Japanese rock gardens, ancient Mayan designs, labyrinths… they’re everywhere.
No one knows exactly what they mean, especially in the really old versions of it. Indigenous people seem to connect it to either wind or water legends — basically things connected with the forces of nature. Some think it’s the cycle of life, death and rebirth. There are carvings of women that place the spiral on her stomach, representing the womb. Whatever it is, they all seem to connect humans to the natural world.
I never loved school and now that I’m done, I refuse to spend endless hours trying to research spirals throughout history. I guess the connection between spirals and nature makes sense — I found them deep in the woods by the Eno. But why were they there?
Then I found the Fibonacci Sequence. My oldest friend is a pretty good coder. He knew all about it – the mathematical pattern comes up a lot in computer programming – but for me it blew my mind. Some of those twig spirals were definitely Fibonacci.
2 comments on Indigenous Spirals
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The Fibonacci Sequence
Just Google it. My head exploded.
The spiral made by the Fibonacci Sequence looks like the spirals I saw in Eno River State Park. There were some 3D ones, but the flatter twig shapes looked just like Fibonacci.
I’m attaching a picture of the number sequenced graphed into a spiral. Has anyone else seen this shape near the Eno?
Some people say it’s Mother Nature’s secret code so this might be a silly question. Eno River State Park is like 4500 acres of nature and the Fibonacci spiral appears all over nature – pine cones, leaf patterns, nautilus shells, pineapples, artichokes.
But I mean twigs bent into that shape?
Or maybe they grow in that shape? I’ve never seen anything like them. When I googled Fibonacci, loads of things in nature pop up, but I couldn’t find a tree or bush whose branches grew out of the ground like that.
Have any of you seen anything like it?
I might be writing to myself or a few random people who stumble across this site, but I really want to know. If anyone is reading, please tell me what you think. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
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Elemental
I’ve been thinking about one of the stories posted in a comment. Her uncle’s friend was pulled into the river by something on the UNC Occaneechi site in Hillsborough in the 80s. There were other weird things that happened like hearing voices and objects moving around, but the big one was connected to the water. The guy was pulled into the river and held under for like a full minute. He was so freaked out he quit the dig.
That sounds nothing like what I saw, but maybe they could be connected? Remember old stories about the elements: fire, earth, air and water? I looked up the classic elements and these four are listed on Wikipedia along with that image I posted of “Leibniz’s representation of the universe as a result of the combination of Aristotle’s four elements.”
Those were considered the elements that made up nature and all matter. Maybe the things I saw were connected to earth and air, but what happened to him was the water element?
Is it possible for nature to be haunted? Or for nature to turn bad?