“The Piasa Project”
Yeah, sounds official, looks spiffy in print. Sounds like an acronym a bit too. It isn’t, it just does. It’s a good place to start on explaining what all this is fuss I’m going to the trouble of building a blog on is really about…
I have to tell you first off that acronyms annoy me, my husband too. I asked a guy the other night what was the actual name of the organization that he was a part of and he spouted off a long string of “alphabet soup.” So, I asked him to explain what he meant, so he told me that it used to be part of …
Well, I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that he rattled off another long string of still more unidentifiable letters, and still NOT an actual name. I’m not too sure he even knew what the full name of his organization was.
Argh, people and power games, clearly a case of somebody in charge asserting control by only giving the full spiel to the anointed inner circle… sounds more like a religion than science to me… whoops, maybe it does sound like science academia these days after all . . . blech….
But, as always, I’m off task again. Time to turn around and get back on the trail. Let’s start with the critter behind all of this bickering, shall we???
The Piasa…
People have been smugly saying that the Piasa was a bird monster for a long while now.
People have also been saying that it’s a bird monster in Alton, Illinois, and patting themselves on the back for their cleverness and historical awareness and accuracy.
Nope, wrong on both fronts.
We had a big thrill not too long back when some bright soul got on Wikipedia and fixed that error. We literally celebrated, whooped it up big time…Then as all things Wiki tend to do…it got changed back to wrong again…we just about cried…
Well, how devoting a little time for some truth telling here.
I promise that I won’t change it later.
Going back to the early records, Father Marquette didn’t say “bird,” or wings. He didn’t use singular terms at all when you get down to. He said “two beasts.” He was a naturalist, he knew the difference.
Go a little less far back, and you find Henry Lewis, lithographer. You run into another big fiction about the Piasa right there … “no surviving pictures of the Piasa”… another wrong but almost universally accepted certitude. Lewis painted lots of pictures of the Upper Mississippi Valley region. At least one is in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum. This guy was really, really good, he was obsessive. The amount of detail in his stuff . . . staggering….
Lewis painted a picture which in the initial publication in Germany of his book of Lithogrpahs was called “Der Piasa Felshen” … don’t quote me on the spelling, I’m not sure about the “H.”
It shows the truth. NO BIRD… well, not exactly a bird… but birds don’t have four legs… you’d argue… monster bird …I still say, “naaaah.” A closer examination of the picture gives lots of other opportunities to mutter “naaah” as well.
1. The background skyline does not match anywhere in present day Alton, Illinois.
2. The background skyline DOES match a spot in present day Elsah, Illinois. (so much for Alton’s ownership claims).
3. The shape of the “field” in which the art work was done is not one which was used by either Native Americans of the region or Europeans. It’s a flattened arch, nearly a rectangle.
4. There is something between the “horns” -- a clearly etched circle. Why isn’t anybody looking at that bit? Eh???
5. The feet are wrong. Native peoples of the region didn’t draw stuff that clunky. When they made feet on a critter, even when it was fanciful and composite, they did WAY better than that. And they made them uniform, but I’ve said WAY more on all that elsewhere don’t want to get hung up on it here.
6. Why all that blank space? If the artists who made the Piasa went to the trouble of shaping a devoted space it hold it, then went to all that trouble to carve it into the cliff face, why is so much of the space filled with … zilch…zero.. nada… blank … nothingness… hhhmmmm…
7. Maybe the color of the stone has a tale to tell… why is all that background lighter that the surrounding natural stone but blank now… I have been there, to the site Lewis painted … that kind of stone weathers and darkens over time… the Piasa in the midst of the space is “grayer” and the background around it isn’t.
8. And, why are those native guys with rifles shooting the “bleeeeeep” out of it, even as Lewis is doing his thing with paint & canvas??? Apparently that was the SOP for local tribes, see Piasa, shoot Piasa… I’ve heard of local rivalries but this is ridiculous.
Aaahh, ‘nuf rattled off on that rant for today. I have get back to my point again.
Just consider this one conundrum settled now, all the stories you have heard and believed for just about forever are wrong. Flat out and almost completely and uniformly WRONG.
So, to start off our part of the whole crazy Piasa saga properly …
One day at work, my husband saw an article on the Piasa in a local small press paper/magazine, and he said to himself, “that critter is NOT local, I should write an article about that, but….”, and I said, “go for it…”
He did, I edited, he submitted it, our editor, said “cool” and published it. And that was the end of it... We hadn’t even found the picture by Lewis at that point … end of story … right???
Ooops … yet another wrong answer to the question of the Piasa …
Golly, woulda’ thunk you’d have seen that coming a mile off …
Ah, heck, you’re smart enough to have read all the way down to this point on the page…
You probably did expect my little bombshell after all…
Good for you.
Just you wait till you hear what happened next…
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