Tribal: Great Horned Serpent

The Great Horned Serpent is something that crawled out of my Tribal brain a while back. This sketch dates to 1999.

The Great Horned Serpent, in my mind, is a mega-fauna creature that exists in the world of my own private tribal-based village. The icon of the spiraled creature and the mixture of serpent and stag is not entirely my own creation.

In the legends of the Native peoples of North America, the creature known as "Uktena" is very similar; so much similar that I'm not exactly sure that I didn't pick up on the details of the creature and just re-interpret it for my tribal society.

I knew about the Uktena as it was the Tribe of Garou that I played back in the day. the Uktena were secretive and generally mistrusted amongst Garou society so I fit in perfectly.

The Great Horned Serpent in my tribal society was a source of wisdom; found in lakes and rivers and streams. The Serpent and its children were to be honored with the Spiral Dance and with song. It kept the rains coming to nourish the fields and called the deer to the streams to drink so that we could hunt them.

-T