292 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Condor survived to find only his sister, some birds, and a single raccoon were left
alive. A new humanity was born from the incestuous relationship of Condor and
his sister. Wiyot tradition mandated that a chief take his sister as bride, a custom
reminiscent of the Egyptian pharaohs, if only ritually, to commemorate his people’s
descent from the ancestral pair that escaped the flood.Wolf Clan
The Worak, a tribal history of Wisconsin’s Ho Chunk or Winnebago Indians,
tells of their ancestral Wolf Clan, whose leader dwelt in “a great lodge” on an
island in the ocean where the sun rises. This progenitor had 10 sons, one of whom
came to Turtle Island (North America) with his fellow clansmen and women. In
time, they intermarried with the natives and established four clans: the White
Wolf, Green Hair, Gray Wolf, and Black Wolf. The quartet was so named in
association with the four cardinal directions which streamed outward from their
old oceanic homeland at the center of the world. Their first child born in the new
land was called “Wave,” after the bow-wave of the vessel that brought them from
the great lodge. Likewise, Plato told how the sea-god, Poseidon, sired 10 sons to
become the kings of Atlantis.
In an alternate version of the Winnebago myth, “the original Wolf brothers
appeared from the bottom of the ocean,” where their ancestral island had been
swallowed up in a terrible deluge. As the disturbed seas began to calm down, the
Wakt’cexi, a water-spirit, arose from the waves, wearing a horned helmet, and led
the survivors across the ocean on improvised rafts to the new land. Thereafter, all
the Wolf clans were known as “water clans.” Anthropologist Paul Radin writes,
“There may be some significance in the origin legends of some of the clans which
claim that they came from over the sea, but it is utterly impossible to determine
whether we are here dealing with a myth pure and simple, or with a vague memory
of some historical happening.”
But as though to confirm the Ho Chunk story of the horned Wakt’cexi, two
effigy mounds of gigantic proportions were found in Wisconsin. They represent
the water-spirit that led the Wolf Clan ancestors of the Winnebago from the Great
Flood. One of the geoglyphs still exists, although in mutilated form, on the slope
of a hill in Greenfield Township, outside Baraboo. Road construction cut off the
legs below his knees around 1901, but the hill-figure is otherwise intact. He is 214
feet long, 30 feet across at the shoulders, and oriented westward, as though walking
from the east and the flood that drowned “the great lodge.” His horned helmet
identifies him as the Wakt’cexi deluge hero. The companion figure, also in Sauk
County, about 30 miles northwest, was drowned under several fathoms of river
by a dam project in the 1930s. In any case, these two horned geoglyphs clearly
memorialize the Atlantean beginnings clearly defined by the Worak tradition of
Wolf Clan origins.
(See Man Mounds, Wilmington Long Man)