A spiritual sandwich with a hungry eye...

As discussed by Birmingham and Eisenberg, the effigy mounds can be seen as the symbolic representation the spirits/animals in this society's idea of a three part world--upperworld and lowerworld (both water and earth). Various animals correspond to these distinct parts, such as the thunderbird shaped mounds representing the upperworld. This idea is also reaffirmed by the same type of upper/lower world representation and animal symbols present in the pottery of this period. With regards to Geertz, this three-part system is the "general order of existence" of the people in this culture. 

While the structure of this "order of existence" may be fairly self-explanatory, what raises a few questions in my mind is the symbols themselves. We believe that they represent animals of the different layers or domains of the earth, but a key element of a symbol is the idea that someone else will perceive and recognize it. Who is the "audience" of this cultures symbols? With the conical mounds it could have been said that anyone who viewed the large land mass would realize that it was a marker (potentially for both a group's territory and their dead). However, the effigy mounds, while still large land masses, also have the large-scale image component. One would think that if the image was meant for other humans to see, the animal would have been represented vertically like a statue. Instead the images are horizontal, and often only clearly viewed from an arial vantage point or on a map. I feel that this component to the symbol suggests that the audience for these images is one that is non-human. Of the three levels (sky, land and water), humans (at this point in time) occupied just the land and the people in this culture have found deities or spirits in the other two--water spirits that go under ground via bodies of water and more cosmic or heavenly spirits that reside above (i.e. the thunderbird and celestial bodies). These other two levels would have the only practical vantage points for viewing the horizontally oriented images. Because of this, I feel that it is possible to conclude that the symbols in some respects were meant to be viewed by the spirits of this time, whether they had to look up or look down.