At Moundville, mounds were built in a very orderly arrangement over about 100 years and surrounded by an immense wall made from tens of thousands of logs, requiring the manpower and allegiance of thousands of people. Native Mississippian political and sacred beliefs were intertwined, and archaeologists conclude that sacred symbols on stone artifacts, shell ornaments, finely made pottery, and embossed sheet copper linked ruling elites with heavenly powers and supernatural beings believed to control nature, warfare, and access to the afterlife. People believed that obedience to rulers' demands for goods and labor would be rewarded with good fortune in this life and the afterlife. A powerful religious image at Moundville was the Hand and Eye motif, best known from Moundville's Rattlesnake Disk, with many variations appearing in pottery, copper, stone, and shell artifacts. Stories passed down among various tribes tell of the dead entering the afterlife through an opening marked by a great warrior's hand in the sky, sometimes described as the constellation Orion with a faint cluster of stars in its palm serving as a portal to the Path of Souls, and researchers speculate that the Hand and Eye represents this constellation. After the mounds were completed, the number of people living at Moundville declined while the number buried there increased dramatically, suggesting that if rulers persuaded people that burial at Moundville was the proper way to enter the Path of Souls, that belief could greatly strengthen elite power.