Black Elk

In Black Elk Speaks, he accounts the shape of human being to be like a hole in time-space through which vision energy penetrates. And for those familiar with the laws of physics realized that the effect of light streaming through a small pinhole will produce a diffraction pattern of energy exfoliation. And in much the same way events in phenomenal time-space have an exfoliate pattern that often resemble geometric shapes and forms. But unfortunately to the egotistical mind the pattern of history is a straight line and we do the best that we can to contort and contract our intelligence and sensibilities to following a line or another. And we think that the moving from one pattern to another is progress but actually in terms of spirituality it's simply a change of phase.

For a seer and a sage on the order of Black Elk when he recounts his life in Black Elk Speaks the average normal pedestrian reader will see a sequential line of development and conclude that Black Elk was a failure because Black Elk draws this particular line in his work and in his book. But the fact is Black Elk is more alive in 1982 than when he passed away or then 50 years ago when he dictated Black Elk Speaks to John Neihardt in Anderson, South Dakota because the pattern of Black Elk's vision is still unfolding and it's only in our time that we're able to appreciate the fullness of its form and its applicability for our country.

In a similar vein, the lecture tonight is one of a long sequence of lectures that have shown American history in its more formative religious angles and it's mystical visions. And if you recall we began with the American Indian experience and how the First Great Indian War under the aegis and leadership of an Indian who historically is referred to as King Philip who organized the Narragansett Indians and the Powhatan at War about 1675, 1676 and how this was the first time the great vision of the threat of the savage reared its ugly head in United States history and how from time to time the image kept reoccurring coming back intertwining with the image of the noble Red man the basic natural visionary. With Black Elk we not only end this series and bring it to some fruition but we also look to the braiding of these two polarities of stereotype and can appreciate them that the lines that are developed by history draw cross-sections through an interpenetrating pattern of large episodic unfoldings that have a coherency in their own right. And Black Elk's vision is rather like the coloring in of one of these gray patterns and he recounts toward the end of Black Elk Speaks how can he have stopped to his great central vision. He would have been much better off rather than to try to jump from one vision to another or perhaps another that we are given a formative fount at some time in our lives which has a spiritual center out of which we may learn to see patterns hold. And by patiently staying to that design we may appreciate the structure of all designs no matter where they originate or what their purpose might be.

I will try to limit myself to Black Elk Speaks. The other well-known book by Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe, I will bring in occasionally but I think that rather the seven rituals of The Sacred Pipe should be presented in a context by themselves. And we’ll see about the next Summer Solstice program about bringing The Sacred Pipe as a focus for the programs.

I have brought a few artifacts from the PRS Library here and during the break some of you can see this is a red clay calumet and this Dakota people held the ground where the sacred red clay was formed. And this shaft of course has been fashioned anew. And we also have here at the PRS Library, Sitting Bull’s medicine bundle which has been cared for by Mr. Hall for quite a long time here and I think I'm the first in many many many decades to bring it out and show it publicly. This is horsehair dyed scarlet with beadwork and these items are kept here at PRS quite safe and displayed only occasionally for special occasions.

Black Elk in order to present himself in 1932 had been approached many times by writers to tell his story and it wasn't until John Neihardt approached him that he found the right vehicle through which to translate his vision because he began to suspect by 1932 that the confines of his people of his tribe would have to be enlarged to include a much wider audience perhaps as he saw in his dog vision by the faces of babies in the clouds around the angelic figures that there were generations as yet unborn at that time who would need to have presented to them the veracity of a complete visionary pattern that came from the Great Spirit in terms of this particular country.

And so Black Elk gave for the very first time in his life the complete vision of his life in Black Elk Speaks. It's the centerpiece of the work as we'll see. I want to show before I start on him though a photograph taken at the end of World War Two, that we have here at the PRS library, so that you get some idea of the stature and greatness of the individual. He's fully of the stature of Emerson or Jefferson or any of the other figures that we have here in this course series. And you may see these of course close up during the break. We'll have a break in about an hour.

He begins, “My friend I'm going to tell you the story of my life as you wish. If it were only the story of my life I think that I would not tell it. For what is one man that he should make much of his winters even when they bend him like a heavy snow. So many other men have lived and shall live but this story is but grass upon the hills.”

So he is not telling his story as the accounting of a life shooting meteor like across phenomenal time-space but rather for the visionary intent. And he relates that he was born in 1863 late in December and for the first few years of his life the old timeless pattern upon the prairies played itself out. There was the hunting and garnering of the buffalo mainly the gathering of various foodstuffs in their season. There was the coming of winter and the moving of the camps throughout the seasons and there was a natural flow in play. When Black Elk began to reach the age of 8 or 9, when the intelligence of the child suddenly asymptotically opens up and they realize that they belong not just to themselves and not just to their family or their condition, the inner spirit resources suddenly open the doors of self-perception to include also for the very first time a sense of context. And for a visionary child like Black Elk or someone like William Blake, for another example, this opening up of including the context as well as the form of the individual produces this sudden flash of intuition. For most persons it might occur harmlessly as a dream or a visionary sequence or perhaps thoughts about life. Little children of eight and nine are really philosophers at heart. But for Black Elk with his background and his capacities this realization this first experience with the totality of the universe produced a fantastic vision. And in his chapter entitled The Great Vision he relates the beginning in this way, now and then voices would come to him when he was out alone and he would think at first someone was calling his name and he would turn. There would be no one there. He was eating, age nine, one time. And a voice came as he recounts and said it is time they are calling you. And the voice was so loud and clear he says that I believed it and I thought I would just go where it wanted me to go. So I got right up and started. As I came out of the teepee. This was out of his parents teepee. A little nine year old boy. Both my thighs began to hurt me and suddenly it was like waking from a dream and there wasn't any voice. So I went back into the teepee but I didn't want to eat. An Indian named Mannheim looked at me in a strange way and asked me what was wrong. I told him my legs were hurting me. So the next morning the camp moves again and again. He keeps hearing voices and the message each time is for him to hurry. To hurry up because they are calling. Who is calling him, his grandfathers. His grandfathers. Now it's the second generation removed that have the spiritual connection. The physical connection runs in a sequence by generation but it seems that the grandparent generation always has the spirit contact closest to us which is why we're closer to persons who are our grandparents in a spiritual sense than those who are of the immediate generation preceding us. Very often there's that kind of symbiosis.

When he heard these voices insisting of course he looked up and for the very first time he saw the spirit messengers the Hermetic shapes which were natural to his spirit pattern to see. They came like arrows head first beings coming out of the sky. Two of them. And he said, he wrote and said, “When I got up to follow my legs did not hurt me anymore and I was very light. I went outside the teepee and yonder were the men with flaming spears.” Now he had seen them through the door of the teepee and they had come in like arrows and they were carrying spears. And of course for those who have been here and have heard some of the lectures in shamanism the arrow or its symbolic equivalent like a spear or a harpoon in Moby Dick or whatever image is familiar to you. Ostensibly it's an arrow. That is a shamanistic tool of penetration. And you find it in Tibet you find it in the North American Indians you find it in the Ramayana with Rama. It is a symbol for the penetrating power of the visionary capacity to go back through this hole in time-space to the other world and to see there the origins of the unfolding that we experience as phenomenal events and as Black Elk several times says this world seems to be like a shadow of the other world and only when this world has the shaping and arcing of experience into meaningful meaningful forms do we find a direct transmission then from the other world straight through to us and the veracity gives us power. Not power in the sense of money power but power in the sense of spiritual veracity.

So he comes out and the two figures have these flaming spears which they use to return back up into the cloud layers and Black Elk goes with them. He says, “And when I looked down I could see my mother and my father yonder and I felt sorry to be leaving them. There was nothing but the air and the swiftness of the little cloud that bore me with those two men still leading up to where white clouds were piled like mountains on a wide blue plain. And in them thunder beings lived and leaped and flashed.”

And forever after this whenever Black Elk would experience thunderstorms coming. He would again have this queer feeling of affinity with the power and the meaningfulness that was manifested from the West. The thundercloud beings come from the west, the light comes from the east. But it's the light of peace and understanding. And the morning star in the West. It's the thunder beings that arise. He will several times relate how when he went through a period a long period in his life of trying to ignore these visions he increasingly was terrified of the spiritual power in thunder clouds and would finally of course get to the point where panic would set in. If we do not grow with spiritual energy it will torment us. And he reached a point finally in his life just to look a little bit ahead for just a moment because there is a negative side here. He was unable to stay in a teepee long enough to sleep and he would go from tip to tip and not get any sleep trying to run away from the situation, the context. Why? Because the intuition knows that it is the intuiting of the context behind one's own limited form that is the source of the power. And of course if it's experienced as a compelling fear as an anxiety one seeks to flee, to get out of the context, get out of the situation, get out of the frame of reference and of course it's impossible because the frame of reference is structurally there with the power of vision. It's made by it. And the age old reaction to it is that this is a death coming and we must flee the primordial experience to it.

In the great vision though for the first time when Black Elk is understanding this he is taken up and when he is there he sees a bay horse who becomes his spirit guide. And this bay horse forever after will become Black Elk's symbolic talisman as well as his physical embodied spirit guide. He says “I looked and saw a bay horse standing there and he began to speak. Behold me he said my life history you shall see. Then he wheeled about to where the sun goes down and said behold them their history you shall know. And I looked and there were 12 black horses all abreast with necklaces of bison hooves and they were beautiful. And then the bay horse and then their life you shall see.” And four times he does this for the four directions. And each time there are different colored horses there are blacks there are sorrels there are buckskins. And the bay is of course the one showing. There are white horses also. “Their history you shall see.” Their history is not a straight line history but rather it's the curving of developing mean until the entirety of the vision is declaimed so that the entire pattern is seen so that Black Elk even age nine makes no difference whatsoever. The human spirit is fully formed and can entertain the complete universal vision at any age actually. Shortly after birth in fact.

But Black Elk is being introduced here to a spiritual history. And in fact his whole notion of power and purpose. Power again not like monetary power but inspirational power. Energy we would call. His whole understanding of the unfolding of power and purpose is according to this kind of patterned history complete. The patterns must be complete and their perfection lies not in the refinement to an ultimate circle but in the fact that the completeness is full, in that is their perfection.

I guess if you have trouble envisioning this I'll digress for just one second and give you an example out of Christianity. In Chartres Cathedral in the floor where the cross is made with a name and so forth is a labyrinth. And in order to get to the center of this labyrinth and the floor of Chartres Cathedral one must go around the complete surface area of this labyrinth. The maze itself is ingeniously constructed so that you cannot get to the center without covering every square foot of the maze so that the perfection of the achievement of the form of spiritual triumph through the labyrinth of time-space is exactly coterminous with the completion of the entirety of the pattern.

This is the kind of history that Black Elk is being shown in his great vision so that if he were to understand his actions and the occurrences, the episodes, and the events of his life properly he should not be duped and fall into trying to put them into some line like a string of beads. And what's the next step? And where are we going in this sense? But rather to see how it folds in and develops the fullness of this visionary mandala which is given to him. His capacity as a sage, as a seer, was to understand that he had in the middle part of his life made a mistake by going off onto another vision and starting to make some kind of a straight line understanding. And late in his book but about midway in his life two thirds of the way through his life he comes back to the great vision and this mandala form of history. And that's why we have the book itself because its unfolding is the first time that he gives the great mandala of his life complete and his understanding was that it was not for him that the vision was manifested, but he was only the vehicle through which the vision should be given to whom he knew not. So he opened it up and gave it to the world.

In the vision then in this completeness and there's a four part exfoliation running all the way through it. There are 12 horses. 12 black horses, 12 white horses, 12 sorrels, 12 buckskins and in the center of it a bay horse who can talk to Black Elk along with and 12 or 3 fours. Along with all this geometry of the horse who is not just a symbol of mobility and power and the continuity of a way of life but as a spiritual totem animal having a feeling tone of referential mode as well as the visual symbolic single referent mode so that there is a feeling of communion between the spirit guide as a bay horse in this case and an initiate who was learning who was being tutored to. This large pattern as well as just the envisioning of it. The purpose for that incidentally is so that it is mnemonically indelible and clear so that reconstructing the feeling tone first the entirety of the mandala comes back into full force and play. It's like a musician who hears the first bars knows the piece and can then simply in phenomenal time in space give you the rendition of it. The same with the Tibetan who is to recount a Tanka. Given a few of the images the entire Tanka no matter how complex can be reconstructed or perhaps to use just one other Instance given a couplet from the great epic storytellers like an ancient Greece or an ancient India one could then cue in to the home mnemonic structure and spin it out even if it took days to do it.

The great Homeric scholar Milman Parry found people in Yugoslavia in the early part of this century who could go on for 5 or 6 days without stopping once they had the key. Once they had a mnemonic couplet to go on they could spill out the entire epic. The same for these great visions. They always have a feeling tone, a mnemonic synch to bring them back from memory. Awe is the feeling tone for Black Elk here.

“Make haste the bay horse said and we walked together side by side while the blacks the whites the sorrows and the buckskins followed marching 4x4. I looked about me once again and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and to all the fowls that are and these fled back to the four corners of the world from whence the horses came and vanished. And as we walked there was a heaped up cloud ahead that changed into a teepee and a rainbow was the open door of it. And through the door I saw six old men sitting in a row.”

And this rainbow will be a flaming rainbow doorway. The name given to John Neihardt by Black Elk was Flaming Rainbow. That is to say the translator of the vision into English 50 years ago was given the name of the lintel image over the portal of the Great tepee in the sky so that it is his work, his translation work that is the portal lintel through which our understanding may pass into the vision. He at that time of course saw it as a little boy aged nine as a natural image. It was a rainbow. He could see that that was what it was and that's all it meant to him at that time. There was a point after the fiasco of the Ghost Dance religion when Black Elk saw a single flaming rainbow vision and that was all, there was nothing else with it. And he says that he misunderstood at the time and it was only years later that it was a warning sign from his great vision to return to the original pattern. That it was complete, it was sufficient for whatever circumstances were to come up. But he misunderstood it because he was following after secondary visions at the time. These six grandfathers inside the teepee in the Cloud Mountains, represent the directions not only the four directions of a two dimensional plane but also the heavens and the earth. And the oldest of the grandfathers is the earth. The sixth the oldest spoke and said to Black Elk in the vision: “‘Your grandfathers all over the world are having a council and they have called you here to teach you.’ His voice was very kind but I shook all over with fear now for I knew that these were not old men but were the very powers of the world.”

These six grandfathers then in turn imparted to Black Elk from each of their directional vectors in this mandala a meaning key which when all focused and brought together had Black Elk himself at the center. He was given various implements in this focusing and the main implements are these: An eagle wing and a bowl of water which when one looked in the sky was reflected. Sky, a bowl, a chalice if you like, of sky water. And a wing, a white wing which would clean and cleanse in its motion through the air that is in its motion through time-space would be a cleansing. There was a bow which went along with the morning star. There was a sacred pipe and there was a hoop for the nation so that these were the primordial symbols if you like. But they were really visionary modes of manifestation whose vibration was not so much in meaning intellectually but whose positioning was in focusing incoming incarnating energies so that it would produce a historical pattern of completed meaning which could be enfolded into a feeling tone and placed in Black Elk so that it was indelible. It's misleading as you can see to just speak of these things as symbols and then to look in a dictionary for meanings and so forth. This is totally a one line slashed through way of understanding and approaching has no real purpose other than to just show you that you can work crossword puzzles. It's not really efficacious.

All of these implements are given to Black Elk. Even as a nine year old boy he is still spiritually complete and mature in his manifestation and he has work to do. So the grandfathers each present him. They say in fact, “Take this. It is the power to make live and it is yours. And now he had a bow in his hand. Take this he said. It is the power to destroy and it is yours. Then he pointed to himself and said look close at him. Who is your spirit now? For you are his body and his name is Eagle Wing Stretches.” So that Black Elk's spiritual secret name is Eagle Wing Stretches and forever after his guiding image is not so much the bay horse incarnation but a spotted eagle whose shrill voice and hovering wings over his head in that kind of a feeling tone mode is a guide to him that he is on the right path. He is unfolding the great vision the way that it should be. The purpose incidentally of these visions is that they be manifested in phenomenal time-space. As Black Elk says, “if I hadn't manifested them hadn't brought them through,” we would say acted them out made them concrete actually lived them, “they would have had no meaning at all.” And he probably would have been a worse person than the average and done a great deal of harm.

“Take this. It is yours. And then he pointed to himself and said look close at him. Who is your spirit now? For you are his body. That is there is a spirit and a body. The phenomenal world and the spiritual world and the spirit in this spirit's name is Eagle Wing Stretches. And saying this he got up very tall and started running toward where the sun goes down. And suddenly he was a black horse that stopped and turned and looked at me. And the horse was very poor and sick and his ribs stood out. And the second grandfather he of the North arose with the herb of power in his hand and said take this and hurry. And I took and held it toward the black horse yonder. And he fattened and was happy and came prancing back to his place again and was the first grandfather sitting there.”

Now this herb has a blossom that blossoms in the four primordial colors blue, white, red, and yellow. And later on in his life when Black Elk realizes that he is to be a medicine man, that is not only an individual to whom great religious visions are given a spiritual sage or seer but he is also to be a healer one who can cure persons. It's the curing herb from his vision that accentuates itself out of the pattern and occurs to him and he sees that not only is it a spiritual vision but it's an actual plant growing. And he goes off on a quest with a friend of his at the time to find this herb. He has never seen it. And how does he do it? He does it in the old hermetic pattern of questing. That one of the little ways one way and then goes back and another and widens out until one has a pattern opening up like that and is looking all the time for the clue for the part of the visionary pattern that comes through into phenomenal time-space to be the clue which if one follows and then looks for the next pattern manifesting the next element of the pattern manifesting. One begins to piece together like the drawing of lines between the stars and makes a constellation. Out of seemingly random events, out of seemingly random happenings, suddenly a constellation of meaning begins to distill itself alchemically out of the chaos and we have before us a template of motion and action and purpose. And following such a pattern Black Elk noticed first a peculiar looking hill. He noticed next birds circling. He noticed next certain kinds of contours of the land and suddenly found himself where a bunch of little gullies came together almost like a five pointed star. And there on the bank growing right in front of him was the herb with its primary colored blossom. And when he brought it out of course he said it was about the size of a thumb and about as long to his elbow with the root and had this primary colored blossom. And just in this way great spiritual visions manifest themselves in phenomenal time-space. And in just this way man has always been able to recover from scratch out of the chaos of the universe the patterns that he is needed to live the discoveries he has needed to progress the visions that he is needed to bring together to form and reform a life situation for himself. All of this from the great vision. He goes through the various grandfathers and then when he had been still a little wild to hear the birds sing. He spoke again and said behold the earth. So I looked down and saw it lying yonder like a hoop of peoples. And in the center bloomed the holy stick that was a tree. And where it stood there crossed two roads a red one and a black from where the giant lives in the north to where you always face in the south the red road goes the road of good. The grandfather said and on it your nation shall walk. The black road goes from where the thunder beams live in the west. To where the sun continually shines in the east. A fearful road, a road of troubles and of war. And on this also you shall walk. And from it you shall have the power to destroy a people's foes. In four sense you shall walk the earth with power.

And Black Elk says in an aside in Black Elk Speaks that he thinks now when it was written in 1932 that the grandfather meant for generations that the offense would be generation long all of the grandfathers have given him gifts have given him vectors in the focus of the mandala. When he looks out he notices that in one of the visionary factors an individual has run out and begins rolling on the ground and becomes a very fat bison and then runs off happily. And Black Elk when he first is able to settle in on his vision cannot make out how some of these parts manifest and later on in his life these are the very elements that come out to bring him back into the vision. It's almost like curiosity elements. And he says that, “So I started writing toward the east down the fearful road and behind me came the horsebacks four a breast the blacks the whites the sorrels the buckskins. And far away above the fearful road the daybreak star was rising very dim. I looked below me where the earth was silent in a sick green light and saw the hills look up afraid and the grasses on the hills and all the animals everywhere about me were the cries of frightened birds and sounds of fleeing wings. I was the chief of all the heavens riding there. And when I looked behind me all the 12 horses reared and plunged and thundered with their manes and tails and there was whirling hail and their nostrils snorted light. And when I looked down below again I saw a slant hail falling and the long sharp rain where we passed. The trees bowed down low. And the hills were dim.”

And as they go on in the vision Black Elk sees that there is a tremendous apocalyptic time approaching for his people and that in fact the time of his childhood a very beatific time was to be followed by increasing difficulties until finally he is almost afraid to look. That he says “You see I had been riding with the storm clouds and had to come to the earth as rain and it was drought and I had killed with the power that the six grandfathers gave me. So we were riding on the earth now down along the river flowing full from the sources of waters. And soon I saw had the circled village of a people in the valley. And a voice said behold a nation it is yours make haste Eagle Wing Stretches.”

So he has given the entire Sioux nation the Dakotas or as the southern Tetons pronounce it the Lakotas. Given the Lakota Nation it is yours not as Black Elk but as Eagle Wing Stretches. As his higher spiritual self. He enters the village and he realizes that everyone then is looking to him to as he would say make the nations who live. And when he is finally brought into a situation where he has tried to ignore his vision, he has tried to not let it be known to others and he has suffered this great panic, compelling fear to the point where he can stand it no longer, is literally suffering as Kierkegaard says from the sickness unto death, he finally confides to a medicine man who has brought in to see what is going on that he has had this vision. And the medicine man right away says, ah this is it. What you must do then is to teach us all the songs of your vision and we will make an acting out of all the elements of the drama and the entire tribe will participate because the meaning is not for you alone even though the vision was given to you. And even though in the vision the people were even given to you it is not a time-space possession along some kind of a restricted line that you're dealing with but you're dealing with the fullness of a spiritual pattern. And in order to make it manifest we have to unfold the pattern on earth in human beings and in our actions to make it manifest. And then the power instead of short circuiting you as an individual will have its bloom just like the blossom of the healing herb and the primordialness of it will come through.

He writes, “Now I was on my bay horse again because the horse is of the earth and it was there that my power would be used. And I, as I obeyed the voice and looked there was a horse all skin and bones yonder in the west a faded brownish black. And a voice there said take this and make him over. And it was the four rayed herb that I was holding in my hand. So I rode above the poor horse in a circle. And as I did this I could hear the people yonder calling for spirit power. A hey a hey hey hey hey hey. Then the poor horse neighed and rolled and got up. And he was a big shiny black stallion with dapples all over him and his mane about him was like a cloud. He was the chief of all the horses and when he snorted it was like a flash of lightning and his eyes were like the sunset star.”

One is reminded in these visionary descriptions of the beginning meditation in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad where one is to meditate upon the rising sun as the eye of the horse and the flowing cirrus clouds as his mane and the mist of the morning as his breath. To take not just a symbol or not just a totem but to take phenomenal creation as a living being in terms that one could conceive of as an entity as an organism and put it together so that what is being seen here of course very sophisticated meditation vision and not at all a primitive limited anthropological dream. So this vision as he brings it together, “then I saw ahead the flaming the rainbow flaming above the teepee of the six grandfathers built and roofed with cloud and sewed with thongs of lightning and underneath it were the wings of the air and under them the animals and men all the levels of being brought together under this pyramid. All these were rejoicing and thunder was like happy laughter. As I rode in through the rainbow door there were cheering voices from all over the universe and I saw the six grandfathers sitting in a row with their arms held out towards me and their hands palm out and behind them in the cloud were faces thronging without number of the people yet to be. He has triumphed cried the six together making thunder. And as I passed before them there each gave again the gift that had been given to me before the cup of water the bow and arrows the power to make live and to destroy the white wing of cleansing and the healing herb the sacred pipe and the flowering stick. And each one spoke in turn from west to south explaining what he had given me and what as he had done before.”

That is their summarizing all of this so that it's compacted and brought together and the pattern is now brought so close into focus that in the summation all of the elements are brought in rapid fire to the focus. “And as each one spoke he melted down into the earth and rose again. And as each did this I felt nearer and nearer to the earth.” In other words just as I said before the feeling tone key is being formed in fashion so that it's the pure heart that can open the vision and not just some trick of the intellect or some imagination of the darker shadow. But the pure heart who's feeling tone pierces through like the eagle's shrill cry is the way in which this pattern is unlocked. “Then the oldest of them all said grandson all over the universe you have seen, now you shall go back with power to the place from whence you came and it shall happen yonder that hundreds shall be sacred hundreds shall be flames. Behold and I looked below and saw my people there and all were well and happy except one. And he was lying as if he were dead and that one was myself.”

Then he taught him the song. And as he's coming back to earth closer and closer back into manifestation in our time-space it went like this. “There was someone lying on earth in a sacred manner. There is someone on earth he lies. In a sacred manner I have made him to walk.” So that there is a refashioning of Black Elk. Not just a adding on of something new to what had been there but a complete refashioning of what had been there into a new structural pattern a new unfolding. “And as I walked alone,” Black Elk related to Neihardt, “I heard the sun singing as it arose. And as it arose it sang. It sang like this, ‘With visible face I am appearing in a sacred manner. I appear for the greening earth pleasantness. I make the center of the nations who I have made pleasant. With visible face behold me.’”

You see it's a song, a charm song about waking up in a manifestation. “‘The four leggeds and two leggeds I have made pleasant with visible face made them to walk the wings of the air. I have made them to fly with visible face I appear my day. I have made it holy.’” So that the manifesting the waking up is a waking up to the veracity of the spiritual pattern in its completeness as a realm that must be brought through and made incarnate. Well the singing stops. Black Elk says I was feeling lost and suddenly very lonely. “Then a voice above me said look back. And as he looked back there hovering a spotted eagle his spirit guide form finally and spoke and he said I looked and where the flaming rainbow teepee built and roofed with cloud had been I saw only a tall rock mountain at the center of the world. It was all alone on a broad plain now with my feet upon the earth alone but for the spotted eagle guarding.”

It's like being reduced finally just to the spirit guide because the entire pattern has been exfoliated and in its visionary capacity been sewn together with thongs of lightning and brought in and summarized into a symbolic mandala shape and brought into a magnetic feeling tone key and placed hidden inside and all that is left from it is the guiding star. The spirit guide image and nothing else is like a suture beyond the best surgery you can imagine. Signed and sealed and delivered and now invisible but there and working in a different way. Then he says I could see my people's village very very far ahead. And he began walking very fast and the feelings of homesickness start caving in on him as the fullness of the vision has enfolded. And because of the feeling tone deposit he now has a reaction from this bodily feeling and it's homesickness. And suddenly he was home and he was sitting up and he said I was sad because my mother and father didn't know I had been so far away. And the man that his mother and father thought had brought him back Whirlwind Chaser they gave him some very fine gifts for having saved Black Elk.

But Black Elk even as a nine year old boy could see that Whirlwind Chaser had not understood anything at all of what had happened. He said I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all and that I only felt it. It was the pictures I remembered and the words that went with them for nothing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words I heard. I did not have to remember these things. They have remembered themselves all these years. I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all and that I only felt it because that was the only trace left at age nine was the feeling tone, navel showing with the umbilical into the other world all in place to give a birth later on.

Well we better have a break. Have some of those cookies over there. You can look at some of these items. Please don't take them but take a look at them.

I usually try to stick to the subject matter. I know that all kinds of images and ideas are stimulated and flower forth as they should, but for myself I usually try to stick to the subject matter at hand patiently building what I think will be a useful series of cassettes. All of these lectures, this is the 105th lecture in this on developing series. Each series I attempt to make some kind of coherent structure so that one could review the cassettes in the order in which they were given and there should be some shape of understanding that could arise from that experience. Usually I try to put in enough levels of understanding and reference so that after listening 2 or 3 times to a cassette there should be a fuller development from yourself. I try to put out images that elicit responses and ideas that are not quite completed so that you have a tendency to want to complete them yourself so that they have an efficacy of creativity for you yourself. Many persons who come to one lecture or two lectures or are used to hearing all kinds of people talk about the entire universe in two hours are somewhat put off by this, but it's really this patient building that erects structures that are useful that we may live in and commensurate with that I usually try to show you materials that exist especially here at PRS so that you could do your own researching.

Hidden away in the biography section a book that I hadn't ever heard of until a couple of weeks ago. Too late for us to make slides on The Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War. Of course this is the massacre at Wounded Knee. Again here for the very first time. And I'm sorry I don't have a slide on it. We have a photograph of Standing Bear who illustrated Black Elk Speaks and it's interesting to note the gnarled old excellence of this artist. This black. Artist with his bear claws necklace. And he's the one who illustrated Black Elk Speaks. And I show this to you in this scene because it's better to have a glimpse. And missing it exists in the book. The book is in the biography section of the library not the American Indian section which is why I suppose it's been overlooked all these many years.

There are not many books on the American Indian spiritual vision that are useful or worthwhile. I would suggest that if you're interested there is an organization in LA called Four Directions that an Oglala Sioux named Long Walker has founded here in LA and they give instruction and lessons in a traditional mode and manner. And I think he would be pleased with the quality of the individual. Long Walker is a major figure. I think too that in getting the flavor of the American Indian that really buying a record or a tape of the chants of the songs is really a help because there is a feeling tone key in those chants that once you're able to take it in to your own experience and braid it into your own qualities as a being, it quickens the sense of understanding. Just reading books about the American Indian is never going to do it and just ogling distant objects in museum cases is not going to do it. We have to really, I suppose the very best way would be to learn to dance, and dancing in a sacred manner is a primordial way of educating our whole, total being. I remember being amazed at the efficacy of that years and years ago when that was first taught to me. And it's still true and I think particularly true of the American Indian. The old American Indian prayer, “never let me criticize the man until I walked a mile in his moccasins,” might be amended. Let me never say I understand him until I have danced in his moccasins.

I concentrated on the great vision of Black Elk for obvious personal reasons. I think that the understanding of the significance in this type of classic sage is truncated. If we simply view the book as a literary critic would view it, or as an anthropologist would view it. That by taking the spiritual core of the book, if you take your own experience, get a copy of the book and go through it with say even the cassette of what will have been delivered here you'll have a chance to see what the rest of the book is about in the reconstructed and so forth.

The basic meaningful development for Black Elk was as I said he tried to ignore his vision. He found himself in a totally hostile situation more and more. He realized that in his experience he was of an age of about 12, 11 or 12 when gold was discovered in the Black Hills and for the Sioux, the Oglala Sioux, or Teton Sioux, from the southern declension. And they had migrated originally from the Minnesota lake areas several hundred miles south and west and around and finally discovered the Black Hills about 200 years before Black Elk's time and had felt as a people that the Black Hills were really their spiritual home. And even though they were relative newcomers to that region they were able to adjust themselves spiritually to the situation so that when Black Elk came along in his generation they taking away, the eating away of the access to those hills was literally destroying the religious integration of the people. And the story of course is chronicled in several dozen books. You could read accounts of it I think almost in any book and get a general idea. Black Elk's version of it is from a participating boy age 11, 12, 13 when the culmination of course in the broken treaties and the incursions of the army and after them the gold prospectors culminated in the Battle of where General George Custer called Pawhuska along here by the Lakota people was finally rubbed out. As Black Elk would say along with several hundred other army officers. This was in 1876. In the summer of 1876 about the time that the nation was celebrating its centennial of its founding this event happened and within several months of that by October 1876 the victorious remnants of the Sioux Nation had been scattered all over the plains and innumerable Wasichu as the Sioux called in Lakota the name for the white men as Wasichu which simply means ‘endless numbers’, ‘endless numbers’. No matter how brave one is no matter how great a warrior one is one could kill 100 or one could kill 500 or 1000 but when there are endless there is no chance for a victory. In Black Elk Speaks the major protagonist upon the field of historical action in terms of what you would get in a history book was his distant cousin Crazy Horse who is portrayed by Black Elk as having been a mystic and a visionary much like himself. Only instead of having a great vision as a template upon which to base his actions and his knowledge and his understanding, Crazy Horse had to work freeform all the time and very often was a very moody individual going off by himself, having visions alone just standing in the middle of the prairie, or walking along a river and suddenly stopping and listening to the rocks and the stream. And Crazy Horse of course was respected enormously by his people as being a mystic and a leader, but was by no means a sociable member of the Oglala band of the Sioux Nation. He was always off by himself. He had the respect of people. He loved little children. And he was great in wartime conditions joking with his men to keep their courage up. But characteristically Crazy Horse was the great standalone mystic. Black Elk says he was 30 when he was killed. He was murdered. He actually probably was closer to 35.

Crazy Horse was assured in his visions that he would never be wounded in battle and he never was wounded by an enemy. He was wounded twice by his own people by mistake. And he was, after the tremendous winter of 1876, 1877, when the Sioux were reduced to eating their ponies and then finally when they had no ponies and had to walk without food and came into the agencies that had been set up to receive them from the Scattering Star Strategy. Crazy Horse when he was brought in even though he was disarmed and was without any way of organizing his people again, was so feared that they were planning to move Crazy Horse to a prison, probably, I understand, down around Florida. And when he realized that he was being led away to this fate he brought a hidden knife out from under his blanket. And of course one of his lifelong friends another Indian a friend of his trying to save Crazy Horse from this rash action, held his hands and a young recruit abandoned him and he died.

Crazy Horse when he went into battle had a small lightning bolt on his cheek and a hailstorm pattern on himself and he wore a smooth rock behind one ear. These were his symbols and he was of course the great leader. Crazy Horse, there are some speculation that he had learned classic military strategy from an ex-West Point man who had taught him. The tradition that Black Elk gives is that he was taken as a youngster 10, 11 years old by the senior Sioux warrior, a man named Hung and was educated all through his teens and all the military strategies that the Sioux people had engendered through their long and victorious career. At any rate in Black Elk's estimation Crazy Horse was the man had he had lived would have unified the nation of the people and not himself. That Crazy Horse's mystic capacity, almost like a messianic charisma among his people, backed by this incredible strategic mind almost like Alexander the Great really in a way, that Crazy Horse would have been able to unite the Sioux nation back together as it was of course after he was killed after the late 1870s the history of the Sioux Nation is a constant downhill landslide until the arrival of the Ghost Dance religion about 1889 or so.

Black Elk went to Europe in 1886 with Buffalo Bill's traveling show as it's a marvelous adventure that's related in here in a beautiful way. They had never seen large towns. And of course when they got to Omaha in 1886 they thought this was a huge place. Then when they got to Chicago they were absolutely astounded at the size of the Wasichu towns. And when they got to New York they lost all scale of proportion. And then when they showed Black Elk the fireboat that was going to take them to Europe he said he didn't believe it was real. It was so enormous this ocean liner. And of course when they arrived in London again he realized that there were so many Wasichu that it was incomprehensible to them.

The largest that the Sioux nation ever was in terms of population at that time was about fifteen to twenty thousand people. The Blackfoot nation at its height could only fill 4500 men in the whole nation who controlled an area the size of France. So you can see that the American Indian sense of proportion was really we can't even say provincial by our standards. It was like a New England village size scale of human cooperation. And when they saw cities of a million people and more it would just simply outdistanced their capacity to see.

I once saw a film of Eskimos who had never seen trees and had never seen cities being shown a film of New York City and of Upper New York State with the forest. And the look on their face was just incomprehensible. It wasn't even like science fiction imagery. It was impossible. How could such things be? So too for Black Elk. And he says that all during his European tour he was in London he was in Paris and in Germany he went to Italy. He danced before Queen Victoria who he loved. He said she was a great lady. She was little and fat and beautiful. She had a great soul and spirit and all the Indians he said, when Queen Victoria was going away suddenly he made a great chant and cheer and they sang a great song to cheer her up and she turned and she said you'll have to visit me since I came to visit you. And so later on they went to visit Queen Victoria. He said she was a marvelous individual and shook hands with Black Elk because he was one of the major dancers at that time. When he was in Europe he befriended a Parisian girl who took Black Elk home to eat several times and one time at a dinner out of the clear blue they were sitting down as a breakfast as a matter of fact. They were sitting down at the table and suddenly Black Elk said He looked up and it seemed to him in his kinesthetic feeling that the house was spinning and as he looked up it was like the whole house was going up like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, only it was just himself and the others were down below and suddenly it was like a cloud assuming it had become like a cloud and he was flying it at a tremendous speed he said. And he was able to look down and see that the great water that they had crossed many many many days was just flashing below him. And there was like night and then day. And then he saw this huge city New York. And pretty soon later on he saw the great Missouri River. And then he looked down and he could see the homeland of his people and he could look down and he could see the lamenting of his mother and he saw her look up at him on this cloud and he realized that he would have to come home. And there was like a retracting of this tremendous vision backwards all the way back to the place in Paris. And he woke up and there was a French doctor leaning over him and they were about to order a coffin for him because they thought he was dead. He'd been three days with almost no heartbeat, almost no breathing motion whatsoever, in a perfect deep yogic samadhi resembling death. So when he came back to he went to Buffalo Bill who gave him a ticket home and $90 and he made his way back just in time to arrive at the Sioux Nation where the Ghost Dance religion was being taught and brought in a Paiute over in one of the valleys near the Sierra Nevada in the state of Nevada. And had a vision of the Great Spirit having giving him a tremendous influence and power to refashion the Indian nation and to forever drive the Wasichus from the sacred land. And like all the Plains tribes, the Oglala band sent emissaries, they picked three men to make the trip all the way west across the Rockies and across to the deserts to go and see this person. His Indian name was Wakinyan. He who makes life, Wakinyan. And they came back with glowing reports that this was the like what we would expect the second coming of Jesus. This was the individual whose vision was true and who was teaching the religion of the Ghost Dance. And later on Black Elk found himself being drawn into the frenzy of the religion. And of course it led to the expectation of millennium, and all those dreams were supposed to culminate in 1891. And of course just as the expectations reached their culmination as happens so often in these apocalyptic movements in history, historical reaction seems to turn on its fear the expectation and produce just the opposite. Instead of a new age coming to the Sioux people. The massacre at Wounded Knee happened in 1891. About five miles from where Black Elk had finally settled down and he said that he heard gunfire. Early in the morning I heard cannon fire that was just reverberating through his body and he saddled up his horses and he and several others started riding toward Wounded Knee. And by the time they got going there were about 20 of them half riding along. He writes this, and I think it's worth reading this, and we'll have some slides. I have some pictures. I think we need some pictures to bring this together in a little while.

“We had come to the top of the ridge where looking to the east you could see for the first time the monument and the burying ground and the little hill and the church is. That is where the terrible things started. Just south of the burial ground on the little hill a deep dry gulch runs about east and west very crooked and it rises westward to nearly the top of the ridge where we were. It had no name but the Wasichu sometimes call it Battle Creek. Now we stopped on the ridge not far from the head of the Dry Gulch. Wagon guns were still going off over there on the little hill and they were still going off again where they hit along the gulch. There was much shooting down yonder and there were many crowds and we could see cavalry men scattered over the hills ahead of us. Cavalrymen were riding along the gulch and shooting toward where the women and children were running away trying to hide in the gullies and the stunted pines. A little way ahead of us just down below the head of the dry gulch there were some women and children who were huddled under a clay bank and some cavalry men were there pointing guns at them. We stopped behind the ridge and I said to the others, take courage. Then we all sang the song which went like this The Thunder being nation I am I have said the Thunder Bay nation I am. I have said you shall live you shall live you shall live. Then I rode over the ridge and the others after me and we were crying take courage and it's time to fight. I had no guns and when we were charging I just held the sacred bow out in front of me with my right hand. And the bullets did not hit us at all. We found a little baby lying all alone near the head of the gods. I could not pick her up just then but I got her later and some of my people adopted her. I just wrapped her up tighter and saw that was around her and left her there. It was a safe place and I had other work to do.”

And for the rest of the morning Black Elk with his bow in front of him unscathed miraculously at the end of the day went back and forth to try and bring the women and children out of the massacre at Wounded Knee. I won't go on. It was a travesty. It was a terrible day. There were literally heaps of bodies. And of course it's well known about the situation there. In fact in this book Sitting Bull in the Indian War gives a full contemporary account of the events there at Wounded Knee. For Black Elk the disappointment and the Ghost Dance religion and the massacre at Wounded Knee had forever broken him of his nation. So he thought in the 1890s. And so he thought for all those long decades. The period from the 1890s up to the First World War through the 20s and finally entering into the 1930s it was when he began to understand and suspect that the pattern of division that had been given to him was by a people which included people of all colors all backgrounds and in fact one of the visionary manifestations that came to him later on in life was of a wind coming toward him and instead of being surrounded by the wind he was surrounded by a tremendous flight of butterflies of all different colors sparkling rainbow-like. And it was this feeling tone of a cloud of evil butterflies cocooning him that was like a key to his understanding that his vision was for a tremendous population of people of this country and that it should be then given to all. And of course and to do this he had to in his heart of hearts in that phenomenal key the open heart the key to his vision had to forgive the white man. He had to forgive the Wasichu the demon who had put him and his people and everything that he had loved and illustrates ended the condition. They were the ones that had to receive the vision and their language. And it took a tremendous religious metanoia and a change of mind a change of heart and part of Glasgow to be able to say well we have to share his innermost vision of his power with those persons that had supposed all along to be the culprits. They were to be helpers. So it's a tremendous feat and it was just about 50 years ago today. It was 1932. In 1932 June the month of the fact that Black Elk Speaks were given to.

Well I have some illustrations. Let's see them and then we'll hope to see you next week. Alexandria and Rome. So big a jump as you might think.