Black Elk

We have for us tonight the second in the series of four after the Thanksgiving break. We have been working all year on trying to understand what we characterized in January as Hermetic America. That America which is not stamped out by the Constitution and by legalistic mentalities, but that America which is really a United States which is a flow of tradition formed quite consciously by excellent individuals and recursively checked and refounded again and again throughout our several hundreds of years with the original peoples of America. And we saw early in this year, in the fourth or fifth lecture on Benjamin Franklin, that Franklin gave us an indication of why the de-population of the eastern United States had occurred, allowing the perception that this country was a wilderness not populated by peoples at all. That the arming of the Iroquoian people with guns in the 17th century by British mercenaries had tilted the balance of power among the tribes of the eastern part of the United States and that by the 18th century the de-population was chronic and we saw that Jefferson, in his retiring from the presidency, was ready to dedicate his life, the remainder of his life, to the study of Indian languages. He had accrued during his second administration some fifty volumes of dictionaries of American Indian languages and that the trunk that was containing these volumes was stolen from Jefferson on his way back to Monticello and curtailed this great study which he was undertaking.

We saw how during the Civil War Walt Whitman in his vision of the spiritual decimation of the American character reduced himself almost into the condition - which we will recognize from Black Elk - called crying for a vision. Where one with real tears and real sense of desperate chronic spiritual malaise opens oneself up to the powerful visionary currents of the universe to have some vision of truthfulness. And after spending four years with all the maimed and wounded and crazed soldiers - North and South - Whitman found himself in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. He found himself the secretary in charge of receiving all the depositions from all of the tribes who came in after the Civil War, sent their most noble spokesmen and individuals to Washington, having heard that Lincoln was an honest man a true man. And all the tribes had sent their depositions in to be heard, now is the time for reconciliation. But Lincoln was no more, and only Whitman's vision and psyche and courage received those depositions. Formally they were put into filing drawers and left there. And that's what's happened to the American vision: It's been put in filing drawers and left there.

But fortunately for us there are courageous individuals who have managed to hear and understand and express back to us again that something is important here about the land. That this land has a transformative character to it and that the European peoples, and the African peoples who came here came as pilgrims, and were transformed by the Native American people into pioneers. And that's the sacred meaning of Thanksgiving. To transform people who are pilgrims fleeing from conditions that were not right fleeing with mentalities that were made in those conditions that were not right and coming and arriving and finding a wilderness, and finding fearfulness, and finding that the minds and characters that they had formed in conditions that were not right were completely out of place here and they didn't know how to be. And it was the American Indian who transformed those pilgrims into pioneers, taught them that you don't have to be afraid of these forests. They're home; you can be at home in these forests. You can make your way. You can live a very good life here because it's all spiritual. The whole landscape has been kept spiritually intact forever. It's never been desecrated. And the desecration that has happened over the last two or three hundred years has been a schmear, a paste, on the surface. It has not penetrated into the land. Bulldozing the forest is not taking away the spirit and we have to understand that it's still there and is coming back. And if there is any future at all, if there is any meeting of the East and the West it's on the altar of the American Indian. It's the only viable navel of integrity in our age. It's the American Indian people who are like the Old Testament Hebrew people, after their long exile, who have been purified enough to understand that the vision that they had was real and still exists has never been able to be erased or watered down. And it's on the integrity of that heart that the 21st century can continue. If it isn't founded on that it won't happen because Western civilization has come to a dead end long ago.

The silence of Wittgenstein is eloquent testimony to the blank wall that Western thought left to itself reaches, and reaches again and again and again. It's called a dead end. It's called don't go that way. And the reinfusion of cross fertilization is the only possibility. But there needs to be a matrix of honesty and the only one still viable is that of the American Indian. The only one that has not ever really been desecrated.

We have tonight Black Elk. And in Black Elk - I won't use Black Elk Speaks because I've lectured on that a number of times, the tapes exist - but I want to start off with the vision in The Sacred Pipe, and in The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk gives us the seven rites, seven rites of The Sacred Pipe. And seven reoccurs constantly, not only in Lakota mythology - if one would like to talk that way - but in all of the American Indians. The seven, like the seven stars of the Pleiades, or the seven stars of the Big Dipper, or as we have talked about and discovered in other modes that this is an archetypal seven, this is the hebdomad, this is the seven spheres, the seven planets, the seven days of the week, the seven musical notes. It is a, it is a completeness. It is a matrix of completeness of what can be expressed. It is the complete utterance of the form but has by implication an eighth component, an eighth step, which is not named. Which is either return back like in the musical scale one returns to another ‘do’ but on a higher pitch, a different key. Or one transcends the hebdomad to the ogdoad - if you want to speak hermetically. And that the eight - like the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha - the eight is the completeness of what can be expressed along with the unexpressible sense of the whole of the matrix itself of the unity of it. So that there is a self-consciousness added to it. It's like the exclamation point after ‘Om’. It's the implicit recursive consciousness that indeed not only is the form expressed completely but one is conscious that there is a background which is not in the form which is allowed for the form to be articulated and that too must be given its due. And when the eight is realized, when the ogdoad is realized like this, when self-consciousness recursively informs nature, one has - if we may use the term - a cosmological vision.

So the seven rites of The Sacred Pipe are the Seven Rites, but there is a sense of the whole also which hovers like a silent eagle over all the proceedings. In this series, it starts off with the keeping of the soul and moves to the releasing of the soul and then moves to the rite of purification. And in the rite of purification, the sweat lodge, the Inipi. We use the word Tipi, and Inipi is a special house. It's not a house for living in but a house for purifying it. And it usually is built of willows. In the tradition of my daughter, the purification lodge was often done only once a year and was one hundred willow sweat lodge. And the construction of it had to be quite accurate in the interweaving. But for the Siouxan peoples, the Oglala peoples of Black Elk, often it was twelve or sixteen willows made for the four directions. And in this willow sweat lodge, in the center, was marked out with a center stake and a rawhide thong, a circle, and that circle was cut out into the sod, into the soil. And that circle was taken out, that earth was taken out, and was taken four steps out of the lodge towards the east, due east. And as it was taken it was shaken so that some of the sod would come off and leave a trail, a noticeable trail, a sacred path, and the rest of that sod was placed four paces outside directly to the east. And that sod, when it is out there like that, the Sioux word for that is ‘unci’, and means grandmother, grandmother. That the call inside of the sweat lodge is to grandfather, but that the guarantee of that call is a space which is guaranteed by the grandmother.

It's masculine inside that sweat lodge but the masculine coherence needs the guarantee of the feminine which is outside the sweat lodge towards the east. In fact the master of ceremonies inside the lodge often had a helper and the helper was a woman who was always on the outside of the lodge, always moving on the sacred path - before that mound and coming back. And the purification of that sweat lodge was done by the master of that ceremony before anyone went in with The Sacred Pipe to the six directions. And that sacred pipe was then placed outside on this mound, taken from the sacred space now which was masculine and placed as the anchor upon the mound of the feminine outside. And six paces beyond that was a fire called an eternal fire, or the fire of no end - four sticks one way four another, and upon this the rocks were heated.

It was the feminine helper who then brings the pipe back in at various times to that sweat lodge. It is she who brings the rocks into them. It is she who closes the flaps and opens the flaps four times during the ceremony. She is the guaranteer of the articulation of the meaning without which the masculine spiritual sense has no understanding. Without the feminine spatiality, without her special holiness of knowing how to articulate according to life, man's waterfall consciousness spiritually doesn't register a thing. Because when he gets spiritual he goes off into what's called the void, shunyata. When you're really there it doesn't register. It takes the articulation of life in its punctuation to allow the grammar of meaning to emerge so that one understands we are doing this and this and this and it means such and so. So that the masculine is grateful to the feminine for the articulation for the space that allows it to be understood.

Black Elk takes very great pains, and I had outlined it and we don't have time to go in all of the Inipi, but it's after the Inipi that he brings up the crying for a vision. The crying for a vision is literally tears. You cannot have a vision unless you can cry. It's a question of being open enough to the feeling tones of understanding that it can manifest in tears. If you can't feel that deeply then you're closed off; you're not going to be able to have a vision. And in crying for a vision the person, the man, or the woman, comes to a holy person who is going to be a helper, who's going to be a guide, a spirit guide. We've often early on here talked about Athena and Merlin as spirit guides. Well, this is like a spirit guide. This is guiding-star being who acts as a celestial coordinate in this crying for a vision because one is going to open up completely. Completely. And in crying for a vision one goes through the sweat lodge ceremony but the ceremony now, the Inipi, is merely preparatory towards the leaving of the camp the leaving of the sweat lodge the leaving with that purification and going up to a mountaintop. Or if it's a woman going up to a hill near, nearby the camp. Women need to be protected but for a man he must, he must go far out. For Black Elk, he went to the highest peak in the Black Hills.

And one exposes oneself there according to a designated time duration. One has told the holy man how long one is going to go through this crying for a vision. Usually it's four days. It can be extended. I once did one for forty-nine days. It can get to you. And in the crying for a vision when you bring the purification after one has already been able to bring the tears and goes out for that duration it's like the inner sense, the clock sense inside, that sense which you can tell yourself to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and you'll wake up at 6:30 in the morning. On the right day of the vision quest, the crying for a vision, it will come. It's not an imaginative image; it's not a speculative guess. It's mysteriously there; it occurs. It occurs in the spiritual sense to oneself. It's quite a different phenomenon. We should call it a noumenon by now. That a numinous image is quite different from a phenomenal image. It's not imaginative, it is not memorable in the same way that remembering what physical reality looks like or what a dream was like or what other images although the dream is very close to it, but it comes up in a median spatiality in the spirit and has an indelible tone to it. We call it veracity in English. And whatever that numinous image is that links up with the holy person who is like an anchor guaranteed that this is a true process. And in that line of understanding and meaning that person crying for a vision begins to find his coordination and whatever happens to him then from then on begins to fill in and create the geography of understanding of what is happening, what is to be. And this is extraordinarily powerful. And one can live spiritually very well in this way.

In the crying for a vision the sacred chant at the end sounds prosaic to us, but if we can hear it in this numinous truthfulness here is often what is said:

Grandfather, behold me!
Tunkashila, behold me!
I held my pipe and offered it to You,
That my people may live!

Tunkashila, behold me!
Tunkashila, behold me!
I give to You all these offerings,
That my people may live!

Grandfather, behold me!
Tunkashila, behold me!
We who represent all the people,
Offer ourselves to You,
That we may live!

For, in crying for a vision what dissolves, what becomes transparent, are all of the egotistical confines that one thought you needed to give yourself a shape. And what occurs, absolutely clearly for oneself, is that man is a unity that the people are a whole and that whatever blessings come, come whole-like. That somehow a misunderstanding has crept into the Western mind. It's like we have the idea that the blessings from the sun's rays are little ankhs on each ray coming down to individuals, but we forget that every sun ray has the same gift of life. And it comes, rains, wholesomely on everyone; that the egotistical blinders saw just that that ray with that ankh is coming to me and it's mine. And that was with blinders on. It was short-sighted. It was not understanding. The crying for a vision brings out this in an individual because in the crying for a vision behind beneath below whatever desperately one needed to know. It was this understanding that really you needed to know. And once having that one can deal whatever problems there are.

It's then that Black Elk gives us the Sundance - the Okan. And after the Sundance, notice the spacing, he gives the ceremony, the rite of the making of relatives, because it's extraordinarily important then when you realize that we are a whole we are a people, all of us are a people, that the understanding of the relations then between ourselves is extraordinarily interesting and that the making of relatives is not the limited family thing that we thought, but is rather like a very large spirit family of the whole and we are able to find out how we are all related; what peculiar way that we are all related.

Black Elk writes, “In this rite we establish a relationship on earth,” - because the family of man is here on the earth - “which is a reflection of that real relationship which always exists between man and Wakan-Tanka.” Because the sacred, the sacred bringing the earth into relationality guarantees a common parentage for us all. It's a guarantee. The way in which sky and earth meet just right - that's where we are, those are our real coordinates. And then after the making of relatives he gives us the rite for preparing a girl for womanhood because it's extraordinarily important for girls to become women. Because the feminine is truncated if it remains girlish. It has to mature into womanhood. And it's the maturing into womanhood that is so difficult in the late 20th century - is almost impossible. And Black Elk's preparing a girl for womanhood. Very very important.

He writes, or he dictated to Joseph Brown, “These rites are performed after the first menstrual period of a woman. They are important because it is at this time that a young girl becomes a woman, and she must understand the meaning of this change and must be instructed in the duties which she is now to fulfill.” We don't like that word, ‘duties,’ but that's what he said. “She should realize that the change which has taken place in her is a sacred thing, for now she will be as Mother Earth… able to bear children, which should be brought up in a sacred manner. She should know, further, that each month when her period arrives she bears an influence with which she must be careful, for in the presence of a woman in this condition…” even a holy man could lose his power.

Why? Why? Because the feminine guarantees by her participation the articulation. A man can get lost in his spirit quite easily. Black Elk says, it's in the dark of men's eyes that they get lost because if there's no image in the pupil it's all just blank, void, dark. When you refine your masculine insight, when you perfect wisdom and penetrate, it pokes through all of the net fabric of the world and sees only the infinite darkness. It's only the feminine spatiality that brings, compassionately, an articulation. And one has the image numinous of reality because that perfection is articulated into completeness.

So every girl who becomes a woman is extraordinarily important. And we don't have time to go into the whole rite, but one of the motions in the rite is the pouring out of a blessing by the officiating holy man of red dust from his mouth out onto the girl. This is taken from a vision of the way in which buffaloes used to relate to the birthing of calves.

And Black Elk writes, or dictates, “Smoke was then made from sweet grass, and, standing over it, Slow Buffalo again purified his whole body. When this was finished [and] it was necessary before making the sacred place that Slow Buffalo demonstrate to all the people that he had truly received a power from the buffalo; so he began to chant his holy song which the buffalo had taught him.”

This they are coming to see!
I am going to make a place which is sacred.
That they are coming to see.
White Buffalo Cow Woman Appears
Is sitting in a wakan manner.
They are all coming to see her!

The girl.

“Just then as Slow Buffalo finished this song, he let out a loud Huh! like the bellow of a buffalo. As he did this a red dust came out of his mouth, just as a buffalo cow is able to do when she has a calf. This Slow Buffalo did six times, blowing the red smoke on the girl, and on the sacred place; everywhere within the tipi there was nothing but this red smoke, and if there were any children peeping in the door of the tipi, they were frightened and ran…” away quickly because this was a frightening sight indeed.

We have in Black Elk the beginnings, the nibs, of an understanding. And in this understanding one concern which is important to us is to understand the ritual language, the use of ritual language. Our English is extraordinarily sophisticated by now. English as a language has been refined and developed. It's like Greek was, or Sanskrit, Chinese. It's one of the world's great languages for articulation, but it is particularly poor in certain time tenses. There are time tenses in Algonquian languages which have fourth and fifth person declensions. There are possibilities of expression which do not occur in English. And consequently English has to be poetic in order to be really expressive spiritually. But in Indian languages, especially the northern Plains Indian languages, the possibilities are quite practical of saying something spiritually. In a book called Oglala Religion, published by the University of Nebraska Press, he writes:

“The sacred persons were distinguishable from the common people not only by their ability to interpret sacred knowledge and perform ceremonies, but by their ability to communicate with the supernaturals and each other in a special language unintelligible to the uninitiated.”

That not only is the language founded upon human communication but because of the nature of envisioning, of crying for a vision, of rites of purification, of going to have a dream, of being in contact with the numinous realms, the languages, the American Indian languages were from the beginning in the very syntax and the very grammar capable of spiritual communication with supernatural powers, supernatural beings. So it's in the language. It's in the very nature of it. And if one takes an anthropological mind and tries to translate from say Blackfoot into English one reduces it down. One truncates it. One recuts it with a language whose psychology cannot permit the statements made to occur. It's just like an English version of a T’ang Chinese poem. It can never be right. It simply can never be right.

So the difficulty was that for a long time the understanding of the spiritual depth of the Indian was based upon an inadequate grasp of the actual experience. And in this book he points out, Powers, his name is - William Powers. According to Densmore. This is Frances Densmore who was an ethnographer who worked in Washington D.C. around the turn of the century and what he concerned himself with was not so much anthropological lore but music. And he wrote many books like on Teton music and Chippewa music. And because he got into the music, because in music interval and pacing and so forth is almost a universal language, he realized that something very sophisticated was happening here. This is not just tom-toms. This is extraordinarily complicated, intelligent, spiritual communication. And so Densmore was one of the first to sense that American Indian languages are an incredible key to a sense of reality which we have in fact not only lost, but have become curious about. If you remember, the late 19th century was the philologists paradise and everybody was studying to try and find the basic language the Indo-European language. And that whole philological interest was completely set aside once linguistics came in. And linguistics came in and displaced philology because of the great dictionary compendia that Franz Boas and others did of the American Indian languages because when the American Indian languages were laid out we had an incredible panorama of the spiritual structure of language which Indo-European languages had largely lost and had truncated but were there in the Indian languages. Enormously rich, enormously.

For instance, Southern California had more linguistic diversity than the whole of Europe. There were 20 major families of languages in Southern California. The idea that the Indians were primitive is not only absurd but it is ridiculous. It misleads us from understanding the complexity.

“According to Densmore, [then] ‘a language of this kind was said to be necessary in order that persons intimate with supernatural things could communicate without being understood by the common people.’ Densmore gives no evidence why a secret language was necessary, and there is no evidence that there was a conscious attempt by sacred persons to exclude common people from sacred discourse.”

It's not like an elite priesthood at all. That is transposing an idea that's from Egyptian Western traditions. It's not that there is an elite. It's that in this experience the confusion of tongues comes because one has to speak quite clearly of what actually is happening in experience and it sounds confusing if you don't have that experience, if you're on the outside, or if you have no one to guarantee the articulation of your understanding. Because if you have someone to guarantee that articulation then the cacophony becomes paced just enough, differentiated just enough, so that one tunes in and hears the intelligible threads throughout it.

It's like if you saw a painting of Mark Tobey’s with his white writing and you magnified that a hundred thousand times and each brushstroke were there then you could follow it through. It's like that. It's like speaking in tongues. It's speaking in tongues to someone who is not spiritual but someone who is in the spirit. It is intelligible, each line of it, because the articulated sense of reality rises asymptotically. One is no longer caged by time or space. And so this becomes extraordinarily interesting in terms of Black Elk.

In the concepts of life and death for the Oglala religion it's extremely difficult for us initially to appreciate how complex all this is. In fact, Powers, in his book says, “I recognize the danger in attempting to explain basic Oglala religious conceptions either directly or by analogy through the eyes of a Western observer.” We've talked about this some time; that the mind which thinks in terms of analogy is by its structure already polarized into a sense of identity and that one cannot understand spiritual form by this kind of equivocal projecting. It simply doesn't occur. As long as one is thinking in terms of identity and difference which is characteristic of the mind that is polarized which then needs analogies in order to proceed intelligibly along lines of argument, one is always projecting out this equivocation and working basically upon emending tautologies into speculations and no sense of reality can come from that at all. In Mahayana Buddhism this is called ‘papanca’ cloud forming just clouds. It's all illusory; none of it is real. Whereas the spiritual mind does not see tautologically at all there's no sense of identity and difference. There's no need for analogy. There is direct perception. It is what it is. And American Indian religion is like that. There's no mentation involved. And so trying to understand it from a mind schooled in analogy with its equivocation, with its polarized structure, is an impossibility. It's like looking cross-eyed, you never see anything, you can't see anything cross-eyed.

So this is being pointed out. And he writes here are some interesting comments, some basic – we'll take a break in a minute – some basic tenets of Oglala religion. “The universe is composed of a finite amount of energy; good and evil are thus aspects of the same energy” but is finite. And, “Man may harness good energy toward his own ends by propitiating Wakantanka; [and] he [can] harness evil energy by propitiating wakan sica. Wakan sica is subordinate to Wakantanka, and man is subordinate to both.” Energy is, “visible and invisible [but] the potential to transform visible energy into invisible energy, and the reverse, is called tun. [And] the tun of every invisible aspect is its visible aspect.”

The capacity for transformation. That capacity for transformation is inherent in the invisible its tun is visibility and in the visible its tun is invisibility. So there is a complementarity, a reciprocality, here based upon transformation, and one of the archetypal keys - if we can use that term - of transformation is that man in his capacity in his spiritual capacity is dependent for his transformability upon his whole relationship to the animal kingdom. And as long as they are intact, his transformability is guaranteed. When the white men came and killed off all the wild animals it took away the possibilities of transformation. It wasn't that men didn't understand what they had to do, it was that they couldn't do it anymore. Until the wild animals come back. And the only way the wild animals can come back is if the land is returned back to its wholesomeness because that's their home. And in this way the ecology of reality needs to be reinstated.

When all the fences are down from Great Bear Lake to the Caribbean the animals will come back and man will be able to transform himself again. Until then he's going to be crippled. He's going to be fenced in by his own projected greed which seals him off and compartmentalizes him from his spiritual capacity. It's about that grand and about that picayune and about that difficult.

Well let's take a break and then we'll come back.

We'll take up where we left off. Most of you are familiar with Joseph Campbell whose four volume work The Masks of God has become a standard in mythological work. Well he's redoing it because The Masks of God was written early in his life when he still had a conception about mythology that was persona-, personae-based. And he's now redoing it in large volumes. And it's going to be given the general title of, An Atlas of Historical Mythology. And the first volume which has come out is called The Way of the Animal Powers. And this is what Black Elk is talking about the way of the animal powers. We need the animals. We cannot transform if we are stuck in the human, because if we are stuck in the human all we get are permutations and not transformations. And mastering a lot of permutations merely makes us clever and makes us devious jailers of our spirit.

This is the world of the demiurge in Gnosticism. To think that you have changed just because you're going through permutations. But the more permutations that you go through the more your life is governed by chance. But when you transform then you realize that the fulcrum is not on chance but on change - change. Changing of form. And for that we need the animals. For that the animals are sacred but they have to be wild animals. They can't be domesticated. They have to be wild. They have to be free to be themselves. And the only way they can be free to be themselves is that the land has to be free. So that they have a place to forage to grow up to live and to be. So the whole preservation of wilderness is absolutely essential to reality. There's no way anyone's going to transform inside of any buildings without wild animals being at home in the world. It seems weird when you first hear it. It seems like the most kooky thing anybody could say. It's true. And this is what the American Indian has been trying to say now for a couple hundred years. “Don't kill the wild animals off. Don't fence the land in.”

The direct spiritual experience of reality shows that this is necessary. We have all kinds of insights. We have the stories of Saint Francis with the animals; of Milarepa with the animals. These are spiritual geniuses out of Christianity and out of Buddhism telling us these are important. The archetypal projection of Bigfoot and of the Sasquatch and of the Yeti is an understanding like the archetypal projection of UFOs. It's an understanding that wholesomeness in this universe requires that there be a bridge from the human to the animal because it's the only way in which we can transform. We have to go back to the animal, back to that realm, in order to be dissolved from our humanness and re-precipitated out into a new form. If you try to stay within the human range you just get these clever permutations and one becomes facile as a spiritual mystery.

Black Elk says it this way in 1931:

“At that time I was young, but I began to realize the facts that were going on and sometimes I think about it. The four-leggeds and the wings of the air and the mother earth were supposed to be relative-like and all three of us lived together on mother earth” - we had real teamwork at that time. “Because of living together like relatives, we were doing just fine. We roamed the wild countries and in them was plenty and we were never in want. Of course at that time we did not know what money was and we got along just fine. We would get out just a little ways to bring home plenty of meat [and] at the same time we were outside in the fresh air, because it was this way that the Great Spirit wanted us to live. He had also given us a way of religion according to the four quarters and the four-legged animals - through them we sent up our voices and [could] get help from the Great Spirit. It was his intention at that time to put us together so that we would be relatives-like. We got powers from the four-leggeds and the wings of the air.”

If we're stupid and think that it's just somebody speaking, some nice old Indian just speaking nice mediocre friendly way, we're missing the whole shattering experience of understanding we're being told esoteric mysterious truths about reality. That we're never going to know if we stay inside the truncated mind which we are imprisoned in. We can't even hear what's being said to us simply basically by honest human being who is wise. It doesn't matter how many tarot decks you own. It doesn't matter how sophisticated you are in Kabbalah; how much you know about astrology. That's not it. The fulcrum of transformation is change in reality and not permutations within a mentality. And it has to be engraved in terms of the sacred language which numinous images speak - and that's called spiritual experience.

Then Black Elk said, “But from time to time the white man would come on us just like floods of water, covering every bit of land we had and probably someplace there is a little island where we were free to try [and] save our nation, but we couldn't do it. We were always leaving our lands and the flood devours the four-leggeds as they flee. When we get to the island the water is all around us and today I feel very sorry – I could just cry – to see my people in a muddy water, dirty with the bad acts of the white people.”

But in giving these interviews to John Neihardt in 1931, Black Elk began to bring out another aspect and that was, is, that the white people as well as the Indians were trapped. That they had become in fact relatives and brothers and that all human beings were in the same situation now. Nobody had a boat, nobody had reality anymore. And he phrased it in terms of the mythological image of his people. He said that the tree of life had lost its bloom, had withered, the leaves were gone, the sap was gone, the tree was dead, but the roots were alive. The roots were still alive because the roots are not dependent upon man. All human capability has been erased. Nobody knows anymore. Nobody has it anymore. But the roots of the Tree of Life are still intact because it's not in man, it's in the land. The land is still sacred. Underneath the concrete it's still sacred. It still has that capacity to charge us with numinous images that are truthful and waken us, harken us inside to be able to understand again and respond to it and bring the world back to life. But what we have to do is we have to hear the good news that it's still alive but it's the land that has to be freed. And part of the freedom of the land is letting the wild animals come back. And part of that is learning how to be relatives to those wild animals in their wildness so that we can transform again. And then the tree will be brought back to life. Then the hoop of a new nation will be formed. The old nations are gone. They are gone. They will never be back. But a new nation can be made. A new brotherhood can be made from these roots in the land. And this is why all of this is given.

Black Elk went to Harney Peak in the Black Hills. And he said, “At the time I could see that the hoop was broken and all scattered out and I thought, ‘I'm going to try my best to get my people back into the hoop again.’ At this time, when I had these things in my mind, I was abroad with strange people.” He was in Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. “They were not like my people and I couldn't have any clearness of understanding and somehow I had in mind that I was in a strange country and a strange land that it was not the place nor the habits or religion that the spirits had assigned me, but then I had often wished that someday I might see a day for me and my people. [and] At that time the wilds were vanishing and it seemed the spirits altogether forgot me and I felt like a dead man going around – I was actually dead at this time, that's all.”

And he relates in The Sixth Grandfather, in that book, just came out, he relates that there was a man some seventy years before he lived, sometimes called Wooden Cup or the man sometimes in a mystical mode was called Drinks Water. The basic motion of nourishment in this life is Drinks Water. That was his mystical name. He was the primordially that nourishing thread of reality which can be expressed in the phrase Drinks Water. Well, Drinks Water or Wooden Cup, foresaw the dying off of the wild animals, the binding of the earth with bands of steel - the railroads - the taking of people out from their homes and putting them into little square gray homes. And he saw all of that and delivered that vision about seventy years before Black Elk. And Black Elk in the thirties kept going back to drinks waters mystical vision and saying this is in fact true, this is all this has happened. But that while there was no chance of passing the tradition on any longer in the normal ways there was a possibility because the roots of the tree of life were still intact and because there were still some wild animals there were still a few human beings capable of transformation that by putting the message out sort of like on a general broadcast frequency through these books in the English language somebody somewhere would hear this and would commit themselves to that transformation, to that tradition, to be able to come back and to work to reinstate this. This was about fifty-five years ago that he had this vision.

During the Second World War Black Elk had a series of interviews, the 1944 interviews. And he was concerned at this time with the future. He was in 1944, eighty or eighty-one years old, and he was concerned with what was going to happen and in an interview at that time he said that there were four ways to tell the future. One was in the Sundance (the Okan). “When you go into a sun dance you foresee things concerning the people as a whole. You might be in a coma. Whatever you foresaw it always came true.” Generally this was the individual who was the focus of the Sundance through his suffering, through his acceptance of suffering, personally accepting the suffering on the basis of the whole of the people he could be guaranteed at the end of that ceremony when everything was over, when his suffering was complete, he would go to have a dream usually still within the Evergreen Lodge and everyone would be silent while he would go to have a dream. And in that dream he would have the capacity to foretell the future.

The second way is through - what the English word here is lamenting - crying for a vision. That in the vigil, in the vigil phrase of crying for a vision, one is opened to the extent that time and space no longer exist as categorical compartments and one can sense the future. He says or said, “You might be awake in the vigil and see things. If you sleep, in your dreams you [would] foresee things.”

And then third, “There's a place in the Black Hills,” which actually does exist and there's one “also on the Little Big Horn [Wyoming], a bank of solid rock where there are inscriptions that only a medicine man can read. It is a mystery.” These are pictographs. They're not publicly available anymore. “There is one in the Black Hills that only a medicine man can read. We don't know who wrote it, but a medicine man can decode it and get the meaning.” It's like if someone if you see pictographs they're not intelligible because you don't know what the articulation is, what the syntax is. There's no way to know visually. One has to see this in a numinous mode. He says, “We would camp and when we would [get] back there would be more writing.” Meaning not more pictographs but that more of it would occur to someone, that you take yourself there. Alfred North Whitehead had an interesting philosophic designation for this kind of activity. He called it, in Process and Reality, he called it “accumulative penetration.” That sometimes one understands not by reason nor by insight but by what Whitehead called “accumulative penetration.” And this is the process the American Indian used quite often in seeing more and more and more and more and more in what was there. And the fourth way is that anyone who is about to die can in last moments be given a sudden vision of the future. And if they can exclaim it or declaim it one can tell in that way.

As far as Black Elk could tell - and he died in 1950, age eighty-six - as far as Black Elk could tell, the tribulations that had happened were temporary, that they seemed long and they seemed almost conclusive and indelible to human sense but that in a numinous visionary sense they were going to come to an end and that their end was coming fairly soon. He died in 1950. He died interestingly about the same time as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary proclamation was made - the divinization of the feminine in the Roman Catholic tradition. Very interesting. Synchronistic happening.

Jung, when he died, said that the last fifty years after his death would be the culmination of Western civilization. He died in 61, that would put it at 2011. Black Elk felt that there were about two generations more of this travail and that it would change. We've already had a couple of generations so we're there. We're due.

There is so much that could be said. There's a book called Lakota Mythology and I was going to give you a basic insight into the tremendously detailed and complex spiritual mythology of the Lakota peoples. It's not simple at all. And it's not by guess and by golly. There's a lot here and we just don't have time to go into it.

Along with The Sixth Grandfather - and Black Elk called himself the sixth grandfather. Along with that and Black Elk Speaks is this book called When the Tree Flowered by John Neihardt. Neihardt - N-E-I-H-A-R-D-T. This is in the form of like a fictional novel, an autobiography, but it's actually the experiences of Black Elk put into this kind of a form so that certain elements of experience could be given. That is to say Neihardt was an extremely conscientious poet, American poet. He wrote an epic of the American West almost like a Homeric epic - very large many many hundreds of pages. He wrote a book on poetic theory. He was extremely interested in translation and its problems in poetry and its capacities. And Black Elk had waited for Neihardt to go through his transformations to be able to come to him. And of course when Neihardt came he told him he was expecting him. He was waiting for him.

It was a curious relationship between Americans who have transformed in themselves and American Indians. A very curious relationship. Those of us who have transformed find that they are our relatives. That we belong, we belong with them. Our lives belong with them. Our lives and our sacred honors belong with them. Not with the corporation, not with those families that we thought we were from, but with them. And Neihardt was like that with Black Elk.

There are some beautiful elements in here and I want to just read you a paragraph from this so you get the flavor because Neihardt wanted to get the flavor through. Because spiritual experience has a flavor to it. It has a fragrance. And he's trying to attune the reader to this homey, lovable flavor of spiritual experience. That it isn't exotic in the sense of being far out, but it's exotic in the sense of being so familiar that we recognize that this is us. This is us. And that sense of ‘this is us’ comes home right directly to our very quintessence. And then we know that we are home. That's the homecoming. So here's the flavor he's trying to get.

“So we went, and there were four of us. When the moon was low in front of us and the morning star shone upon our backs, above a streak of daybreak, we were far away, for we had walked fast. There was a place with rocks around it, and a clear creek was flowing there with grass beside the water. And near the place was a high hill that was not quite a mountain. It was a good place to eat what was left of the papa and to sleep a while. But before we did this, Kicking Bear took a pipe out of a deerskin bag. The stem was wrapped with red porcupine quills and an eagle feather was hanging from it, and there was bison-hide on the mouthpiece. And Kicking Bear said, ‘My Brothers, this is one of the hardest things we are doing, and we shall need help, for we are only men. We will go up on that high hill yonder before we rest and eat, and there we will dedicate this pipe to Wakon Tonka and make a sacred vow.’ So we climbed the high hill, the four of us, and when we stood breathing on the top the day had grown and spread, and the prairie rose steep from beneath us to the end of the world. We stood and looked until the sun leaped up and blazed against our eyes. Then Kicking Bear gave me the pipe and I held it high to the place whence comes the light of seeing; and on my left side Charging Cat was standing and on my right stood High Horse, both with hands upraised palms forward; and behind us Kicking Bear was sending forth a voice. He was asking the Great Mysterious One to behold us and the pipe we offered and to hear the sacred vow we made. We were four young men with strong hearts who wanted to do great deeds that our people might praise us, and by ourselves we could do nothing. So we were dedicating this pipe and asking that we might return as victors to our people. And if this should be, then we four would dance the sun dance, piercing our flesh with thongs; and [we would do this] for thanks. And when Kicking Bear had finished, we all cried, ‘hetchetu aloh!’ Then we left the pipe on the hilltop with the mouthpiece pointing toward the sunrise, [left it] and went down to the place with rocks around it and a clear stream flowing through, with grass beside cold water. And there, with hearts made stronger by the prayer upon the hill, we ate what was left of the papa, and laid down in the grass to [sleep].”

This is the truthfulness of the American landscape. It's our home and it's the only real home that we have. Getting out of our mind is the problem and our mind has become like a paste spread throughout all the fault structures. And just merely to acclimate ourselves to dealing with that is not a sign of maturity, but a sign of accepting imprisonment. It's unacceptable.

Well, next week we will see yet another contemporary American who shows us ways out. And we'll see in Khigh Dhiegh’s great work that the Chinese Taoist tradition is very much penetrating into the United States, very much penetrating into the American psyche and mind, and giving it an articulation that allows it to attune itself even more to the American Indian. So I hope some of you can make it then.