Black Elk and the Way of the Shaman

[mystical_mountain_9]

Through much of my life I have had the good fortune that whenever I was curious about a particular spiritual path, people who were knowledgeable about – or practitioners in – that path, would just pop into my life. One such incident happened in my very early twenties, when I was curious about the religion, spirituality and mysticism of the First Nations peoples of North America. As soon as I sent out to the Divine a wish to learn about the spiritual life of First Nations, a new person joined the small spiritual community that I felt at home. His name was Stewart and he grew up in a part of Saskatchewan where it was almost impossible not to be exposed to First Nation culture. This was in the mid-1980s and Stewart’s biker-looks (very long beard and hair down to his waist) raised eyebrows among some of my friends. But soon I saw that despite his biker/hippy appearance and strong New Age orientation, Stewart had a very open heart – and so, we became fast friends during the couple of years that he called Toronto home. Early in our friendship, Stewart recommended that I read the book Black Elk Speaks – a narrated autobiography of an Oglala Sioux holy man whose long life (1863 – 1950) coincided with his people’s transition from a traditional lifestyle to being a conquered people living on government-dictated reservations – written down by John G. Neihardt in 1931. I was transfixed by virtually every aspect of the stories told by Black Elk – but, most of all, I was fascinated by Black Elk’s spiritual experiences.

Here is Black Elk’s description of his first mystical experience:

It was when I was five years old… I was going to shoot at the kingbird with the bow my Grandfather had made, when the bird spoke and said: ‘The clouds all over are one-sided.’ Perhaps it meant that all the clouds were looking at me. And then it said: ‘Listen! A voice is calling you!’ Then I looked up at the clouds, and two men were coming there, headfirst like arrows slanting down; and as they came they sang a sacred song and the thunder was like drumming… I sat there gazing at them, and they were coming from the… north. But when they were very close to me, they wheeled about toward where the sun goes down, and suddenly they were geese… I did not tell this vision to any one. I liked to think about it, but I was afraid to tell it.

After that, Black Elk was visited by ‘the voices’ from time to time when he was out alone but it happened only occasionally, and he did not know what these voices wanted of him. This changed when he was nine years old and fell ill. This time he had a very elaborate experience - the ‘Great Vision’ as he called it. Black Elk describes its beginning as follows:

When we had camped again, I was lying in our teepee and my mother and father were sitting beside me. I could see out through the opening and there two men were coming from the clouds, headfirst like arrows slanting down, and I knew they were the same that I had seen before. Each now carried a long spear, and from the points of these a jagged lightning flashed. They came down to the ground this time and stood a little way off and looked at me and said: ‘Hurry! Come! Your Grandfathers are calling you!’… I went outside the teepee, and yonder where the men with flaming spears were going, a little cloud was coming very fast. It came and stooped and took me and turned back to where it came from, flying fast. And when I looked down I could see my mother and my father yonder, and I felt sorry to be leaving them.

According to Black Elk’s account, in his vision, the cloud took him to a place where the Six Grandfathers were having council. And he knew that these Six Grandfathers were not old men but were the Powers of the World: one Grandfather for each of the four cardinal directions, as well as a Grandfather of the sky and a Grandfather of the Earth. Each Grandfather gave Black Elk a gift and many teachings and prophecies. A black stallion, a bay horse and a disembodied voice also spoke to him. These visions were to be the blueprint for Black Elk to live his life.

Black Elk describes the end of his ‘Great Vision’ as follows:

Then I saw my own teepee, and inside I saw my mother and my father bending over a sick boy that was myself. And as I entered the teepee, someone was saying: ‘The boy is coming to; you had better give him some water.’

Then I was sitting up; and I was sad because my mother and my father didn’t seem to know I had been so far away.

Black Elk states that as soon as he awoke, he felt well enough to run around, but his parents prevented him from doing so, stating that he had been ill for twelve days, lying as if he were dead all the while.

Then he says something that struck a chord of recognition in me that I have remembered clearly more than forty years after first reading it:

… as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.

I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all, and that I only felt it. It was the pictures that 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 that I heard. I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years.

The next morning… I felt well as ever; but everything around me seemed strange and as though it were far away. I remember that for twelve days after that I wanted to be alone, and it seemed I did not belong to my people… I would be out alone away from the village and the other boys, and I would look around to the four quarters, thinking of my vision and wishing I could get back there again. I would go home to eat, but I could not make myself eat much; and my father and mother thought that I was sick yet; but I was not. I was only homesick for the place where I had been.

Those who have had mystical experiences know well how this nine-year-old Black Elk felt. There may be a ‘gift’ of having one foot in each world, but there is also a ‘price’ – and it is a sense of alienation from one’s social circle, not because of others’ behaviours towards you, but because you understand that others simply won’t be able to relate to your most important and vivid experiences in life.

When Black Elk was seventeen years old, he knew that the Great Vision had endowed him with a powerful intuition that is of great practical power (such as having a ‘hunch’ where game is or where enemies are hiding themselves), but he was tormented by the feeling of responsibility given to him by the Six Grandfathers and by the many other things that he saw in his vision and not knowing what to do about it. He describes his situation as follows:

A terrible time began for me then, and I could not tell anybody, not even my father and mother. I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling to me: ‘Behold your Grandfathers! Make Haste!’ I could understand the birds when they sang, and they were always saying: ‘It is time! It is time!’ The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: ‘It is time! It is time! It is time!’

Time to do what? I did not know… I could not get along with people now, and I would take my horse and go far out from camp alone and compare everything on the earth and in the sky with my vision…

When the grasses were beginning to show their tender faces again, my father and mother asked an old medicine man by the name of Black Road to come over and see what he could do for me. Black Road was in a teepee all alone with me, and he asked me to tell him if I had seen something that troubled me. By now I was so afraid of being afraid of everything that I told him about my vision, and when I was through he looked long at me and said: ‘Ah-h-h-h!,’ meaning that he was much surprised. Then he said to me: ‘Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do what the bay horse in your vision wanted you to do. You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth.’

Following my first reading of the book, I took Black Road’s advice to heart. And whenever I, or members of my family, have an unusual vision, I strongly advocate that the vision be enacted as literally as possible. And when such visions have been enacted, the results have been truly extraordinary.

Following the destruction of the traditional Sioux lifestyle by eliminating the bison (1883), the young adult Black Elk worked on Wild West shows across the USA, Britain and Europe from 1886 to 1889. Though he was valued by his people as a healer, Black Elk decided to experience the world of the ‘Wasichus’ (non-Natives) to see if there was anything he could learn from them that would help him to “bring the sacred hoop together and make the tree to bloom again at the center of it” as per his Great Vision.

While on tour, his show went to Paris, where a local girl took a fancy to him and took him home to meet her family. This was in 1889 and Black Elk was terribly homesick which also manifested as physical illness. One time while at this French girl’s house, Black Elk had what we nowadays call an ‘out-of-body experience’. While sitting down to breakfast with this French family, Black Elk looked up to the ceiling and saw it rotating, and then a cloud descended and picked him up. The cloud took Black Elk across the Atlantic and the eastern half of the USA back home to Pine Ridge. He saw his family’s teepee amongst a large gathering that surprised Black Elk as it looked very different from when he had left his family. Black Elk desperately wanted to get off the cloud and be with his family, but he feared that the fall would kill him. But he saw his mother look up at the cloud and he felt sure that she saw him. Soon afterwards the cloud carried him back to the same house in Paris where the adventure began. When Black Elk regained consciousness, he discovered that he had been in a near death-like state for three days.

Shortly afterwards Black Elk left the show and returned home, where he found that Pine Ridge and his family’s teepee were located exactly as he had seen them in his vision. Black Elk’s mother told him of a strange dream she had had in which she saw him on a cloud, but he could not stay. The following year (1890) was the Battle of Wounded Knee and the forced settlement of the Sioux people on reservations.

The book ends with a postscript by the author in which Black Elk, now a sad old man who believed that he had failed to bring into this world the glorious vision that he had received as a nine-year old, requested Neihardt to take him to Harney Peak in the Black Hills (renamed Black Elk Peak in 2016) – the ‘center of the world’ in Black Elk’s Great Vision, where he had received so many gifts and teachings from the Six Grandfathers. Here, Black Elk, dressed and painted as he was in his Great Vision, holding the sacred pipe in his right hand, sent a prayer to the Great Spirit and the Six Grandfathers, which includes the words:

Today I send a voice for a people in despair.

You have given me a sacred pipe, and through this I should make my offering. You see it now.

From the west, you have given me the cup of living water and the sacred bow, the power to make live and to destroy. You have given me a sacred wind and the herb from where the white giant lives – the cleansing power and the healing. The daybreak star and the pipe, you have given from the east; and from the south, the nation’s sacred hoop and the tree that was to bloom. To the center of the world you have taken me and showed the goodness and the beauty and the strangeness of the greening earth, the only mother – and there the spirit shapes of things, as they should be, you have shown to e and I have seen. At the center of this sacred hoop you have said that I should make the tree to blossom.

With tears running, O Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather – with running tears I must say now that the tree has never bloomed. A pitiful old man, you see me here, and I have fallen away and have done nothing. Here at the center of the world, where you took me when I was young and taught me; here, old, I stand, and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather!

Again, and maybe the last time on this earth, I recall the Great Vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!

In sorrow I am sending a feeble voice, O Six Powers of the World. Hear me in my sorrow, for I may never call again. O make my people live!

It is hard to imagine the agony of Black Elk’s life: being given a sublimely beautiful vision by the Divine, doing the best he could to implement it, and instead of seeing a cultural revival of his people, seeing the depths of despair that is the lot of a freshly conquered, disempowered and impoverished people. But to his credit, Black Elk did what he could to communicate and record the spiritual wisdom of his people during the last few decades of his life.

But the Divine has its own timing. Black Elk Speaks is arguably the single most widely read book within the vast literature on Native Americans which, along with his later book, The Sacred Pipe – an account of the seven sacred Lakota Sioux ceremonies – have been the backbone of the gradual resurgence of pride in First Nations culture and spirituality. This, combined with the births of multiple white Bison in traditional Sioux territory in recent years – a supremely auspicious omen among the Sioux and even beyond, due to the popularity of the legend/prophecy of the White Buffalo Woman told by Black Elk in The Sacred Pipe – there is resurgent hope and renewed determination to rebuild the sacred hoop and the blossoming of the sacred tree (metaphorically speaking) from Black Elk’s Great Vision. Nearly a century after the publication of Black Elk Speaks, it can be truly said that the mystical vision given to a 9-year-old Sioux boy in 1872 in some obscure corner of the Great Plains has managed to spread to the four corners of Turtle Island (North America) and beyond and has deeply affected countless lives.

One of the big ‘take-aways’ that I had from Black Elk’s autobiography is that his spiritual journey was not initiated by him; rather, spiritual beings revealed themselves to him – even sometimes when he dreaded them. It reminded me just a bit of stories in the Bible when angels would take people by surprise to make an important announcement or, in the case of Jacob, wrestle with a human. It is not as though the figures in these stories of the Bible were praying for an angel to appear to them. But Black Elk’s experience had a different ‘feel’ to it than what I had gathered from Christianity or even quite a few other religions that I was well versed in by that point. To my mind, Black Elk was practically ‘seized’ by the Divine beings that revealed themselves and/or their messages to him, and the Divine gifts that they gave him came unasked for. Intrigued, I wanted to learn more. And there I explored the experience of shamans (I am using this as a generic term for holy people / medicine people in tribal societies as opposed to its traditional meaning pertaining to medicine people of Siberia).

What I found through this exploration was a world in which a certain person of a village seemed to be “chosen” by the Divine (but not in way that Harry Potter was the “chosen one”) for inscrutable reasons. And once chosen, the individual would be transformed in a harrowing, seemingly violent way: often described as being physically torn into pieces and then re-assembled in a different way. Never again would that individual be the same: he (or she) was destined to be a misfit who had only one foot in “this world” and the other foot in the “world of spirit”.  Fortunately, in traditional tribal societies, there seemed to be at least one other community member who would recognize the traumatized young person as being “marked” by the spirits (it takes one to know one) and would help to orient him/her to this new way of being. And, given that many other members of the village would have at least some spiritual experiences via vision quests, or something similar, the “shaman” would be accepted as part of society and be sought after for healing, advice, and seeing the future. I am not the only person who harbours the belief that the “shaman experience” may be universal across the globe but in non-tribal societies, their life is a lot harder. And in the modern West there is a high likelihood that a “shaman” will be committed to a mental institution perhaps for life (the same fate can befall mystics in general, especially for those who do not learn the art of using great discretion in communicating their experiences to others).

Well, there’s plenty more to explore regarding Black Elk and mysticism which the next two posts will delve into.