“Cowboys and Indians at Madison Square Garden! Seats are cheap, and you’ll only need the edge!”
In the late 1880s a Buffalo and an Elk—a famous star and an anonymous performer—travelled to New York by train to put on a show that would garner enough attention to fund a trip across the Atlantic, to England.
For the Buffalo—Buffalo Bill—it was a trip to the old continent, for the Elk—the Lakota medicine man Black Elk—it was a chance to see where the white man had come from.
Indeed, the opportunity proved more exhaustive than Black Elk had bargained for. After he missed the ship home, he had to join another ‘wild west’-themed performing troop whose tour took him all around Europe, so that he finally returned home in 1889.
That year, the U.S. Congress about halved the size of the Sioux reservation, and a few months later, 1890 would see the massacre at Wounded Knee. But such hostilities were nothing new. In late June of 1876, when Black Elk was 12, his people suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the U.S. government after refusing to allow the violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, following Lt. Colonel Custer’s expedition into Lakota land and subsequent illegal gold mining there. We are now coming up on the 147th anniversary of this battle, which was followed by the surrender and death of Crazy Horse, an older cousin of Black Elk’s, in 1877.
From a young age, and in the context of this turmoil, Black Elk had had visions of spiritual and national renewal.
After returning from Europe, he received more such visions, apparently catalysed by his participation in the Ghost Dance, a movement started by the Paiute mystic Wovoka. The Ghost Dance was a rite by which natives were said to connect to their dead ancestors and bring about the restoration of their tribes. Wovoka did not dissuade native Americans from attending Christian churches, and his work was interpreted by some as compatible with Christianity. In this context, we may interpret Black Elk’s participation in the movement, and the spiritual insights gained thereby, as a fulfilment of the Ghost Dance.
Two years after Wounded Knee, he married Katie War Bonnet, a Lakota woman and Catholic convert. After her passing about a decade later, he converted as well, taking the name of Nicholas, and remarried another Catholic Lakota woman, Anna Brings White. All his children were baptised.
He worked as a catechist while also continuing to serve as a Lakota medicine man, integrating his people’s rites with Christianity, finally dying at the age of 87.
Today, his legacy includes an ongoing process for his canonization.
Dakotah Daniel
In this context, it is interesting to briefly touch on one of his principal visions, ‘The Great Vision,’ which, I would suggest, presents us with a structure of spiritual epiphany that corresponds to Daniel’s prophecies and related texts of the Bible, such as John’s Apocalypse.
I will parenthesize these parallels as I describe some of the major elements of his first vision, without, however, pretending to be exhaustive, given its detail and complexity.
To begin with, we should note the constant direction given to the seer by “a Voice,” which seems to operate like the voice of the Lord heard by prophets in Biblical accounts.
After Black Elk’s initial heavenly ascent, he sees the great ones of the four cardinal directions, as well as the sky and the earth, like a six-armed cross.
On his descent, he becomes as rain and defeats a blue figure representing draught, whose colour relating to the sea would mark it out as a false water which actually drains the land of life, like the chaotic waters representing the instability of idolatry in the Bible (prominently the salty waters of the Dead Sea) opposed by the water from above—rain—embodied by the medicine man himself.
The Ancient of Days and the Son of Man
Black Elk sees a northern white giant (the Ancient of Days in Daniel, the giant angel in the Apocalypse), who is somehow his own transcendent perspective, for he is told that no matter what direction he looks, it is south (his proper seat is the northernmost top of the world).
As the giant’s dynamic manifestation, there appears a champion man painted red in the south (the son of man) with whom Black Elk identifies, and who lays down for his people and becomes a bison (the lamb which is the king).
Another vision confirms this translatio of Christianity and the identity of the man in red. Black Elk envisioned Christ manifesting as a native American, in which context the medicine man’s own vocation, including the work of renewing his nation, are iterated:
I saw twelve men . . . . I went to the centre of the circle with these men and there again I saw the tree in full bloom. Against the tree I saw a man … He did not resemble Christ. He looked like an Indian, but I was not sure of it. He had long hair which was hanging down loose. On the left side of his head was an eagle feather. His body was painted red … This man said to me “My life is such that all earthly beings that grow belong to me. My Father has said this. You must say this” … his body began to transform. His body changed into all colours and it was very beautiful. All around him there was light. Then he disappeared all at once. It seemed as though there were wounds in the palms of his hands. Then those twelve men said to me: “Turn around and behold your nation, your nation’s life is such … Their way of life you shall take back to the earth.”
As for the giant of the north, he is described as having wings, which relates to another name by which Black Elk is called: “Eagle Wing Stretches”. The medicine man’s two names, then, Eagle and Elk, contain this duality of aloof giant and dynamic hero.
In the midst of this, Black Elk sees a new, fertile tree (the Tree of Life), renewing his nation.
A sacred man … was painted red all over his body, and he held a spear as he walked into the centre of the people, and there he lay down and rolled. And when he got up, it was a fat bison standing there, and where the bison stood a sacred herb sprang up right where the tree had been in the centre of the nation’s hoop. The herb grew and bore four blossoms on a single stem while I was looking—a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow—and the bright rays of these flashed to the heavens.
Black Elk himself will be responsible for re-planting this Tree:
It was the daybreak-star herb, the herb of understanding, and they told me to drop it on the earth. I saw it falling far, and when it struck the earth it rooted and grew and flowered, four blossoms on one stem, a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow; and the rays from these streamed upward to the heavens so that all creatures saw it and in no place was there darkness.
Higher beings, and the Voice itself, repeatedly tell him that he is to restore his nation. This is to be done by making earthly arrangements conform to the archetype above, as he himself declares: “A good nation I will make live. This the nation above has said. They have given me the power to make over.”
The Bison and the Stallion
The idea of conforming creation to its heavenly paradigm relates to his early encounter of a four-legged creature in heaven, and his subsequent restoration of its earthly counterpart (a powerful stallion). The heavenly creature, that contains the four primal elements in itself out from which the cosmos is made, is what Plato calls the autozoon, or the world-soul.
Black Elk will ride a bay horse at key points of the vision, and is told by the Voice he hears to use the herb he has been given to restore the health of an emaciated horse, who becomes a healthy stallion and renews nature as the earthly counterpart to the world-soul, reminding us of the horse which Christ rides in the Apocalypse.
Black Elk’s renewed nation now appears as one among many, the plurality of saved nations in the Apocalypse. Taken together, they reflect transcendent unity not by their uniformity, but by their harmony.
I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the centre grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
This centre of his people, with its healthy stallion, is now marked by four paradisial women, red like the champion the medicine man saw before. They are as Jacob’s consorts and mothers of Israel’s twelve tribes, corresponding to the four directions (the four sides of the New Jerusalem, the Church as wife):
Four virgins, more beautiful than women of the earth can be, came through the circle, dressed in scarlet, one from each of the four quarters, and stood about the great black stallion in their places … All the universe was silent, listening; and then the great black stallion raised his voice and sang.
Arrows and the Sun
The medicine man is also guided throughout by two men who fly like arrows,
Then as I stood there, two men were coming from the east, head first like arrows flying, and between them rose the daybreak star. They came and gave a herb to me and said: “With this on earth you shall undertake anything and do it.”
We may interpret these as corresponding to the dual faculties we must balance in the course of the spiritual quest: attraction and aversion, or desire and distress, and, in a deeper sense, inward ‘thinking’ and outer ‘sign-seeking’. These are described by St. Paul as the Hellenic and Hebraic dispositions in 1 Corinthians, which, in their exalted forms, correspond to the two trees and witnesses of the Apocalypse—prophecy and law—and to Moses and Elijah, who appeared flanking Christ at his transfiguration.
The sun rises between these two men, and Black Elk is exalted with the morning star, like the anointed, Davidic king begotten by the Lord in the “womb before the morning star” in Psalm 109/110:3. Spiritual victory, in Black Elk’s vision as in the Bible, is represented in terms of rebirth from the womb of the dome of the sky, through the morning star as an umbilical cord that heralds the new day, where the prophet is like the rising sun.
The symbolism of horned animals is worth commenting on. Muslims have a saying according to which one should not pray towards the sun at dawn because it rises between two horns. These horns relate to the animal self, which will lead us to idolatry if untamed. They specifically refer to the psychological manifestation of animal reactions, given that horns grow from the head and so bespeak a mental reality. In contrast, if it comes in the form of cattle, if it is tame—like the lamb, the bison—it becomes an aid to spiritual work, represented by the rising sun (the horn of plenty, the ‘exalted horn’ of victory of Psalm 148). Just as the bodily instincts, when subordinated, are a fattened bison and trusted steed, the psychological poles at play in them, the horns, become allies.
Animal horns thus come to correspond with the two angelic arrows who guide Black Elk. Similarly, the Qur’an speaks of a righteous hero called “Him of Two Horns,” Dhul Qurnayn, who travelled to where the sun rises and to where it sets.
Overcoming animal reactions and their psychological manifestation means that the symbol of the rising sun is not approached through ego, or hubris. Importantly, the end of the work is not represented by the sun’s isolated centrality, but by the sun’s generous condescension to the diversity of earthly forms through its light and heat. For this reason, the Lakota, and Black Elk with them, used a lunar calendar in tune with natural cycles (we find the imagery of the solar hero combining with lunar calendars in other traditions too, from early Roman history to Israel).
Nationhood and Spiritual Renewal
Black Elk’s vision displays Biblical patterns and so serves as an example of their occurrence across contexts, highlighting the legitimacy of their translation and enculturation by different peoples.
It teaches that personal and national renewal require a rejection of the false water, which is actually draught, in favour of what comes from above; a taming of the animal or instinctual self; an awareness of the contemplative witness (the giant in the north) at one with the heroic or active self (the red champion in the south), and, finally, conceiving of the particular—in Black Elk’s case, the Lakota nation and Native Americans—as a centre in which the Tree of Life may grow between the Cross of Six Directions (four corners, the sky and earth). This final point follows from the concept of legitimate enculturation.
The medicine man’s tender love for his people, like the prophets who grieved for Israel, does not make his message less, but more, universal and appealing.
Indeed, both the idea that political and cultural change should not be pursued separately from edifying spiritual discipline, and the sacralizing of local identity and cultural particularity, are highly relevant given the today’s prevalence of a hedonistic monoculture.
