There are wayward elements that have collected in my work over the last decade or so. None of them were planned out. They come and go based entirely on what feels right, and what I think the piece needs. For the longest time, having a crucifix in my work felt right. These days it’s the crucifix, four horns on my rotted humanoids, animals with exposed ribs, moths, and some form of the moon.
I think it’d be safe to say that Zdzislaw played a big part in my incorporating the crosses, but I wouldn’t put all of it on simple artist worship. My connection to Christianity has been a lifelong burden of sorts and I’d like to share that strange journey here, semi-officially.
I was raised by my shithead relatives, and they weren’t good for identifying positive traits. They weren’t great at leading by example. They weren’t particularly interested in supporting anyone from a genuine place. They talked poorly of one another. Lies of omission were common. These were toxic people and I wouldn’t be able to untangle myself from them for quite some time.
We were bad people and we had nothing to bind us together. Race was the easy one. Native America was the easy one. Wearing your hair in braids and becoming a Big Lakota was easy. Easier still, was to pick out people who carried themselves well, and label them as “acting White.”
One relative was singled out in particular. None of the qualities that he fostered were shameful or destructive. The person he became would make anyone proud to have known him. My relatives who gave him shit are likely still begging on the streets.
Grandma gave us the gift of the end of the world. She gave us religious paranoia and fear. She spoke of eternal damnation and a final Armageddon. I love and miss Grandma and see where she was coming from. She was a former alcoholic, one who replaced her social circle with members of the congregation. To paint the world in black and white was to put in place a simple path for us.
The world was frightening and it would all end soon.
Our grandparents were from a different world. Their generation got put into boarding schools, they were taught to be Christians. All but one, I believe either my mom’s dad, or my dad’s dad, one of my grandpas lived so far out in the sticks that they couldn’t throw him into one of their schools.
As such, traditional Lakota spiritual practices were simply left to rot. To this day, many of our traditions mean little to our generation. I welcome anyone who wants to keep their meanings alive, as most of us were not sent to this life to enshrine the past. If you’re White and you can learn what these things mean, then go for it. If you’re Native and you practice this stuff, go for it.
I did not choose this path.
Ceremonies were talked with fear and reverence. Yuwipi wasn’t something that most of us knew about, and the mere mention of it was enough to scare some of my uncles. Tobacco ties were seen as pagan and therefore of-the-devil. The Christian mark was stamped in their minds with prejudice, and as such, our connection to a living spiritual life was effectively cut off, as seems to be the standard for all Christians, save for the strange snake dancers.
I will always remember Grandma, off the wagon for the first time in a decade, sitting in a cigarette smoke filled dining room, crying and singing a traditional Lakota song. Not telling us the meaning, only reciting from memory. Pow Wow music has never had the same impact as that one verse.
My cousin became a preacher. Our cousin that we called “White” went off to become a preacher. Went off and joined the marines, and then went to seminary, and then opened his own church while also working with the elderly. He became a good man.
And who were we? Who did we become?
Grandma raised a preacher. She also raised a strange, strange artist who claimed to see spirits, who had visions and dreams, who saw the Lamb of God with his own eyes.
I worked with my grandma for a summer back in 2016. We cleaned motel rooms. I was on the final leg of my alcoholic years. I shared my dreams and visions with her, assuming she’d see the devil in there, but instead, she wanted to hear more.
She was interested in Christian faith healing. When I was growing up, my lungs didn’t work well. We weren’t aware of just how damaging cigarette smoke was. I had scabs and sores growing on my arms and legs. Perpetually inflamed eczema that hurt when the skin stretched. Cracked with ridges and pus constantly flowing.
My long sleeve shirts would dry and stick to my infected skin.
Grandma saw how bad this body was, saw me tied to oxygen masks, saw me being taken to the hospital.
We were backwoods people. We were poor people. We didn’t travel; we didn’t have the money to travel. Once a year, when those income tax checks came through, mom and pops would round us up and take us to the city, and the city was never too far away. Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls. We were poor and vacation meant staying at a hotel that had a pool.
Very few of us have seen the ocean. Not many of us have flown or vacationed. We’re “ooohn-shii-kuh” – we’re pitiful.
(Ushika)
Grandma took us to a faith healer a town over and sent me up to receive a prayer and a clean bill of health.
If only it were that easy.
When that didn’t work, she took us out to Denver to see a very famous con man, the type that would invite people on stage, who would tap them on the head and they’d fall to the ground and stand back up, healed.
That didn’t work either.
They always asked, all of my relatives asked, they were all curious about Christianity and Christ. They wondered about basic mythological ideas and motifs and were never given an adequate answer.
The preachers said that the devil put corrupt bibles out in the world to cause strife. The true bible, the true story, the true teachings were always what those preachers were selling.
I prefer to have an ativan nearby if I’m gonna do some heavy drinking, these days. The anxiety is something that I was never warned about. If I drink, this old body’s gonna feel like it has pins and needles in its hands, there’s gonna be a heavy weight in my shoulders and chest, and I’m going to want to pray. I’m going to want to be prayed for. I’m going to want the comfort of a church or mosque.
Dad drank Everclear. Drank a pint of Everclear every day. One of my first memories of him was when they tied him to a machine at the ER in the city. Pops drank a lot. 9 months out of the year. Pops was difficult to get along with. He could be insecure, angry, stubborn, accusatory, embarrassing – and after his yearly ICU stay and likely coma, he’d sober up and return to being a mostly quiet fella who preoccupied himself with yard work and maintenance upkeep.
There was always a window somewhere in there, leading up to his eventual return to sobriety, where he’d pass out with the tv on some Christian channel, listening to preachers talk about the end of the world.
One of our relatives burned himself up after huffing gas. He disappeared for a long time after that. I wouldn’t see him for a few years. When he came back, he was different in a strange way. He talked quieter and was preoccupied with the end of the world. He was mapping current events onto the Book of Revelation. He said the Gulf oil spill was a sign of the end.
The Christians preached strange stories and never gave us a good-enough answer for a lot of it.
In the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung says he was awakened by the sounds of spirits. They went to Jung because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in Jerusalem.
At eighteen I found the monomyth and the work of Joseph Campbell, and that brought me to Jung and Terence Mckenna. I found psychoanalytic interpretations of Christian dogma and finally felt that we had some answers that made sense. The Book of Revelation, The Book of Job – the totality of the Old Testament, they were all cut apart by thinkers like Edward Edinger. Campbell brought myths from across the world under one umbrella.
We were not as distant as we thought.
One of these writers once said that the strength of the unconscious, its ability to create ritual and myth was so strong, so standard to various tribes in both North and South America, that the early Jesuit priests were convinced that the devil made it to the Americas first and taught the Natives a blasphemous version of Christianity to mock the Christians.
The Christians partook in the Eucharist, divorced from its original cannibalism, and were shocked to see indigenous cultures around the world living their myth literally.
The Jungians so succinctly mapped the psyche onto Christianity, that doomsday preachers no longer have any teeth. Conspiracy theorists can’t peddle these stories about literal giants, and we can’t so blindly believe, as many would like us to, that every miracle in the bible can be traced back to alien craft and beings.
If only we had active Jungians out in pulpits today to defang Christian Nationalism.
The Jungians and the alchemists have a way of looking at the world, one that makes sense. Jesus, as the son of God, was too pure to be identified with, by common people. So, they began to venerate Mary, as she was closer to humans. And in the Middle Ages, that was brought down a step farther. It was easier to identify with the Arthurian knights than the mother of God, or God himself.
The alchemists and the Jungians inverted the entire relationship by returning to the (blasphemed) early beliefs of Gnosticism. A divorced piece of God (the totality of God) became trapped in all matter. The process then, was to embark on the reunification of Sol and Luna within our own life. The Holy Trinity was incomplete because it was not balanced by both the feminine and the shadow. The early mentioning of a feminine presence in Proverbs, one who says that she was with God before the creation of earth, and our continued insistence on an Antichrist, points to a stubborn problem relating to what-it-means-to-be-fully-human in modern times.
Jesus, God, they don’t descend unto earth from on-high, only to run away afterwards. The alchemists and Jungians say that the Philosopher’s Stone is created in the dunghill. The Philosopher’s Stone is created through base matter. We become like lead in our psychological struggles, and we seek out the advice of modern medicine men, we become the initiate, asking for help from ritual elders (the therapists, if we’re lucky enough to find one), who encourage our examinations of our own psychological and mythological symbolic processes.
Von Franz said that “I am the friend of whoever is lonely” in relation to Hermes Trismegistus. The unconscious is the friend of whoever is lonely. That if we retreat from the world, we load up the psyche with power, and that power becomes a mirror, one that can show us a still-living spiritual process in our time. Not one that can only be viewed after death.
If ever there was a place capable of creating The Philosopher’s Stone, a place where the dunghill is smashed and pushed into wounds, a place where one can be allowed to be truly lonely, then it was this life.
Behold A Red Horse 