Native portfolio. Indian Perennialism and the Kingdom of Quantity

A retrospective on native North American spirituality and its "metaphysics of nature", on the fiftieth anniversary of the repression of the occupation of Wounded Knee (II), or when two hundred "shamanic fundamentalists" managed to keep the forces of the Anglo-American empire in check for 71 days, in defense of their inalienable sacred values.

di Antonio Bonifacio

Wakan-Tanka you are all things, yet above all things. 

Black Elk

Reason is the enemy of nature, not that primitive reason which man uses in the natural state, and in which other animals, equally free and therefore necessarily capable of knowing, participate. Nature itself has placed this in man, and no contradictions are found in nature. The enemy of nature is that use of reason which is not natural, that excessive use which is proper only to man, and to corrupt man: enemy of nature, precisely because it is not natural, nor proper to primitive man .

Giacomo Leopardi, The Zibaldone

What I know about the divine sciences and the Holy Scriptures I learned in the woods and fields.
My teachers were the beech trees and the oaks, I had no others.

Listen to an experienced person, you will learn more in the woods than in books.
Trees and stones will teach you more than you can acquire from the mouth of a master.

St. Bernard

Premise

As is understandable by reading the title, this writing is not exactly an article as it rather resembles what is defined as an portfolio, un portfolio of relevant images, in general, some principle expressions of native North American culture, notably that of Lakota Sioux, which act as a starting point for concise information relating to the image linked together by a common thread.  

These are therefore rapid portraits, drawn up with the pen as if they were strokes of a brush, summarizing some aspects, among the most significant, in which the spirituality of these people was expressed, a spirituality certainly not to be homogenised in a single container which would make them indistinguishable. 'one ethnic strain from the other but which, nevertheless, in its fragmentary nature still shows how these "nations" had a common vision of the "world", basing their "existence" on some principle pillars, such as "the dance looking at the Sun", whose evidence has been identifiable since prehistory. 

“God” (the Great Mysterious) is understood in these lands both in his impersonal and personal expression and he also manifests himself in the dimension of immanence throughout the universe of his “creatures”, which constantly refer, to those who know read the "subtle" reality, with a spiritual counterpart that precedes their earthly manifestation. Animals such as the bison, which we take as an example, live as "ideas" in imaginative underground caves, and in this capacity they can only be reached through vision, a possibility that can only be experienced by those who live the reality of multiple universes, which the psychiatrist Tobie Nathan discusses and which find support in the iatromancers of archaic Greece. 

The mighty quadruped is therefore accessible in its guise imaginal, like appearance and from this “no where” - and therefore an unlocatable place -, projects its “shadow” as appearance physics (in the Brunian sense therefore) in the manifestation, 

This perceptive typology makes us understand why, completely spontaneously, Nature is “sacred” (abject expression in our shores) and the maximum expression of this sacredness is exactly the "wild nature", the wilderness, cross and delight of the European invaders who saw in it, first the still uncorrupted kingdom of the Edenic Adam, then the possible kingdom of the devil who is plastically represented by the "Indian" since he lives in the woods together with his most representative animals, the Bear and the Wolf, and who diabolically opposes the creation of the new Jerusalem and therefore the realization of that "manifest destiny" aimed at the inauguration of the empire of good. 

This redemptive purpose of the "new" American man, whose consolidated individualism becomes the evident manifestation of the progress underway through the continuous movement of the "frontier", translates into a complete emancipation of this sort of "new species" from its own past, a detachment obtained by cutting almost every root that could tie it to the country of origin. 

Two worlds then met in Turtle Continent (this is how the Natives named their land) and, soon after, they clashed and the reason for this "misunderstanding" is in the historical premises that support the reasons for the two distinct universes. 

Speaking of nature, it can be stated that if for the European, who became a shepherd and farmer in the Neolithic, hunting could constitute an almost playful pastime, given the utilitarian deviation of his relationship with the world and with animals in particular, for the native nature, especially when it comes contemplated in its virginal state, it has a profound symbolic meaning since each element is linked in a reticular manner to the rest. For this reason, hunting is the complete opposite of a more or less playful pastime, as it does not exhaust its function in mere food satisfaction but, as a consequence of the profound symbolization of the landscape and its inhabitants, hunting activity always constituted the primary manifestation of the spiritual "search", even before it was a set of techniques aimed at satisfying food needs. 

As Joseph Epes Braun and Hossein Nasr underline the thousand-year absence of a metaphysics of nature in the West it has progressively led to a spiritual catastrophe whose degenerative effect is substantiated in the greedy affirmation of “Kingdom of quantity”, an ideology which, in Calvinism and its derivatives, will find its most complete theological expression as a manifestation of the grace granted to the privileged individual, the new Homo sapiens of the human species. 

In relation toimportance of "animals" among native communities of the Great Plains we can briefly underline that this relevance is so significant that the figure of the "Messiah" for i Lakota Sioux is represented by White bison woman, or by a female of this singularly candid animal, who transforms into a magical and wonderful woman who gives ritual institutions to these peoples, including, above all, the sacred pipe, an object of ceremonial communication between Earth and Sky. 

Black Elk, the last custodian of this oral tradition, telling this to Joseph Epes Brown, the scholar urged by René Guénon to meet the old man medicine-man through Schuon, he will affirm that, like Christ, White bison woman is destined to return. We remember that among the Sioux the bison pairs with the cyclical Bull of dharma of the oriental tradition, is exactly the exact copy on a different continent and therefore identically marks the rhythm of the cyclical rhapsody, bringing with it the ideal seeds of thatapokatastais, which was also a doctrine of the Judeo Christians, as well as of Origen, subsequently set aside. 

The Natives accepted, as an inevitable consequence of the cyclical conception of totality, the end of their era, an end considered part of the divine plan. It represented and represents a necessary stage to inaugurate the next cycle in which the tradition of the red man will once again become the protagonist of the life cycle of the New Era.  

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Portfolio 1:
The beginning of the end of the Native North Americans

A script was inaugurated in the lands of North America at the time ofdocking of Mayflower a Head of Code in the north of the American continent. The pious pilgrims, once disembarked, exhausted by a perilous journey in which many of them lost their lives, would not have been able to survive the very harsh local winter if they had not been helped by the native populations, which is why, having doubled the first year of their stay and the safety of the "migrants" was guaranteed, the celebration was held "Thanksgiving Day" (Thanksgiving), which should have sanctioned, in the original intention, a pact of mutual coexistence between the newcomers and the local populations, as shown by the noble image proposed here. In fact, after the hard work of the beginning, the Pilgrims proclaimed this happy day of thanks to God for the abundance received and to celebrate the success of the first harvest, whose seeds had been donated by the natives, together with their cultivation techniques. 

The colonists also invited the natives to the party, thanks to whom they had been able to overcome the initial difficulties of adapting to the new territories, thus laying the foundations for a prosperous future full of ambitious goals. On the menu of that special day, the precursor of an uninterrupted tradition, there were dishes that over time became customary, indeed almost obligatory for subsequent celebrations - especially turkey and pumpkin - along with other white meats, venison, oysters, shellfish, fish, cereal cakes, dried fruit, peanuts and sweets. Unfortunately the painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris that accompanies this writing shows us only the utopian aspect of a "universal brotherhood" still in the making, because, shortly thereafter, reality revealed itself to be clearly dystopian, compared to the premises. 

In their historical reality, things actually went in the opposite direction, repeating, these ungrateful Christian Puritans, what Columbus had already done by landing among the welcoming Tainos, a sign of the presence of an imperishable supremacist DNA common to all the colonizers. Having regained their strength and therefore encysted in the territory, the Mayflower pilgrims remembered who "they" were and who the "savages" were, that is, those with whom they had happily shared the meal. The celebrated John Mason, founder of the colony that was created only thanks to the indispensable help of those Indians, was transformed, just after the "restorative treatment" he received, into the fanatical and bloodthirsty protagonist who massacred the natives, a few years later on the Mystic and in all the other places where the fanatical “founding fathers” unleashed the devastating Pequot War against indigenous communities.

Yet another paradox, further irritating, occurred on 29 June 1676 when Edward Rawson drafted an official proclamation of Thanksgiving, showing gratitude to God for the good fortune enjoyed by the community and to celebrate, with incredible nerve, the victory against the "pagan natives", that is, those same natives who had welcomed and shared the territory with Bradford and the other founders of the Plymourh colony. It was the beginning of the end which culminated, to cut a long story short, in an act of supreme arrogance, theincipits of the future genocide already in fieri. The script for future actions had now been written and the violation of any pact, which presupposes an equal meeting of wills, became the rule and not the exception of relations between colonists and natives.

One of the most flagrant examples of this was an event that occurred a couple of centuries later. President Andrew Jackson, a Presbyterian and proud opponent of the Indians, proclaimed, in defiance of the Supreme Court's decision against the measure, the criminal Removeral Act, or the act of forcible removal of the Indians of the five nations (who had perfectly adapted to the new living conditions imported from Europe), with which he forced, in the worst climatic conditions (almost a preordained ethnic cleansing), the Indians to leave their well-kept lands now assigned to ravenous settlers, to take possession, now decimated, of the driest and most inhospitable parts of the new territory of their destination. 

This deportation is known historically, and certainly not by chance, as the “Path of Tears”. For the record, we would like to remind you that an identical bloody deportation was also organized in Argentine territory and for the same "appetizing" reasons, leading to the extermination of part of the forcibly migrant population. Wikipedia describes the event like this:

La conquest of the desert (in Spanish: conquest of the desert) was a military campaign carried out by the Argentine government, and led mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s, to wrest Patagonia from the control of the indigenous populations. Recent studies portray the campaign as a real genocide perpetrated by Argentina against indigenous populations, while other sources see in the campaign the desire to subjugate those groups who refused to submit to white domination. 

In short, what is surprising in this long and very partial chain of horrors is that the perpetrators of these atrocities were all, in various capacities, Christians belonging to the most varied confessions, however in bitter doctrinal conflict with each other, but united by contempt of the other and by the desire to absolutely not want to understand him, but only subdue and assimilate. 

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Portfolio 2:
Pontifical man

This image, of which he is the author Frithjof Schuon and which is taken from his book The feathered sun, expresses with the utmost clarity - manifested by the characteristic pose of man's limbs arranged between Heaven and Earth, as if to jointly receive their influences - the aspiration that animates the North American native, indigenous to the great plains, regarding the ontological position that he aspires to assume in the manifested order, which is that ofpontifical man, mediator between two poles: spiritual and earthly. As is well known, the Swiss "philosopher" stayed, certainly not as a tourist, for some years in these lands, hosted by the Red Indians with whom he shared a strong kinship of soul. 

His investigation, entirely spiritual, focused on the search for traces of Tradition Primordial, which he supposed still existed vigorously, perhaps hidden under the ash of a superficial "civilization", in those regions considered by the colonists to have no priesthood, indeed described, almost universally, as wild and inhabited by savage pagans and therefore real "spelons of demons." Il medicine-man, a "differently" shaman, he was the sulphurous referent of the relationships that these people had with the "world below", an opinion that still persists, completely unmentioned, in various confessional circles.

The perspective of the interpreters of the tradition was different. Schuon shared the then singular and unprecedented idea of Guenon that the presence of shamanism in a culture constituted an excellent clue for the affirmation of the existence of a underlying ancestral tradition, a concept that Guénon had clearly expressed in this passage taken from his book The Kingdom of quantity and the signs of the Times, dating back to 1945. Here you can read:

If we examine "shamanism" properly speaking, we note the existence of a highly developed cosmology, which could provide the reason for comparisons with those of other traditions on numerous points, starting with the division of the "three worlds" which seems to constitute its very foundation. Furthermore, we find in it rites comparable to some of those that belong to traditions of the highest rank: some, for example, recall in an astonishing way certain Vedic rites, among those, also, which most clearly proceed from the primordial tradition, such as the rites in including the symbols of the tree and the swan have a predominant role.

Specifically, the opinion of is also very relevant J. Evola than in the book The bow and club (we are in 1968) writes:

The redskins were proud races with their own style, with their own dignity, their own sensitivity and their own religiosity; not without reason, a traditionalist writer F. Schuon spoke of the presence in their being of something 'aquiline and sunny'. And we are not afraid to say that if it had been their spirit that had significantly influenced, in its best aspects and on an adequate level, the material introduced into the American melting pot, the level of American civilization would probably have been higher.

Schuon 1995, pp. 40-41

Schuon therefore knew well what to look for and where to go to find it and for this reason he encouraged Joseph Epes Brown, a student of A. Hultkrantz, the highest authority on Amerindian studies (incidentally Brown had a brilliant university career, from 1970 to 1972 he was a professor at the University of Indiana, and, therefore, from 1972 to 1989, at the University of Montana) to meet the last custodian of the priests “Seven Rites” of the Oglala Sioux. 

This happened because, alongside these academic roles, the scholar was at the same time editor of the American journal of traditional studies Sophia, in which some authors of "traditional" inspiration collaborated. Thus combining his "orthodox" preparation with his particular wisdom orientation and thanks to the providential intermediation of Schuon, he was able to become a student and intimate confidant of Black Elk, who, in a truly predestined way, was waiting for him on the threshold of his home, now at the end of his life, to "shout from the rooftops" the "Gospel" of his people. If we know this patrimony of wisdom today from the only authentic source, it is due to the truly providential work of Joseph Epes Brown and the "encouragements" he had behind him.

Alce Nero can be considered as the most qualified expression of the native "pontifical man" and he will in fact be the custodian of one of the lines of that "perennial philosophy", the traces of which Schuon followed in his movements and which, in this case, was focused onOrder of the Holy Pipe, inaugurated by White bison woman, and on “liturgical” methods of using the calumet. A reserved order, almost a parallel to the brotherhood of the Fedeli d'Amore which proposed in the person of Dante and through the "Woman" to reinvigorate the exhausted Western tradition.

Let's take a step from Hossein Nasr, Schuon underwear - who knew Brown well in the editorial office of the aforementioned magazine, to the point of writing a touching obituary - the content of meaning that the phrase "pontifical man" can take on, typical of many spiritual traditions (Taoism, Islam, etc.) once set in the native context:

Pontifical man is the reflection of the Center on the periphery and the echo of the origin throughout the cycles of time and the generations of history. He is God's vicar on earth, to use an Islamic term, responsible for his actions towards God, caretaker e protector of the earth, of which dominion was conferred on him, as long as he stays true to himself as a central earthly figure, created in the “image of God”, a theomorphic being living in this world but destined for eternity...

Hossein Nasr, Sacred knowledge, P. 194

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Portfolio 3:
Work as sub creation
(the basket maker) 

The passage between the artisanal creation of objects to their industrial serialization is the transition between the spiritual dimension of traditional art, which makes the human being a sub creator, to the dimension of mechanical work that makes man a slave (a machine used to build other machines). As an example of this, and of the meaning of work for the free man, we take this passage in Brown:

The people who weave baskets, in the act of gathering herbs and vegetable dyes, and then in the same action of weaving, perceived the ritual recapitulation of the entire process of creation. The finished basket is the universe in an image, and in the manual making process the woman really plays the role of creator. Likewise, by establishing a dynamic relationship between the vertical warp and the horizontal weft, the Navajo blanket weaver takes part in acts that imitate the creation of the universe.

The spiritual heritage of the American Indians, P. 63

Here, as elsewhere, simple, apparently insignificant gestures instead expressed the reflection of a underlying cosmogony to the recapitulation of which every energy was directed according to an order of involvement that goes from the physical, to the psychic and the spiritual.

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Portfolio 4:
Woman contemplating the Moon
(The long unbroken native bond between Earth and Sky)

The landscape portrayed in this image created bynative artist Carl Gorman it resembles extraordinarily that of the Vezère valley in Ariege, where the Aurignacian men, therefore dating back to around 35.000 years ago, created the prodigious lunar calendar, known as theAbri Blanchard, which contains annotations such as to suggest that these populations had anticipated by tens of thousands of years the calculation of the lunar metonic cycle. This knowledge is certainly not an end in itself but conceived in an order of views that grafted man into one of the rhythms of the visible universe. Brown asserts, agreeing in this with the most recent perspectives on the subject, the result of archaeological discoveries and not of abstract speculations, that even the native peoples of the Turtle Continent they probably lived in the places as early as 60.000 BC, also cultivating a parallel and perspicuous sacral interest in the stars.

This is not a supposition but a fact that emerges - very clear - in mythological narratives in which the indication of multiple stars and constellations is found (e.g. Pleiades, in reality it is a cluster of the constellation of Taurus), which are objects of mythical attention just like what happened in the uranographies of our latitudes. This mythological attention is confirmed by the aforementioned testimonies coming from the archeology that shows us the presence of structures that constitute real celestial tuners, capable of "grounding the sky" and therefore suitable for "converting space into time".

Ultimately, considering the importance that the celestial vault, with its apparent movements, still receives in native ritualistics, it is reasonable to think that they also observed and observe the sky with the same spirit as their archaic European cousins, who today no longer know scan the celestial vault with the eyes of inner vision. The latter, in fact, have lost the knowledge of celestial rhythms over the ages and with it they ignore the importance of their soteriological function. The “moderns” finally arrived after a long time ethics katabasic descent, to a merely scientific and quantitative knowledge of the celestial vault. Consequently, the presence of a qualitative and/or liturgical time is reduced today to a simple verbal expression and does not trigger any conspiracy in the Soul between the different levels on which the manifestation is articulated: Kairos it has disappeared from contemporary conceptions. 

If we talk about cosmic rhythm, we necessarily talk about the circularity of events that are observed equidistantly by positioning themselves in the center of theaxis beat (the one that supports some symbolic architectures set up for the rites of the Natives) and therefore, seeing things from this point of view, it is as if he occupied the hub of a wheel. The four seasons are therefore an expression of the natural rhythm; hoops and quaternity constitute for the Natives the "geometric" fulcrum of their culture (myth and rite) as the orientations, both celestial and terrestrial, divide not only the geographical space but also the spiritual space, each with its inhabitants, if we pass the oxymoron, “symbolically real”. 

The great, enormous drama of our time has been that of having progressively abandoned, at least for a couple of millennia, the metaphysical conception of nature which, precisely, reveals to us its soteriological function hidden under the apparent guise of its manifold manifest aspects, because "She" (like the Virgin Mary, a parallel dear to Schuon) is "filled with God", like the Virgin Mary is filled with "grace ”. Nature is, metaphorically aside, the sacred book of the natives, something that Saint Bernard in some way shared, inviting the saint, albeit in the Augustinian dualist framework, to go back to "God" through the astonished admiration of nature which therefore would not have should have been violated in any way. 

For the natives of the New World, therefore, intact nature was not the means to achieve something, but the end to be preserved for "something": the future of generations who could "enjoy" the divine work and participate in it like real men in a sort of native theosis. Nature cannot be reified, it is not a clock set in motion by a prodigious watchmaker, rather it is a Cosmos totally living and imbued with the divine. What the whiteskins, over the centuries, wanted to transform and therefore reify, for the other was an instrument of contemplation to be preserved, also, and indeed above all, for subsequent generations: the concept of “borrowed” land. This passage offers a perfect explanation:

Before European immigration to North America, the Natives of the continent perceived their sonic world, at least in part, as a symphony of natural sounds where all the voices of the creatures were an integral part of an animal orchestra. When their habitats were radically transformed by deforestation, agriculture and urbanization, and when many tribes were eradicated due to war and disease, many families lost the direct source of natural sonic structures in a relatively short space of time. This produced a halt in the direct association of their music with the natural world, and a subsequent fracture when the wilderness was so profoundly transformed.

Bernie Krause, The niche hypothesis: How animals taught us to dance and sing

The memory of this sonic universe of plurivibrating sacredness is fully expressed by the touching words of Adelphena Logan (Iroquois matriarch descendant of the Logan tribal chief) which can be read here:

It seems that nature begins to pulsate before your eyes again and it seems like you are reliving in ancient forests, with their wonderful shapes and colours. And I seem to hear many voices every time I beat my drum... rowers on their canoes... solitary wanderers of the wild woods and boundless prairies... distant voices of people singing and dancing, with their feathers swaying to the rhythm of the wind. 

Yes, the drum tells me about times gone by: it is a page of history of my people that tells of wise and courageous leaders, sitting around a bonfire; of strong people, symbols of power, resistance and vigor, of noble souls full of dreams, who return in their thoughts to their childhood and project it, at the same time, towards the future. Past, present and future are woven together in my drum.

In the end we can conclude this brief review with the bitter aphorism of Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull):

For you white men, Heaven is in heaven; for us Heaven is Earth. When you stole the Earth from us you stole Paradise from us.   

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Portfolio 5:
White bison woman 

Extraordinarily widespread among the Natives is the tradition according to which a sacred female being brought an object from the world of the Spirit: it is the sacred Pipe and through it a relationship can be established communication between Earth and Sky, a relationship that would otherwise be precluded. Illo tempore The Sacred Woman delivered the calumet to a human character, particularly qualified to receive it, who has, in turn, inaugurated a real initiatory chain that leads back to the primordial female hierophany. 

This original human-animal theophany is not isolated in the historical religious panorama, which legitimately leads us to suspect a possible common origin of the various myths that deal with it. About that F. Schuon he proposed several comparisons with examples found in other continents and wrote about them as follows:

In the spiritually distant world of the American Indians - which is basically an extension of Mongolian shamanism - a characteristic personification of Shakti is the 'White Buffalo Woman' who brought the Calumet to the Lakota Indian tribes. In her celestial substance she is the goddess Wophe, i.e. the equivalent of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi; in her earthly appearance she is called Pte San Win, the 'White Buffalo Woman'. A few centuries ago perhaps – no one knows the time or place - she appeared on earth dressed in white and red, or completely naked, according to another tradition; the color white, like nudity, refers to primordiality, and the color red refers to life...

Schuon, The feathered sun, P. 179

These intriguing parallels offer an excellent viaticum to the observation of the presence of doctrine of the four ages among the natives. It is Alce Nero himself who talks about it, reporting everything to his interlocutor John Epes Brown, who, given the relevance of the declaration, elaborates its contents in a comparative sense and adds an important gloss to Alce Nero's book on the seven rites. The contents of the aforementioned insert are reported in full here:

According to Sioux mythology, a bison was placed in the west at the beginning of the cycle to repel the waters. Every year this Bison loses a hair and at every age it loses a leg. When it has lost all its fur and all four legs, the waters will invade everything again and the cycle will end. The bull Dharma (divine law) of the Hindu tradition surprisingly corresponds to this bison, each paw representing one of the four ages of the total cycle. During these four ages (yuga) true spirituality progressively darkens, until the cycle (manvantara) ends with a catastrophe. Then primordial spirituality is established and the cycle begins again. Both the American Indians and the Hindus believe that, at the present time, the bison and the bull stand on their last leg and are almost entirely hairless..  

in Alce Nero: 2021, 34, n. 15

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Portfolio 6:
The sacred pipe

The pipe is, as mentioned above, for the Lakota the object donated by the mythical entity to the origins of their culture. The calumet is therefore the ritual instrument that allows the pontifical man his exercise of conjugation, thus establishing, through the smoke that ascends from it, a communication between this world and the Big Mysterious. The image of F. Schuon, among the several that enrich his book, many of which represent the Indians accompanied by this fundamental ritual object, is, in its peculiar hieratic sobriety, rather eloquent. 

Epes Brown writes about a teaching received on the symbolism of the pipe from a representative of an initiatory organization that is present in the Crew, as well as in the Blackfeet, and which connects, rather surprisingly, the smoking ceremony to cardiac prayer:

Immediately after initiation, certain chants are taught to be repeated all the time as a kind of mantra. Although their terminology is different from those of other religions when I explained to him that the repetition of a prayer of the heart can establish an identity between the sincere spiritual seeker and the Creator [...] he immediately said that that was the ultimate purpose of the their organization.

The Native then specified that this brotherhood has very ancient origins and has remained sleepy, like many initiatory lines of every tradition, which they go to sleep waiting for the appearance of a "renovator", however the original deposit was kept intact (Brown: 2021, pp. 176-177). 

The words of Joseph Epes Brown dedicated to the Indian silent prayer, so similar to that of the hesychasts, in which the person praying internally repeats the same significant expression "Wakan Tanka have mercy on me”, make the comparison even more convincing. The juxtaposition of the prayer of the hesychast heart with the native one is offered exactly by Alce Nero in the following sentence and this wisdom suggestion is served to us as if on a silver platter:

I am blind and do not see the things of the world; but when the Light comes from Above, it illuminates my heart and I can see, since the eye of my heart sees everything. The heart is a sanctuary in the center of which there is a small space, where the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the eye. This is the eye of the Great Spirit with which he sees all things, and by which we see him (exactly Echkartian statement; NDR). When the heart is not pure, the Great Spirit cannot be seen, and should you die in such ignorance, your soul cannot immediately return to Him, but must be purified by wanderings through the world. To know the heart center where the Great Spirit dwells you must be pure and good and live as the Great Spirit has taught us. The man who is pure contains the Universe in the pocket of his heart.

Furthermore, there is no doubt that the shamanic trait connotes the symbolism of the calumet and its ritual functioning. The symbolic structure of the pipe indeed suggests this conclusion. Four ribbons dangle from its stem, indicating the districts of the Universe and their spirits or the previously mentioned spiritual quadripartition of the cosmos. The eagle feather that surmounts the pipe indicates the One, of which the four spirits are manifestations. It was Alce Nero, with his recognized authority, who wanted to reintroduce the essential rite of conception lakota, whose use has been compared, by some, to the Eucharistic one. However, this aspect does not seem to emerge so clearly if we delve deeper into the symbolism of the ritual. In fact, in a clarification on the topic, Brown writes:

The sacred tobacco that is burned in the stove represents the universe and also man. He who fills the pipe with sacred tobacco represents the Creator in the act of creation. By smoking the pipe, the universe, including man (or ignorance) is consumed in the fire, which is Wakan-Tanka; thus the cycle is complete. Wakan Tanka is thus represented in the aspect of the Creator and Destroyer. The path from the mouthpiece through the stem to the center and then the release. 

This passage constitutes a seed of meditation that should not be undertaken, because it would require a detailed commentary. However, one cannot refrain from noting how the jointly creator and destroyer aspect seems to be able to come together Wakan Tanka a Shiva rather than to the biblical god (subject to further exploration of the theme in another circumstance), and not even the concepts of "Liberation" (and not "salvation") and "One" can equally be compared with theological ease to Christianity. Likewise, it must be said that if ignorance is burned in the fire of the stove, this event necessarily has, as a counterpart, the achievement of knowledge, knowledge which evidently cannot be otherwise than sacred knowledge.      

Alce Nero knew this well and Epes Brown, in a letter dated 19 November 1947, demonstrates, once again, the free and indomitable spirit of this authentic "Father of the Homeland" who does not bend and maintains the teaching of his ancestors despite his adherence (not conversion) to Catholicism and thus manifests his independence:

Of course it means a lot to Alce Nero to have the support of a Christian father (Father Gall, his “adopted” son; NDR), given that the priests here have always insisted that he abandon his "pagan practices" and the works of the devil to adhere totally and exclusively to Catholicism. 'Black Elk Speaks' (the disputed book by John G. Neihardt) failed to acknowledge (much to the church's resentment) the fact that Black Elk was baptized and was responsible for the conversion of many Indians some forty years ago. Black Elk says he is sorry if his action to bring back the spiritual traditions of the Lakota will anger the priests, but their anger only demonstrates their ignorance, and in any case Wakan Tanka is happy because he knows that it is by his will that Alce Nero carries out this work. 

This is confirmed by a recent observation by Marco Toti, an excellent expert on the subject, who wrote as follows:

The historical phenomenon in question therefore does not coincide with a conversion understood in the exclusivist ways typical of the supporters of Christianity, but rather with a continuation of the ancient and traditional inclination of the people towards what can be defined as a non-exclusive and cumulative adhesion.   

Marco Toti in Alce Nero: 2021, 13

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Portfolio 7:
Hunting as a search for the Self

It is known that hunting and fishing, for the populations who in residual forms still live mainly on this form of economic subsistence, represent an event imbued with sacred values ​​which are expressed in prayers, purifications and so on and which concern the totality of the event and therefore goes from the preparation of the hunting trip to the "decomposition" of the prey. Consequently, both the preparatory activities and the pursuit of the prey, as well as its killing and all the subsequent activities of treatment of the remains, from the fur, to the carcass, to the bones, receive a treatment aimed at the spiritual valorization of the "gestures and the word ”, before fulfilling the utilitarian function, which is only a consequence of the previous one. Needless to say there is no relationship between hunting as a "playful" practice of modern man and the sacredly rhythmic hunting of the Native, starting with the use of the same type of weapons. 

Naturally, the peoples of North America lived the experience of archaic hunting in full involvement of all the plans that were involved in this bloody and at the same time necessary activity, to the point that Joseph E Brown was able to write:

Black Elk said that the act of hunting is - does not represent - the search for the supreme truth that is conducted throughout life. Hunting is a repetitive quest, requiring preparatory prayer and sacrificial purification; the scrupulously followed tracks are the signs and clues of the objective and the final contact with the prey is the realization of the Truth, the ultimate goal of life".

Black Elk said the act of hunting è – does not represent – ​​the search for the supreme truth that is conducted throughout life. Hunting is a quest, he repeated, which requires preparatory prayer and sacrificial purification; the scrupulously followed tracks are the signs and clues to the objective and the final contact with the prey it is the realization of the Truth, the ultimate goal of life.

Note that Alce Nero speaks of "realization", meaning therefore being one with the truth and not a mere external knower of it; acquaintance and known form one whole. The aforementioned Brown adds, demonstrating the non-extemporaneous nature of Alce Nero's statement:

Similar examples of the hunting as a meditative rite can be offered by southwestern peoples, and Franck Speck noted the same attitude in the Naskapi hunters of the Labrador peninsula.

J. Brown: 112-113

We add, having dealt with it a short time ago, that the offering relationship between prey and hunter is figuratively well illustrated in the pictograms of Porto Badisco where it is the deer (the prey) that offers the bow to the hunter, with the aim of being chased, killed and consequently delivering a spiritual content to his killer. One might (boldly) conclude that hunting, ritually understood as a form of knowledge represents a form of "gnosis", and the hunting parallel reminds us of a crude passage expressed by an expression Dogon, captured by Dominique Zahan:

The lion uses powerful claws to tear its prey. Likewise, man digs into the mystery of the world with his spirit to reach the truth. His motto is "the lion Liberator, he who rends the fresh heart and liver.”

The search for the ultimate truth therefore seems to be the root of these bloody behaviors and, for this reason, it can be believed that hunting represents a particular aspect of the great family of "sacrifice" characterized by a particular "voluntary" aspect on which the same informs us Brown. He writes:

Every natural being and substance had a life and power within itself that needed to be respected, since that power could be passed on to humans. Animal hunting was therefore a ritual activity in which the hunted offered his being to the hunter; food as well as the skin and other parts of animals were therefore included in this sacrificial act and in the sacred power of the specific animal.

J. Brown: 114

Therefore, if hunting is, in essence, a self-sacrifice of the victim, it can be compared to ritual sacrifice whose fundamental component, incomprehensible to us contemporaries, is the victim's consent. He talks about it Marcello de Martino in the volume The sacrificial performer, the knife and the victim. Morphology of the Indo-European god of war and genesis of the three Dumezilian functions which certainly, as is evident from the title of the text, explores the theme in a very different context. From reading the text, however, some traits in common with the voluntaristic conception of the native North Americans cannot fail to be highlighted, as can be compared by reading this passage synoptically:

Il Indo-European god of War (there is a significant equivalence between hunting and war among the North American natives) he was the recent incarnation of the primordial Celestial Hunter and the great slaughter of the battlefield finally manifests itself as the theater of an enormous sacrifice. The deity is therefore the sacrificial matador, his weapon is the curved sword-knife with which he immolates his victim, who willingly meets his own fatal destiny: three distinct characters who perform three specific functions for an Indo-European "ideology", but who become one Great God, one and triune.

In the next passage, taken from a writing by Roberto Calaso, the same spirit is captured:

Zειου συ ταχεως, "shake yourself promptly!", Aristophanes' Trygaeus shouts to his sacrificial sheep: by shaking his head it must give its consent. The Delphic god had made it very clear to Theopropides Euscopus: only a sheep that spontaneously consents can be a just sacrifice.

In Plutarch's time, this rule was still scrupulously adhered to and in Daphnis, for example, milk and wine were poured on the heads of his sacrificial animals, as was done to obtain the required nod of assent. You could also pour water into your ear. For a sacrifice in Delphi, a shaken head was not enough: the animal had to shiver, so that the Pythia could pronounce the oracle (Karl Meuli, “Griechische Opferbräuche”, in “Gesammelte Schriften”, Schwabe, Basel, vol. II, 1975, p. 995 – Quoted by Roberto Calasso in “The ruin of Kasch”, 1983, p. 348, Adelphi – 2nd ed. 1994). As is easily understood, none of this has any similarities in contemporary slaughter of men and animals.

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Portfolio 8:
Indian eschatology and Western eschatology (the Eagle with its feathers is the sun)

It is clear that "Western civilization", the one that came into being after the Middle Ages, so anthropologically characterized by the central position of the Vitruvian man, has now conquered the world. There's no point in talking: the West is practically everywhere and the lemma "West" is emptied of any locative meaning and is now indicative of a mentality, not of a geographical dimension. It is not for nothing that even the most remote and inaccessible patch of territory on Earth testifies, with the presence of a sinister plastic bottle abandoned on the ground, that someone got there and left a precise trace of their "civilization". Together with this, however, the news presents us with the problem, if not the drama, of imminent climate change, attributing, with what reason we do not know, the disaster, considered imminent, precisely to the greed of "Western" man, which he would now like to remedy through a drastic slimming treatment, even pushing him to eat an insectivorous diet, completely foreign to his culinary traditions. Belated regret, it seems to us, given that only a century ago the famous Sitting Bull had uttered what is perhaps the most famous of his phrases:

Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last lake has been polluted, only after the last fish has been caught will you realize that money cannot be eaten..

No one can know if future generations will feed on wild honey or desert locusts, as the Baptist seems to have done but, inevitably, it appears clear that, with the "slimming cure" proposed, if not actually imposed, expansionist pride will receive a notable downsizing, if not even a radical rethinking: globalist commodification is prospectively aimed at receiving a strong backlash from the very limits of our "development". 

However, the legitimate doubt arises that what has been prepared for the success of the so-called transition may only be a clumsy attempt - or a "smart" act by unidentified occult powers - for sell the illusion of being able to stop a car launched at breakneck speed, when it is now close to a wall with which a collision is inevitable whatever maneuver is attempted. Now there is nothing left to do but wait: you cannot get off the world and, consequently, stopping the carousel should be considered a mere illusion. 

Among the Natives, visited half a century ago by F. Schuon and E. Brown, at a time when the use of ritual pipes had once again become the protagonist of native religious life, there was a eschatological reading of these events, that is, while i Lakota they restored their traditional rites, re-establishing a firm connection with their spiritual principle - namely Wakan Tanka, the Great Sacred, who is "Grandfather" in his impersonal dimension and "Father" in his personal one - the civilization of white men, due to the opposite nemesis, would be in such a tilted position that it could no longer be concretely rectified, finally showing that it had reached its end, having expressed all its "quantitative" potential, and therefore inevitably close to its extinction.

Il native renaissance it would have materialized with the end of the hegemony of white skin. E. Brown notes, completing the exposition of his interlocutor's thoughts regarding the catastrophic nature of this "prophecy":

La His hope is that some of his people will build a bridge leading from the end of this period to the next and this will be done with the help of the pipe.  

Small Parts John Sessa, in his detailed commentary on Schuon's book The Feathered Sun:

When the Calumet is lit, the smoke that is lost in space indicates the de-individualization, which man must achieve to verticalize his life and return to the Principle. Man in reality, by essence, is divine, and with the ritual he must become aware of this and become what he is. It must become the Sun, the Sun plumed with eagle feathers, the bird that more than any other, with its flight, symbolizes the ascent to Heaven, an omnipresent ornamental theme in Red Indian clothing.

Because man, in the native conception, is body-soul-spirit represented iconographically by the Natives by means of symbols “three circles” and, precisely for this reason, only this man who has reintegrated his spirituality will have the earth "restored" (which, speaking softly, refers to the prophecies on the third age of Joachim of Fiore).

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