By Jamie Moran [4] The Apophatic Awe of Lakota Prayer Lakota prayers open with the invocation of Tunkasila, ‘Grandfather.’ This is not ‘anthropomorphic.’ I…
By Jamie Moran
[4] The Apophatic Awe of Lakota Prayer
Lakota prayers open with the invocation of Tunkasila, ‘Grandfather.’ This is not ‘anthropomorphic.’ In the deeper apophatic tradition of unknowing, it speaks of the ancient, unoriginated source— the primordial mystery before creation. Judaism calls this mystery ‘the ancient of days.’
Before any specific petition is made, a prayer will begin with a long period of silence, with the person standing still and holding the sacred pipe, pointing it toward the heavens. This is consonant with the apophatic understanding that silence and stillness before the Great Mystery is where all contact begins. It is echoed by a cry in the Liturgy, ‘lift up your heart.’
Black Elk recounted that when addressing the Great Mystery, the first feeling is one of complete insignificance and blindness. The human ego must shrink to nothing before the blinding reality of the Wakan.
The Hanblecheya — ‘Crying for a Vision’ — is the ultimate apophatic practice. A person is stripped of all comfort, clothing, and companionship, left entirely alone on a mountaintop with nothing but a pipe. The central prayer of the vision cry is sparse: “Wakan Tanka, onshimala ye; wani kta cha” [“Great Mystery, have pity on me, that I may live”]. This is a prayer of vulnerability, acknowledging our dependency on the divine for all our life. What is ‘not’ in this prayer is also apophatic. There are no theological descriptions, no bargaining, and no positive attributes assigned to God. The petitioner does not tell the Mystery who or what it is. The seeker simply stands in the naked fear and awe of their own contingent existence, crying out to the only Source.
The spirit of this praying is akin to that of David in the Psalms. The prayers ‘fear’ God in the Hebrew sense of awe, astonishment, reverence, gratitude, worship as thanksgiving.
The very word ‘Wakan’ is apophatic. Western missionaries desperately tried to translate it as “holy” or “sacred,” but Lakota holy men explained that it means something closer to ‘incomprehensible’, ‘mysterious’, or ‘beyond understanding.’ This is exactly the way in which St Gregory of Nyssa describes the cloud of unknowing that is the gateway into the divine darkness.
If something cannot be explained by human reason, the Lakota say, “Wakan tanyan yanka” [“it sits mysteriously”]. Wakan things in nature, or human history, are unusual, odd, not in the run of play, not easy to fit in any known categories. This would include the uncanny, the unsettling. God cannot be ‘grasped’ by the mind, nor any other faculty of the human constitution. The relationship the Great Mysterious offers humanity is therefore of the utmost importance. This is not a relation of detached neutral observation [such as the schitzoid person deploys to protect their fragile self from attack, and which science has pushed as the only route to ‘objectivity’]. God reveals his soul and heart to humanity, evoking in us a response of our deeper soul and deepest heart. Though we stand in awe before the Mysteriousness of God, something mysterious in us leaps up for joy because it recognises its Creator as its real home. We ‘know’ God through love, and this love is, on both sides, free and personally given. ‘I put you in my heart’ or ‘I give my heart to you.’ The Beloved matters to the Lover, is valued beyond all cost. As the tobacco in the sacred pipe, once burnt by the fire [the Holy Spirit is Fire] it turns to smoke and goes into the vault of sky. Is this not an apophatic metaphor for letting go definitions, fixed ideas and rigid images, as we draw closer to the Mystery of God? This turning to ashes, to release smoke that disappears into the sky, is the unknowing that is a stripping away, a dying. We are only reborn ‘in God.’ Otherness becomes the basis of Love—as it is in human relationships. Enmeshed relationships, where there are no boundaries, are not loving. Rather, they are confused, frustrating, and damaging to all caught in the mess.
The sacred pipe of the Lakota, like all the seven Christian sacraments, is a physical locus where the transcendent abides, becoming immanent through the mediation of that physical thing. Sacred differs from Holy. Holy is God in himself. A holy person, or anything else that is holy, is filled with the divine holiness. Sacred refers to a concrete, material, reality that is set aside for the task of mediating divine power and presence. The ikon is sacred art. Sacred refers to the tangible wood and paints of the picture, the tangible bread and wine of the cup of communion, the tangible oil anointed over key places on the person’s whole body at the Easter Wednesday ceremony of Extreme Unction. St Ephrem regards all of creation as sacred, all created is a sacrament of God. Sometimes sacred and holy converge. For Jews, their Bible is a sacred text yet is more. In its very words, and the spaces between words, and the music behind words, God the Word is incarnated. The Bible is holy because it radiates with the divinity dwelling in its verbal markers. The Word of God, who is God, is in all its words. It takes the Ruach, the Holy Spirit, to read the words and understand them in the soul and from the heart, not just with the mind. ‘The Spirit searches out the deep things of God and humanity.’ God invites us into the deep things. The deep things are hidden in humanity, awaiting our willingness to engage them.
Awe before God is not reached as a conclusion of philosophical debate and argument. It is the visceral, immediate, honest, reaction of the human creature to their Creator.
This awe extends into the way Lakota conduct themselves in their relationship with the Ultimate Mystery. The First Nations were struck, in their focus on the creation in its Sacred Beginning, by both the awesome Otherness of the Mystery of the Creator, too vast for human ken, and yet the concrete help gifted to human life in the forms of its sacred powers and creative forces working in nature. The natural becomes the conduit for the supernatural. You do not disrespect such help. You don’t speculate about it in the abstract. You don’t try to standardize it in dogmatic thoughts, clever explanations, fixed formulae. You show gratitude for the help, and you deploy the help in all areas of life, practically. The help helps with all the coming and going of human activity in culture, in nature, in history. You do not question, rebel against, ‘convict’ the help of having gaps, absences, failings, as the Jews do. But the Jews cleave to God even when they are feeling let down by God. The Shamanic peoples do not go in for such Jewish ‘arguing with God’ because often the help they receive supernaturally is life or death for their life on earth. The survival of the entire tribe may be at stake. You do not bite the hand that feeds you. You learn to accept the food and the way it is dished up. If that is as mysterious as the Divine Mystery, then who are you to challenge it? You bow head and heart. ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ is the foundational attitude of all Indigenous spirituality. Yet at the same time, there is freedom and boldness, chutzpah and self-belief. If you are in a benign relationship with Divine Mystery, it encourages you, empowers you, and you come to respect your own dignity, and you will not lightly surrender it to any kind of intimidation that seeks to take it from you. There is a reassurance in receiving supernatural help, because it says you are valued, considered worthy, loved, in the long run of eternity, whatever befalls you in the short run on earth. Thus, Shamanic spirituality is permeated with confidence and humility. Indigenous peoples have a lot of humour, along with their robust fortitude, enduring and bearing what must be borne and endured. They know how to enjoy the gifts of life. They know how to travel light. They do not need the heavy baggage of fame and fortune, possessions and status. They seek to ‘walk in a sacred manner’, in all that they do, day in, day out. In all of this, they fulfill what God has asked of them. They hold the Sacred Beginning.
[5] Skan, Tate, and the Four Winds
The Spirit Skan [Taku Skan Skan], Sky & Motion, has as his companion Tate, the Wind. The Wind brings movement and dynamism into the world, along with the life breath and its life force. Tate has four sons, the Four Winds.
Yatá [The North Wind]:The first born, who is cold, harsh, and strong.
Yáŋpa [The East Wind]: The second born, who brings the morning and new beginnings. He is rather passive and lazy.
Okága [The South Wind]: The third born, who is gentle, creative, and brings warmth.
Wiyóhipeyata [The West Wind]: The fourth born, who rules over the sunset and endings.
Before Tate’s sons grew up, the world existed in a state of chaos without order or boundaries. Tate sent his four sons on a massive journey around the edges of the world. As they travelled and established their own circular paths, they permanently established the four cardinal directions of the Sacred Circle. The Sacred Circle is shaped like a wheel because the winds circling the unformed world journeyed in a curving path. The curve in nature has spiritual qualities the straight line of Western ‘progress’ lacks.
The parallel between the Lakota Skan, the Jewish Ruach, and the Christian Holy Spirit, is close.
Light allows God to have a Face, enabling person to person, face to face, meeting and friendship. Martin Buber’s I—Thou relationship between God and humanity rests on the Logos as the Face of God, lit up by the Light of God. The Wind & Fire of the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father directly, and does not proceed from Father & Son, or Father & Logos. The Holy Spirit is the immediate experience of God, the warmth and power of God’s heart. This is intimacy, heart to heart.
The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. The Spirit is personal, the sanctifying and divinizing of persons in their particularity, yet at the same time uniting them in the warmth and inspiration of Holy Fire. “Fire is in all things” [St Dionysus].
In Eastern Christian theology, the ‘logoi’ are the blueprints of creation derived from the mind of the Logos, but it is the Holy Spirit who actively animates, sustains, and drives those logoi into motion. The Ruach, the Spirit, breathes the Life Breath into the human soul, and all souls of all beings. The Holy Spirit is the Energizing of everything, setting everything in motion. Thus, the Holy Spirit is the “Giver of Life” [Zōopoios],a dynamic force that is ‘everywhere present and fills all things.’ This is not just moral cleansing and personal sanctification. It is a meta-physical and cosmic sustaining power. Without this continuous Uncreated Energy flowing from the Spirit, creation would literally collapse back into nothingness. In Genesis of the Jewish Bible, the Ruach, the Holy Spirit, ‘hovers’ or ‘vibrates’ [merachephet] over the unformed waters when creation begins. This is the kinetic creative power of God.
This parallels Skan closely. Škáŋ is the ‘all-powerful, all-moving’ spiritual presence that keeps the cosmos from stagnating. Skan is the very principle of vitality and change. Skan too is the Sky and the Wind, the origin of the Breath of Life [Woniya] and Life Force in all living beings.
In both traditions, God is not a detached clockmaker. The Divine Spirit is an active, moving power running through the currents and threads of the physical world.
Both traditions reject a static universe. in Eastern Christianity and the Lakota Way, movement is a divine quality. For the Lakota, if it moves, it is sacred [Wakan], because motion is the gift and has the kinetic force of Skan. For Eastern Christianity, the movement, growth, and transformation of creation — leading toward divinisation — is the direct work of the Holy Spirit’s Power. This Power manifests in multiple forces, energies, potencies, spread throughout everyone and everything.
The parallel might only diverge in the End toward which the Holy Spirit is moving all persona, creatures, and things. Theosis, or divinization, is the Fire Jesus Christ the Messiah said he came to kindle, and how he wished it were kindled already. The Lakota focus is not on this End, which requires the salvation and redemption of humanity before humanity can be divinized after the pattern of the ‘divine-humanity’ of the Messiah. Humanity’s theosis will precede the theosis of all creation. These are all eschatological mysteries, for the End. The Lakota focus is on the Beginning, as God has asked of them. Skan & Holy Spirit parallel strongly at the beginning of creation.
However, the eschatological End cannot be reached without the sacred foundation of the Beginning. The ‘theosis’ at the End rests in the reality of Skan originally ‘moving’ the creation= originating the creation in movement, change, dynamic transformation of state. The creation is not a static object, a static machine, but a fluid and flowing movement, an ex-stasis, not a stasis. Skan is responsible for founding that dynamic flow keeping the movement of the whole in harmony and balance. The diverging occurs when the necessary dynamic becomes time in movement toward the End, victory or ruin. That means not all movements of Spirit are circular and cyclical. There is a progressing over time not straight and linear [as in the Western idea of material ‘progress’] but more akin to the Celtic spiral, going forward through circling repetitions, yet always taking a further step into the new.
Existential time introduces radical, fundamental, change over time. The change toward theosis is ‘at stake’, at existential peril, over the entire span of time, Beginning, Middle, End. The creation either ends in abject ruin, entropy, degrading of energy and a static state that is death to movement [ontological stasis and stagnation], or it reaches theosis. The creation is ‘moved’ toward the final marriage of created with Uncreated.
For the Lakota, ‘only the ancestors have faces.’ For Messianic Christianity, the future ending has the face of Jesus Christ the Messiah.
However, the end is latent in the beginning, and the beginning is only fully revealed at the end. When we look at the Holy Spirit as the Cosmic Mover – as well as all his other gifts of holiness to soul and heart – the parallel with Skan is undeniable. Both these ‘Movers’ declares that the creation — the cosmos, nature, the earth — is alive, dynamic, and sustained by a sacred and holy spiritual Motion.
St Maximos said there are three incarnations of the Logos= in the man Jesus Christ, in the Scriptures, in Nature. Learning from Nature is learning from a “natural scripture.” Many people in the West and elsewhere, for whom organized religion has failed, find in the natural world intimations of the divine. For these people, nature is the church. St Ephrem called nature and the entire creation ‘a sea of symbols.’
If the key difference in regard to time is ignored, then the divergence between the two traditions seems to come down to how each tradition views humanity’s place in existence.
For the Lakota, the aim is to be ‘a part of it.’ In Crying For A Vision, the seeker is given a sacred power, their sicun, and such power reveals to them how they fit into the Whole. The gift is their responsibility to the people and the earth. The vision actively places the person in the Sacred Hoop. They become a clear channel of Wakan Tanka’s care for the creation.
In theosis, the aim is the divinization of humanity after the pattern of the divine-humanity of the Messiah Jesus Christ. For the Eastern Christian tradition, the human being is unique because they are made in the Image of and called to grow to the Likeness to God. In Theosis, the human does not just find their place among in creation. They are filled with God’s own life. While the human never becomes Godlike by essence, they become Godlike by grace, whilst remaining human. But, as microcosm of the macrocosm, humanity ‘contains’ the stars and the animals, and all creatures and things. St Maximos said humanity is the ‘workshop of creation’ because we are created at the intersection of all the polarities that have split and become dualities. Our role is to integrate the creation, keeping it in harmony, and balance. This closely parallels the Lakota calling of humanity as revealed in the Vision Quest. Eastern Orthodoxy dips back into Shamanism, because theosis must bring all creation with humanity. Humanity is the summation of nature, not a superior spirit sitting uneasily above the rest of creation on some phony throne. That very picture is Luciferian.
Thus, when time is understood as the key dimension of the Messianic Mystery, then a seeming divergence becomes a necessary complementarity. The Lakota Way of humanity learning from nature the way to creatively express and protect its potentials is where divinization begins. Divinization cannot be built upon the fallen condition, with its isolate and enclosed ego sticking out like a sore thumb. The second step in divinization is the Jewish shift from nature to the ‘nightmare’ of history, to save and redeem the human venture that is otherwise more and more egoized as time goes on. The third step in divinization is the sacrifice of the Messiah for all humanity, the Cross, Descent into Hell, and Resurrection, of Jesus Christ.
‘Let those with eyes, see, let those with ears, hear.’ Shamanism, understood from the perspective of the Eschatological End, will be lauded and thanked for having laid down the first necessary step toward divinization. Without this step, humanity strays farther and farther from the Source.
Though scholars dispute it, I am persuaded by George Carlin’s argument that ‘Indian’ comes from ‘in deos’, a people living in God. No such country as ‘India’ existed at the time Columbus discovered the ‘New World.’ Moreover, ‘Red’ is the colour of the sacred. In Genesis, Adam – humanity – is made of the ‘red earth.’ Wherever we walk on this earth, we walk on sacred ground. It is because the world is contested by the evil one, and our own division of heart [we are in two hearts about love and its cause in the world] that the sacred ground has become a killing ground. Red is sacrifice, blood. The creation begins with God giving his blood. This story of Inyan the Rock is profound theology. Sacrifice is ‘basic’ from Beginning to End, from Shamanism to Judaism and from Judaism to Christianity into the Messianic Age. The Ways of Sacrifice know that sacrifice is the real engine of time.
COMMENT 2
By discovering similarities in the ‘cosmology’ and ‘creation spirituality’ of the Lakota Way and the Eastern Orthodox Christian Way, two converse approaches can be firmly rejected.
1= The Western colonial disrespect and mischaracterisation of Indigenous Spirituality as “primitive” animism, polytheism, or paganism, supposedly lacking any consciousness of a Mysterious Source.
In reality, as the comparison of Lakota Shamanism and Orthodoxy has sought to show, the Lakota approach is sophisticated, complex, nuanced, and as is the case for Orthodox Christianity, panentheistic, not pantheistic. Wakan Tanka is not just the sum total of trees, animals, wind. Rather, the Creator is transcendent, beyond comprehension, and dynamically imminent, weaving through and sustaining all created. God is not his creation, but the creation is imbued with his presence. It was the Western Christians denigrating the tribes ‘living in God’ who were primitive, crude, unspiritual in the extreme. Too many of them gladly took part in cultural and literal genocide. There were individual exceptions and the Red Indians recognized these men and women who stood against their Western culture. Probably the Quakers have the best record overall.
2= The Western scholastic reduction of Christianity into a legalistic, non-cosmic framework.
This was always an unfortunate tendency in Western Christianity but reached its apotheosis in St Thomas Acquinas. This and the dark theology of St Augustine of Hippo, Luther, and Calvin, resulted in a religion that was all too often fearful and narrow, mean spirited, and blind. Western Christians tended to worship a remote Monarchical Majesty. Their cathedrals are too grand, and make a person feel they are in the palace of an omnipotent ruler who lays down commands to keep people in order. The ethos is cold. There is no intimation of the God who loves humanity and wants greatness and deepness for humanity’s heart. Other churches feel like court rooms where a person is under investigation, and accusation. Or the churches feel like school rooms, where reading the book becomes so paramount, no reading of the sacred and mysterious realities all around us is possible. This becomes Logo-centric and neglects the Spirit.
[6] Feminine Sacred Mysteries
1, One of the key parallels between the Lakota tradition and the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition is that in both these Ways, the ‘divine feminine wisdom’ plays a huge role. There is no equivalent to this in the West of Christianity.
Let the story begin with the Jewish and Eastern Christian Sophia [Chokhmah in Hebrew]. She is God’s consort, dancing before the throne of God before the creation is made. She says she was ‘brought forth’ before any of God’s works [Proverbs, 8]. In the creation, Sophia acts as a ‘master craftsman’ beside God. God creates through ‘her.’ In Greek, her name means ‘Wisdom.’ It is never given to a boy in any form. It is confined only to girls. Sophia is a companion to God in creating, a divine feminine wisdom. But her ontological status remains ambiguous.
Sergei Bulgaklov, in the 19th century, tried to resolve the ambiguity but many current Russian Orthodox think Bulgakov misfired. Sophia seems neither God qua God, nor just another creature, however exotic or special. She fits neither ‘Creator’ nor ‘creature.’ Some Orthodox equate Sophia with the mysterious being of the ‘church’ or ‘temple’, God’s ‘House.’ In Judaism it says, “Wisdom builds her House” [Proverbs, 9, 1]. In Orthodoxy, Christ is married to the Church. Sophia, the temple/church, and Mary the Mother of God, are symbolically linked.
All of this should be left as poetry, not seeking to turn it into theology, especially rational theology.
When the attempt is made to rationally pin down Sophia, she vanishes like water we try to hold in a closed fist– or a fruitless theological war breaks out, as happened with Father Bulgakov [he was soundly attacked by Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florensky]. Her ontological status is fluid and multivalent. She is many things and nothing we can get a tight grasp on. Is she a hypostasis= does she have a personhood? Or is she a personification of something spiritually abstract and obscure? She is not ‘the fourth person of the Holy Trinity.’ Yet neither is she lacking personalness in relating. She is, as God’s Partner in the action of creation, the relational space where Creator and creation embrace. She is the ‘in between’, the bridge linking Uncreated and created, and linking all the distinct and differentiated realities of creation without rubbing out their contrasts of nature. Sophia is a mediator, cosmic and human. She is the bridge that allows flow between distinct realities and the bridge that heals splits when divisions arise between these realities that should be linked together in a dance. She mediates accord, harmony of many parts, balance of contraries.
The link between Sophia, the Jewish Temple, and Mary the Unwed Girl and Mother of God, is symbolic of a ‘sophiological’ sacred reality.
Sophia is the beauty of God’s intent for creation, as creation responds to the Creator and becomes filled with his glory. Sophia is the beauty the creation has in open, transparent, relationship to God. Her qualities are receptivity, responsiveness, sensitivity, suppleness, flexibility, fair assessment. These are the virtues and values inherent to the feminine soul of humanity, and indeed all the souls of creation. One of Sophia’s titles is ‘Soul of the World’ [Soul of All Created Worlds]. If the creation is not aligned with God, it loses this beauty. In the fallen condition, we cannot see the real beauty of the creation. We see it in part, not in whole. Yet it has not reached its full wholeness yet. It was created good and beautiful, yet the creation is not finished, it is ongoing, and its destiny is bound up with human destiny.
The Temple is God’s House. The Temple is the cosmos, the creation, that is built to become, over time, God’s House. The vault of the Temple is sky, the ground is earth, and all parts symbolically recapitulate the sacred geometry of the creation. The Temple is the ‘House’ where humanity enters into communion with God. Christ is married to the Church because the Church is the restored, purified creation.
For the Logos to enter history, incarnate in the man Jesus Christ, Mary was chosen as the physical ‘house.’ It is not that Mary was ‘born without sin’ [the Roman Catholic “immaculate conception”], according to the Augustinian doctrine of ‘original sin.’ This doctrine is not accepted in the Christian East. Mary is a flowering of the Jewish yoking to God over the centuries, and her ‘purity’ is that she embodies the spirit and dynamic of Sophia as the paradigm, the protype, of the Mysterious Feminine Response to God. This Feminine Response is made before the creation, and this Feminine Response begins the creation in a radical Yes. When Mary replies to the angel making the Annunciation, she says ‘be it done unto me according to your word.’ She is what Sophia embraces, joyfully, even before the creation begins. God will not proceed unilaterally. God waits upon the Feminine Yes that co-operates with his action on all levels, in all degrees, with all kinds. Sophia is the creation’s joyfulness in responding to God’s initiatives, the creation’s dancing to the divine actions. Sophia is the creation taking joy in the divine creative initiatives. She puts up no resistance and accepts. The joy in her soul is a dance, and this dance helps craft the whole cosmos of the creation. The creative action becomes Eros in love with the soul, and the created worlds are their children. Sophia is daughter, wife, mother, of the Divine Creative Activity. Sacred Marriage is at the root, and will be the end, of all creation.
Orthodox ikons that portray Sophia – this is not supposed to be done, yet it is done [mainly by the Kiev and Novgorod schools] – the central figure is a fiery spirit, Sophia, whilst Mary stands directly beneath or within her, carrying the Christ child. Mary is the human point where the Wisdom of God Sophia becomes flesh and blood. Mary is the Gateway for heaven incarnating in the earth.
That the name ‘Sophia’ is never given to a boy is vital. In the grammar of Hebrew [Chokhmah], Greek [Sophia], and Latin [Sapientia], Wisdom is strictly feminine.
The masculine principle [Logos] represents the outward-moving Word, the speaker, the seed, the isness of structure, and the light. The feminine principle represents the capacity to receive that Word, to shelter it, to gestate it, and to respond to its fructifying in beauty. God does not create by violently imposing his will onto a passive, dead canvas. God creates by speaking into a loving, responsive, and joyful Feminine Wisdom that celebrates the Divine Action whatever it is, and wherever it goes.
The implication is stunning.
Without the joyous Yes of the feminine, and her co-operative action that compliments the creative divine impetus, creation could not happen. A certain freedom, trust, faith in God, must be inherent to Sophia. She has one foot in the Uncreated and the other foot in the created. She is the ‘dual-nature’ that unites the duality, rather than letting it split apart.
‘Sophiology’ has to do with secret knowledge, the knowledge of how Uncreated and created flow together. Sophiology is also the understanding of the arts and sciences as ways of bringing back to God, and offering to God, all the gifts he has given to humanity through the creation. When the cultural creations of humanity are inspired by Sophia, a magic attends their evocation. There are celestial, terrestrial, psychic, mediators in human culture. Sophia ensures all of these joyously reflect the divine creator in some manner.
To turn Sophia into an explicit dogma is to kill her mystery. If you make her a fourth person of the Trinity, as Jung wanted to do regarding Mary, you fall into heresy. If you make her just an angel, you strip her of her cosmic, divine role and weight.
Sophia is the poetry of God’s love for the creation. She is the reality that before the creation was ever made, the Creator imagined a beautiful, feminine, responsive partner as the soul of the creation, and God has spent time building a House where they, and all their children, will finally dwell together. In that House of Wisdom, the original joy, even playfulness, will ring out, even as all tears, all dying, all pain, will be no more.
2, Sophia clearly links powerfully to the Lakota Way. The Beautiful Whope, the Star Maiden or Falling Star, and the White Buffalo Calf Woman, are two immediate parallels. There are others..
Whope is the daughter of Wi, the Sun, and Hanwi, the Moon, and is the most beautiful and graceful of all the feminine spirits. She is known as the Mediator who brings peace and restores harmony and balance. The White Buffalo Calf Woman, Ptesáŋwiŋ, came to the Lakota to give them the Sacred Pipe, and the Seven Sacred Ceremonies. She is a holy prophet.
The Beautiful Star Maiden and the White Buffalo Calf Woman are widely considered to be the same spirit or closely linked manifestations of the same divine feminine mystery. Lakota oral tradition teaches that the White Buffalo Calf Woman was a physical incarnation of Whope sent to walk among humans to deliver the sacred teachings.
Whope’s name means literally ‘something falling down’, a meteor or falling star.Wakȟáŋ Woȟpá is ‘something sacred falling down.’ Whope is that sudden, bright flash streaking across the night sky. She is not a permanent star. She comes, then goes. When descending to earth, she takes on the form of a beautiful woman. She brings heavenly virtues of ‘peace on earth and good will to all men.’ She mediates conflicts and restores equilibrium. She promotes friendship, and the necessary balance between spirits and humanity.
At a time of crisis and famine, Wohpe embodied in the physical form of the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought the sacred pipe [channupa] to the Lakota. The smoke of the pipe carries prayer up to the Great Mystery. “I send a voice.” The Seven Sacred Ceremonies of the Lakota were also brought by her.
When the White Buffalo Calf Woman first approaches, two young Lakota hunters see her. One looks at her with lustful, profane eyes— seeking to dominate her. He is immediately enveloped in a dark cloud and reduced to a skeleton. The second hunter looks at her with reverence and holy awe, recognizing her Wakan nature. He becomes the messenger to prepare the tribe.
Whope, through the White Buffalo Calf Woman, leads the ritual thanksgiving of the people to their Grandfather, the Creator. It is Sophia who ‘rightly’ responds to God. She teaches humanity how to be near God, in respect and trust, in love and delight. It is Feminine Wisdom that knows how to be close to God, neither swallowed up in the awesomeness of God, nor estranged from God’s care.
When a person is seeing a meteor or flashing star, it is Whope mediating on their behalf. This is why Drinks Water, a holy man and prophet, was not afraid the world was ending the night he witnessed the great star shower in 1833. He knew ‘The Night The Stars Fell’ was a blessing. Even in the desacralized West, we ‘wish upon a shooting star’..
The woman’s name ‘Hannah’ comes from the Hebrew Channah [חַנָּה]. In the Jewish Bible, Hannah is known for her abiding faith, perseverance, and maternal heartfelt prayers for her child, who would become the prophet Samuel. The linguistic root of Channah means ‘grace’ or ‘favour.’ In Arabic, a Semitic language close to Hebrew, the name can also be linked to meanings of ‘happiness’ or ‘bliss.’ In Christianity, the linguistic root of the name has been theologically employed to speak of God’s “grace” and “favour.”
Thus, the ‘grace’ of God is feminine in some significant sense. God’s grace is favour, happiness, bliss.
By Grace= By Sophia.
[7] The Fall of Humanity
Wilmer Mesteth, spiritual leader of the Oglala Lakota [Western Lakota], discerned in the Jewish-Christian story of the Fall and the Lakota ‘Emergence Story’ a common theme, which he called ‘prematurity.’
This is wanting more on your plate than you can fit on it, and racing to the end too quickly, so that you try to walk before you can crawl, try to run before you can walk, try to fly too high while you should stay grounded. You become impatient, wanting the dramatic story you are living over before you have gone through it. This ‘advance’ in humanity could have occurred with God guiding it step by step= symbolized-and-embodied by the incredible fortitude and patience of the buffalo who take one step at a time to cross 1000 miles. They go that distance northward, then come back southward for another 1000 miles. I asked Wilmer if the Lakota had a story similar to the Fall. The Fall story originated in Babylon and was reconfigured by the Jews at the time of their captivity, 600-500 BC. Wilmer replied that the Lakota do have a story different in events, yet similar in what it portrays.
In the Lakota Emergence story, human beings originally lived underground [or in a spiritual realm called the Tunkan Tipi]. They were instructed by the Creator to wait patiently because the surface of the Earth was not yet fully prepared to sustain them.
The spider-trickster Iktomi and the dual-faced woman Anóg Ité wanted to mock creation. They sent a wolf into the cave carrying beautiful things: sweet berries, soft clothes, and rich buffalo meat. The leader of the underground people, Tokahe [“The First One”], told them that they should wait. He reminded them of the Creator’s warning. But the people grew restless. They wanted the gifts of adulthood right away. They followed the wolf up through Wind Cave into the summer sun. Summer inevitably turned to winter. Lacking the wisdom, maturity, and tools to survive the harsh season, they were starving and freezing to death.
When they cried out in misery, the Creator did not abandon them, punishing their disregard of the divine instructions. Instead, seeing they had emerged before they were ready, the Great Mystery transformed them into the buffalo. He gave them heavy fur to survive the cold and thick hooves to walk the earth. The buffalo moves slowly, one steady step at a time, crossing vast distances. The first humans had to become a buffalo people to learn the very patience, groundedness, and endurance their prematurity rejected.
The core tragedy in both narratives is prematurity. It is not a transgression against a legal framework. It is not outright wickedness. It is falling to a subtle temptation, to be elevated before one is ready. In both stories, the first humans refuse to grow at the Creator’s pace. They reject their own childlikeness and seek ‘a quick route straight to the top.’ This does involve a ceasing to trust the Creator, not just defiance against rules and regulations. God walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening= a parental relationship of love is in motion. This loving contact is mistrusted and betrayed. St Irenaeus of Lyon, and later St Maximos, interpreted the Fall in the Garden of Paradise as choosing a premature rising rather than going step by step. The fruit of the forbidden tree was not bad. It was ‘too soon.’
St Irenaeus brought ‘time’ into Christian theology and thereby rendered that theology ‘existential.’ He maintained that God intended for humanity to eventually have the knowledge of good and evil and to become like God. But humanity was still a ‘child’ in relation to God. You do not feed a baby solid meat= you feed the newborn milk. St Paul talks about Christians who need “pap” and cannot handle the “strong meat and drink” of mature religion.
The spirit tempting Eve is the evil angel Lucifer hiding in the mythical form of the Serpent. He tempts Eve with a false ‘Gnosis’, a kind of knowing that the angels have, and portrays it as closest to God. This is a Lie. Humanity was always destined, through the Messiah, to be divinized, not the angels. Lucifer urges on the soul a ‘self-divinization’ that is his own reason for falling from heaven [Isaiah, 14, 12= “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star”]. The forbidden fruit, for the human soul, is an autonomy gained from knowing ‘higher things.’ Lucifer will always tell the soul this is a ‘secret knowledge’, available only to a very select few.
Wilmer and I once had a talk on the parallel between the Lakota Iktomi and the Jewish-Christian Lucifer. Lucifer is certainly a tricky dickey guy, fast on his feet, like a carnival huckster, and with a talent for the glib gab. He charms, befuddles, seduces, poisons, in an eye blink, akin to quick bite of a vampire. If Lucifer has Trickster features, Iktomi and other Tricksters in world mythology certainly have Luciferian traits. Unlike the Sacred Clown, or Heyoka, who serves the Thunders in their mission of riding the world of spiritual evil, filth, ‘wickedness in high places’, Iktomi and other Tricksters are only motivated by their own sadistic glee in upending people. Wilmer and I took our conversation to the Lakota Studies class he was running at the Oglala Lakota University, and the class explored it for some two hours.
There is a sting in the tail of any Trickster, spirit or human possessed by that spirit. Though the Trickster loves to mock, and disparage, and fool others, he is often in the end fooled himself. His tricks lead him to be tricked, and he becomes the laughing-stock of children and adults. The tricker of people, to show them up, is tricked by his own trickiness. The disrupter ends up ‘disrupted’, flat on his ass.
There is a subtle hint of this outcome to Iktomi’s nasty trick on the first humans in sending a wolf. The wolf is the spirit animal who guides and guards people on the path through existential reality, a path of authenticity and honesty, courage and generosity. In the adult world of ‘existential exactions’, the wolf is the key helper. Thus, though the wolf acted as Iktomi’s messenger, this also meant that the Emergence of the first humans into existential reality would be protected by the wolf spirits. The wolf spirits are Keepers of Paths. Thus Iktomi engineered, unwittingly, a good outcome for the people in their new existential peril.
Unlike the Western Augustinian view, which often portrays Adam and Eve as fully mature, ‘perfect’ adults who committed an act of divine treason, Eastern Christianity views Adam and Eve as spiritual children [children, not adults, to God], innocent, perfectible but not perfect. Just as the Lakota Creator changed the premature humans into buffalo to survive their new environment, God clothed Adam and Eve in “garments of skin.” This is the ‘animalistic’ ego that copes with a challenging world by being as brutish. This was an act of mercy by God, to protect Adam and Eve from destroying themselves in their state of spiritual immaturity.
Thus, both the Emergence story of the Lakota and the Jewish-Christian story of the Fall diagnose the obsessive illness of the rampant human ego= the dissatisfaction with where and when and who we are, our desperate desire to arrive without taking the journey. We want the Crown without the Cross. We want the whole world of human possibility without the underground waiting, growing, readiness, that accumulates in the unconscious little by little and slowly ‘sinks in’, before we can act on it, and draw from it as a wellspring in facing the rigours of existential reality.
Shamanism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity agree that to fly, we must first learn how to patiently remain grounded. This is the real humility. It is ‘not our place to get above ourselves.’
[8] Sacred Marriage
1, Skan, the Sky, and Wi, the Sub, are both connected by love to Maka, the Earth. Skan is more the fatherly protector, whilst Wi is more the Lover. The two relationships operate simultaneously. Both are necessary.
The primordial marriage is Skan [the Blue Sky] and Maka [the Green Earth]. This linkage is structural, it is set-up before plants, animals, humans arrive. Inyan’s sacrifice begins creating. His blood became the waters. His body became the dry land, and his spirit became the dome of sky. In this process of creating, Skan and Maka are the primary binary pairing= Father Sky and Mother Earth. This is an ontological marriage, creating Above and Below as constants for all life on earth. ‘Celestial and Terrestrial’, in the terms of St Maximos, or ‘Heaven and Earth’ in the terms of the Chinese Book of Changes, the ‘I Ching.’ This is sacred geometry building the cosmic architecture.
The Sun has a generative relationship to the Earth, concerned with how life grows. Sun is constancy, bravery, generosity. He penetrates the Earth with light and warmth every dawn. This wakes up the seed of life in Maka, so that it germinates and grows to fruition. Sun is not so much married to Earth as giving his energy to her so that the children of Earth can survive. In this sense, Sun is acting for Skan.
Sun is actually married to Haŋwí, the Moon. They were originally designed to travel the sky together as equals. The tragedy of their story [caused by Iktomi’s trickery] resulted in Wí neglecting Haŋwí for a moment. Škáŋ separated them, forcing Wí to rule the day, and Haŋwí to rule the night. Sun is a husband whose true wife, the Moon, is hidden from him. She reflects his light, but she also sends the cooler light into the Earth, letting it work in a new and more feminine way, in the dark and governing the movement of the oceans. Hanwi is the guardian of the night.
2, Skan and Maka can be seen as the Jewish Temple. Sky is the dome, and Earth the nave floor. This is Holy Spirit and Sophia= the heavenly, the creative, and the earthly, the receptive.
The Sun, or Logos, is exemplified in the priest leading the liturgy. The Light and Warmth unlocks the seeds in human souls and makes them grow.
Both the Logos and the Holy Spirit enter into relationship with Mary, the Unwed Girl and Mother of God [Theotokis].
In Luke 1, 35, the Archangel Gabriel announces the Incarnation to Mary.
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you.. and the Power of the Most High will overshadow you.” It is the Holy Spirit, the Power of God the Father, and the Fatherly protection of Sky, who will who bring the Logos into Mary. Consequently, the Logos, the Word and Light of God, is conceived in Mary’s womb.
Mary enters a simultaneous, non-contradictory relationship with the two arms of God, the Spirit and the Logos.
3, Mary is the true Earth= the mystery of the ‘earthiness’ of Maka is spiritual.
In Eastern Christian hymnography — especially during the Nativity and in the Akathist Hymn — the Virgin Mary is given earth-based titles. She is called=
The “Unfilled Field” that brings forth the divine grain.
The “Untilled Land” that yields the fruit of life.
The “Holy Mountain” from which the cornerstone is cut.
These are praises of the Sophiological Mystery that inheres Mary.
Mary is humanity, and all creation, at its most receptive, most grounded and humble, most trusting of God [a trust that Eve, then Adam, threw away]. When the Divine Light [Logos] is brought into her by the Divine Power [Spirit in Movement], she conceives the Incarnate Logos who will be the Messiah, and this will also ‘release’ the Messianic Spirit working in a new way to deliver humanity from the tragedy in the Garden. The Spirit will plunge into humanity’s ‘Difficulty at the Beginning’ [Chinese Book of Changes].
All of Sophia’s three relationships to God are imprinted and dynamized in Mary= she is the daughter of the Father, the wife of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of the Logos. The joyous and receptive response to God of creation led by Sophia becomes the opened door through which God enters ever more fully into the creation.
The Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos [a selection]=
“Rejoice, height that is too difficult for human thought to ascend;
Rejoice, depth that is too fathomless for angels’ eyes to perceive
Rejoice, for you are the throne of the King;
Rejoice, for you hold him who Sustains everything.
Rejoice, star that shows forth the Sun;
Rejoice, womb in which God became incarnate.
Rejoice, through whom creation is renewed;
Rejoice, through whom the Creator becomes an infant.
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.
Rejoice, heavenly ladder by which God came down;
Rejoice, for you gave birth to the light ineffably;
Rejoice, for the “how” you taught to no one.
Rejoice, surpassing the knowledge of scholars;
Rejoice, dawn that illumines the minds of believers.
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.
Rejoice, goodwill of God to mortals;
Rejoice, boldness of mortals before God.
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.”
This is a multi-layered, multi-dimensional, love story between Creator and creation, with the Divine Feminine Wisdom leading the creation’s response to the Creator as mediator between Uncreated and created, bridging that gap, personally and ontologically.
When Lucifer, a very bitter and twisted angelic spirit, leads the earthly response to God, the creation is cut off from its Creator, and becomes ‘Dame Folly in the House of Death.’
Tradition calls the Messiah Jesus Christ the “Sun of Righteousness” and has often called the church the “Mystery of the Moon” [St Ambrose]. The church reaches not just into ‘the dark of the world’, but into the realm of night, the realm of the unconscious, the hidden realm, to heal and grow its buried treasure. The church is a dynamic function for cleansing and healing the collective unconscious, and the personal unconscious, while joining them in a helpful and creative inter-lock.
(to be continued)
