I grew up in this valley and there was an old Ojibwa man named Eddie Barbeau, who told us stories about this place, and the people who lived here long ago, Salish, Blackfeet, Shoshone, and others.



One of the stories was the legend of the Sleeping Giant.

The Sleeping Giant is a simulacra, something seen as the shape of something else, in this case, of a giant sleeping on the northern horizon of the Helena valley, feet to the west, head to the east. He is made up of a series of hills and peaks.



His nose is also known as "The Bear's Tooth." This rock pinnacle was a landmark on the Old North Trail, the trail along the Continental Divide that the Indians traveled, all the way back to the Ice Age, dispersing across North America and eventually even to South America. Much later, Lewis and Clark noted it in their journals as they ascended the Missouri River and passed through the Gates of the Mountains next to it.

Back to Mr. Barbeau's story...this is the legend he told us about the Sleeping Giant...



All of these illustrations are by me, as part of a series I have been drawing over the last few months.

Now that I finally found my old drawing compass, I started today on getting more deeply into sacred geometry and mathematics. The two books I am using as texts are: A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science, A Voyage from 1 to 10, by Michael S. Schneider (HarperCollins, 1994) and How the World Is Made: The Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry, by John Michell with Allan Brown (Inner Traditions, 2009).



I am of course starting with the Monad, the Circle, which represents the unity and wholeness of creation: "The goal of many religions and mythic ordeals is to return to a los state of Divine Oneness. But we have no need to return to a state of oneness because unity is axiomatic and we already are integrated in it. Barely recognizing our situation, here and now we live in a whole and beautifully harmonious wonder world. Only a self-imposed illusion of separateness keeps us from recognizing our own center of awareness and identity with the One" (Schneider, p. 20).

There are three additional principles that can be deduced from the Monad/Circle:

1. Point, the center = Stillness, the beginning, and then equal expansion (rings, waves). Nothingness: zero-dimensional point.
2. Circumference.= Cycles of movement, time, etc., always with both increase and decrease, rising and falling, but also Everythingness, without end.
3. Radius = Most efficient geometric space; maximized efficiency, the most enclosure (space) with the least exposure (smallest perimeter). Everything is contained between Nothing (the point/center) and Everything (the circumference).

At sunset, after studies, I took a walk around the neighborhood, to observe changes in the signs of the season (phenology) as well as look for examples of the monad, in the tree trunks, flowers, and more. The evening was clear, but humid (for here) and the day had been very warm (it got to about 87 F today).

The apple and crabapple blossoms that were blooming so luxuriantly last week, fragrant in the breeze, have dropped all their petals, so the calyx (blossom as a whole) is not longer as evident. Yet the inner parts of the flowers are still attached to the branches, where the ovaries will swell and the fruits will develop.

As the apple blossoms declined, the lilacs have gone into full flowering, and their scent fills the evening air. Bumblebees wobbled among the lilacs. Chokecherries too are still in bloom, as are the mountain-ash (relatives of the rowan). American linden (or basswood) flowers are not as showy, but they are evident for those who take the time to look.

All the trees are finally in full leaf, the elms the last ones, especially the old Siberian elm. The mushrooms at its base have disappeared now, a week and a half after their one-day rush to the surface. There should be another fruiting cycle sometime this season. The evening's impression was one of fruitfulness and sultriness.

"The Green Frog Skin – that’s what I call the dollar bill. In our attitude towards it lies the biggest difference between the Indians and the whites. My grandparents grew up in an Indian world without money. Just before the Custer battle the white soldiers had received their pay. Their pockets were full of green paper and they had no place to spend it. What were their last thoughts as an Indian bullet or arrow hit them? I guess they were thinking of all that money going to waste, of not having had a chance to enjoy it, of a bunch of dumb savages getting their paws on that hard-earned pay. That must have hurt them more than the arrow between their ribs.

The close hand-to-hand fighting, with a thousand horses gally-hooting all over the place, had covered the battlefield with an enormous cloud of dust, and in it the green frog skins of the soldiers were whirling around like snowflakes in a blizzard. Now, what did the Indians do with all that money? They gave it to their children to play with, to fold those strange bits of coloured paper into all kinds of shapes, making into toy buffalo and horses. Somebody was enjoying that money after all.

The books tell of one soldier who survived. He got away, but he went crazy and some women watched him from a distance as he killed himself. The writers always say that he must have been afraid of being captured and tortured, but that’s all wrong. Can’t you see it? There he is, bellied down in a gully, watching what is going on. He sees the kids playing with the money, tearing it up, the women using it to fire up some dried buffalo chips to cook on, the men lighting their pipes with green frog skins, but mostly all those beautiful dollar bills floating away with the dust and the wind. It’s this sight that drove the poor soldier crazy. He’s clutching his head, hollering, ‘Goddam, Jesus Christ Almighty, look at them dumb, stupid, red sons of bitches wasting all that dough!’ He watches till he can’t stand it any longer, and then he blows his brains out with a six-shooter. It would make a great scene in a movie, but it would take an Indian mind to get the point."

- John (Fire) Lame Deer, "Seeker of Visions"

There is a common stereotype I run into all the time, that somehow magic and religion that has African roots is somehow evil, voodoo, hoodoo, etc. On one of the lists I read, it has been the hot topic the last day or two. Here's a little of my two-cents on the subject.

What I know firsthand about African and African-American ways comes from taking
cat yronwode's online hoodoo course (which is also controversial in some parts
of the African American community, as I later learned) several years ago, and
living in the Yoruba part of Nigeria for four months in 1996.

Like everything else to do with magic, everything else HUMAN ;-) , there is the
full spectrum of human behavior and motivations.

We sit here in comfort and ease relative to many places in the world. It kind of
makes me mad when we cast stones. It reminds me of when I was a young fellow
walking along the road, and people would honk their horns as they drove by, and
yell "Loser! Buy a car!"

Dude.

I learned a lot about people and REALITY during my stay in Nigeria.

I was the only "paleface" in a group of African-American students who was
studying there. It was really interesting to be the one who sticks out in a crowd
for a change!

Because of the danger of juju (magical practices in the Yoruba
language/culture) flying all around us, we also had to be adopted into one god
or another's sect, with divination to see if we were acceptable, not as a
practitioner, but just under their protection so to speak. Me and another guy
were adopted by the traditional hunters of Ara, who follow Ogun. The other two
who were studying dance and arts were adopted into Osun's sect.

(Ps. it's not yo-ROO-bah, it's YO-ruh-buh)

I could say a lot about stuff over there, but the main thing is it is a hard
hard life in many ways, and yet people smiled a lot more and you were never
lonely and it was amazing and frustrating and crazy and everything you could
think of. I come back here to the land of plenty, and the big thing I notice?
Everyone here has so much, so much food, so easy a life, and yet so few seem to
smile.

Juju isn't separate from religion or everyday life, it is part of the life's
blood. There is great goodness and great badness, and all parts of what it means
to be human. Here's a post I previously made on the subject: http://hengruh.livejournal.com/93230.html

The Yoruba have an overarching Supreme Being called Olodumare or
Olorun, like the Jewish Ain Soph, YHWH, who is beyond all gods and goddesses, and who
is beyond the reach of prayer by mortal humankind. That seems to be in common
among all the various beliefs in traditional Yoruba thought.

The real interaction with the deities is on the level of the next, the Yoruba
pantheon of gods and goddesses (Orisa/Orisha), similar in some ways to the Norse
or Greek pantheons, which I don't usually think of as dualistic, but instead
polytheistic.

I mainly knew followers of Obatala (the patron of Ifa and the
babalawo/diviners), his rival Oduduwa, and Sango (Shango) god of Thunder,
lightning and fire; Ogun god of metal and hunters, Osun (Oshun), Yemoja goddess
of the rivers and oceans (and Mami Wata). Esu is the trickster/devil. There are
many others.

When parents can't have children, they pray to the Mami Wata to lend them one of
hers, and she sends a soul to the parents, and a baby is born, the child of both
the parents and the Mami Wata. One of my sponsors was such a child, and I also
knew a little kid who was such a child. When they are little their hair is left
long. I did a mural at the Ewe-Nla (Big Leaf bar in Ara) in honor of the Mami
Wata and the Igbo Iwin (Forest Spirits) there.

As far as an initiate, no, I wasn't initiated as a true practitioner, just more
as a "little brother" of the hunters, under their protection and guidance, and
given a hunter's name.

Whether one believes in the existence of spirits or not, all cultures have had spirits of one kind or another, good and bad, whether gods, ghosts, nature spirits, and so on. When JudeoChristianity encountered the gods and spirits of another group, generally enemies, those of another belief system (faith/religion), they called them evil spirits, if nothing else, because those spirits were of a foreign land or belonged to the religion of "the enemy." The Greeks called such spirits, "daimones" (pl.), Greek being the language of the New Testament...and so in the New Testament, we read of demons (the English form of daimones). All demons are, are daimones, or spirits and gods, of other cultures. Some are malevolent/hostile/harmful, some are neutral, some are nature spirits, some are benevolent/helpful, some are like people, moody and changeable, and treat you as you treat them. So, yes, if you are JudeoChristian and have entered into an enemy relationship with them, they are your enemy. But to other cultures, they are the spirits of their own lands and ancestors, and are allies. The Muslims took the same approach as the JudeoChristians, and see them as enemies (djinn) in general due to their own religious covenants. That is, if you believe that spirits exist ;-)

Sometimes I dream about the Land I actually live on, the inner side of it, or eternal vision of it. I look for the Land as it was/is before settlement in 1864. The creeks and willows and sagebrush and chokecherries and buffalo and wolves. I look at the mountains with their genii locii in them, and places on the landscape with "differences" and beings that claim certain areas. There are pathways and trails these beings travel even today. There is a small hill nearby with all kinds of activity, which is connected to the mountains here.
http://hengruh.livejournal.com/tag/hill
Mount Helena is one of the guardian hills/home of a genius loci. The town here loves this mountain, unfortunately sometimes loving it destructively.

Using both inner vision and scientific knowledge of the area's geology, I get flashes of the Ice Age carving the high places and sending the tendrils of creeks from the meltwater into the river, and long before that the oozing volcanics of the Oligocene and Cretaceous and the mountain-building, and inland seas, and long long before that the Great Sea which made most of the sedimentary rocks, and back to the very beginning, more than a billion years ago.

And sometimes, you can even get a little bit of what will come, not just the decline and contraction of our present civilization and the herders and nomads to come, and the ruins of things I know now, but the changes beyond that.

There is no end of the world, not until the Sun itself dies. People die, civilizations die, species come to their end, but new people are born, new societies develop, and new species evolve and fill emptied niches. Don't be afraid, it all transforms and continues as it ever has :-)

When all the (how do I put this nicely) Euro-Asian stuff (Middle East-Europe and
all that connects to it and the three religions of the Books -Judaism, Islam,
Christianity) gets me confused and tangled up, including Hermeticism, and magic
stuff, I turn to the other cultures of humanity to see what the roots of
humanity have to say. And empirical atheistic science can be useful as well.

First, Judaism started as an animistic desert tribal religion of
hunter-gatherers. Their "elohim" (desert and mountain Powers) seemed to be more
like the manitous of the Algonquians, essentially nature deities/forces of the
elements. Later Jewish theology developed them into faces or personifications of
God, or messengers of God, aka angels (angel=Hebrew "messenger"). This is before
the writings in the Bible, but can be seen in archaeology and linguistics.

Then as Semitic civilizations developed more complexities with the development
of agriculture and the earliest cities like Jericho, there was similar
elaboration and codification of a regular pantheon, with storm gods, fertility
gods, etc. (similar to how other civilizations developed formal pantheons, like
Greece's Olympians or the Mayan's Lords of Darkness). Of course the desert
nomads kept the older forms (elohim), but the "city folks" developed
temples and elaborate rites that formed and fed egregores (some based on actual
human spirits/ancestors melded with functions like "god of the fields/fertility"
(Baal = lord) or "god of thunder"). This is the time period of the development
of formal pantheons/systems, which reflect the hierarchies developing from, and
necessary to civilized (city) life (as seen in Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.) The
Semitics developed pantheons like those of Babylon, and of course the pantheon
which developed out of the roots of the elohim animism, namely El (followed by
YHVH) and his goddess wife/consort Asherah/Athirat/Astarte/Ishtar (see
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_jehovah02.htm
and
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa102197.htm
if you want to delve into this further). It is a story of tribal warfare
reflected in the changing and mutation of pantheons.

When two tribes clash, and one wins decisively, the losers' deities are either
demonized by the victors, or sometimes simply absorbed as lesser deities (the
Aesir-worshippers defeated the Vanir-worshippers, while the ancient animistic
gods/forces of mountains and sea were cast as the demonic giants and trolls). Or
Tiamat in Mesopotamia as the forces of evil/chaos vs the forces of good/order
Marduk.

Realize that elaborate pantheons are a reflection of the development of
agriculture and agriculture's eventual offspring the city (civilization). My
tribe for example, though we did some agriculture, did not get to that point. We
still remained essentially hunter-gatherer in our theology, animistic,
personifying the forces of nature, with a few protodeities like Trickster. And
every society had/has some kind of trickster, who is the rootform of a deity of
chaos and/or evil (blamed on when things go wrong, or worse, when things turn
evil). The Norse Loki is an example. In some cases, the trickster is a
benefactor of man (such as the "tricksterish" Prometheus), in others it becomes
an adversary of man.

The idea of evil is as old as humanity. When there is violent and bizarre forms
of death especially, slavery, torture etc. this feeds "something evil",
sometimes the trickster-god, sometimes a city-god, or when there is human
sacrifice, this is usually for agricultural fertility or success in warfare.
Such things can either feed and mutate deities/ancestors or it can feed and form
egregores into sentience. Whether most of these "things" existed before humanity
is debatable, but really it is unimportant in terms of practical considerations,
because they sure exist now. If anything possibly unreal, has real effects, then
it is real enough to matter...whether gods, ghosts or magic ;-)

The Semitic adversary was Satan, introduced in the Book of Job, as the tester
and inflictor of sorrow with God's permission on poor old Job. Just as "angel"
literally means "messenger", so Satan literally meant "adversary." Setting aside
the snake in the Semitic tribal origin myth found in Genesis, the first
appearance of "the devil" (related to Sanskrit's "deva/devi" linguistically, the
way "God" is related to Germanic "gott", and funny enough both "devil" and "god"
mean "deity"...which is just from "deus" which also means the same thing!)

Lucifer, the light-bringer, aka the Morning Star (Venus), from Wikipedia: "In
Latin, from which the English word is derived, Lucifer (as a noun) means
"light-bearer" (from the words lucem ferre). It was the name given to the
Morning Star, i.e. the planet Venus when seen at dawn. Use of the name "Lucifer"
for the Devil stems from applying to the Devil what Isaiah 14:3–20 says of a
king of Babylon whom it calls Helel...Shining One), a Hebrew word that refers
to the Day Star or Morning Star (the Latin term for which is lucifer).
This association developed in Early Christianity, in the 2nd or 3rd century.
In 2 Peter 1:19 and elsewhere, the same Latin word lucifer is used to refer to
the Morning Star, with no relation to the Devil. In Revelation 22:16, Jesus himself
is called the Morning Star but not
"Lucifer", even in Latin (Vulgata stella splendida matutina)."

So really, in Christianity, we have a range of beings and concepts that were
distilled and synthesized from its various roots and later cultural contacts,
into one Being, the Devil. A Christian would counter they were all the same
being, or faces of the same being. So we have a chicken or the egg situation
that presents itself. In any case:

Baal + Tiamat + various defeated Canaanite and other deities + Satan (Judaism) +
Lucifer (Latin) = The Evil Spirit (devil="deity")

A KEY: Part of all of this can also be related to the innate workings of the
human bilateral brain, and how it conceives of things in terms of natural
oppositions (light-dark, good-bad, up-down, right-left, etc.) which also is
reflected in binary code. If there is something All-Good, then there must be
something All-Bad. Even in secular society you have sports and cross-town rivals
ranting away at the other, or Chevy and Ford people ranting away, or Americans
and Islamists ranting at each other. ANOTHER KEY: For there to be an "us" there
has to be a "them"...and if there is not a "them" we must be creative and create
"a them." So doing this is a natural human trait, from our ape-band ancestors,
and it is all about group identity in protecting one's territory and thus
ensuring resources to increase one's reproductive success and survival.

But like everything else, when it grows too big and out of control, that which
is natural and necessary becomes disordered and destructive. Of course
destruction is also natural and necessary, or new things could not come into
existence. People must die so that there is room for new people. Me included,
though of course it is natural for me to fight my own death, till my last breath
;-)

Anyways, getting too long as usual, so I'll stop here.

Years ago, I was working as a sort of minor helper at a Hawaiian church that had also been built on the site of a sacred spring. There had been other manifestations there too. While wearing shorts (it was Hawai'i!) I was walking around the grounds looking at some trees that had been planted and staked, and as I turned to look at something the person was talking about, I felt a sharp slash on my shin and looked down. The metal stake had slashed me deeply and blood was pouring forth. After stitches, etc., and I was home, I thought about this, and always felt the site had taken sacrifice from me, so that I was now a part of the land itself and always would be, where my blood was spilled. After thinking about it, I felt adopted and honored. The Church had adopted me, and the Land had as well :-)