The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

existence can be manipulated under certain conditions and
according to certain laws. These conditions and laws, called
“ritual” or “magic” in the West, are known to American Indians
variously. The Sioux refer to them as “walking in a sacred
manner,” the Navajo as “standing in the center of the world,”
and the Pomo as “having a tradition.” There are as many ways of
referring to this phenomenon as there are tribes.
The symbolism in American Indian ceremonial literature,
then, is not symbolic in the usual sense; that is, the four
mountains in the Mountain Chant do not stand for something else.
They are those exact mountains perceived psychically, as it
were, or mystically. The color red, as used by the Lakota,
doesn’t stand for sacred or earth, but it is the quality of a being,
the color of it, when perceived “in a sacred manner” or from the
point of view of the earth itself. That is, red is a psychic quality,
not a material one, though it has a material dimension, of course.
But its material aspect is not its essential one. As the great
metaphysician Madame Blavatsky put it, the physical is not a
principle; or, as Lame Deer the Lakota shaman suggests, the
physical aspect of existence is only representative of what is
real:
The meat stands for the four-legged creatures, our animal
brothers, who gave of themselves so that we should live.
The steam [from the stewpot] is living breath. It was water;
now it goes up to the sky, becomes a cloud again …
We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday
things, which in our mind are mixed up with the spiritual.
We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us
the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man
sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot
that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted
too, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a
world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the