[Online] Starting Mon Nov 9 5pm Book Club XXVIII Black Elk Speaks

Our 28th convergence of the 22 Teachings Book Club presents Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt’s account of the life and visions of Nicholas Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota holy man.

First published in 1932, Black Elk Speaks moves between autobiography, sacred vision, ceremony, history, and the devastating transformation of Lakota life during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Black Elk recounts his childhood, his Great Vision, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, his work as a healer, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, the Ghost Dance movement, and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

For our work at 22 Teachings, one of the most powerful threads in this book is its relationship to the elemental world. Sky, river, earth, fire, weather, animals, direction, season, and landscape are not merely abstract symbols. They are immediate, living realities woven into spiritual experience, ceremony, vision, and daily life.

That makes Black Elk Speaks a particularly rich text for anyone working with elemental magic. As we read, we will consider how sustained attention to the natural world changes the way we understand the elements themselves, and how that attention might deepen our own fourfold Hermetic practice of earth, air, fire, and water.

Together we’ll encounter a worldview in which relationship to land, weather, animals, directions, and elemental forces is lived with extraordinary immediacy.

At the center of the book is Black Elk’s Great Vision: an immense symbolic world of horses, directions, powers, ancestors, sacred objects, illness, healing, and a people gathered beneath the flowering tree. We will follow those images closely while also keeping the historical world of the text in view.

Schedule:

Week 1: Monday, November 9
Chapters 1–5
The Offering of the Pipe through At the Soldiers’ Town

Week 2: Monday, November 16
Chapters 6–9
High Horse’s Courting through The Rubbing Out of Long Hair

Week 3: Monday, November 23
Chapters 10–14
Walking the Black Road through The Horse Dance

Week 4: Monday, November 30
Chapters 15–19
The Dog Vision through Across the Big Water

Week 5: Monday, December 7
Chapters 20–26
The Spirit Journey through Neihardt’s Postscript

Please note:

• Those who register late will receive access to the previous week’s recordings.
• Payment of $20 grants you access to all 5 weeks and the Zoom link is the same each week.
• Download PDF with Zoom link from the confirmation screen at checkout.

The book is available online here: https://link.amazon/B08N3HHux

As always with our bookclub, we record audio only, no video, and this is sent to everyone who is signed up. We do not sell the audio later on the website. This is a participation-based event, designed for all to share and feel safe to ask questions, share experiences and learn together.