Path of the Sacred Pipe: Journey of Love, Power, and Healing

By Jay Cleve

In these days of global crisis, thoughtful seekers increasingly turn to Native Americans for healing wisdom. The Sacred Pipe is the medicine, says Jay Cleve in this informative and practical guide to a key practice of Native American spirituality. The Hopi and other ancient cultures predicted our present age as one of transition into a New World. The galactic alignment ending the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 occurs only every 26,000 years and is thought to be a critical time for raising consciousness to align with the radical expansion of Earth energies. Cleve shows how the Pipe can facilitate transformation on both the personal and planetary levels. He explains its use in rituals such as the sweat lodge, the vision quest, and the sun dance and in relation to the Medicine Wheel. He also provides practical information on obtaining and caring for a Pipe and on preparing for and performing the Pipe ceremony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quest Books
• Release date: Dec 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780835630474

Book preview

Path of the Sacred Pipe

JOURNEY OF LOVE, POWER, AND HEALING

Jay Cleve, PhD

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Copyright © 2012 by Jay Cleve

First Quest Edition 2012

Quest Books

Theosophical Publishing House

PO Box 270

Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

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Cover image courtesy Musee du Quai Branly/Scala/Art Resource, NY

Cover design by Drew Stevens

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cleve, Jay.

Path of the sacred pipe: journey of love, power, and healing / Jay Cleve.

   p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8356-0909-8

1. Calumets.  2. Indians of North America—Rites and ceremonies.  3. Indians of North America—Religion.  4. Vision quests.  5. Spiritual life.  I. Title.

E98.T6C45 2012

ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2068-0

5 4 3 2 1 * 12 13 14 15 16

To my teachers, Sun Bear and Wabun Wind.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Introduction

1. The Sacred Pipe

2. The Medicine Wheel

3. Ceremonies with the Sacred Pipe

4. Native American Spiritual Philosophy

5. Smoking the Sacred Pipe

Notes

Acknowledgments

To Richard Smoley, editor, for his interest and confidence in the book; Sharron Dorr, publishing manager, for her orchestration of the book; Betsy Robinson for her careful and sensitive editing; Jessica Salasek for her enthusiastic publicist work; my wife, Susan, for her many searches and researches on the Net; and my stepson, Patrick Windmiller, for all the computer support.

Author’s Note

Capitalization of special terms in this book is used to refer to something sacred, holy, or otherworldly.

When discussing pipes in general, I use the lowercase p; when it is a Sacred Pipe, specified as such, that has been gifted by a Spiritual Messenger or the Great Spirit, or has been blessed and awakened, I use an uppercase P.

When I use heaven or heavens, referring to the sky, I use a lowercase h; when I mean the spiritual realm, and not simply the blue sky, I capitalize. When referring to the physical sky above, I use a lowercase s , but the spiritual Sky is capitalized. Similarly, when I’m referring to the sacred planet, as an entity or being, I capitalize Earth; when I’m referring to the land, e.g., setting stones on the ground (earth), I don’t. When I mention a direction on the compass, I don’t capitalize. When I discuss the sacred Powers of the Cardinal Directions, I capitalize, i.e., east becomes East.

Similarly, when discussing real animals or birds on the earth plane, a lowercase letter is used, such as e in eagle. Eagle is capitalized when it represents the medicine archetype representing the power of Eagle. The same holds true for all of the power animals described in this book.

Introduction

Prophesied Age of the Pipe

T he year is 500 AD, and Gray Wolf is standing on what is now called Bear Butte near Rapid City, South Dakota. He is facing east on a cold spring morning, holding his Sacred Pipe. As the rising sun turns the distant hills to pink, his aged hands place the last pinch of tobacco into the pipe bowl. After lighting the pipe and taking his first puff, he blows the sacred smoke to the heavens, to the Creator, and sends a puff to Mother Earth. He then blows smoke to each of the Four Directions. After holding the bowl with stem pointing to the sky and beseeching Grandfather and Grandmother Eagle to send his prayers to the Great Spirit, he slowly smokes, giving thanks and asking for health and healing for himself, his tribe, and the Earth.

It is 2012 AD on a chilly spring morning in Wisconsin, and I am standing on a cliff overlooking Devil’s Lake. As I watch the first rays of sunlight paint the sky just above the frosted hills, I remember that it has been twenty-five years since I smoked my first pipe. In this timeless moment, I feel the presence of the grandfathers and grandmothers—the ancient ones, the keepers of the land. A thrill rushes up my spine as bits of ancient memories stir in the deeper recesses of my mind. And I realize, and sometimes even remember, that the ritual I am performing is older than the trees, even perhaps older than the hills.

Ancient memories? That the pipe ceremony is embedded in the collective unconscious of Americans was driven home to me a number of years ago when my stepdaughter asked me to do it during her wedding, before she and her fiancé took their marriage vows. As I took off my shoes and put a large, beaded medallion over my tuxedo in preparation for the ceremony, she felt some trepidation. How would 150 white, middle-class yuppies respond to an unusual ritual they probably knew nothing about? But as I began the ceremony—pointing the pipe stem to the heavens, blowing smoke to the above and below, turning, pointing the pipe stem and blowing smoke in each direction, and then beseeching the Eagle to send our prayers—I felt the crowd totally with me, sitting silently in rapt attention. Later, at the wedding reception, about a third of the group came up to one of my family members or to me and commented on the ceremony. Few of them had been to a pipe ceremony before but they were deeply moved, and a few said it felt familiar. With tears in her eyes, one wedding guest said to me, I have never been to a pipe ceremony, but I ‘remember’ it!

The great psychoanalyst C. G. Jung said that when he treated Americans, he often found Native American symbolism and archetypes in their unconscious—even those who had no interest in Native culture or spirituality. And over the years I have spoken to many people on spiritual paths that didn’t involve Native interests or practices; they were surprised to find at least one of their spirit guides to be Native American. Why not? Natives have lived on American soil for thousands of years and the ancient ones are part of the land, the very air we breathe.

Just how old is the pipe ceremony? There is recorded evidence that the ritual use of the Sacred Pipe dates back 600 to 1,500 years. But it actually goes back to ancient times. In the Americas, the parents of cultivated tobacco have existed for over 8,000 years. From the very beginning, tobacco may very well have been primarily for ritual, and the plant itself sanctified. Find the first pipe and one finds the first pipe ceremony. The use of the earliest tubular pipes dates back between 3,000 and 4,000 years.¹

The Native American sacred ways, the Good Red Road,² and the ceremonies and practices have survived until today because they were protected over the centuries. But Jim Tree, Cherokee ceremonial leader and Keeper of the United Nations Turtle Pipe, points out that we aren’t living in the same times and situations that warranted secrecy before. We are in a transitional time—a time when pipes are turning up all around the world—working toward a new way of being for humankind.³

Today, more and more Natives and non-Natives alike are being drawn to the Sacred Pipe. Some non-Natives are becoming pipe carriers: they obtain a pipe, receive training, and have their pipe blessed and awakened by a medicine man or woman.

The wise and powerful healer and spiritual chief of the Teton Sioux, Frank Fools Crow, puts the need to share Native teachings very strongly: The power and ways are given to us to be passed on to others. To think or do anything else is pure selfishness. We only keep them and get more by giving them away, and if we do not give them away we lose them. . . . The survival of the world depends upon our sharing what we have and working together. He adds, The ones who complain and talk the most about giving medicine secrets away are always those who know the least.⁴

THE TIME IS NOW

Ed McGaa (Eagle Man), a Lakota author, writes with some pride about the expansion of the Rainbow Tribe, a worldwide tribe made of people from all colors and races.⁵ Some of the greatest of the medicine people—Black Elk, Fools Crow, Rolling Thunder, and many others—were not only willing to share teachings but actually sought out non-Natives to teach. American scholar and author Joseph Epes Brown discovered that Black Elk was expecting him when Brown finally located the great medicine man. Hopi elders asked Frank Waters to write on Hopi philosophy and prophesy.

In 1989, a year after I began work with Sun Bear and had finished a lengthy paper on the Sacred Pipe, he encouraged me to keep writing and to tell Wabun Wind—his medicine helper, author, and coauthor—that I was a published author. After I wrote the pipe paper, Wabun had me present the teachings to the advanced pipe group.

Several years later, after receiving training from Sun Bear, Wabun Wind, and Shawnodese, empowering us to awake Sacred Pipes, Sun Bear conducted a ceremony bringing each of us in our small training group into his lineage—passed down through his uncles, both medicine men.

Over the twenty-five years I have been a pipe carrier, I learned that many of us who have no Native blood are grabbed, at some point, by the pipe; the teachings have felt familiar; we remembered them. Many pipe carriers I have spoken with report that their teachers have told them they had many past lives as Native Americans. Some of these memories awaken even before they take up the pipe.

In 1998, a brief summary of the paper I wrote for the Bear Tribe was published in Gnosis: Journal of Western Inner Traditions.⁶ After adding a few things to the paper, I set it aside—perhaps waiting for a Native American to write a book on the Sacred Pipe. Prior to 1990, the only book dedicated solely to the Sacred Pipe was Offering Smoke by Jerome Paper, a university religion professor.⁷ The book was solid and scholarly but not one that invited readers to become personally involved with the Sacred Pipe.

At the age of seventy-one, toward the end of a large writing project, I suddenly felt compelled by a sense of urgency to write this book. But first I investigated whether others had written a book exclusively on the Sacred Pipe. To my surprise, I found only one slim volume: Jim Tree’s The Way of the Sacred Pipe, published in 2004.⁸ It is a very wise and respectful book, two-thirds inspiration (personal stories and experiences) and one-third practical information and advice regarding the care and use of the pipe. An excellent book, but a book was still needed to present in depth the history, background, and spiritual philosophy of the Sacred Pipe.

NATIVE PROPHECIES

There is an ancient prophecy that the time would come, after seven generations of subjugation by a white serpent that came from across the great eastern waters, when the children of the Earth from all Four Directions would come to the elders of the Native Americans to learn the ways of balance and harmony with themselves and the Earth.⁹

A later version of this prophecy was seen in a vision by Crazy Horse, the great chief and medicine man. He shared that vision with Sitting Bull during a ceremony with the Sacred Pipe:

Upon suffering beyond suffering, the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become a circle again. In that day there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of the unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom. I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am at that place within me, we shall be as one.¹⁰

Four days later Crazy Horse was murdered.

While living in California in the 1960s, I was told of an ancient prophecy: When whites began to dress like Indians, it was time for the Native teachers to share their spirituality. I think the great medicine man Rolling Thunder spoke of it. And, in fact, in the ’60s, hippies began wearing long hair, headbands, and beads. And for three to four decades we have seen this prophecy coming true all over the world.

As early as the 1980s and ‘90s, Sun Bear was teaching large groups of apprentices in Germany, where Native spirituality had caught fire. Jim Tree, Cherokee ceremonial leader and Keeper of the United Nations Turtle Pipe, reports that people from Australia continue coming to the United States to learn about the pipe. Tree says, These Pipes are integral to ushering in the way of interdependence of all races . . . pipes are being dispersed throughout the world, their positive energies and efforts interlacing like a giant spider web covering the planet.¹¹

Medicine Man Wallace Black Elk told me in the late 1980s about the prophecy that all peoples will again take up the pipe. He spoke of the Nation