Pasaquan: bringing the past into the future

Pasaquan: bringing the past into the future

 

This article does contain some sexual references. While most of the content is suitable for all audiences, some elements may not be suitable for children, and parents are advised to practice discretion.

 

I.

High school students, on field trips, entering the site between the two Moai-like figures that guard the gate entrance. Church groups studying the disks like particolored, celebratory shields sunk into the living room walls. Tours led past the dancing pit filled with white sand, their eyes draw up the grand, undulating Pasaquoyan staircase to the pagoda’s meditation room, wherein they will discover mandalas with diameters of grown men, each individually radiant in red, blue, green and white.

Four of the seven acres that comprise the Pasaquan site are imprinted with twenty-seven years worth of construction and decoration, the work of Eddie Owens Martin, the enigmatic, eccentric fortune teller of Buena Vista, Ga., better known as St. EOM. From 1957 until his death in 1986, Martin recreated his mother’s old farmhouse into a home that reflected his idiosyncratic worldview, a fusion of beliefs drawn from his untutored reading in libraries and exploration of museum exhibits in New York City. Any single element from the site, disembodied from the whole, would seem odd; taken as a whole, the enormity of Pasaquan—the physical expanse of the place and the unity of vision required for a twenty-seven year project of this scale—overwhelms. Pasaquan is a strange jewel, inspiring and perplexing. At the end of a tour, whatever your response to individual elements, from the stories told by caretaker Charles Fowler to the many masks that adorn the extensive walls, it is difficult to leave Pasaquan without being viscerally impressed by the place.

It’s really flippin’ cool.

It’s also difficult to explain. Tom Patterson’s 1987 “St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life and Times and Art of Eddie Owens Martin,” soon to be reissued, is, apart from the site itself, the best place to start. But the book, like the site and its creator, present as many questions as answers. Patterson recorded most of the book; we are given Eddie explaining himself, and Eddie was a storyteller as concerned with entrancing his audience as with establishing a solid historical record. For this article, we have used Patterson’s book, and the insight of Charles Fowler and Michael McFalls, caretaker and director of the site, respectively. We are grateful for their help.

Here, we will give some history of the place for context and some images for reference. Whatever else is said about the site is presented with the eternal disclaimer of all who try to write about art: go see for yourself. In the case of Pasaquan, we urge you not to delay.

Before and after of Pasaquan pillars

II.

Eddie Owens Martin, otherwise known as St. EOM (pronounced “om,” like the sacred sound in Hinduism), lived a life no less colorful than the home and ever-expanding art project he created. Pasaquan is a vibrant art environment, a “psychedelic Assisi in the Southern pines,” as Tom Patterson has it. While the site enchants with its parade of pagodas and statues, metal fringe scintillant in the sun, the site, much like the man behind it, contains a depth and darkness not immediately apparent.

For those who drove out to Pasaquan on bright Sunday afternoons to have their fate foretold by St. EOM, the eccentric fortuneteller was a burly man, sporting brightly colored shawls, with his untrimmed beard braided up into a great mass of hair hidden underneath elaborate headdress. And when he ushered you into his home and really got going with your future, he might speak with melody and in rhyme. But the tattooed man who eased the two German shepherds at the Technicolor gate before you dared exit your vehicle had a history; rich though it is with wild stories and interesting characters, it is equally marked with abuse and tragedy.

Eddie Owens Martin was born in 1908, at the stroke of midnight on the Fourth of July, or so he claimed. He was the second youngest of seven surviving children of sharecroppers in the village of Glen Alta. His father, a violent alcoholic, often spent whatever surplus a season’s crop afforded on booze, and would return home to beat young Eddie. His mother, while accommodating, was not the tender sort. Martin seemed to know, as soon as a small child might consider such things, that he did not fit into the white southern society in which he found himself. Imagining the tribulations of being gay in the south in those days is beyond our power. After school, he would sneak off into the black community of Glen Alta, where he saw in the music and dance a celebratory alternative to the stark brutality of his home life. His interest in other ways and ideas, alternatives to his present context, stuck with him for the rest of his life.

At the age of fourteen, after years of abuse from his father, after sexual assault at the hands of older school boys, after long months spent working in the fields when his peers attended school, Martin ran away. He fled north, to New York City. There were few options for an adolescent southern runaway, so he turned to street hustling. He sold himself and lived in one-room flops. He also gravitated to the many museums and libraries in the city, where he inhaled exhibits about cultures from all over the globe and read about art, history, religion. For much of his life, Martin lamented his inability to study in school, a pain for which he compensated by tutoring himself in the expansive subjects that caught his attention.

As he grew older, he turned to art. He began by sketching on whatever scrap paper he could get his hands on. After nearly a year in lockup for marijuana possession, Martin returned to New York, where he found work as a fortuneteller in a teashop. He excelled. He had a regular, energetic clientele. He bought paints and tried to have his work shown in galleries. He also made occasional trips to Georgia, to Buena Vista, where his mother, after his father died, had acquired some property. Martin spent summers helping in the fields, the rest of the year reading tealeaves and painting in New York. When his mother died, Martin moved into her small farmhouse. Still feeling very much out of place, he built the first walls, at the front of his property, a barrier between himself and the greedy world, the beginnings of Pasaquan.

Aerial view of Pasaquan

 

III.

Martin’s first vision came on one of his many summer trips to Buena Vista, in 1935. He fell seriously ill and lay in bed with a high fever for twelve days. His family was certain he’d die. Instead, he had a vision. A figure came to him, with arms “big around as watermelons,” Eddie said (Eddie mixed his references equally between his agrarian roots and somewhat confused interpretations of Eastern philosophy and religion). The figure, its beard parted and tied up into long hair that reach to the sky, told him, “go back into the world and follow my spirit.” The penalty for not following the spirit was death. It was a call to god. When Eddie awoke, he was still a man growing too old to hustle in the street, but he was now a man determined to do something radically different.

A second vision gave Martin the name, Pasaquan. For Martin, Pasaquan “[had] to do with the Truth, and with nature, and the earth, and man’s lost rituals.” From an obscure book by British occult writer James Churchward, Martin adopted the mythology of the lost continent of Mu, a place where man began, where people lived a kind of idyllic life, one rooted in primordial rituals toward which all other religion points. Through the idea that all cultures are striving back toward this first land of inclusion and tolerance, Martin amalgamated symbols and ideas into what he called Pasaquoyanism. This philosophy, far from systematic, results at the Pasaquan site in the inclusion of symbols from diverse cultures, often conflated in uncomfortable ways. One of his first statues, which he claimed was of Shiva, seems to have elements typical of Shiva and Kali, two distinct Hindu deities. These jumbled ideas can be seen throughout Pasaquan, resulting in curious, even captivating images; the trouble, of course, is that Martin is explicitly coopting the identities of other cultures in order to be transgressive. He wants to stand apart, and part of his method is to incorporate sacred iconography from traditions not his own, Mu mythology or not.

So what do we do with St. EOM’s appropriation? First, we think we remind ourselves of the circumstances. We remember that Martin was a largely uneducated runaway, born in 1908. We remember that his vision was, sincerely, one of totally comprehensive love and acceptance. This was a man who moved comfortably through every culture he did, in fact, encounter, including some tough crowds in a New York City long before Disneyfication. As Charles Fowler points out, this is a man who paid his helpers fifteen dollars an hour, and that was in the 1970s. Throughout his Pasaquoyan proselytizing, St. EOM’s message was unwaveringly compassionate. Because here’s what we can do: We can let the site, and the man, be complicated, contradictory, troubling and profound. These all exist together, and rather than derive some hardline lesson or stance, we may experience the place for our own visceral edification. And today, as we continue to navigate questions of appropriation or ‘cross-pollination,’ visiting a site like Pasaquan may very well be an important part of that discourse, an argument free from the sometimes malign rhetorical devices of speech.

With our retrospective eyes, there is a humor to Pasaquan. St. EOM’s concept of Pasaquoyans extended into space, onto other planets, and this is found prominently at two places of the site. Beneath the meditation pagoda there are depictions of distant planets, atoms, the imagery of space age America, one which tuned into the “Twilight Zone” and eagerly watched satellites catapult for the first time into orbit. Inside the house, before you enter St. EOM’s studio, is a room decorated with figures wearing what appear to be space suits. St. EOM called them “levitation suits;” he said they were air-conditioned, and by harnessing the power of energies emanating from various parts of the body, wearers could transcend the typical bonds of gravity. St. EOM even built one. When asked if he could, when wearing the suit, actually levitate, St. EOM is reported to have said that, no, he could not levitate—but he did feel lighter!

 

IV.

Eddie Owens Martin committed suicide in 1986. He had been ill. He had grown bitter over the art world’s neglect of his work, even as those who were “in” celebrated another eccentric Georgian outsider, Howard Finster, who built Paradise Gardens in Summerville.

After his death, Pasaquan began to decay. Restoring and maintaining four acres of intricate art is a major undertaking. For 30 years, the Pasaquan Preservation Society worked diligently to preserve the site. In 2014, the Society deeded Pasaquan to the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving art environments throughout America. This transition allowed a tripartite partnership, between the Pasaquan Preservation Society, the Kohler Foundation and Columbus State University. These three organizations set about the monumental task of restoring Pasaquan to its former glory.

There was much to do. Hand-carved wooden beams, rotted and eaten away by termites, had to be recreated. Tiles placed decades ago had to be carefully removed, restored and replaced with precision, and this over wooden walls that also needed replacing. Cracks in concrete needed filling. And the whole site almost, top to bottom, required repainting. All of this was done with an acute eye for detail, with professors and students from CSU and Kohler experts expending thousands of hours on the site. The work continues to this day.

For the visitor, Pasaquan shimmers under the Georgian sun, its high walls containing a wonderland of outsider art unlike anything else in the world. Restored, Pasaquan has entered a new phase of life, welcoming guests and tour groups, admirers and curiosity seekers, and more than a few who remember having their tealeaves read by St. EOM himself. Visitors can explore the rooms of the remolded farmhouse, enter the verdant bamboo murals of St. EOM’s studio, listen to the artist’s music in the same room the artist once enjoyed music. We can emerge from amid the meditation room’s spiraling mandalas, stand at the precipice of the grand staircase, on the very spot St. EOM delivered Pasaquoyan sermons to visitors, and descend the broad steps to the dancing ring, where St. EOM physically communed with the Pasaquoyan spirits.

For Pasaquan, the future is as bright as its freshly painted surfaces.