Psychic Telephone · 29
Steven
Most people who come to Steven, if they come asking for a ceremony, they’ll bring tobacco, they’ll bring a čhaŋnúŋpa—a pipe—and they’ll bring gifts and food and all that. And then they offer it to him for the ceremony. So when they do that, when they offer him a čhaŋnúŋpa, they have committed. That starts the contract. They have commenced a spiritual contract with the Creator—above, below, and the spirits. And from there it’s up to him to conduct the ceremony and keep it going.
The ceremony, as they go through it—like any other Lakota ceremony, there are four parts. In the first part, they open the doorways. They load the čhaŋnúŋpa. They awaken the altar. And then they bind Steven, the medicine man. They tie him up and they turn off the lights, and he’s tied up the whole time. The second part is the spirit-calling songs and talking songs. He has singers, and he sings too. He had to learn hundreds of songs. Not just a few—hundreds. And there are still songs he doesn’t know. Because the spirits want songs. They want certain songs. So there are spirit helpers that come, the spirits come. They have names, and if he calls them, they’ll be there in an instant. And spirits are funny because they can work with each other. And what they do—he can’t explain that part. He doesn’t know what they do.
The ceremony itself, it’s pitch black. Sometimes there are forty people, sometimes a hundred and sixty. And when Steven gets into that space, as it’s going—he knows there are people right next to him, but the room turns into a great big chasm. The room opens up so great big, it’s so great big. He hears the singers from a mile away. It’s like they’re in an endless chasm. Everybody experiences that. Endless. Endless.
The third part is doctorings. Mental health—that’s the third part. The fourth part is the physical doctorings, physical health. And then it’s sending the spirits home. And after all that, after the spirits have untied him, they’ve got to smoke the čhaŋnúŋpa that was loaded for the ceremony. It brings all their prayers together, all at once, and takes them up. So there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot to it.
The best way to learn about a ceremony he does is to experience it. One time, he says, there were people who were there to report back to this one guy who doesn’t like him. They wanted to debunk it. They said what he was doing wasn’t true. And it turns out it was. In the ceremony, they have certain instruments and stuff, like rattles. And they find all kinds of stuff after they turn the lights back on. Unexplainable things. His walls are high where he does the ceremonies, walls that have bookshelves. It’s twenty foot tall in that room. And when you find the whole set of rattles up in the top bookshelves after sending the spirits home? He turned on all the lights and said, Is this what you want to see? They were like, Whoo, man, how did you do that? If he knew, he’d be happy to tell you!
Lisa’s even seen him float. Yeah, float. A few feet off the ground, floating, three or four minutes. A long time, though he couldn’t tell. He really couldn’t tell. But she wasn’t the only one who witnessed it. There were a hundred people who watched that, people who will verify that story for you.
The thing about coming to a ceremony is having an open mind. White man, they’re not schooled that way. They’re schooled to be skeptical, you know. You look straight ahead. You don’t look in a circle. The Lakota look in a circle—that’s the Lakota way. And when they do that, it makes life more livable.