The Botanicas of New York: San Miguel & Anaisa

"I Am With You Always" says a poster of Jesus as twin figures of Santa Muerte, "Saint Death," loom above Him. San Judas — St. Jude — patron Saint of lost causes towers above them all, while a mere three-leafed not-so-lucky clover promises...something. Chinese prosperity gods, Haitian goddesses and Indian spirit guides line the shelves behind: It's multicultural cosmic order at the Botanica San Miguel & Anaisa in Brooklyn. It's all about skulls and scythes and scepters; crowns and halos.


Is that the Holy Infant — El Divino Niño — or Elegba, African God of the crossroads? Is that Our Lady of Guadelupe, patron Saint of Mexico, or the Earth Mother Tonantzin?

San Miguel & Anaisa are syncretic Saints revered in the Dominican "21 Divisiones" tradition, though my exceeding ignorance on such matters presents me from explaining what blessings they might offer. Though their storefront would look at home on any tropical street, it's the heart of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, once home to Scandinavian immigrants and now a melting pot of Latin American and Asian newcomers as well as more established communities of folks with roots in the Spanish Caribbean.

(These windows are a reflection of something I love about New York. From time to time I'll be posting pictures from the various botanicas I stumble across. This is the second in a series. These photos were taken by me in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Click on the images to see them larger.)

The Botanicas of New York: Siete Potencias

I love botanicas, and New York was once full of them. They're the plaster-statue-filled religious items shops catering to practitioners of folk religions. Inside they're full of candles, cheap perfumes, painted plaster statues, beads, animal parts, religious pamphlets, prayer cards and all manner of trinkets and baubles, and sometimes refrigerator cases of fresh tropical herbs and plants. They serve communities of a panoply of related spiritual paths: syncretic folk magic, Lucumi Santeria, Puerto Rican espiritismo, Afro-Cuban Palo, Haitian Vodun/Voodoo, the Dominican 21 divisiones, Mexican Santeria, South American Indian herbalists and healers, and others. As neighborhoods gentrify, the ranks of botanicas have thinned drastically over the last ten years.

It's not always easy to tell which kind of shop you're looking at; many mask their true nature. Someone selling a beaded necklace they've dipped in holy water or waved through incense probably isn't a Santero as my tradition would use the word; while someone doing spiritual or card readings for people coming in off the street may well actually be a priest of a certain religion or may just be a person who gives good advice. Some are welcoming of new patrons, and some deeply suspicious of customers outside their presumed ethnic base. Some are just business endeavors, and I've seen several over the years that were obvious fronts for drugs. The busy Almacenes Chango in East Harlem, now long gone, was one of the few that served primarily initiates of the Yoruba-based Lucumi Santeria into which I was initiated. It was a hubbub on a Saturday morning selling supplies for initiations and other ceremonies.



I love the aesthetic of these places, especially their store-front windows. Its clutter speaks to me, and its multicultural chaotic abundance challenges the eye. Statues of idealized native American indians stand next to Catholic saints and African gods and Chinese good-luck deities. There are solemn gory martyrs dripping blood, rakish gypsies, and sometimes skulls and skeletons. There's an old-fashionedness about them that speaks to me. I love how in the window shown here most of the statues are peering out from cellophane wrapping.



These windows are a reflection of something I love about New York. From time to time I'll be posting pictures from the various botanicas I stumble across.

(These photos were taken by me of the Botanica 7 Potencias on Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Click on the images to see the divine chaos larger.)

Echoes of a past life: My Seven African Powers

I published a small edition of a hand-made booklet for friends and family in 1993. Entitled "My Seven African Powers" I published it under the Six of Swords Press imprint: it had a color xerox cover (a rarity back then) and illustrations that combined found objects, original photos, appropriated art scans, weird typography, and a series of poems and brief epigraphs I had written over a few years, tied together with a natural fiber ribbon cut from a grass skirt.

Like most of my writings, the poems covered both political and spiritual subjects, and were arranged to loosely correspond to the 22 trumps of the Tarot deck, starting with the The Fool. Some are doggerel, and some I'm very happy with. Several of the poems had their origins in Pagan rituals that explored expressing life experiences in a sacred manner. My Tarot teacher, Cayte Jablow, (also my co-leader of Queer Pagans and of our smaller private "coven") was working out an experiential three-dimensional study of the Tarot and of Aleister Crowley's version of the Qabbalah; her vision of personal intimacy with the images of the Tarot was a spiritual revelation to me that's all over this short booklet. The title and cover art are references to the syncretic "7 African Powers" prayer card of spiritualist/botanica-style Santeria: the Orishas of Yoruba religion are combined with iconographic Catholic saints in a way that manages to be both cartoonishly simple and a profound statement about the universality of spiritual experience.

Here are a few of the poems. Perhaps the omitted ones will make an appearance here later. With the benefit of many years hindsight, I've edited a couple of these. They're my poems; I'm entitled!

-----

My Seven African Powers
by Ian Scott Horst
Six of Swords Press, 1993

How odd and wonderful it is that we each walk that path anew, and sometimes, when our feet land in stony fossil indentations, we say, "Aha!" thus remembering, until the glint of a golden sun blinds us to all but its shining presence.

STEPS
Each moment is a crossroads--
there we dance
possibility and danger
promise and regret,
hope and forgetfulness.
There the past is not relived
nor the future predicted--
instead the sweaty brilliance
of the now is embraced
its dizzy terrifying vertigo
revealing steps,
in pattern yet unknown,
on solid earth and level grade,
that in their steady fall
guide each beating heart
to its content
(February 9993)

MY SEVEN AFRICAN POWERS
With heart of amber
And lens of amethyst
Ruby-shod
I reach for the mirror
Emerald fingers
Wrapped in silver
Rivers of hot indigo
Animating glassine flesh

Inner visioned eyes tilt
Balance fails...I shudder

And golden tongues, shimmering, dancing,
Change yearning to black dust

No longer reflected
But real.
(January 9993)

ODE TO DIONYSUS & CHANGO
It begins like fever,
Wet hot skin heaving,
breath short quick, quivering.

The pulse-kindled flame that
Spreads outward
Engulf hips
Dizzies legs
Shuts eyes inward
Reaches, grasps at things that cool.

Transformed, I am one
With sad, inebriate madness
With visioned and welcomed fate.

Bitter tears tasted
Reveal edges felt,
And tested skin, like tight gloves
Stretched, regretfully confined
Now in this brief combustion
A delirious rhythm graces
Feet bare and feeling.

Beat-beat pause beat-beat.

My heart, wild and cruel,
lies throbbing on stone.
I grasp it.

One, in this red hot
Driven blur
Of
Dancing fire that eats need
and
Gives birth to love.
(January 9993)

ECOLOGY
I hear electricity. The waves roll and bounce.
I see, as in a mirror, a chrome and plastic lie, blue-tinted.
I touch glass and metal, reading, brailled, not the thing but its ghost.
I breathe raspy, wet and shallow, acrid piss and vivisected flower.
I taste ash and thirst.

I dance in concrete fields. My legs break and snap. I sink into shimmering, rainbow-shining mire.

And shit and
blood and
bottles and
rinds and broken
things become my
sustenance. And my
arm, rising, is blackened, ashen.

As in a memory, I saw a circle.
What was taken, was given back.
What was given back, remained to be shared again.

The memory wrinkles.
The mirror splits and grates.
And the bloom turns to poison,
acid, bitter, sad.
And I am witness.
(Samhain 9992)

THIS JOURNEY
And suffered pains
And griefs give way
On the dawning of that day

These weary shoulders,
Their secret burdens released
No longer shrugged nor stooped
Now move in breath's
Steady rhythmed motions

For this journey shuffles
Mud-caked souls to the embrace
Of some remembered destination
And yields...

...Hope.
(Winter 9993)

My Great Great Grandfather

I've written elsewhere about the journey of my father's father's family from Russia to the United States. Here's a little bit about my father's mother's family. It's the most "American" branch of the family: unlike the immigrant Volga-Germans, German-Germans, Irish, and secret Jews comprising the rest of my ancestors, the Scott wing seems to have come to these shores before there was an actual United States. I was recently sent a box of old photos from my grandmother's estate--she's been gone a long time but these were floating around somewhere--and included is this amazing photo of my great great grandfather William W. Scott, of Vicksburg, Michigan. He's shown in his Union Army uniform in 1865. I don't have a lot of documentation of any of my family roots, but I know at least that William Scott was born in Indiana in 1844, and died in 1918. He was married to Maria Decker, and among his children was my grandmother Dorothy's father, Clinton R. Scott, a dentist in Marcellus, Michigan (who married Dora Kimble--sometimes spelled Kimball), born in 1868.

It's amazing to see this young man of 20 or 21, just before starting his family, perhaps on discharge from service in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Here's another photo, undated, but apparently in some sort of parade in the 1910s. On the back is pencilled in "Dr. W. W. Scott".

The Scotts had lots of children. I'm sure my distant cousins are legion. I don't know when they settled in that part of Michigan: but my father was born there and my grandmother didn't leave there until the 1950s. My grandmother herself was one of many siblings: I met her oldest sister Ruth once, the beloved daughter of the family who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a nursing home in California. The photos of the Scott children in the early 1900s show pampered middle-class children in tree-lined small town idle. My great aunt Frances Scott, gramma's sister, was a photographer--and more-or-less out lesbian--in Mill Valley, California from the 1950s through her passing in the 1980s. It makes me wonder, given this family blessing, what it would have been like to be gay in William W. Scott's generation: was it always a suppressed and hidden inner struggle, or were there blue-coated brothers in some former secret army of lovers?

Thou Shalt Not Study War

Surprisingly there are no thick and musty Bibles documenting my family's past printed in English or any other of the family tongues, at least, not that I have seen. While I am not sure in which German plain or valley my father's paternal line had endured the centuries, it's clear that when the Empress Catherine of All The Russias sent out word that fields of brambles and black earth in the southern part of her realm would be opened to development by peasants less barbarous than those currently calling themselves her subjects, my ancestors packed their belongings into wagons and fled the scene of their medieval serfdom for parts eastward.

I'm sure they had family Bibles, since the Horsts were, if nothing else, deeply committed to their obscure rebelliously ultra-Protestant ways. They were all about the swords into plowshares and the not killing and venerating no kingdom but the kingdom of heaven. These were difficult beliefs to hold in central Europe in the centuries when crosses were battle standards and religious sermons were exhortations to go out and kill people who believed differently. These Horsts were not princes nor barons nor generals but simple people who wanted to stay close to God and close to their own.

So they left all that behind, seduced by this German-speaking Empress in a far-off realm who promised them something that sounded an awfully lot like what passed in the eighteenth century for freedom. They would not have to speak Russian. They could build communities around churches of their own choosing, and hold plots of rich land with moderate taxation as long as they promised to plow and till and harvest. And most attractively they would not have to serve in the Empress's army.


But as the years passed Catherine's heirs were definitely not of a mind to emulate that great empress. The Russian people were wondering who the hell these foreigners were in their midst to be given such special rights. The Tsars cried out for allegiance. The Horsts had dodged marching to serve or fight Napoleon. They had dodged the Franco Prussian war. They had dodged being cannonfodder in Crimea. They had dodged a dozen conflicts great and small. But by decree of the Tsar, they would not dodge the next one, and oh yes it was near.

But all good things come to an end and as they sat in that train, crossing in reverse all the frontiers their own forbears had passed not a hundred and fifty years before, travelling from Saratow to Hamburg to board a ship for an ocean voyage they knew, surely as the prophets in their Bible, that it was time to go.

On that train ride they dodged two world wars. The cousins who might have stood in the fields, waving goodbye as they passed, were not seeing that prophecy clearly enough. The wrath of dictators of left and right, the brutal caldron of the first world war and its revolutions, the apocalyptic tide of the second world war, these the cousins would suffer until the world remembered them no more. If the fields and cities of America swallowed the memories of the old world among the generations begat by the travellers, the fire of war and the ice of Siberia would erase the cousins completely leaving neither ruins nor orphans behind.

And so the train reached the docks. If the Babel of Saratow had intimidated them, the crowds in this ancient city girt against the sea must have been beyond the imagination of those Horstsl. Up the gangplank they trudged into the iron belly of a ship far larger than anything they had seen before. From that moment on there would be no looking back. My grandfather's family put their faith in the waves, the children screaming against the bellow of the ship's horns and the clank of chains and thuds of cargo and sweat of their shipmates.

Amen, they must have muttered, Amen.

Norka Farewell

There were a lot of children. And a lot of bags. What went through the minds of my father's grandparents as they bundled those children and bags into what, a wagon? Sweeping out hay and manure to make room for a brood of ginger children, for carefully picked belongings and the house, the furniture, the fields, the church, the life to be left behind there on the banks of the mighty Volga.

The wagon, full with thirteen of them, which uncle or neighbor chosen to stay behind and drive the wagon back to the land, the land not ancestrally theirs, this foreign steppe, but now, decisively, not to belong to their heirs either.

My grandfather, a toddler at best, but not the youngest, so carried by a sister no doubt. In clean sturdy clothes to last for the long journey. Red cheeks wiped of black Russian dirt, tear-stained? The hope of the journey, the pain of the friends and lives and families left behind. Wrinkled stained letters from distant uncles read and re-read, parsed for signs of hope and divined for clues to a hidden future.

Did the cart's wheels creak and strain as it passed the wooden church buildings that was everything to these simple people, strangers always in the land of their birth. Nine children, loud no doubt. Well-behaved, certainly, but the sounds of high children's voices teasing and playing in German as the Tsar's grim agents checked papers, and documents, and poked, and prodded, and vaguely disapproving of this alien entourage, yet glad to be rid of yet another cartload of privileged strangers, wondering what buonty was to be gained from the space left empty behind them.

Was it to a train station in Saratow, this cartload of German farmchildren from the little village called Norka, past the farms and villages and churches of their cousins, past the factories and the brick buildings of the big city, through the throngs of actual Russians and Jews and Tatars staring at them with curiosity, or disdain, my great-grandparents knowing enough Russian, surely, to interpret the sneers of good-riddance or the wistful glances of I wish that was me. Papers checked again by the young soldiers at the station.

The children, literate enough to read their German bibles and sing their German hymns, staring now at the proliferation of signs in Russian, the signs denoting arrivals and departures, that much was surely clear, warnings surrounding the crowded black train spitting steam. Uniformed workers scurried about seeming to placate this monstrous black machine lest it storm ahead on its iron and stone path. The smell of the fields was gone now, replaced with smoke and soot and coal and tar and sweaty bodies and fear and hope.

Children and bags carefully counted, thrown together now and none missing, not into the cheapest boxcar but not into the car with the plush red velvet either. Much shouting in frightening now foreign tongues, and the reassuring cluck of my great grandmother, and the doors were closed and the whistles blew and the faces of the people stilled and the train came to life and then, right then, my grandfather--was he drooling on a piece of sugar to keep him silent--ceased to be a little Volga German farm boy and became someone else, as did I, not yet a glint in anyone's eye.