The Story

He was born Edward Owens Martin, the son of a Marion County share-cropper, arriving on the 4th of July, though his world would be neither red, white nor blue. He would die as the self-proclaimed St. EOM, The Wizard of Pasaquan, a visionary culture shown in a feverish dream and which he built on parched Georgia land that he once had farmed. He became its founder, its prophet and its artistic icon.

He lived 77 eccentric years. He was the son of rural dirt-farmers. He worked in textile mills. He picked fruit. He cut timber. He drifted to Harlem where he ate breakfast in bordellos and slept in subway stations. Armed with only a sixth-grade education, he eked a scrappy survival as a waiter, a bartender, a street-corner hustler, a pimp and a gambler.

He was hungry to learn, receptive to anything. He studied people - Greenwich Village artists, flamboyant hookers, Jazz Age musicians or druggies of a generation that never considered saying no. He learned wherever there were lessons - in libraries, theaters and dance studios.

He talked about time as a merchant seaman and visited India and Burma where he studied the occult, read about lost civilizations and practiced yoga. He sought balance in a life that teetered between principles of Bible Belt Georgia, New World visions and the dogmas he had absorbed.

At harvest time, he always returned to Buena Vista to help with the crops. Then, in 1957, with his parents dead, he said a voice told him to come home. He didn't return to be changed. He came home to change others. He called the old family place Pasaquan, dreaming of a haven from a world he saw as deprived.

Neighbors viewed tire colorful walls and totems he built as novel and Eddie Martin as a novelty.

His hair and beard, before mousse or gel, reached for the sun, stiffened by boiled rice syrup, a sign of power and an antenna to the universe. He wore candy-striped turbans and feathered headdresses. He flowed with robes and jingled with jewelry. His body was decorated with tattoos. He spoke in a lispy black jive with a sing-song patter.

Pasaquan wrote its own legend. There was talk of trained rattlesnakes. There were his growling dogs. There were dozens of cats that would ride with him to town and leap back into his car when he beckoned. There were rumors of devil-worship. There were the eyes painted on the walls as if they were watching anyone who came. There were graphic sexual figures alongside Christian symbols. More than anything, there was St. EOM.

Years before in a 42nd Street tea house, he had learned to be a seer so he began to tell fortunes. People came to see the wizard, driving rural blacktop roads, turning into a dusty yard and parking outside the imposing twelve-foot totems that guarded his compound. Aging German Shepherds escorted St. EOM to the parking lot Some people he waved inside, one at a time. Others he turned away. Guiding an invited guest inside, he walked ahead, one of the dogs by him, the other pacing next to the guest. Inside the house, the person was given a deck of cards and told to shuffle. Through Eddie Martin, the cards would talk. He warned. He predicted. He cautioned. In kings, queens and deuces, he saw people, places and dates. For $20, he told what he saw. He also made beads of chinaberry, acorns and bamboo and pocketbooks of pelts decorated with shells, nuts and beaver paws. He wanted his art to be noticed, not the artist.

But his fortune telling and his novelties bought the bags of concrete to raise the walls, the cans of Sherwin-Williams house paint to color them and the materials to build the elaborate pagodas. Neither the world of art nor the world of Marion County was ready for Eddie Owens Martin or St. EOM.

By the early 1980s, the hair he hadn't cut since World War 11 was going away and, strangely, so was his strength. Diagnosed with cancer. he spent time in a Columbus hospital. Back at Pasaquan, too ill to continue to build the dream, he overdosed on drugs but his helper, Scottie Steward, rushed him to the hospital. Then, on April 16, 1986, he sent Steward to town for fast food. Putting a 38-caliber pistol to his head, Eddie Owens Martin shot himself. He was 77, an artist starved for acceptance, a man no one understood. And he died that same way.

Since his death, acceptance and a measure of understanding have slowly come. His art hangs in museums and galleries. It is a collection as enigmatic as its creator - watercolors, drawings, sculpture, jewelry, wall hangings, costumes and musical instruments. Pasaquan has been called "one of the three or four most important folk art centers in America."

He was buried in a cemetery near Buena Vista. He willed his four-acre oasis to the Marion County Historical Society. Now neighbors who rejected him preserve his memory. His provocative biography - 'St. EOM in the land of Pasaquan'- was published in 1988. His cosmic life and distinctive art continues to be featured in magazines, newspapers and documentaries.

He lived as a misfit who called himself the 'Bodacious Mystic Badass of Buena Vista.' His biographer, Tom Patterson, called him a cross between Walt Whitman, Sun Ra, Montezuma, Lord Buckley and Boy George. He wanted to be a teacher. He lived instead as an outcast in the county where he was born and the county in which he is buried.

Now his home is visited by people who would have never come while he lived. But perhaps Eddie Owens Martin knew it would be this way. Perhaps he knew the world that was never ready for him would finally come to call.

Maybe that was the future he saw in the cards for St. EOM.

A Maniacal Marvel

By Jill Jordan Sieder - Courtesy of The Atlanta Magazine

Origianlly published in the January 1999 Edition of Atlanta Magazine

Just outside of Buena Vista, a little town south of Columbus and east of Ft. Benning, in the midst of a bastion of Southern Baptism and military preparedness, you'll find a place called "Pasaquan," a wonderfully strange, vibrant, intricately ordered spot, a fantastic four-acre spread of Far Eastern, far-out architecture, painting and statuary. At first glance a cheerful festival of colored circles, stripes and zigzags, Pasaquan ultimately instills in each visitor an overall feeling of gravity and a spookiness that commands respect.

First you encounter the brightly painted concrete walls flanking the entrance, adored with hundreds of disks inset with small sculptures shaped like suns, moons, flowers and rocket ships. Closer to the main house, these walls, which curve around and connect each building, develop personality and a brazen sexuality, some with larger-than-life sculptures of other-worldly masked men and women, their torsos tattooed, their ample breasts and bushy genitals exposed. Long, curvy snakes slither atop most of the walls, while pair-, of cool-colored green and blue eyes, brows arched, stare out at every turn, some placidly and others with a searing intensity. They seem to know something.

Some of the iconography is familiar, such as orange and yellow yin-yang orbs, and thin red crosses carved into the cement. There's something for almost everyone, including elements of ancient Mayan temples, Japanese pagodas and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Several walls feature playful abstract figures crafted with what looks like a very free hand, in a style you might call Dr. Seuss On Peyote.

But step back and the order imposed on the flat split-level buildings, trimmed in shiny tin roof flashing, seems more Frank-Lloyd-Wright-meets-UltraMan. All of the disparate elements compete and scream for attention, yet everything comes together in a pleasing geometric rhythm. Its vitality and mystery beckon the viewer to bear witness -and enjoy. You see quickly that the creator of this world, Eddie Owens Martin - or St. EOM, as he called himself (made up of his initials, and pronounced "ohm," like the chant), a wily old man armed with a sixth grade education and truckloads of gumption - wasn't your run-of-the-mill folk artist, doodling with whirligigs and funny facejugs.

Inside the main building, (which is very chilly, so bring a sweater), you'll find the ceremonial room, where more private rituals were performed by St. EOM. Painted on the kitchen walls are figures wearing depictions of St. EOM's "astronaut levitation suit," a medley of vinyl and leather he had fashioned for himself. Apparently, the suit had "pressure points" that corresponded to "yoga chakra energy sources" on the human body. Once he got the pressure levels right, he believed he'd be able to fly.

If you want to try to understand Pasaquan you have to be willing to venture into the off-centered mind of a genius gone wild with belief in himself and his art. His world challenges our belief sys-tem and its origins. It even challenges the way we wear our hair.

Eddie Owens Martin, who was born and reared three miles from the spot on which he eventually made his world, ran from an abusive father and a gritty life as part of a dirt-poor share-cropping family, at age 14, to a freewheeling existence as a Harlem street hustler, which included stints as a pimp, prostitute, gambler and pot dealer, before his instinctive knack for telling fortunes started paying the rent. It was his abrupt spiritual awakening at the ripe age of 50 that brought Martin back to these pans to build this incongruously joyful temple on four acres of his family's old farmland, in the shadow of Fort Benning, where artillery fire still booms and shakes the earth every few minutes.

By all accounts, St. EOM was perhaps Mari-on County's original hippie, a pot-bellied, scraggly bearded man who in the late 1950s would stroll past the startled overall-clad townsfolk in a handmade Africanesque dashiki decorated with bells and shells, his head adorned with a feathered and beaded headdress, or perhaps pulled up in a bun, sumo wrestler-style. He turned many of the curious flower children who'd stream into his compound onto his methods of meditating and chanting yogi style, sometimes parading around in the nude, wearing only his turban. You might say he skilled the line.

St. EOM, in the spirit of the most touched of self-taught religious artists, invented his world, Pasaquan, his beliefs, Pasaquoyanism, and left both for generations of believers to come. Coined Pasaquan from the Spanish word pasa, which means "to pass" or "to go," and quoyan, which he said was "an Oriental word that means 'bringin' the past and the future together,' " Pasaquoy-anism is Martin's own special blend of ideas and images he encountered in books, films, museums and, most importantly, in his own imagination.

"Pasaquoyanism has to do with the truth, and with nature, and the earth, and man's lost rituals," he said. As St. EOM, he wanted to reclaim the rituals he believed were given to man by God but forgotten because of greed and hatred.

You can't help but marvel at what kind of mystical zeal it must have taken for a man who'd long ago left behind his life as a Georgia farm boy for the lure of an openly gay artist's life in New York City, to return, at age 50, to spend the last three decades of his life building a massive temple of concrete and tin, mostly with his bare hands, in which to chant, dance, drum and worship as he saw fit, mainly because a giant long-haired man he met in a dream told him to.

Among other things, Pasaquan is a monument to big hair. Martin had seen paintings in which ancient Mayans and Egyptians depicted them-selves with their hair pulled up and bound and their beards braided. He came to believe that "hair is your antenna to the spirit world" and that it should not be cut. He began pulling his own mane back, and wearing it in a turban. His sculpted figures all have big, thick manes that point skyward. If people would just let their hair grow up, he insisted, the world would be a better place.

Though St. EOM did appear in one show at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., during the Carter Administration, along with the Rev. Howard Finster, Lanier Meaders, Mattie Lou Kelley and a few other Georgia folk artists, his work was largely bypassed by the art world until his death in 1986, when, at age 77, in failing health and depressed by the recent death of his two beloved dogs, he shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber pistol.

As cruel fate would have it, St. EOM's art-work has since made it into places like The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art. Pasaquan, featured in everything from the discriminating art journal Raw Visions, to the British version of Novei, is now considered one of the world's most compelling visionary art environments.

Pasaquan is now being restored, thanks to the Pasaquoyan Preservation Society, which has received grants totaling more than $90,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and other foundations to fix the crumbling cement and the leaky roofs. The preservationists involved have hired paint technicians to figure out how to best restore St. EOM's painstaking work.

They have also begun restoring dozens of reels of Martin's home movies and taped music performances, in which he dances, plays percussion, and reveals bits and pieces of his ever-swirling psyche. The museum hopes to bring the pied piper of Pasaquan back to life, or at least to pipe in his gravely-throated voice.

Georgia, God bless this state, is chock full of religious zealots, some of whom can't seem to help but sing, shout and preach about the feelings welling up inside them. A rarified few among them are so moved as to construct temples unto themselves and their quirky cosmic viewpoints, hoping as they pay homage to their mighty Creator that they might spur other folks on to the right spiritual track. Like the Rev. Howard Finster's "Paradise Garden," an example of one man's incessant output and slavish service to the god he claims to know personally, Pasaquan is a place to be seen, absorbed, awed by.

Just think - these religious artists who can hear voices most of us can't and have seen things most of us won't, may know things some of us never will.

Nearby: Downtown Americus, about 26 miles southeast of Buena Vista on Georgia 30, is definitely more lively than Buena Vista, with clothing and furniture shops, antique stores (try Magnolias, 125 N. Jackson St., (91 2) 931-0098), eateries (Dixie Bakery and Catering, 113 W. Forsyth St., (912) 928-0952), a good bookstore (Americus Bookstore, 122 W. Forsyth St., (912) 928-2849), and, oddly, several barber shops bustling with activity. Habitat for Humanity's international head-quarters is here, 121 Habitat St., (800) 422-4828, and you can tour it on weekdays by appointment. If you've gotten swept up in the spirit of Pasaquan, you can visit Koinonia Partners Farm, 1324 Georgia Highway 49, Americus, (912) 924-0391, a commune of socially conscious Georgians founded in the 1940s. The Koinonians will let you work in their gar-dens and sample their cakes.
 

Eddie Martin Road | Buena Vista, GA | Information: Contact Us!

Mailing Address: Pasaquan Preservation Society, P.O. Box 553, Buena Vista, GA 31803
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