ST. EOM'S PASAQUAN

A day at St. EOM's PASAQUAN:
"I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, cause there's nothin' that I see in this society that I identify with or desire to emulate. Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I don't have nothin' against other people and their beliefs. I'm not askin' anybody to do my way or be my way. Although, when I'm dead and gone, they'll follow like night follows day."


St. EOM to his biographer, Tom Patterson, 1985


Eddie Owens Martin was born at the stroke of midnight July 4, 1908. His father was a Southwest Georgia dirt farmer, an uneducated sharecropper whose only apparent interest in his son was as a farm laborer who could toil without payment in producing the annual cotton crop. Eddie, however, was "different" from the other five children in the family. Secretly assisted by his mother, he learned to read. He soon contemplated an existence far beyond that of the backbreaking day labor in the fields of Marion County. At fourteen, following an incident during which his father cruelly killed a puppy that Eddie had received as a gift from a neighboring black family, he left home. After wandering around Georgia and Florida for several months as an itinerant fruit picker, young Eddie drifted north. He eventually found New York City, where he stayed until the mid-1950s.

In New York, Eddie Martin's creative individualism developed beyond that which could scarcely have been imagined by the young farm boy in Georgia. He quickly became a savvy street character in Greenwich Village. He connected with the city's provocative underground culture and the struggling artists, the musicians, the poets, the beggars and bums of lower Manhattan all became members of his newly found family. For more than thirty years he survived in New York, employing whatever means were necessary to get by. He often worked as a fortune teller in Manhattan tea rooms, and he prepared and sold meals of soul food to other displaced Southerners. The New York art scene fed his expanding flamboyant personality and fired his artistic spirit. All the while he was a habitual visitor to the city's museums, libraries, studios, and art galleries. He absorbed New York hip culture like a colorful sponge.

At a time in the late 1930s, during an extended and fever-ridden illness, Martin experienced the first of a series of phenomenal visions that would prompt and continue to drive his artistic efforts for the rest of his life. In the initial vision, he was confronted by a trio of extraordinarily tall personages who identified themselves as people of the future -- special envoys from a vaporous land called Pasaquan, a place where the past, the present, the future, and everything else all come together." He had been chosen by them, he later reported, to delineate an understanding of the peace and beauty that the future might hold for mankind, if mankind would take heed. On that day, Eddie Owens Martin of Marion County, Georgia, became St. EOM -- the one and only Pasaquoyan of the Twentieth Century.

The empowered visitors in his vision offered him extensive instructions on how to ritually prepare for the proper conduct of his personal daily existence. They revealed how he was to communicate with and receive cosmic instruction from the energies of the universe, and how to follow a course that would enable him to artfully render the futuristic world of Pasaquan in paint and pen, metal and concrete. The most compelling instruction that he received from them was this: To "return to Georgia and do something." That is precisely what he did -- for over thirty years.

The result is St. EOM's PASAQUAN.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• ST.
• EOM
• Eddie
• Owens
• Martin
• Pasaquan
• Marion
• County
• Buena
• Vista