Hack Wilson, The Birth of Modern American Civilization & The Shamanic Tradition of the Olmec

Hack Wilson hits home run number 46 on August 30, 1930. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

I am returning to this photograph after a brief interlocution. My work has pivoted back into ancient shamanism for the most part; I would like to return here to Hack Wilson and the real, imminent manifestation of force in the swing captured in the above photograph.

The emergence of power hitting, embodied by Wilson’s full torque swing — to me is best analogue to the Olmec ritualization of the jaguar as the space embodied and best manifest between chthonic world (the nagual) and the phenomenal world of appearances (the tonal). Wilson here acts and is captured in the absolute moment of embodied peak power and physical transformation — like a great jungle cat in the midst of pouncing. This is, in short, a revelation of the powers of nature in the moment of incarnate action; physical movement; the full harnessing of the powers of Wilson’s massive ‘hack’.

When we are looking at baseball, we are looking at the modern mystery tradition of the emergence of the powers of being through human movements; shamanic movements of human transformation through movement as a vehicle for the expression of the powers hidden and latent within humanity. This is a total somatic, embodied endeavor of active ritual transformation — in which, as we have discussed, the player puts on the uniform, cloak, or disguise of participation in said ritual — the ritual of physical transformation unto the revelation of the powers.

This photo of Wilson is likely my favorite baseball photograph for precisely this reason — it captures the moment between the human and the hinge of the nagual — the massive force manifest in the rippling swing of Wilson, swinging out of his skin, the entire hinge of his body oriented toward generating massive force and torque toward the baseball. Wilson, once prophesied to be the inheritor of Ruth’s mantle — here is emblematic of the ‘power swing’ movement of baseball out of the dark ages of small ball — a new, ritual form which was focused on the increase of human expression as in the movement from the chop swing; McGraw and Hanlon’s strategic movements with the early Orioles and New York Giants — to the mammoth, physics defying feats of propelling moonshots of baseballs into the sky as a physical act of the expression of the force latent within the human body — by such muscular figures as Ruth, Gehrig, Wilson, and others.

The emergence of Ruth, Wilson, and power baseball is the full flowering of the hitherto known ‘Golden Age’ of baseball — which is really; fundamentally the maturation of baseball as a shamanic technology of modern industrial America as a ritual space of the expression of the carnal, incarnate tension between the tonal and the nagual — the phenomenal and manifest physical and the force of chthonic, primordial, and primal nature behind the curtain of a rapidly formalizing industrial society.

The 1897 Boston Beaneaters, photographed by Elmer Chickering

The growing pains of the rapidly developing, modern America out from the fin de siecle is a pastiche of historical tropes; the attempt to find and build character out of the scaffolding skyscrapers and cavernous class divides of the product of industrial and technological revolution. It was found in the relic and artifact of baseball as a consciousness technology: a mud, dirt, direct, blood and strategy game of bat and ball with Mesoamerican and indigenous heritage in the very grounds and hemisphere on which it was played for thousands of bloody years. Baseball was no new technology, but rather, it became emblematic of the latent, problematic institution of American culture and civilization as the reminder of the literal flesh and bacteria incarnate in the midst of its steel, machination, and abstraction into numbers, science, and philosophy. Baseball, for America, was the memory of the carnal, survival of the ape amidst the garish clothes of a new century.

And as such, the emergence of the massive, mammoth powers of a lumbering, 5’6” Hack Wilson, weighing upwards of two hundred pounds, forged in the ironworks of factory — embodied the deep primordial and primal victory out from under the factorial production and modes of civilization as a mechanism of and for the domestication of a deep evolutionary heritage of pure animal survival. Born with fetal alcohol syndrome; dying an early death from the disease that birthed him, Wilson became representative and face of the force of and behind American culture — the workman’s hands that turned the wheel of steel modernity; the soot and iron and coal which powered the birth of the world power of American metropolis. And he was set upon the national stage of America’s game — as a living reminder of the tensile thread and wire between man and machine; between the phenomenal appearance of American Chicago in the year 1930 and the Olmec jaguar, stalking the jungle floor, four thousand years in the mist.

This heritage of Wilson and the jaguar shaman are selfsame — being as that they are the heritage of revelation proper directly through the somatic body as proprietary solution to the tonal and nagual worlds; the manifest expression of profound energetic power emergent in Wilson’s swing and the jaguar’s eyes as it strikes from stone. This is the history that America could not forget, not proselytize or make ideological distance in textbooks and principles. It was the history of conquest and violence that built America, just as it was revered and understood in the Olmec tradition as the powers of the principality of land and sea. The forces of nature at work through the body of nature itself; the primary, pre-linguistic, indivisibility of those total powers from that which they appear to emerge.

This force, inborn in the body of Wilson; captured in the photo of his 46th home run in the year 1930, cannot be separated from the jungle floor, nor can they be separated from the Mesoamerican sacrificial rites, nor the conquest of Cortez. Nor the conquest of the settlers of the North American plains native population; nor the slaughter of the buffalo. This blood that built American civilization is inborn in the violence of Wilson’s birth and labor in the print works, carrying, in his words “a million pounds of lead”. And it was this force that found its way to the American stage, speaking the American language in a way that was absolutely beyond speech — a direct immanency; an absolute, historical totality.