The Visions of Vicki Weaver

Steve Ely

Vicki Weaver was a white separatist who moved with her family to remote northern Idaho in the late 1980s to prepare for the end-time, which she believed was imminent.  Vicki was immersed in the theology of Christian Identity, which holds that the ‘white race’ is the true Israel and that all other races are inferior.  Vicki’s conspiratorial worldview was informed by frequent mystical visions that enabled her to incorporate theories about UFOs, for example, into her worldview.  Vicki was shot dead by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi in July 1992, in the so-called ‘Ruby Ridge’ incident that became a cause celebre amongst human rights activists, constitutionalists and the libertarian right.

The First Vision

1 A revelation of Yahweh concerning
The Last Days, to His servant
Vicki Weaver.
2 I saw a fiery spaceship, over Cedar
Falls, Iowa, a burning cross in the
firmament of dawn:
3 And the sky roared like a Canaveral
launchpad, a thousand retro-boosters
booming in my head:
4 And the stars tore loose from their
berths in heaven; the blood-streaked
thunderheads ripped and fled:
5 And the world whorled to whiteness
through the red disc of the sun.
6 An angel descended, saying, You
are the daughter of Manasseh.
7 The angel stood before me,
and scorched my temples with electric
fingertips, saying, Let the all-seeing
sight of Yahweh be manifest in
His servant’s eyes.
8 I saw Joannie and Chachi hosting
an Amway party, building their
pyramid, in five years millionaires
through vending detergent.
9 I saw Arnold and Willis looting
stores in Watts, drawing welfare
and food stamps, chanting Burn,
honky, burn.
10 I saw Vinnie Barberino pushing
drugs in public school, the Fresh Prince
dealing AIDS to brainwashed
Aryan girls.
11 And five thousand Russian tanks
in the Sierra del Carmen, a million
UN troops hitting the beach at
Norton Sound.
12 A beast arose from the mud of
Chesapeake Bay, brown in the
bodily likeness of Cain,
13 His many mouths spitting poison
against Yahweh’s quorum of fifty.
14 The beast sent forth its legions
and the fifty bowed down and paid
tribute in slaves and gold:
15 And the hemispheres marvelled
at the power of the beast.
16 And the angel said, Let them that be
in Judaea flee to the mountains of
the west, for the time of the
tribulation is at hand; only a
remnant will remain; Yah has
saved Him seven thousand that will
not bow to Ba’al.
17 On angel’s wings I journeyed
to Cumarah’s mystic peak, and I
saw the saints fleeing to the
mountains of the west:
18 John Carver and William
Bradford, turkey-red Mennonites
and buttonless Amish, Meriweather
Lewis and  Joseph Smith
19 John Jacob Astor and Theodore Roosevelt
DW Griffiths and James Monroe;
20 Richard Butler and the Bruders
Schweigen;  James D Wickstrom
and Tim McVeigh:
21 And I saw a golden homestead in
a clearing on a ridge, high in the
Selkirk range; a wilderness
secluded from the vision of the Beast.
22 Trout leapt in the brook there;
deer slipped into the meadow from
the forest at night: a pen there was
for goats and chickens, a garden thick
with greens.
23 And the bedrock crags of Yahweh
rose bare from His good earth:
24 And American stars still spangled,
over the Selkirk mountains.

The Second Vision

1 A revelation of Yahweh to his
servant Vicki Weaver, concerning
the darkness to come:
2 I stood on the peak of mystic
Cumarah and gazed upon the tableau
of God’s New World.
3 Farmers plowed in the flat field;
in the tree-fledged foothills, foresters
lopped and sawed:
4 Cattle bellied deep through the
blue-grass pastures; in the hard-pack
corral, broken horses stamped
and wheeled.
5 Wood-smoke curled from
homestead chimneys; the clatter
of saucepans announced the
evening meal:
6 And the shouts of children, their
pealing laughter, bounced between
the free-state mountains; and it was
good.
7 But I heard the Beast prowling at
the gate of the valley, and lo! a dark
cloud blew in from the east:
8 And the cloud flashed with flame
and detonating ordnance; and an alien
babel cacophonied from within:
9 And there spilled forth a disorderly
militia; wetbacks, gooks and niggers,
mud-fiends of the first creation.
11 And they emptied the clips of their
federal full automatics; up the backs
of fleeing infants, into the faces of
mothers in milk; he that has ears,
let him hear:
12 And American corpses piled in the
smoking valley.
13 A cannibal leapt from an APC
and butchered the fallen, saying,
14 Come get a taste of these ‘woods’
white flesh, the breasts of their
women, their childrens’ chitlins:
15 And the savages clamoured and
feasted, like the unclean circling
fowls of the air.
16 And I fell to my knees, and vomited
over the desecrated land.
17 But the apostolic tongue was
loosened in my head, Yahweh
of Armies urging me to WAR:
18 Get thee a mountain!
19 Fortify it!
20 Dung it about with the enginery
of war!
21 And again I saw the golden
homestead; a cabin ringed with a
clear-fell kill-zone, a coverless,
sniper-scoped, halo of grass.
22 Trip-wires and pipe bombs
secured the perimeter; M16s
and sawn-off shotguns lay oiled
in window berths.
23 And children shouldered rifles as
they roamed across the mountain,
their right to dam streams or build a
tree house in the forest, not to be
impeded or infringed.

The Third Vision

1 To the daughter of Mannasseh,
Yahweh’s apocalypse:
2 A rough-cut cabin in a mountain
clearing, the sun dropping low
behind the hemlock ridge:
3 And the sunset flare suffused with
fire the southern Selkirk range.
4 Bathed in the blood of my
sun-illumined skin, I swayed on the
porch’s creaking swing-seat and
watched gnats dancing in the pines’
spoked-light.
5 The humming air seemed molten;
and the gnats seemed to scribe and
score upon the glow, trailing their
cursive tracers, their doodling runes:
6 And my eyes read the writing of the
kinnim of the Lord, etched on the
opened corpuscles of light:
7 Trichotomous Adam in the image
of God, pneumatic and sanguine,
naming the mud-beasts as Yahweh
presented:
8 This one, deer, that runs in the
woods; this one, eagle, that circles
the Sun:
9 This other, salmon, that leaps in the
stream; this one, nigger, that toils
in the field and beds in the straw
as the cattle.
10 He that has ears let him hear.
11 And the whine in my jawbone
shrieked to a pitch beyond sound
and I snapped into silence, floating
in the vision.
12 I saw the mother of all living squatting
in the loam, farrowing serpents from
her mucus hole:
13 And the serpents wriggled and spread
across the earth, cursed above all cattle,
flowering in the likeness of men:
14 Yet still they were serpents, like unto
their sire of beguiling.
15 And a male-child dropped from her
buttocks, swaddled in the pristine skin
of his Lord; and he laid amongst
the serpents:
16 And his eyes were of cobalt, and his
hair ran like the summer corn; and
the blood of his breeding showed
in his face;
17 And he sat upright amongst the
filth and in his infant fists, choked
the writhing serpents that strived
to bind.
18 And I woke to skirling trumpets,
chariots and horsemen pouring from
the East; and the King of Assyria
came against the land:
19 And the adulterers of Israel were
dragged off to Asshur in chains:
20 Yet the providential remnant fled,
north to snowy Caucasus, and
thereon to Europa, to Ultima Thule.
21 And the fragments fell from
dreaming; and the heaped grey
waves of world broke on my
psychic strand:
22 On coracles cached in creeks,
beach-hauled longboats lashed to
loblolly pine; gnats etching and
erasing in the evening pines’
spoked-light.

The Last Vision

1 Selkirk sundown, silence on the
mountain:
2 My shot-dead son was laid out
in the birthing shed; I was opening
apricots, uncanning tuna, just trying
straighten my head.
3 Then I heard the recoil of a .308,
my husband cry out, the sun-dried
spruce of the birthing shed splinter
and crack; footfalls thrashed the brush,
stampeded onto the rough-board porch.
4 I felt for my holstered nine, scooped up
Elisheba and dashed to the door.
5 I saw a hillside of bastards vanished
in cryptic fatigues, sunlight squinting
off ten power sights:
6 I saw Randy sprinting for safety,
clutching his torn tricep, blood
oozing between his fingers;
7 I swung the thick door open, to cut
the sniper sightline from the North.
8 Randy dived at the doorway, Sarah
bounding behind, then Kevin
in a headlong fling, rolling and
clattering into the cabin
9 Then I heard the re -
10 I saw blood-grouted floorboards
blurred in molten darkness;
anaesthetic voices, muffled, familiar;
I thought I was dying, or dead.
11 I was dragged, straightened out,
shrouded in blue-checked gingham.
12 Then the underside woodgrain
of the kitchen trestle lidded
my travelling vision no longer:
13 I saw bootless feet, sticking out
from under a tablecloth;
Kevin rocking in the corner, gargling
blood; Sarah clutching Elisheba,
Rachel cleaving to Daddy, Randy
embracing the huddle of them all.
14 And I rose through the rotors
of patrolling Apaches and the blood-
dimmed world spread out:
15 A cabin in a clearing, yellow labrador
pressed into driveway dirt, flattened
under Bradley FVs .
16 Federal pine woods, fire-breaks
dividing, littered with cop-cars and SUVs:
17 Cutlery clattered from a mess
of khaki canvas, where camo-clad
G-men milled and assembled,
their urgent voices and short-wave
static carried away on the wind.
18 And my vision ascended over
the mountains, and I looked down
on Bonner’s Ferry, sunset burnishing
the southern Selkirk range, the broken
course of the Kootenai River foaming
with much blood:
19 The sun sank behind the mountains,
in Naples, Boise, Washington DC:
20 And I saw the sun setting on
Federal America, from sea to
burning sea;
21 And I journeyed into darkness;
the wild stars yet spangling in their
constituted spaces.

Glossary

Amway – notorious pyramid selling detergent company.
Arnold and Willis – characters from the late 70s/early 80s TV show Diff’rent Strokes, in which white millionaire Philip Drummond adopts two black orphans.
Bruders Schweigen – the Silent Brotherhood, the Order; a neo-nazi terrorist group founded in the early ’80s by Metaline Falls lumberjack Robert Matthews.
Cumarah – the Mormon mystic mountain, where Joseph Smith claimed to have experienced the revelation that ultimately led to the founding of the Mormon Church.
Fresh Prince – the transplanted Brooklyn ghetto kid (played by actor Will Smith) in the late 80s early 90s TV series, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Henry L. Beach – founder of the consitutionalist Posse Comitatus movement, which holds that the highest official sanctioned by the US constitution is the County Sheriff.
Jim D. Wickstrom – firebrand neo-nazi and Christian Identity preacher.
Joannie & Chachi – ‘teenage sweetheart’ characters from the 70s sit-com Happy Days.
Joe Smith – founder of the Mormon religion.
John Carver & William Bradford – leaders among the Mayflower pilgrims.
Kevin (Harris) – friend of the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge; fired the shot that killed US Marshall Bill Degan.
Kinnim - gnats (Hebrew).
Manasseh – son of Joseph and eponymous patriarch of one of the twelve tribes of Israel, identified by Christian Identity believers as the ‘Caucasian’ race that settled America.
Norton Sound – bay in Alaska, held by 1980s conspiracists to a likely landing point for a Soviet invasion force.
Randy Weaver – white separatist, Vicki Weaver’s husband.
La Raza – the Mexican people.
Richard Butler – influential American Nazi and Christian Identity preacher, founder of Aryan Nations (Hayden Lake, Idaho) and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian.  Died September, 2004.
Sierra del Carmen – mountain range in northern Mexico, rumoured by 1980s conspiracists to host a secret army of UN/Russian troops, ready to invade the USA.
Tim McVeigh – white supremacist, neo-nazi and Aryan Republican Army member, executed in 2001 for detonating the truck bomb that blew up the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City.
Turkey Red Mennonites – the Mennonites were responsible for the introduction and distribution of the ‘turkey red’ strain of wheat, which was able to grow in the prairies of the middle west and thus opened the way for the settlement of the continent.
Ultima Thule -mythical hyperborean ancestral home of the Aryan race according to Alfred Rosenberg and other pan-German theorists.
Vinnie Barberino – the Italian-American teenager played by John Travolta in the hit ’70s TV show, Welcome Back Kotter.
WAR – White Aryan Resistance – slogan developed by Californian neo-nazi Tom Metzger and adopted widely on the extreme racist right.

STEVE ELY is an English writer interested in exploring issues such as identity, extremism, crime and transgression.  Other extracts from his epic poem JerUSAlem have been published in a range of litzines, including Beat the Dust, Laura Hird Showcase, Dogmatika and Black Mail Press.  Other poems and short stories by Ely have been published in Literary Chaos, Lit Up, Lilies & Cannonballs Review, the Savage Kick, The Slab of Fun, Magma and elsewhere.

Other sections of JerUSAlem are published at the links below:

Part One:  Moschiah
Part Three: Westside Story
Part Four: American Patriot
Part Five: Dream – various poems – 3 parts here and 1 part, Salt Lake City, here
Part Six: Sammy