An Interview With A Remarkable Master
...Steven Knopp
And the History of Archery
by Louise SaintOnge for MastersConnection©
All Rights Reserved.
August 10, 2007
Transcribed by Bertha Rainen
I met Steven Knopp when my son and I attended his bowmaking workshop this summer. From that
absolutely
wonderful experience I discovered what
a remarkable and self-
made man he is, passionate about so many things. He’s the kind of person that one could
take a long journey down any number
of paths & never reach the end. He’s been a student
of Ramtha for 22 years.
He has high level training and is an instructor in Kung Fu, Tai Chi,
Chi kung,
and Instinctual archery. He’s a master bowmaker, a cabinet and furniture
maker,
boatbuilder, musician, singer/songwriter & composer. He has been
a wilderness guide and
preparedness consultant, and has lived and taught
primitive technologies and survival skills.
Need I go on? Truly one of the“Great Minds” in our school.
Needless to say I could have done an interview
with him on any one of these things, but have chosen to focus on his vast
knowledge & experience with archery.
MC: You really have a deep and long-term relationship with archery. Tell us how that came about in your life.
STEVEN: I started with it in my childhood; just being a young boy growing up in the rural areas of northern Indiana and running in the forest and hunting and fishing and living that natural kind of lifestyle, which is what I did from my childhood on. And I had a very keen interest in anything Native American. I actually have part Native American genetics. I was fascinated by this.
MC: Was that influenced by your family at that time?
STEVEN: A little bit from my family but it was just me. I was fascinated by those kinds of things. And also in those days, you may remember the early Tarzan television, Johnny Weissmuller. That was totally inspiring and interesting to me. My mother’s nickname for me was 'Tarzan' because I would disappear in the forest, sometimes for days.
MC: A love of the natural world.
STEVEN: … and the natural world. I was totally involved in that from very early childhood.
So the archery started there, making my own little bows and arrows before I really knew much about making really good ones, and hunting anything I could shoot at.
But then in my early teens I began formally training in Asian martial arts; the whole aspect of archery as it was used in martial arts, not only for the focused discipline part of the martial arts training, but as a warfare thing. I began to investigate and study that, all the different types of traditional bows around the world; the Asian style of archery, the Asian style of bows. Eventually I began to study archery in all its traditions all over the world because I began to make bows.
MC: I recently did some research about the history of archery, and found that the bow seems to have been invented in the late Paleolithic Age, the second part of the Stone Age, beginning about 750,000 to 500,000 years B.C. That’s incredible!
STEVEN: It is as ancient as anything you can possibly explore, but some places and some archeological perspectives will try to say the 'atlatal' was more ancient. And it probably was.
An atlatal, was a weapon for hunting and survival and warfare. It’s a throwing stick, a stick that you use to extend the leverage of your arm, and it throws a very large arrow, almost the size of a spear. And where does the atlatal come from? Atlanta, Atlantis, Atlatia. The term is very similar. It was a weapon that came from that continent.
Archery is as old as you can do archeological exploration. Every culture in the world I have studied, and every geographic region of the world has a tradition of archery, save the Australian bushmen. I have never seen that the Australian aborigines or bushmen had a tradition of the bow and arrow, for some strange reason. They had the boomerang and the atlatal- various throwing sticks and bolos, and many other kinds of weapons that they used for survival, but not archery. Everywhere else in the world, from the Eskimos, to the tip of Patagonia, to Antarctica, to Asia, China, North America, South America, Europe, the great desert lands of the Middle East, archery completely ruled the world as a tool for survival, hunting and warfare, until the last 35,000 years or so.
MC: It was also used as a sport as well.
STEVEN: Totally. Anything that people have to practice as a discipline to gain the skill, then becomes a sport or a competition as a way of practicing and training when people gather together. And, of course, it was the sport of kings in many of those cultures — in ancient China, the royalty and nobility; in Japan and in the ancient Persian empire; the Mongolian empire totally lived by archery. The whole Mongolian empire and Eastern European nomadic peoples on horseback — it was their whole way of life because they were a horse-mounted cavalry, nomadic people on the steppes of Russia and Asia. Throughout the Middle East, the Persian empire, the Indian empire. Check out the classic movie The Mahabharata, which is the ancient history of all of mankind. Archery plays a huge central role in this movie and you see the blindfold archery discipline used and demonstrated as an example of extraordinary mind in The Mahabharata.
MC: Where do the martial arts and archery come into play when you talk about their history? Are they separate?
STEVEN: Well, it was warfare. It was the dominant ruling weapon in warfare for untold thousands of years because you can do this at a distance. You can hit the animal at a great distance to provide your food, or you can hit the enemy at a great distance without having to go hand-to-hand with swords and knives and spears and broadaxes and broad hatchets. It was the artillery of primitive times.
So the martial arts aspect of archery is training people with not only the focused discipline to develop the mind and the skills and aim, but it was warfare. This is where the development of archery bows came into play, because if you can develop a superior bow of design or construction, you can shoot an arrow farther than your enemy. You can be conquering them at a greater distance than they can shoot arrows and hit you. This is where many diverse designs of archery bows, and archery techniques in the martial arts sense, so to speak, originated. But whether we are talking martial arts, everywhere in the world it has been the dominant weapon for survival and/or warfare for a very, very, very long, long, time.
MC: Can you talk a little bit about the the different styles of bows?
STEVEN: The styles of bow, their design and their construction has to do with the geographic location in the world where the people live and the materials they had to make those, as well as how they used them. For instance, if you were a nomadic people who had a horse and you rode the steps of Russia, you would need a bow that you could shoot from horseback.
So you have an animal, a horse. You can ride up very fast on animals for hunting or in warfare, but you need a bow you can shoot from riding on a horse. So a shorter, more compact, double recurve bow evolved that is very powerful and can cast an arrow with great power and speed, even though you are riding on a horse.
So that in contrast to, say, people who lived in the forests of North America who had unlimited species of wood from which to make very good quality long bows, and they hunted in the forests and the fields and the grasslands on foot. Now you need a powerful bow that can penetrate through the brush of the forest and shoot a large arrow and take everything, from animals that are living in the forest, to large mammals, bear, elk, moose and caribou, you know, large game animals that you need to have a very powerful bow to be able to do the job.
In Europe you see the Robin Hood tradition, or English medieval archery, or any number of countries in Europe where European style archery was. They developed the use of the longbow to launch very heavy, long arrows, hundreds of yards, and rain them down like artillery on the enemy. But they hunted with them as well, both on foot and on horseback.
So these different designs evolved around the world. I recently watched an incredible documentary about ancient China showing that Celtic-looking, tall, light-skinned, red-haired, green-eyed people had been dug up in burial grounds in the Gobi Desert, and the desert regions going into China. They discovered that European people and Celtic white Aryan people had been making their way to China, and brought these different designs of the archery bow many thousands of years before they once thought. People have been more nomadic and traded these kinds of advances in technology and survival skills way, way, way, further in the past than often the archeological evidence shows. So it is ancient, very ancient.
Many different designs of bows have evolved all over the world and this was of an interest to me because I began to make bows. I studied every kind of design, every kind of tradition
and I wanted to make them all.
MC: When did you start making bows?
STEVEN: I really got serious about making bows when I lived in North Carolina. I was a cabinet maker, furniture maker and woodworker. I had a very wonderful woodworking shop. Other friends of mine were bow hunters and I really started getting seriously into making bows for people because I had this woodworking business.
MC: You were used to the medium of wood.
STEVEN: It was a wonderful sideline business to all the other kinds of fine furniture and antique repair and restoration. I had a shop that could do anything, so I began to seriously make bows for myself and others.
As I was learning to make all these different kinds of bows and began to get bows into the hands of other people, somebody said, “Well, why don’t you start giving workshops and classes to teach people how to make their own.” In the bow hunting world and in the archery world, it is considered the next ultimate level of challenge to make all your own equipment, you know, so that the equipment you use you have made yourself. So you have been learning and mastering the process all the way from designing and making the bows and arrows and the arm guards and the quivers.
At the same time I was doing that, there was a tremendous resurgence in traditional archery, where guys were doing not only archery as a discipline, but bow hunting, and abandoning the modern high-tech compound equipment and going back to the simple, elegant, wonderfulness of a traditional longbow or recurve bow.
So I kind of rode the wave of that and then began to give workshops to teach people to make their own.
MC: In watching the video you made- I was so interested
in seeing all the stances that you shot out of — I had no idea. And to see the power you had in those positions and the strength of your body and your legs. and you pull that bow and let that arrow go and your upper body isn’t moving all.
It is really awesome to see that and then the one legged? What was the motivation and intention behind the video.
STEVEN: I was asked to do that video by Kung Fu grandmasters, friends and teachers of mine, who knew what I was doing with the archery, and how I had developed it in a martial arts training practice for myself. They asked me to do this video because there wasn’t another video in the world that took archery and brought all these training aspects and martial arts aspects along with instinctive shooting, basic instinctive shooting, like bow hunters use. I did all these things and put it all together in a training video so anybody could watch it and begin to train and develop every aspect of archery, because it’s a very diverse, wonderful world. It is really the only one I know of of its kind in the world.
MC: The other thing I liked about that was seeing you shooting at symbols. You had the star. You had a Chinese symbol. That to me was another way of focusing the mind and teaching us when we are using our eyes, teaching us where our mind is at.
Can you speak about that
a little bit?
STEVEN: In many spiritual traditions, focusing with eyes open on sacred geometric symbols, spiritual symbols, is a part of their disciplines and training, too, all over the world. They have mandalas and yantras and all these different kinds of symbols that are used to develop aspects of the mind and unlock the language of the subconscious mind. So including them in the archery discipline with eyes open is a historical part of the archery development in the martial arts and/or spiritual training parts of it.
Blindfolded, again, is another whole world but it is like when we make cards or we make symbols and we focus on them, whether you are focusing on them in the internal hologram in the frontal lobe or you are looking at them with the eyes, there are effects in the physiology and in the mind and in the subconscious mind. These are all different aspects of spiritual training. Some of them are used to heal eyesight and take care of problems with the eyes.
These ancient symbols are a language of development that’s been handed down through
many traditions for thousands of years. So I included that in the archery video as a way to incorporate that, even when doing it with eyes open, or using your eyes in the archery discipline. Put a sacred geometric target down on the end there and spend all day focusing
on it. It has a wonderful advantage.
I wanted to give people A-to-Z of what I had done, or what I knew had been done historically throughout the world with archery.
MC: Let me ask you something. I was just thinking about the wilderness skills that you have learned and lived, and having this wonderful depth in martial arts and archery, does that help you to survive when you have really difficult situations living out in the wilderness? Has it been pretty easy, or is it focus, and you grew with it?
STEVEN: (laughs) I wouldn’t be here talking to you today if it hadn’t helped me in uncountable, innumerable situations in life all over the world, whether it was the underground metro in Moscow at rush hour or at high elevation in the mountains on the edge of hypothermia and possibly dying. So yes, all of the skills and experiences I’ve had, the disciplines of RSE, as
well as all the stuff I’ve learned and lived. That’s the important key — lived. I assure you I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I have many, many adventures; many, many very close calls
in every imaginable contact style, in nature …
MC: You used the discipline of the mind and obviously the skills of survival. Is that true?
STEVEN: Absolutely. I could tell you stories for the next month.
MC: Would you tell me one?
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK......
Steven's next bowmaking workshop is September 29th and 30th.
He can be reached at 360-458-6777 x228 and by Email Here
