In 1935, three mystical beings from a land called Pasaquan came to Eddie Martin, a starving artist in New York and the son of a South Georgia sharecropper, in a fever dream. They told Martin how mankind could live in harmony and urged him to teach the world about this peaceful future through art. From that day forward, Martin became St. EOM. After returning to his native Georgia in 1955, the eccentric artist and a team of local workers turned his late mother’s seven-acre property in rural Marion County (between Columbus and Americus) into a multicolored showcase of mandalas, which seem to spin and change color, and giant concrete heads centered on a sandpit where Martin, who died in 1986, communed with spirits. A multimillion-dollar restoration by the Pasaquan Preservation Society, Columbus State University, and the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation has made Pasaquan just as entrancing a stop as Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in North Georgia.
