cellini's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Personal History of Accidental Shamanism

Last night I finally finished 'Voice of the Fire.' Whenever I read something by Alan Moore it gets me thinking. Moore is onto something that is just true enough to be a bit frightening. It will likely be another 10 years or so before I can completely wrap my mind around it and get anywhere near comfortable enough with it to incorporate it into some sort of working cosmology.

On finishing the book I had an idea for a book of my own. A personal history of accidental shamanism. A narrative of every significant mystical or superstitious experience throughout my life. Every encounter with 'other.' Every moment of making a decision based on something obviously irrational. Every attempt to influence events through magical actions.

It would have to begin with an experience at the age of 3 when my brother and I went down into the dark, unfinished basement alone to look at ghosts. We hid behind the enormous, white dresser in a corner. Standing on boxes we peeked over the top of the dresser and watched the ghosts dancing mid air. Their white, shapeless forms vaguely transparent like dense mists. After a long moment we lost our nerve and bolted up the stairs. I saw this. I really saw this.

The dream I had when I was 8 years old of a doves nest in the apple tree behind our house. 3 tiny, naked baby birds had fallen from the nest to the ground. As I picked up each one to return it to the nest, they spoke to me in turn. Each relating a phrase of wisdom of incredible value. The last of them added 'you will need to know this for the rest of your life.'

Today I have no recollection of precisely what any of them said.

Also at the age of 8 I receive a Holy Bible on the occasion of my first communion. One night I read from the Old Testament before falling asleep. I awoke in a panic and a heavy sweat. I had been fighting a great battle of some kind, this much I was sure of. A battle on behalf of all that was good and just. From that night on I was convinced that I'd been chosen as some sort of crusader.

When I was 13 I endured 3 nights of harassment by strange, tall, humanoid figures while camping on land owned by my parents in Virginia. The first night alone, the second night with my brother and a friend and the third night with my brother and a different friend. Just after sunset the noises would begin a few dozen yards past the circle of firelight. First a scuffling of leaves. Then a loud snort. A roar like a lion and sometimes a responding roar from another creature. We would quickly retire into the relative safety of the tent and spend the whole night absolutely terrified while God-knows-what outside poked the top of the tent and played havoc with our gear. Once, my brother mustered the courage to poke his head out of the sleeping bag to see what he described (and later sketched) as a sort of mongoloid face resembling a human.

To this day I have no good explanation of either what was really happening nor why I went back again and again to experience such utter terror from dusk til dawn. My brother will no longer speak of it. Which is wise of him. You cannot go talking about this sort of thing or people will call you a lunatic.

When I was 16 I traveled to the Yucatan and wandered ancient Maya ruins. At Chichen Itza I threw a token into the sacrificial well. Later that day I climbed several pyramids and became delirious due to mild heat stroke and dehydration. I sat at the top of a pyramid in a trance-like state while the dead city wobbled around me.

At 18 I went to college and discovered LSD and mushrooms. Once while taking mushrooms I directly experienced the world in 6 dimensions, which made it very difficult to remove my boots and awkward to take a shower. I became a forest spirit for an afternoon. I could fill entire chapters with accounts from this period.

When I was 26 I was trying to buy my first house with no money down. Things weren't going well with getting the loan closed. Nothing was happening. I really wanted the house. Somehow it just made sense to get rid of an old pair of shoes in order to make this work. Not just any shoes. My favorite boots. The black, German tanker boots. I brought them with me on my way to work and dropped them into a trash can on the street. The very next morning things got moving again and my load was quickly approved.

In 2004 on the day my daughter was born I glimpsed an apparition of a very large black dog laying on the floor at the foot of the bed while my wife labored. I sensed that it was a protective spirit of some kind. A gurt dog like that of English folklore?

Onward to various experience with magic and hunting. Thumping the butt of my rifle on to the tracks of a deer in order to 'tie it down' like the witch doctor did in the autobiography of a famous African hunter I'd read. Minutes later, finding the deer standing in a thicket only a few yards in front of me, paying no heed to my presence and not running away as a deer should.

The incident with the bird obviously represents a major departure from the casual magic and mysticism of my past, which I have written about recently enough in this diary as not to hash out again.

That's about all for now, I think. I'm not actually writing the book here, after all. Just sketching out the sorts of things that would go into it. For anyone who hasn't gotten the point when I've written about this in the past, I don't see my experiences (up until the bird) as being anything at all out of the ordinary. I think that almost everyone is practicing magical thought on some level without really facing up to it. And everyone has experiences with 'other' like those which I describe. We just shove those memories out of the way for years.

They are easy to discard. Strange moments from childhood. Odd experiences as adults that are so much in conflict with what we know to be 'real' that we make little effort to reconcile these experiences with our other ideas about the universe. Rather, it gets filed away as 'strange' and only comes up some half-drunken evening with cousins or friends when everyone is telling tales of ghosts and aliens glimpsed and forgotten.

10:22 a.m. - 2007-09-10

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next

latest entry

about me

archives

notes

DiaryLand

contact

random entry

other diaries:

metonym
mnemosynea
pipersplace
jendix

0 comments so far