Hank Wesselman, P.h.D.

Shamanic Initiation,
Part 2

IIn last month’s column (6/06), we began to consider the nature of authentic shamanic initiation, perhaps the least well-understood form of spiritual awakening… and probably the most powerful.

In the typical pattern, the “invitation” to experience the shaman’s domain begins with a direct encounter with the spirits… and usually it is the Angel of Death who is the first to approach the initiate.

The details may vary cross culturally, but inevitably, this formidable spirit approaches and brings the neophyte into direct connection with the immense Power that exists within Nature. As part of this dramatic encounter, the initiate may also be “seized” and drawn down into the mythic Underworld, a place of challenge where many things may be experienced.

This seminal event may be so intense and so ego shattering (and so unexpected) that the boundary between spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency may become elusive. For the psychologically unprepared, the experience may temporarily unhinge the person’s grip on reality.

Since most of us live in communities in which jurisdiction over the human soul is claimed by our organized religions and expertise concerning the human psyche falls within the territory of the psychologists, shamanic initiation may often be demonized by the clergy or mistaken for psychopathology by the psychiatrists.

And if this were not enough, the experiencer often becomes deeply involved in some sort of personal crisis, sometimes accompanied by “shamanic illness.” In response, one’s life (and sometimes one’s health) can unravel in truly spectacular ways, often in a very short period of time.

This is part of what it means to be involved in an authentic shamanic initiatory experience…

In last month’s column, I also described the inception of my own shamanic initiation, one that began with that direct encounter with Death. To say that this experience was life changing would be an understatement of vast proportions. There were moments when I feared for my grasp on what we call sanity.

Allow me to put in here that nothing in my training as an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley prepared me for this experience. I was fortunate, however, in that the year before, I had taken an introductory shamanic workshop from a fellow anthropologist named Michael Harner, largely out of curiosity. This event provided me with a basic understanding of who the shaman is, as well as the sort of experiences in which shamans typically engage.

Although this workshop did not really prepare me for what happened in that first encounter, it did help a great deal with what came next. Once again, allow me to adapt from the first chapter of Spiritwalker, the first book in my autobiographical trilogy.

The Second Encounter

About a week after my initial connection with the towering black shadow-like being in the forests of the Lower World, I had a similar but briefer experience, and once again it followed on the heels of a joyous marital encounter.

Jill was having another rough night with her ligaments loosening up in preparation the arrival of our first daughter. My attempts to help alleviate her discomfort progressed into love-making, after which I began to fall back asleep. Quite suddenly, I again became aware of the “sensations,” an abrupt tingling of the spine and a sweeping “high” that spread up my back and engulfed the brain.

As before, I was instantly, fully awake. And as before, the sensations roared into me, paralyzing me in an instant. The bedroom was gone and immense shadows seemed to dominate my field of vision.

I tried to visualize the dark forest once again but it didn’t appear. This was reassuring somehow as it suggested that I was not creating the experience. I then tried to invoke the shadow being, and almost immediately, the sensations withdrew. Disappointed, I tried to recapture the state but could not. I felt several parting surges of energy, each less than the last, and then they were gone.

In retrospect, I came to suspect that this session was a lesson. It is possible, even probable, that I was being shown that I was not in control of this dramatic experience, nor could I create it through my intentionality.

The Third Encounter

Nothing out of the ordinary happened for the next six months, although upon reflection, I must immediately take that statement back. Our first daughter was born during this time, an experience that was nothing short of extraordinary.

Jill and I got very little uninterrupted rest during this period, and I often wondered during those months of shattered sleep patterns if another event might be induced. But nothing happened until one morning in mid-February in 1984. And this one began in a very strange way.

Jill had risen to nurse her hungry baby while I drifted in and out of sleep. The next thing I knew, Jill was peering out of the window above our bed into the darkness of the backyard below. Alarmed, she whispered that she had heard a loud noise. Our cat had heard it too and was perched on the sill, staring down at something.

I shook off my sleepiness, wondering uneasily if I was going to have to deal with a prowler. “What did it sound like?” I asked her… “Like a screeching crack—like a board being torn from a fence or a large branch from a tree” she whispered tensely.

We had a small Japanese style bathhouse in the modest garden behind our home, and worried about it being vandalized, I eased myself out of bed and picked up a Maasai rungu that I had acquired at a trading post in Kenya many years before. The hardwood club was as long as my forearm and sported a large round knob at its business end. Its weight felt reassuring as I slipped down the stairs and out the side door into the darkness.

Very primal stuff—inspecting your territory in the middle of the night (in the buff). I gripped my club as my eyes adjusted to the dark, then drifted slowly around our property on my bare feet, pausing in the shadows, psyching myself up to bash any intruder, but nothing seemed amiss. No one was there. The bathhouse was intact. So were the trees.

I went back up to the bedroom, but could not get back to sleep. Jill and I lay in bed, wondering what was in the woods behind the house. Our attempts to reassure and comfort each other led to our making love, and it was close to dawn before we were relaxed enough to go back to sleep. I was just dropping off when the front doorbell rang, bringing me to full wakefulness in an instant.

The bedroom was filled with the warm yellow light of an early summer dawn. This struck me as unusual since it was February and the night had been pitch dark only moments before. The light seemed to flicker with a shimmering ripple that disappeared when I looked at it directly. Yet I was aware that I could see it with my peripheral vision.

I rose from the bed, wondering who could be at the door at such an early hour. As I walked across the room, I became dimly aware that I could still feel the bed under my body, and at the doorway I turned to look back. Jill was asleep, and there next to her was someone stretched out—it was myself!

Strangely, this did not strike me as odd at the time, perhaps because the doorbell had elicited such a strong response in me. I turned away and walked down the stairs… and opened the front door.

No one was there. A warm predawn glow pervaded the familiar neighborhood scene. I stepped outside and carefully looked around. I was alone.

Without warning, a tremendous rush of the sensations slammed into me. Gasping for breath, I struggled against them with a brief pulse of fear and surprise. But once more, the exquisite nature of the sensations of power quickly dispelled my fear. My body was filled with a feeling of unbelievable exhilaration verging on joy.

My intellect was fully aware and clicking through different analyses and scenarios. I wondered in those moments if these extraordinary sensations could be associated with whatever had made the noise in the backyard. I recalled my meeting with the towering dark spirit six months before and wondered if this being was once again in proximity.

Questions formed in my mind: “Why are you here?” No answer. “What do you want?” Again, there was no answer, but I slowly became aware of a sense of urgency, as though I had to go somewhere… The feeling increased, and so on impulse, I said (in my mind) “OK, let’s go…”

Immediately, I was lifted off into the air above my front yard, and I flew up and over my house with great speed. Staggered, I looked down at my familiar neighborhood from this dizzying perspective. I noted that the roof of my car was dirty, and our cat was observing my ascent from an upstairs window.

I rose swiftly until the details of what was below were lost and I was traveling up through luminous clouds. My body was filled with the soaring sensations and my mind was completely awake… and more than half in shock.

I can only describe what then took place as some kind of otherworldly travelogue. I was taken to places and shown things that were vividly real—locales to which I had never traveled in this world, places not in my memory banks.

Some were monochromatic and lunar-like, with gray ashy plains and stony lifeless landscapes under starry black skies. Others were brilliant with color and alive, but with animals and plants that were completely unfamiliar to me. During the course of this extraordinary journey, the creatures and places that I saw seemed ever more alien.

Some landscapes were pleasant, while others were frightening and lonely in their empty immensity. In one scene, the sky held two suns of different sizes, which produced interesting double shadows of slightly different hues behind the “things” they illuminated. There were lagoons of turquoise water with vivid pastel ferns or palm like vegetation growing near and around them, and the rocks were blood red.

In retrospect, I have no idea how long this trip lasted or how many places were visited. My training in Biology and Paleontology had provided me with a good working knowledge of the classification of plants and animals, both extant and extinct. But during this visionary voyage, I simply lacked any familiar frame of reference with which to compare much of what I saw… or how I saw it.

If this were not enough, I was very much aware of a presence throughout the experience—as if there was someone or something else with me—but I couldn’t see my invisible companion. As before, I was infused with the extraordinarily exquisite sensations of power or force throughout and this time, the predominant mode of travel was “soul-flight.”

Then, as suddenly as the experience had begun, it came to an end. The experience of lying in bed restored itself as primary, and as the force that had filled me began to ebb, I thought once again about my unseen companion.

Perhaps in response, I saw one last startling image. I was now back in my bedroom (in bed), and as I glanced out of the window to see the first light of a typical Bay Area foggy winter dawn, there, right outside the glass panes, three floors up, a woman was staring in at me.

She may have been wearing something, but if so I don’t remember because of the intensity with which her eyes held mine. Her stare pinned me to the bed as if I were an insect, excluding all else. She was neither angry nor hostile, not benevolent, happy nor amused. There was just her look, neutral, detached, and emotionless.

With great effort (as though I was heavily drugged) I raised my arm in her direction. I did not know whether Jill was awake (she wasn’t), but I managed to point at the woman hovering outside the window and forced myself to slur out—“There she is… there she is…”

Then there was a sense of movement in the dark room, and abruptly, the woman’s figure appeared between me and the window, silhouetted against the light. Her form was completely dark and shadowlike, yet still distinctly human in shape.

Suddenly, her left eye became visible within the blackness that was her face. It was as though that eye alone was illuminated by a spotlight.

For a long moment, that eye gazed down impassively at me from beside the bed, not unlike the talismanic Egyptian symbol of the eye of Horus. Then in an instant, both she and her eye were gone, and the sensations that had held me in thrall ceased completely, leaving me awake and shivering uncontrollably as my mind filled with questions for which my scientific training had no answers.

From my talks with other shamans, I have since learned that there tends to be variation in the scope and content of shamanic initiation and subsequent training, yet it is always experiential and it always takes place at the hands of the spirits, much like my own experiences offered here.

This brings up another point about shamanic initiation. Unlike Wicca or Yoga or Meditation in its various forms, there is no human hierarchy in the shaman’s world. Although it can help enormously to experience training with an accomplished shamanic teacher, especially in the beginning, in the shaman’s worlds true hierarchy exists only among the spirits.

That means that as shamanic practitioners, we are all students, even those of us who serve as teachers—and for life.

It is also known that as shamans progress in their experiential instruction at the hands of the spirits, they are introduced to many levels of reality, awareness and experience, and along the way, they are brought into relationship with more and more spirits who assist in their training and who introduce them to what is possible.

As the student progresses, they eventually reach the point where they “graduate.” At this point, their surrender to the spirits (who serve them as teachers) is no longer required. It is at this interface that these wise beings become our spirit friends and allies… that is our “colleagues.”

Those who have read my autobiographical trilogy will recall that the dark shadow being, the Angel of Death, reappeared at various opportune moments in this unusual adventure, furthering my experiential training, until it became fully integrated into my “soul complex.”

I bring this up here because I have been told by others who have been through this experience that this integration with the spirit of Death endows the shaman with a peculiar “vibration” that can be felt by other shamans as well as by some sensitives and psychics.

This vibration can be downright scary to some people and especially those who are still dependent on the religious dogma of our organized monotheistic traditions or who are fearful by nature. I also occasionally cross trails with startled folks at conferences and workshops (as well as in my college classes) who are able to pick up on this vibrational fingerprint in my energy field.

The presence of this “death” vibration may also explain why the priesthoods during the Middle Ages reacted so strongly to the witches. These wise women and the men of knowledge and power were that last holders of an ancient body of wisdom and technique that had been passed down to them from the pre-Christian tribal shamans of Europe and Britain.

If the Christian priests were able to sense the great power in these “pagan” medicine people, intimately connected as they were with both Death and Nature, it may explain why the church and the Holy Inquisition tortured and killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of shamans in response.

My previous column about one of my spirit helpers—the one I call the leopard man (in the Meta Arts archives 04/05) as well as the column about my encounter with the Jinn in Egypt (02/05) provide dramatic examples of what it means to live in the shaman’s world as well as what is possible for the shamanic practitioner. They also reveal aspects of the shaman’s practice that our organized religious hierarchies, and medical hierarchies, find threatening.

I have mentioned one other aspect of shamanic initiation that deserves consideration—the phenomenon known as shamanic illness. And in next month’s column, we will talk more about this.

Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua. With his blessing, I extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.

--with warm thoughts--Dr Hank