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Encounters on
the Shaman's Path
with anthropologist Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD.
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by Dr.Hank Wesselman, P.h.D. |
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Ancestors
Our last two columns have been focused upon an encounter—about how I came into relationship with a Hawaiian elder, a man named Hale Kealohalani Makua who was a high chief and also a Kahuna Nui.
In last month’s narrative (6/07), I began to describe a meeting with him that unfolded on the rim of the volcano Kilauea, a side vent on the great mountain Mauna Loa’s southeastern slope. On that afternoon, my wife Jill had gone for a walk with his partner Nina, leaving the two of us alone so that we could get to know each other and establish rapport, man to man, and this is precisely what occurred.
I asked Hale Makua about his life and his genealogy, then listened open mouthed as he mentioned some of his more illustrious family members. On his mother’s side, he was a seventh generation direct descendent of High Chief (and King) Kamehameha Nui and his third wife, and on his father’s side, he was directly descended through seven generations from High Chief Keoua Kuahu’ula, the famous cousin of Kamehameha. Makua then told me of how the two cousins had originally been raised in the court of High Chief Kalaniopu’u, the paramount ruler, with whom the British captain and navigator James Cook also had dealings.
Makua, as he was generally known, then told me an extended story of how Keoua came to be killed in 1791 by Kamehameha below the heiau (temple) at Pu’u Kohola, the Mound of the Whale, near the present day town of Kawaihae in the district of Kohala. He spoke of how Kamehameha had needed a human sacrifice to sanctify his newly-built temple and how he had summoned Keoua to come.
High Chief Keoua had recently suffered some severe military defeats, and to top it off, he had lost most of his soldiers in a volcanic eruption, an event that convinced him that the Akua, the Gods, had turned against him. He knew that if he defied Kamehameha’s invitation, that this usurper (for Keoua was the rightful paramount chief of the island of Hawai’i) would send his soldiers to slaughter Keoua and his people in the district of Ka’u. Keoua thus knew his fate was sealed, and so he sailed with his supporters for Kohala, knowing that only the highest could be used as a sacrifice to sanctify a heiau, and that they had to volunteer for the honor.
The night before his arrival, Keoua withdrew from his supporters and attendants, and in a last act of defiance, he cut off his own penis, thus making himself an imperfect sacrifice. The following day, he and those who elected to accompany him into death arrived at the beach below the heiau and there they were killed.
High Chief Keoua’s body, and those of his kahunas, were taken as human sacrifices into the new heiau in order to sanctify it. And it was from this heiau that Kamehameha then launched his conquest of the Hawaiian Islands to become the first King, ka Mo’i.
Makua, directly descendent from both men, was thus a Pili chief, a sacred man of high degree, a living deity according to tradition, the descendant as well of a brother and a sister who had separated seven generations ago, creating two lineages that had come together once again through his mother and his father.
As we talked together with the afternoon light softening the surroundings and the wind whispering around us, I suddenly understood something with absolute clarity. If the Hawaiian monarchy had survived the illegal machinations of the American President McKinley and his corporado henchmen, Makua’s exalted genealogy might well have projected him into being the current King—the King of Hawai’i.
In so many words, I was sitting in the presence of an authentic King.
In response to this awareness, I told him something of what I knew about my own ancestors, and of how my father had informed me about the long line of rulers stretching back across time from all four of my grandparents. For example, on my father’s father’s side, our family name had originally been Wesselman Van Helmond, and we had been the rulers of the town of Helmond, located in north Brabant in the eastern Netherlands today. Accordingly, I, as the eldest son, would have held a title in the old days and in confirmation of this, the family crest on the ring that I wore depicted a crown above the knight’s helmet and shield, with eagles on both sides and above the crown.
On my father’s mother’s side, my father had claimed that we were descended from the Norman King known as William the Conqueror, and through marriage of his descendent, Henry II (Plantagenet) to Eleanor of Aquitane, we were also directly descended from Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor in the 8th Century.
Of course, I told Makua that much of this family lore was unconfirmed by hard researching, but he brushed this aside. “Oral tradition was always our way,” he proclaimed with fervor. “And your mother’s family?”
“On my mother’s side, there were a lot of English, Scots, Germans, French, and Italians,” I went on. “In fact, my maternal grandfather’s mother was descended from the Estenzi, a well-known noble Italian family that had prospered from the late 10th to the early 19th Centuries. They were the ones who had built the famous Villa D’Este near Rome and during the Renaissance, and members of the D’Este family were the rulers of Bologna and Ravenna …” I glanced at the chief. He looked approvingly at me.
“And through my mother’s mother,” I went on, “the Everett’s of Cleveland were rumored by my mother to be descended from Clan Stuart, the ruling house of Scotland from 1371-1603 and of England and Scotland from 1603-49, and 1660-1714.”
“The Stuarts,” said the chief thoughtfully. “They are descended from the ruling families of Egypt—from the Pharaohs.”
“How do you know this, Makua?”
He glanced down at his walking stick. “From the chants,” he replied. “It is all recorded there, in our oral tradition that stretches back across thousands of years. The chants are the story of human migrations. I can trace my own genealogies back though all of Polynesia and beyond, through southeast Asia and even through a branch that went into Tibet.
“The chants extend even further back into the Middle East, and to Persia and Egypt and even to the New World. It’s all there in the chants.” He looked me over speculatively, then volunteered. “The Tahitian people, for example, are actually descended from far ranging Egyptians who traveled into the oceanic world, into Polynesia, where they decided to remain. Mason Maiku’i’s family came from Tahiti” he said, referring to the young Hawaiian man I had met at the Frank Lloyd Wright house just days before. I thought about him and reflected that his face would not look out of place in the souks of Egypt
“Do you know all these chants?” I asked him.
“I do,” came his calm reply. “When I was a little boy, I was required by my parents to learn them and recite them from memory, over and over. My mother and father were kahuna on both sides. My dad was blind, by the way. At dinnertime, my mother would gently tell me to begin, and as long as I continued chanting, I could eat. When I ran out of information,” he laughed, “that was the end of dinner for me. I learned fast.” More laughter shared by us both.
Makua then looked at me with renewed interest. “You are descended from a long line of chiefs, like me.” His satisfaction in knowing this was palpable. His dark eyes bore directly into mine and he laid his warm brown hand on my arm to reinforce the point. Then our talk took an interesting turn.
“Our rulers today are not what they once were,” I observed offhandedly. “How many among our kings and queens, our presidents and prime ministers, know what it is to be an authentically initiated ruler?”
He nodded and immediately took up the thread. “That’s the key-- authentic initiation. What does it mean to experience authentic initiation?” He asked to no one in particular. Then he continued. “If our leadership had experienced authentic initiation, the world today would be quite different. Western people have largely forgotten what that means. Non-Western people too,” he added thoughtfully.
“When I was in my early 20s,” I began hesitantly, “I was very much in search of initiation, and so filled with fire and political fervor, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Nigeria in the middle 1960s, teaching science classes in two different schools during my time there. This is where I became interested in indigenous spiritual wisdom. I lived with people of the Yoruba Tribe for two years, and when I came home, I was really different. I had changed dramatically. Having seen unimaginable poverty and human suffering, I was also fully committed to making the world a better place.”
I paused. I had the chief’s complete attention.
“I got involved in politics upon my return as a committed liberal. Then Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968 and I was stunned. I could see him quite clearly for who he was as well as who he wasn’t, and I simply couldn’t believe that this toxic warrior, focused as he was within the dark side, had been chosen to be the ruler. This was the end of my confidence in the possibility of social change through the political process. It felt as though I lost a part of my soul when that dark man assumed the presidency.”
I considered the big Hawaiian watching me thoughtfully, then came to a decision. “I have a confession to make Makua—I have not been able to participate in the whole voting process ever since, a personal preference that has earned me a lot of criticism from my friends and colleagues… Even Jill votes faithfully in each election, yet I just can’t seem to get emotionally involved in the process. It just doesn’t move me, nor do I trust it.”
“I don’t vote either,” said the chief calmly, looking off toward the distant horizon. I immediately perked up. “Why don’t you vote, Makua?” I needed to hear what he had to say.
“It’s simple. When you vote for a politician, you give them your mana, your power. Most politicians are double-tongues as our Native American brothers and sisters have observed. They will say whatever they have to say in order to get us to vote for them. But once we have voted for them, they can then do whatever they want. And we can’t do anything about it because they have our mana. We gave it to them when we voted for them.” He paused and then concluded, “ I am not going to give them my mana.”
The kahuna sat lost in thought for long moments, then continued. “The political system in the Western world is organized in such a way that the amount of money it takes to win a campaign preserves the tradition of the moneyed interests who are controlling the government. The amount of money needed to win is now so great that any candidate with any possibility of winning is already so much a part of the system that they are not likely to significantly change it. Those who disagree with this perception simply don’t have the experience to know what they’re talking about. I learned this when I was in the military…
“I was not a particularly good student when I was in school. School was boring,” he continued. We both laughed. “And we Hawaiians got beaten when we spoke our own language as kids.”
“Are you fluent in Hawaiian?” I asked him, to which he responded calmly “I am. There are things I intend to discuss with you… things I can talk with you about in English that I could never talk about in Hawaiian because they are kapu, restricted,” he smiled. “There is always a loss, of course, because the English language is limited. It can never convey the depth or the richness that our Hawaiian words carry.”
He paused for long moments, then smiled again and returned to his original line of thought. “I completed virtually all my coursework for a college degree and then I just walked away. It just didn’t move me, as you pointed out.” Long laugh.
Makua then floored me with something totally unexpected. “I did a lot of reading in those years and in the years to follow. Do you know that Plato, the Greek philosopher, was democracy’s fiercest critic?” his eyebrows shot up. This was the last thing I expected from a Hawaiian kahuna elder, and yet I was coming to understand the degree to which this man had walked in both worlds, his and ours. I was beginning to perceive his depth.
“Plato listened to all the talk-story of those arrogant Athenian idealists,” he went on with a chuckle, “and he knew that the rest of the Greek clans (he used a Polynesian perspective here) just couldn’t stand them!” He burst out laughing, and I too, while I scrambled to remember my one college philosophy class. We had read Plato’s Republic, as well as the Phaedrus, but most of what I learned was long gone. Makua sensed this and continued.
“Plato was aware that the average farmer or fisherman, artisan or servant simply had no idea what qualities and abilities were required of a ruler, and because of this, he knew that to give them the vote was a vast mistake. Folks are not all at the same level in their understanding of themselves and the world, and he saw that democracy was an illusion, an idealistic one that could never succeed because of this. He knew that only those trained to be rulers from birth had the knowledge and the skills to be rulers, and accordingly, only they had the necessary foundation to be able to choose who among them should rule…”
He paused again, then thought for a moment. “The key to success is always authentic initiation, isn’t it? But what exactly does this mean?” He smiled and left the thought hanging for another long moment, then finished it, speaking as though to the invisible others who were with us. “It means knowing with absolute certainty who you are, as well as where you are....
“What do you do as an anthropologist?” he asked me suddenly, shifting directions. I realized that I was being evaluated and gathered my thoughts to reply.
“For the past 25 years or so, I have been doing field research with several international scientific expeditions, exploring the ancient eroded landscapes of eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins. My colleagues and I go out into the fossil beds and look for the fossilized bones of the early humans who lived in those places millions of years ago. I am especially interested in the fossils of the animals among whom they lived, and I use them to reconstruct the paleo-environments of the sites at the time they were laid down in the remote past.” I paused. The chief seemed riveted.
“I began doing this field work when I was a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in the early 70s, and across the next five years or so, I got to rub elbows with some real notables including Don Johanson, Lucy’s discoverer, and members of the famous Leakey family.” I stopped. I wasn’t sure these names meant anything to the Hawaiian elder, and it sounded like I was name-dropping.
“I am still doing this work today. In fact, I am currently working with a group of research scientists headed by Dr. Tim White in the Middle Awash Valley in Ethiopia. I was there, out in the tribal lands of the Afar peoples just this past year when we found something really interesting—a partial fossilized skeleton of an early form of human called Ardipithecus ramidus—a species that is so primitive, it may in fact prove to be the famous missing link between humans and apes that none other that Charles Darwin himself predicted that we would eventually recover in Africa.”
Makua looked very thoughtful as he mulled this over. “Ancestors,” he concluded with satisfaction. “You are connecting with the ancestors. They are calling you back. How far back have they drawn you?”
“About four and a half million years ago,” I replied, expecting him to be impressed.
“Wow!” he laughed explosively, picking up on my expectation and delighted with this unexpected turn of events. “Sounds like you are working at the top of your field.”
I just looked at him. “I am. That’s why I was completely unprepared for what happened to me here in Hawai’i—the experiences published in my book…” He watched me with alert interest and waited for me to continue.
Those who have read Spiritwalker know that it is a non-fictional, autobiographical narrative of an ongoing continuum of spontaneous visionary experiences that took me, a highly trained and accomplished scientist, completely by surprise. These events happened while I was living with my family on our small farm on the west side of the island in the late 1980s. In each of these altered state experiences, my mind was drawn into connection with that of another man. And during the duration of each episode, it was as though I was him—as though I was there, and I mean really there. This is a man of Hawaiian ancestry named Nainoa who lives somewhere on the western coast of North America. And if that is not enough, he lives in a different slice of time. He lives in the future roughly 5000 years from now.
Now this may sound incredibly flaky to those who live and work in the mainstream of the Western world, and especially to those who work in science, but I also knew as an anthropologist that such experiences are accepted with equanimity in the indigenous world. They are even expected under certain circumstances. This awareness was and is one of the foundation stones that I held on to in order to retain my grip on what we call reality.
In Nainoa’s world, everything we take so much for granted is totally and inexorably gone. He lives in a time after the collapse of Western Civilization, and my ongoing visionary connections with him during those years, as well as during the years to come, have revealed much about the world we are walking straight into if we continue to business as usual. What was totally unexpected is that Nainoa began to have the same kinds of visionary connections in reverse—he began to connect with me in my slice of reality and time.
Interestingly, from his perspective, he concluded that he was making contact with the mind and soul of one of his ancestors. This threw the entire complex into an entirely new light for both of us. If I was his ancestor, and he my descendant, this could explain part of the causality for the connection between us.
Makua was watching me. I understood that he knew considerably more than I about the nature of such connections, as well as about visionary experiences. Makua was kahuna, a title implying mastery, and a label not lightly given, nor lightly carried by the one who owned it. I knew he was monitoring my thoughts and emotions as they surged this way and that, seeking escape from the quandary of confusion, searching constantly for meaning as well as understanding. The other books I would write in this trilogy would record aspects of my search.
But on that day, the last day of the year in 1996, much was still coming into being and I sensed rightly that the chief knew this and he had come to help me out.
We will share more about this fateful meeting next month. Until then, allow me to invoke Makua who would become my great friend, and with his blessing (and his words), 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
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Dr. Hank Wesselman, P.h.D
Anthropologist, Shamanic Teacher, Healer, & Author
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Dr Hank Wesselman PhD., holds advanced degrees in anthropology and zoology from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Since 1971, he's conducted research with an international group of scientists, exploring eastern Africa's Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins--fieldwork that has allowed him to spend much of his life living and working with traditional peoples, rarely, if ever, visited by outsiders.
During this time, he has worked with many notables including Prof F. Clark Howell, Dr Don Johanson, "Lucy's" discoverer, as well as members of the famous Leakey family.
He is currently engaged in fieldwork in northern Ethiopia with the Middle Awash Research Project headed by Prof Tim White, where he is reconstructing the paleoenvironments of sites dated between four and six million years old that have yielded the fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors.
Dr Wesselman has taught anthropology for the University of California at San Diego; the University of Hawai'i at Hilo's West Hawai'i campus at Kealakekua; California State University at Sacramento; American River College and Sierra College in northern California; and Kiriji Memorial College and Adeola Odutola College in Western Nigeria, where he first became interested in indigenous spiritual traditions while living among people of the Yoruba Tribe as a US Peace Corps Volunteer during the 1960s.
Dr Hank (as his students call him) is also a shaman in training, now in the 23rd year of his apprenticeship. His autobiographical trilogy Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker describes an ongoing continuum of visionary experiences that began spontaneously out in the bush of southern Ethiopia in the 1970s, resumed in Hawai'i in the 1980s, and continue to the present day.
Combining the sober objectivity of a trained scientist with a mystic's passionate search for deeper understanding, Hank's books and teachings contain revelations about the nature of reality, the self, as well as the shaman's spiritual worlds.
Since 1994, he has offered seminars and training workshops at many internationally-recognized centers such as the Esalen Institute in California, the Omega Institute near New York, and the New Millennium Institute in Hawai'i.
Hank's newest books include the Journey to the Sacred Garden: A Guide to Traveling in the Spiritual Realms, and Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms (co-authored with transpersonal medical practitioner and soul retrieval specialist Jill Kuykendall).
He currently serves on the advisory board of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, is a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and is featured in Traveling Between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans by Hillary S Webb.
In addition to his scientific publications, he is at work on a book about his expeditionary field experiences in Africa.
He has also written a small book for children: Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf.
Contact info and workshop schedule:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
email:
hw@sharedwisdom.com
Notes & Updates
from Dr.Hank
Descriptions of the workshops and presentations offered by Hank Wesselman and his wife Jill Kuykendall, as well as the website links to the centers where they will be held in 2007, are now taking form on their web site:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
Soul Catchers
I discovered, quite by accident almost 15 years ago, that I am married to a great soul catcher. My wife Jill Kuykendall was trained in the Western medical paradigm and has worked as a physiotherapist in acute care rehabilitation in hospital as well as home health settings for more than 25 years.
Today, Jill works primarily in transpersonal medicine and has a private practice devoted to soul retrieval. Clients come to her from all over the country, as well as from abroad and she is usually booked up months in advance.
Interestingly, the transpersonal nature of this work means that it is “nonlocal’ and is just as effective when done long-distance, revealing that Jill can still do the work on behalf of those who cannot travel to meet with her in her office.
Jill is the co-author with me of Spirit Medicine and wrote the chapters on soul loss, soul retrieval and more. As you may be aware, we have a website <www.sharedwisdom.
com> where Jill has a page describing the nature of her work in soul retrieval.
For those interested, there are also two hour-long interviews with me posted on the Broadband Learning Channel <www.bblc.tv>, one of which is focused upon health, illness and healing the soul in the indigenous perspective.
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