There Was A Voice Long Ago
What do I talk about next? I thought about discussing taboos, or waxing brainy over the color orange. Then I remembered I had this little item in a folder since 2022. So I’d like to introduce you to Voice.
Apparently you’re not supposed to talk about your familiars and spirit helpers - your manitu and animals - while at the same time everyone in the village manages to know the name and get intimate with your manitu and animals. I’ll be honest, when I read that I considered the source - Frank Speck, a White anthropologist who did make some good friends but was still in some respects an outsider - and decided to go for the simplest solution. Besides, Dad had never told me not to talk about such things… that is until he fell in with that Christianized crowd. But that’s a topic for another day.
When you grow up in the magical (read: Medicine or muhndu), you attract things. I could tell you about night terrors, and the things that would bring them. The dreamworld has always been close to me, but this isn’t unusual for someone like me. I can tell you I definitely took after my father there.
Another thing is the presence of elders that have no body. They’ve just always been there, sometimes switching hands. For me in the past 20 years or so there’s been one who has stood out for the rest. I guess he could be classified as a spirit guide, but he doesn’t guide me when I’m walking through houses or tell me messages from the other side. This isn’t a movie where some lost spirit is going to come to me with a murder to be solved only for my magical, feather-bedecked spirit guide to swoop in with the wisdom of ages. He’s more like a friend who stops to visit once in a while. A cool uncle. I’ve only recently given him a name: Voice. Maybe I’ll translate that to Mohegan later.
Well, okay. There was one event I can’t really talk about where Voice told me of some serious things going down in a certain sandy place far away that lead me to start making a lot of panicked phone calls until I finally reached the former head of one of the government’s psychic programs (now shuttered), whereupon when the man learned who my father was had to stop his excitement over the phone and then took down in detail what Voice had told me. We can’t talk about that here.
What I can talk to you about is this one time I was sleeping and minding my own business when Voice came to me, as he sometimes does. He knows that I am very fond of learning things I’ve done in past lives, and I guess he was feeling friendly. At the time I’d not made the connections on what was what and who was who. Back then I only knew this manitu, this spirit, had come to me as a man (very rare) and said… well, let me just copy and paste my record of it. I barely remember any of it at all, which is the way of some visions.
A man came to me in my dreams and said he would take me to see my past life. “Would you like to see your past life?” I said yes. Of course I would.
He picked me up somehow and carried me through time until I was in a village of people whose faces I pretty much remembered, because they were familiar to me. They were so familiar I took them for granted as friends and those I’d known. I slipped right back into that old shell.
We were a fair-skinned lot near the sea but not right on the shore. Off a ways. We were running from another group we were at war with, and the other group was of a sort that it wasn’t the type of warfare more peaceful tribes engage in. (War is different from culture to culture.) It was savage, and we had to flee.
A young man whose hair had been turned white by his connection with the powers called forth “the devil” and flew us to an island in the sea. I still remember how he did it, and the great sacrifice as it took a lot out of him. We were carried in whirlwinds through the air, gently, and put down softly…ish… to our new home. There were only a few of us he could take, but I was one of them because the men in my family had died and I was defacto leader despite opposition.
When we landed, we landed at a run and he fell to the ground as the power ebbed from him. Later in the dream his hair was black and short. When he started his hair was long and white.
I remember noticing how long his eyebrows were. They were very long. I can’t remember the eyebrows now, but knowing I’d centered on such a silly detail makes me laugh now.
At the time I wrote about this, I also remembered puddles on the ground, the texture of the soil, how sparse some of the greenery was and how concerned I was by that sparseness. There was a tree trunk near to me that I could almost say was some sort of palm, but the look wasn’t clear. I was also watching the children that landed with us as they walked away, because that’s what you do: you watch things to make sure all is okay.
Time passed in a montage of scenes for us, and those scenes were spent watching the young magician. At one point we’d been found by the attackers and had a war on the island. The young magician had used up all his strength and had mostly foresight and knowledge left. He never called forth a “devil” again.
There was a battle at one point where the magician was facing down the enemy - he was a warrior like all the men as well as a magician, but war makes warriors. He was using his powers to slip into the enemy’s mind or something. I’m not sure, but when the enemy was given the killing blow the magician was watching and feeling it too. This broke his mind a little. When there was any sort of altercation, we’d have to surround him while he crouched on the ground and held his head and cried.
The youngers were annoyed at this, but I knew what had happened and was concerned. But I could also only watch. Our tribe’s “shaman” (that is not the word we used), or perhaps a shaman from somewhere nearby, came to him finally and took him away to train with her. I remember she was a portly person. Wore small light brown gourds around her neck. Her grey hair was up and wrapped to keep it away from her face. She was the only one who wore her hair that way.
This by the way is what you do when someone has gifts. You apprentice them. I’m not sure why it had not been done for him before. Maybe he didn’t own up. Maybe we were blending with the population. Can’t say.
There were dogs we’d adopted the day we’d come. They were fluffy, a gift from the magician to the tribe. We were given four puppies about 8 weeks old. They weren’t tiny round balls, but they weren’t at the awkward stage. They had facial features kind of like German shepherd and husky mix. Or a Belgian shepherd, but a Belgian’s nose is too pointy. Pointed ears. The tufts on the sides of their head would stick out. They were so cute. Very expressive little faces, and so happy to be with us.
(Two days after this dream a friend told me about the tibicenas in the Canary Islands (which is where I think this happened; all of the scant data matches completely), and I looked them up. They match. These dogs were not myth. They’re just extinct. And I am sad by that. The myths have one thing wrong: their eyes were not red. They were typical dark brown dog eyes.)
To us the dogs were gifts from “the devil” and were half mortal dog and, we believed, to be half of our patron daemon’s dog breed. They became our dogs, and we cared for them and their generations. I of course had one of the first. Mine was all black because that was what I preferred. They were very friendly cuddly and expressive puppies. I remember of these dogs there were more that would be other dark colors or have white markings. Black wasn’t that common, but I didn’t choose that because it was rare.
Many years had passed. I’m guessing that with the arrival of the female shaman to help our magician and the fact that there were no more battles, either we had won or some sort of arrangement had been made to our favor. We were very prosperous. As a passage of time, my old dog had died and I was choosing a new black puppy. I remember noticing that black had been a more common color that year.
The men decided having a female leader just wasn’t acceptable. If you look at a dog’s life as a time marker, this means I would have served the tribe for years and brought us into a good age. The mean had never liked the idea of a woman leader, though. This opened up new strife, but I wasn’t allowed to see what happened. There was something about a boat - a long one that I’d almost say was a steamboat but also could have been one of the Norse long ships so who knows - I and people who were loyal to me were boarding to leave the island.
It’s two years after this vision and I’m searching my mind, trying to remember what happened to the magician. I’d watched him all those years, carefully, which means I was emotionally invested in this young man somehow. It seems like he’d grown in to his own power, but I couldn’t tell you now how that was. Maybe he stayed with his teacher. Maybe he came back. I know that I wasn’t worried for him in the end.
By the end, speaking of it, I was forced out of participating in my past and to a part in my head where I was watching it “on television: - from the outside. I don’t know why but suddenly there was an old man with me, and he didn’t want me to see the end of my story. I threaten his life, but by that point in time the credits were rolling. I am not kidding, this old man actually rolled credits at the end of my vision. Stupid movie directors and their sad endings. I can only guess I didn’t make it to the boat or something.
I’m aware this happened in my sleep, but dream visions work that way. Being given this cool information doesn’t change the world or dictate political matter. It’s just a personal and fun thing that my friend gave to me. I had a good time. When I woke up, the scent of the island was still with me to the point I’d immediately researched online to see if I could find anything. When I found it, the dogs, and even legends that matched what I had witnessed I was gratified. It simply was cool.
So for the record, and probably repeating myself a bit, I looked up the dogs and the people and found them all in the Canary Islands. I was actually surprised to learn the people were indeed fair skinned.
At some point archaeological evidence is going to come out backing me up (which is often the case) and I’m going to nod my head and say, “Yup.” And then someone is going to tell me how people only choose famous things for their past life memories and that’s why past lives aren’t real.
The biggest takeaway I have from that cool visit down memory lane was the honor I had of watching that young magician grow to be a man, get past personal pain and become a great being. We owed him our lives. He wasn’t out to make history. He was simply doing what was right.
All these years I wonder if the vision was wrapped around itself. Perhaps I had come in the middle of the story, or the end of it. We were running away from trouble and at the end we were running from trouble. Perhaps the young magician was someone I’d watched grow up, and at the end he used his long-learned power to bring “the devil” to save our lives… which is where the story started? Agh. Voice, please tell me!
Originally published at River Shaman. You can comment here or there.