Spirit

Image & Intensity.

Anima, original art by the author, MK'25

I was walking alone in the mountains. My only companion was the sun of a winter day. I enjoyed the solitude immensely, miles away from civilization, the warmth of the light and the cold of the earth forming a dynamic contrast.

The path was hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old. Over the spans of time it changed very little. The mountains had settled in, a world as yet unperturbed and untouched by greed and stupidity, offering secrets and magic that could only be perceived by the very few.

A mystical event is like perfume. It seems to continue to exist long after the event passed. The scent, the taste of that which just expanded ordinary beliefs about what is solid, true, and real.

There was no warning. With great speed, suddenly huge hooved beings were upon me. The energy was rippling, all flailing limbs and eyes like obsidian. They raced past me effortlessly, the intensity of their tawny forms following each other with hardly any effort.

There was no physicality to the encounter. They were close enough for us to share breath. Their speed and power could have flung me to the rocks, a lifeless rag doll. We shared space for that charged moment, theirs was no attack, mine, I stood in awe of their current that washed over me.

Modern minds trained by religion can only imagine spirit as something without a body. Yet the physicality so precious to ideas of reality has no truth of its own. Spirit is an image, and an intensity beyond what is deemed real.

Large and sharp hooves kicked no stone, left no track, other than the echoe within me. I believed I heard them traveling, yet at the same time they left absolutely no clue as to their passing…nothing disturbed save me.

After they left I was spinning in a daze. I started to move away, only to stop and look around. The silence did not relent. The wind was gentle and fair. No dust hung in the air. The mountain shoulder they had scaled showed not even a bent blade of grass. I followed their direction, but they had vanished as they had arrived.

The modern world, and its religion know nothing of the animal power, nor do they comprehend visitation. Ancient man understood the way the animals moved and communicated. They welcomed the animal power.

We are ingrained while still quite young with the tyranny of the one life, one world explanation. It isn't up for revision or modification. It is upheld purely by its own self assertion. There is no actual evidence. This becomes clear when the visitation steps into view and destroys that smug declaration.

There are of course, many ways to approach such experience. The first one is off the table unless you happen to live in a community that understands image, intensity, transformation. While there are those today who will guide you, for a nice sized fee, into the labyrinthine belief systems of modern “practitioners”, there are essentially none who will provide you with the opportunity to arrive at your own establishment of communication and being. Why would they? After all if you achieve your new homeostasis, you become their competitor.

The second, and most common is to let the intensity fade. Allow the jokes and denigration of those within the society to convince you that you are being stupid, an idiot whose imagination got the better of them. It was purely a response due to stress and isolation. It means nothing. Turn on the TV, watch the game, move on.

The third path for dealing with the experience is also rather common, and that is to brag about it, to use it to build a stack of money, to claim that it provides you with the sanction to hang out the shingle and blow your horn. Some people become quite good at this, and develop things like buisnesses and reputations.

The fourth arm of the spinning cross, some say the last, is to do what none of the others can even imagine, to honour the experience, grant it truth on its own terms.

Modern minds that are more inquiring link meeting with spirits to images of white smoke and translucent orbs, the scent of old earth and ectoplasm, knocks on the walls and wailing tones in the sudden surreal cold that grips the living.

Yet the spirit can be as physical, as solid, as real as any phenomenon in this world. The spirit can be instructive, but not always in the way one is expecting. Spirits have habits, and their greatest trick is to always appear when and where they are least expected.

It is the nature of the spirit world to seize the moment when their target is disarmed. The Fairie always delights to catch their quarry unprepared, flat footed, gaping. It is after all when one is most honest about who they are, when there is no defense, no strategy, no engaged reaction.

Much to be seen, much to be learned about the mystery of self, especially those uncomfortable truths that had, until then, been successfully kept out of the light of examination.

In the old ways, the elders spoke of vision as guiding. If one was granted vision, they had to come clean about it. I never really liked this phase of the process, but I can at least understand it. If one must relate their experience they bring a certain order to it. Through relating the vision it no longer is only yours, it now belongs to the terrain of everyone who participates. Like storytelling from long ago, the story becomes the experience, a resonance beyond the deeply personal of one's experience. Singing the song given is equally important, because it fixes that song into one's destiny, affixes the rhyme in memory, gives it away and calls it back, making a circle.

Raw spirit encounters are very similar, if the person who experiences them honours the communication. Then these experiences grow to become a part of one’s own lexicon, that inner library. The feature of mythopoesis is thusly ignited, and as those who have dreamed myth know, myth is the powerful directive force in all of existence. In myth dreams speak. In myth is found meaning. In myth spirit lives.

The bones of the dead go on living. They become a nexus point to rattle during those uncanny meetings, to obscure the earthly vision well enough that a different form of seeing shines through.

Anima is spirit, where from the word animal derives.

There is this feature of ancient humanity, the need, the identity that is the untamed animal power. The partnership with animals, their essential motive natures, is rarely if ever reflected in the modern world's fascination with pets. This is far from doting or becoming friends, it is a link together in the levels of pre-awareness, where person and animal have no boundaries between each other as the bones become the only source of divergence.

Ancient people took on animal appearances as outer regalia of inner transformations. This is interpreted in modern times as the “Master of the Animals”, or “Shamanism”, yet it goes several leagues deeper than titles and boxes.

Does anyone remember that the Gods themselves move as animals throughout the world? Freya, Falcon perched on the tree, her feather suit rippling in the breeze. Frey, the Shining Boar, digging up acorns. If one dares to hunt him, the chase may take them into the bottomless Otherworld, from which they may never return.

Both the magnetic and the lightning force is made manifest through the activity of animals. The coalescing and the shattering, manifest together in a messy spiral. Ritual behavior began first amongst them, and ceremony is almost always a formal expression of ritual. The first ceremonies were those that surrounded the power and impact of wild animals, their image, their intensity.

Thus do the animals speak to deep human nature, thus are animals spirits, thus do animals instruct in ritual, power, and ceremony.

Taliesin practiced Mantic Prophecy.

Mantic Prophecy is itself a harmony, where the language used is often motion, sensed connection, resonant importance. The birds emerge from the mystic, the background, and their very actions are then imbued with significance.

How could they evoke and embody the unseen and unmanifest on its way to becoming, if they themselves didn't slip so easily between life and death, day and night, physicality and incorporeality, presence and memory?

In the end the modern world and its conclusion is nothing more and nothing less than an enshrining of unlearned ways of perception. The modern world only pretends that something beyond money or influence, or titillation has any existence.

Into this mix arrive glimpses and reminders that it wasn't always like this.

The animals haven't really changed, so much as adapted to the conditions of poison, damage, and relentless pressure. They still move easily through worlds humanity has now rejected. I remember when I was small, the medicine men would say the Buffalo were waiting in the caves, and when the time was right they would return. They never forgot the flow.

Mankind, mankind however has today forgotten almost everything. This wouldn't be completely terrible if they didn't strut and proclaim so excessively that they are the new superior. Modernity is simplification, occam's suicide razor.

Only a few remember now. The cycle ends, not in heroic striving, but in misery and frenzied grasping. What is so evident and so baisic in the modern world is only a chimera, reality that is unstable, substance that leaves all the important questions unanswered, meaningless abstraction masquerading as guiding principle.

Was it really that long ago when symbols, transformations, were imbued with a significance and a living presence that brought the spirit closer to waking reality? Triskele, Swastika, animal bones that are not simply one idea, one concept. They literally represent entire universes of realization.

The tripartite state as a dynamic. Anima, nature, always forever becoming, where death is less an ending than sustenance for the living.

The old road was in truth mostly a rock ridden dirt path. It carved its way through the pygmy forest before climbing into the narrows of the great canyon. In the winter the sun would melt the snow during the day, and turn the caliche’ into a morass. The rest of the year it would be hard and rough, the truck would be coated with dust, fine earthen particulates that clung to everything.

That day traffic was light. No sounds of struggling motors, no banging of suspensions over the rocks and ruts, no bull dust hanging in the air. There was one section of the road that dropped down into a drainage, a place where no one could see into or out of unless they were poised above it, which was exactly where I was that fine sunny day.

I saw them there as if in a dream, but it wasn't. They were bright and white and so clean, their movements were effortless, a dance of flowing tails, shining rippling fur. The power and grace of these great beings belied their size, which was far greater than any Coyote or Fox. They were White Wolves playing, and I watched them completely taken by their great beauty, their wild magnificence.

The vision was such a display of nature, yet so incredibly rare, that I was enraptured with wonder. I lost all sense of what I was doing, the endless press, oppression of the modern world, and for that time out of time, I gratefully beheld that image, intensity that lifted the mundane physical world up onto its head, and held it there laughing.

Alone above the divide, the White Wolves made for me a spiral, their dance a pure emergence from the great river, the flow that breathes through all of life. People say all kinds of things about Wolves, and most of them are just their own reflection. The stuff someone said, and they mindlessly adopted. These Wolves were beyond such opinion. These great beings were carefree, they delighted in their sacred spiral, and when all was complete they vanished without a trace.

I traveled through that place literally hundreds of times, before and after, in vehicles and on foot. The precipitous dip was always an exception to the shake and bake traverse of the road in question, a break in the monotony of high altitude desert expanse. The dip stood in mute observance to the endless striving gone fallow, the world abandoned. It was a fitting place for the spirits to appear. Modernity exhaling. The intake of breath filled with the taste of something far more real…

Never once before, nor ever after would these gleaming beings appear again.