The Making of a Shaman

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1976 The Traveller

The traveller had arrived in Mexico. He had taken six months study leave and travelled with his family to study with Ivan Illich, the world’s foremost social critic. Having written books on Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, Illich’s ideas of dissolving the hierarchical structures of contemporary Western society had hit a chord with the traveller’s anarchistic ideas.

Illich had an independent academy that scholars from all around the world had visited, and anyone was free to come, to listen, and to teach. One week before the traveller had left Australia he had received a letter saying that the Academy was closing down, but he came anyway to arrive in Cuernavaca just in time for the last seminar.

What confusion. So much planning and so many hopes thrown away.

Within three weeks of arriving he and his wife and three children were invited to visit San Juan de Teotihuacan, which later he was to find was the ancient sacred city of the Toltecs. The ancient city was overpowering. Arising from the surrounding countryside were two extraordinary pyramids, one dedicated to the sun and one to the moon. Between them was a mile long ceremonial avenue which had been lined with temples on both sides. The temples were gradually being rebuilt under the directions of archeologists. Already a tourist drawcard, it was to become more famous over the years.

The pyramid of the sun was actually the largest pyramid on the planet. The West with its ethnocentric history had ignored the historical and obvious reality that it was larger than Cheops. Hugely silhouetted against the sky, it and its partner pyramid, the lunar structure, dominated the consciousness of all who visited the ancient site. Ceremonial parades had been conducted along the avenue. The temples would have been full of priestly celebrants and many thousands would have gathered there in the past.

The traveller moved along the avenue, from time to time he was drawn to a particular temple and either ascended the steps to the plaza on top or entered the priestly realms where some of the original frescos and murals still existed. Red and green dominated as colours on these walls, jaguars and men, ancient symbols, archetypal images, ruins, butterflies, other tourists, his six-year-old son and seven-year-old twin daughters, moved with him.

Up to the top of one temple he walked by himself, soaking in the atmosphere, imagining how it had been in this extraordinary city that had so suddenly collapsed from a thriving metropolis to abandoned crumbling ruin, leaving no written historical records.

Then suddenly it happened. Turning around to walk across the plain, to rejoin his family the traveller was confronted by the image of a Toltec medicine man in full ceremonial dress, who just stayed still and looked at him. The calling from the other world had come.

In the following months, the traveller immersed himself into Mexico. He learnt Spanish, taught at a private college on the similarities between the kundalini symbolism in yoga and the image of Quetzacoatl, the flying serpent.

He studied with Paco, the director of the college who had written his unpresented PhD on the Huicholi shamans with whom he had lived for seven years.

He faced his fears as his marriage began to unravel. Without his usual identity markers and escape routes of job, home, car, books, garden, music, colleagues and friends, unable to find the books he needed for his dissertation, with his very reason for coming to Mexico no longer existing, he visited old pyramids, temples, astronomy sites, read up on the Aztecs, Miztecs, Olmecs and Zapotecs.

Once when he visited an old Zapotec ceremonial city which had been built on the flattened top of a hill surrounded by a ring of mountains he had sat and contemplated the old buildings, especially the astronomical observatory. He was overwhelmed by an unexpectedly intense feeling of sadness, and inexplicably wept very intensely.

Some 25 years later he remembered a past life at that city and how he, as an astronomer and holder of sacred knowledge has been one of the ‘spiritual intelligentsia’ of that culture who had been massacred by invaders from the north. Time, place, consciousness, soul memory and history were somehow all connected. We hold memories of places and they hold memories of us. Put them together and unexpected things can happen.

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