The Sword of Michael

by Marcus Wynne

  I opened my tobacco pouch and offered a pinch to the four directions, to Father Sun above and Mother Earth below, pressed a coin into the earth for the earth elementals, and offered up thanks to all the helping and compassionate spirits. I visualized the container of sacred space surrounding me, and called on the Archangel Michael to surround me and cloak me in his protection, so that I would not be seen by the Dark Forces—for my intention was to seek my opponent in the Other Realm.

  I tapped on the twelve-minute short journey drumming track that Sandra Ingerman provided along with several others in the companion CD to her great book Shamanic Journeying. I closed my eyes, and let the flute lead me into the drumming portion.

  . . . and I rose up out of my body, hovered over it for a moment, the steady heartbeat of the drum vibrating through me, saw and felt the brilliant Light of angelic protection, and I rose up, Tigre and Burt and First In Front with me, as always, and we traveled—Middle World—flying through the air and in the vision that is not-vision, we saw a swirling, like a tornado of black and gray, above a shabby town huddled on the prairie, and beneath, a great rift in the very fabric of the Mother, Mother Earth, a rift through and around the town, focused in, followed my intention, and there in an office, sitting at a desk, a man with a square head, black hair fading to gray at his expensively trimmed temples, gold cuff links in a custom shirt, two younger men, his sons, all of them the same, hunch-shouldered with hidden fear, terminally possessed . . . we tracked backwards and there were lines of control, like marionette strings, drawing away and then down, tangled in a horrid symmetry like that of a dangerous spider’s web, and hidden away behind that, another portal . . . Tigre blocked my way, merged with and into me, adding her protection, as did Burt . . . First In Front stood before me, and then I saw . . . dark upon dark, a black hole shaped almost like something human; the gravitational pull of the darkness tugging at me like that you feel on the edge of a pit or looking over the guardrail of a bridge, feeling gravity and the desire to fall come over you . . . and that expanded . . . the desire to fall . . . the Fall . . . and I knew then what I saw . . .

  Fallen . . .

  . . . and those dark beings turned and, through the protective fog that surrounded me, I felt their vision piercing my veil, and I was drawn back, protected from the dark essence that reached for me . . .

  . . . information unfolding in me like a snapshot, full of details that I needed to turn my attention to . . .

  . . . Fallen . . .

  I was back in my body.

  I opened my eyes, thumbed off the music. Took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  “I offer up thanks to Archangel Michael and the Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth, to Creator God and all the helping and compassionate spirits, I offer up thanks to my beloved protecting and guiding spirits . . .”

  “. . . You’re welcome, Beloved . . .”

  I closed my circle, stood.

  Dillon came to me. He looked puzzled and concerned.

  “You okay, man? You look like you just got slapped with a two-by-four.”

  “I feel like it.”

  Dillon scanned the area. “Let’s not tell the tale here, bro. Let’s go get you some coffee.”

  “Good idea. Gigi’s. Meet me there.”

  “I’ll follow you.” He paused. “You want me to drive? You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m not. I’m okay to drive.”

  I got into my Toyota, started it, stared out the windshield. I pulled out and drove around the Parkway till I hit the Rose Garden, turned right and took it up to Bryant and parked behind Gigi’s. I went in and nodded to the women at the counter, took the table deepest in back. Dillon came in, looked at me, went to the counter and returned with two steaming mugs of black coffee. Set one down in front of me after sizing up the only other table, a middle-aged lesbian couple who smiled and nodded at us.

  He sat across from me. “You want to tell the tale?”

  I sipped my coffee. The hot brew scalded my tongue, a welcome pain that cleared my head, made way for the caffeine.

  “So?” Dillon prompted.

  “You ever hear the story of Hell Hollow?” I said.

  “The movie?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “You ever been over to Decanter?”

  He laughed. “Not if I can avoid it. It might not be the asshole of the world, but you can smell it from there. What’s Decanter got to do with this?”

  “You know the feeling over there? That oppressive feeling? Stink of the soy processing plants, an economy tanking, everybody looks beat down, weird people everywhere, just a general bad feeling?”

  “Yep. There was an article about it a few years ago in the Star-Tribune. Highest unsolved homicide rate, completely corrupt government, murder, drugs . . . lovely place.”

  “Decanter has a long history of being cursed,” I said. “Of Dark Forces. The city was built on Indian holy ground. Part of the town itself, the courthouse and the downtown, is built right on top of Native American burial grounds. The original settlers plowed the ancient mounds down, tore up the burial grounds to build there. And ever since then, there’s been lots of dark sorcery there, all kinds of weird shit: incest, murder, strange sex stuff, drug dealing, corruption, you name it . . .”

  “All the more reason to stay out of there.”

  “There’s a gateway there, Dillon. A portal. A portal for the Dark Forces. In a place on the edge of town, where the old town cemetery adjoins what used to be the Native American burial ground. It’s called Hell Hollow. What’s going on here started over there. Who came here is from there. Came through there.”

  “Dude, that’s not a place we want to knock around,” Dillon said. “It’s just a bad and ugly place. I don’t want to be running afoul of what passes for law over there.”

  “I hope we don’t have to. They’re moving over here . . . there’s something here they want.”

  “You?”

  “Not just me. There’s something else going on here . . . something they want to quash.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought for a moment, and then the images from my journey reappeared . . .

  . . . a dark form pressing against the dark fabric of space-time, like a face beneath a taut sheet of black latex, pressing, straining . . .

  “I think they’re trying to open a portal here,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Confluence. If you weaken the very material of the barrier between the worlds . . . think of Decanter as a big gaping hole into the Dark Side—and they can come through there. Think of Minneapolis as a place of the Light . . . and the fabric between the worlds is bulging here. Get it to tear between here and Decanter, that makes the portal way bigger . . . big enough for something else to come through.”

  “What’s so big it needs forty miles of room to come through?” Dillon said.

  “The Fallen,” I said. “The heavy hitters of the Dark Forces. The Fallen Angels.”

  “Oh, sweet suffering Jesus,” Dillon said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ll need His help. We’ll be doing His work.”

  “What are we going to do?” Dillon said. “A small time gunfighter and the local shaman? We should be calling every shaman in the country here. The Pope! The Vatican! Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership! Gurkhas! Whoever will come!”

  “We’ve got help coming, Dillon,” I said. “I’ve been shown this. But right now, it’s you and me, buddy. You and me and the Legions of Light, the Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth. They work through us. All of us who carry the Light. You, me, all those who choose the Light . . .”

  Dillon shook his head in exasperation. “You take care of the shaman stuff, Marius. I’ll take care of the shooting part.”

  I nodded. It was clear we were going to need both.

  CHAPTER 11

  I’m sometimes asked about the difference between a shaman and a sorcerer. With
out getting into semantics, the short answer is intention. A shaman travels to the Other Realms to gather information and to commune with the spirits and deities on the behalf of others; a shaman travels with the intention to facilitate healing, to learn, to find things, to help others. A sorcerer does the same thing, but with the intention to hurt, to harm, to act out of self-aggrandizement or ego.

  Intention is everything.

  It’s a fine line. The razor’s edge.

  My friend Marcus once pointed out to me that it’s like Star Wars and the Force. George Lucas got it right. The path to the Dark Side is paved with good intentions . . . but it’s the path of impatience, of anger, of rage, of hurt, of sorrow—all part and parcel of human existence. We need to find our way past all that. That’s why the shaman’s path is so perilous. Because in the search of power to help others, we can be seduced along the way to take the easy path, the expedient path, to give into anger and reaction.

  Anger can be useful. It’s the Creator’s Gift to us to call us into action when it’s appropriate. But acting while in anger is a dangerous place to be when you’re working with the spirits. Everything we do is vibration and energy—and while anger and rage can surely get things done, the long-term repercussions will just as surely come back to bite you in the ass.

  Or kick your door down and shoot you in your bed.

  Or worse, snatch your soul essence while you’re in the Other Realms.

  I got up off my couch and went into the kitchen to fetch myself another Negra Modelo beer, went back and stared out the window at the park. The beer was good, actually great. It cut through the dryness in my mouth that had afflicted me since my last journey.

  It helped wash away the dry ashy taste of fear.

  A big part of the shaman’s work has to do with fear: his own and the management of it in others. Many New Age shamanic practitioners tend towards a Pollyanna view of reality, clinging to the belief that everything in the Other Realms and this one was fuzzy and warm and nice and safe. The practitioners who were Called and honored their Path, who went forward and did their own work—as hard as it might be—found themselves somewhere along the Path where they had to deal with their own dark fears, because Spirit has a way of manifesting in a very real way those dark things within us we don’t want to acknowledge. Demons, dragons, evil . . . inside every human there’s a piece that resonates with that, and the harder you repress and deny it, the more it persists—“What you resist, persists . . .”—and the Dark Forces sniff for that and go for it, because that’s how they make entry.

  So why was I spending a sunny day inside drinking beer and dwelling on this?

  Because I’d come to the realization that the real danger in all of this was the focus on me and my weaknesses.

  And that scared me. Badly.

  If you’re Called to be a Light Worker, or you self-identify as a Warrior of the Light, then you’re taking a stance. A position in the Great Conflict. The War between the Light and the Dark. The more you do your Work, the more your Light will shine. And the more you will be Seen . . . and once you’ve been Seen doing the Work, sooner or later, the Dark Forces will turn to shut down your Light, slow you, take you off the board, knock you out of the game.

  How do you shut down a Warrior of the Light?

  Not easily, but the basic strategy is to find his or her weaknesses and exploit them, work your way through the list of the deadly sins (one thing the Catholics surely got right) and see what resonates within the targeted shaman. But if the shaman finds the courage, he can work through his stuff and eventually, ideally, evolves to where there is no more resonance for the Dark Forces to find.

  Ideally.

  One thing I was taught early on, and I’ve embodied the truth of, in this Work, you want to be pure, but not too pure. I welcomed the liberation from the need to be perfect, but more than once I’ve caught myself relying on that adage to justify my avoiding self-work.

  That’s the danger for me. That’s why this was coming to me now. In the guidance that came through my recent journeys, in the myriad past lives I’ve lived, somewhere back there was a powerful sorcerer, one who’d gone as far down the Dark Road as one can. I’d come back from that, worked through it, but the Laws of Karma and Balance are inescapable and everything that happens we are responsible for. How we relate to events, how we choose to act, that’s what provides us with the opportunity to relieve ourselves of the old burdens. To choose to do things differently.

  That’s what was in all of this unfolding around me.

  The chance to do things differently.

  That’s what this was all about for me. While there was a call to action, wrapped up in that call was the clear message to heed how I went about it, because this was the opportunity to do things differently than I had before.

  Or get sucked into the same old way of doing it.

  I felt that draw.

  A sense of righteous anger . . . righteousness . . . that’s the draw. To be and act angry, to justify it through righteousness, because you’re doing it—at least in your mind—on the behalf of others. Anger is seductive. It gives the sense of immediate and palpable power, even though it’s an illusion, a semblance of power. Real power is settled and grounded. A filling in. Power-Full.

  A knock on the door shook me out of my navel-gazing.

  I peeked out the window. It was Maryka Owen, the woman I’d done a depossession with. That seemed a very long time ago.

  I went to the door and opened it.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She tugged at her hair with one hand, wrapped a strand of hair around her finger. “I’m sorry for not calling. I needed to see you, so I came right by . . .”

  “Sure,” I said. “It happens like that sometimes. C’mon in.”

  I waved her into the front room and settled back into the couch. She sat in my armchair, leaned forward, knees pressed together, long fingers intertwined in a tight knot on her thighs.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I’ve been feeling much better . . .”

  “That’s good.”

  “But this friend came to see me, from over in Decanter . . .”

  . . . and I felt the knowing and the soft voice of my guides . . . “This is how it opens . . .”

  I repressed my sigh. “Yes?”

  “. . . and since then I’ve had this feeling that there’s some entity hanging around since he came over.”

  “Your friend, is he staying with you?”

  “Yes. He had some problems in Decanter. He’s going to stay with me till he figures out what to do.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  She thought on it. “Two years. We met at a meditation workshop in Indianapolis.”

  I closed my eyes. As it often does, information came to me in a big packet, a ball of energy . . .

  Tigre and Burt . . . Tigre curled beside a huge tree, Burt perched on a low-hanging branch, First In Front seated cross-legged with his back propped against the tree.

  “Here’s the connection,” First In Front said. He held up his old scalping knife and gestured. “This is where it starts . . .”

  Burt flapped his wings and rose into the air, his talons grabbing the fabric of the sky like a curtain and pulling it back . . . into the black . . . black, black, black. Far off in the black, two glowing spots of red that rushed forward and became enraged eyes in a sea of black . . . a flurry of images, one after another rolling into a steady stream . . . images from Atlantis, medieval images, figures twisting in flames, rolling forward . . . long black ships hanging in the air, long threads running down from them to humans far below . . . the main streets of downtown Decanter as seen through a sepia filter . . . and below the streets, tormented souls pressing up against the concrete and the buildings . . . the disincarnate, human and otherwise, walking the streets, sitting in waiting rooms, in courthouses, in offices . . . and near the graveyard on Long Street, on the edge of Decanter, a pulsing invisible to most, a pulsing again
st the fabric of reality, like the image of a sheet . . . the Dark Portal. And all around it the cast of characters . . . the possessed . . . lawyers, bankers, cops, deputies, school teachers, the everyday people of a seemingly everyday town . . . all of them looking down at the pulsing blackness beneath their feet and far above their head, a similar pulsing, a pulsing from the Light they ignored . . . and then the image of an old man, running, out of breath, and behind him, laughing, some of those same faces . . .

  I opened my eyes and murmured, “Thank you” to my guides.

  Maryka cocked her head, puzzled.

  “I think I should meet your friend, Maryka.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes,” I said heavily. “Now.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Anthony Boardman was older than me, probably in his early fifties. He was big-framed but shrunken, as though he’d been ill and hadn’t filled out. His face was pained and I saw the energy around him that told me he dealt with some chronic illness . . .

  Cancer . . .

  Yes. He had that look.

  “I used to be a Reiki practitioner,” he said. He dipped his head to his coffee cup when he sipped, like a bird pecking into a tall glass of water. He looked around at the other tables. “I stopped when I got sick. I want to go back to it, but I feel as though there’s a part of me that’s gone away . . .”

  “Soul loss is common when you go through major illness,” I said. “Did you do chemo?”

  “Yes,” he said. He nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Shamanic work interests me. I have friends who’ve done it. Some of them combine Reiki and shamanic. Seems like it blends well.”

  “It can,” I said. I looked at Maryka and then back at him. “Maryka tells me you had some trouble in Decanter?”