I had many conversations with the daughter in the ‘astral’ shadow worlds and many conversations with the mother in this world, and it was a very long time before we all came to an agreement and conducted a necessary exorcism - or soul-retrieval - and the daughter could finally move on to find her place.
I believe it is wrong to ‘call back’ the dead (unless they become respected ancestors), even though I have become involved with promoting that myself on many occasions. I have had contact with many dead persons in the past, and many famous dead persons during a particular phase of my life, particularly after developing the gift of being able to communicate with deceased souls merely by feeding their names into a specific part of my mind. Some of these people would respond when they knew I could contact them, visiting me on a regular basis; others would close themselves off completely, because they didn’t want me interfering with their souls and their Otherworldly lives. I would receive a kind of ‘character print-out’ from these people: what their inner worlds and psychology were like, what their emotional lives were like, what they might be involved with at the time of communication, what they had done in their past and what they were about to do in their future. This skill, though, turned into a bit of a game - as only it can - with endless lists of names being given to me from people who knew me. It was all very fascinating, and indeed skilful on my part, but I soon realized that it was endangering souls by keeping them out of the ancestral worlds and locking them into shadow worlds, and that wasn’t what life was about, according to the old ways. At the end of the day we were all merely inventing yet more shadow worlds and stepping away from the real Otherworld. It was certainly something my great-grandfather would have disapproved of.
I do still use this ability occasionally in my work today, as it is part of the Chovihano’s healing craft to be able to communicate telepathically with people in all worlds, but it is strictly controlled. I also use the skill now to pull people out of their shadow worlds rather than cast them into them, as I will describe more fully in a future chapter.
Exploring the Otherworld and its many realms can be educational for any of us who wish to initiate healing in the soul. It cannot be recommended too highly. There are, after all, so many vast landscapes of indescribable beauty and unbelievable realms to explore once you have learned the rules. There are great ancient forests to walk through or fly over, where spirits may act as friendly guides or outwit you in their attempts to teach you a lesson, and where in little leafy glades the Bitee Fokee may preside in great majesty over their magnificent fairy kingdoms. We can find great forests stretching for miles behind our eyes, the sound of great rushing waterfalls living between our ears, and great lakes and whole mountain ranges resonating within our hearts. This is because the personal Otherworld map, unlike the physical geographical map, is immeasurable, which makes us all immeasurable on the inside, because every human being has the potential to touch the sky and to wallow in the deepest bowels of the Earth.
Throughout all of this, we are constantly putting the life back into nature, back into earth and sky, so that we understand that we human beings are not the only beings in this universe who are alive! We, and the Earth, are both alive, at the very same time; in fact it’s true to say that the Earth is probably more alive than we are! We, and the Earth, can only ever borrow each other, if we are to return to a more harmonious relationship.
For the old Romani gypsy nomads, living with the Earth, as opposed to living upon the Earth, was perhaps most important - becoming familiar with each tree, each branch, each leaf, and hearing the leaves growing in spring and falling from the trees in autumn. We can still do all that today if we try. If we live with and borrow the Earth, in our own personal way, as far as we are able, we are not so distracted by those things that rob us of energy in our modern world and we can focus our attention entirely on the power of nature, which is the greatest healer of all.
To access the Otherworld the old gypsies often travelled ‘to the edge of the Earth’, as in many of their folk tales. This is a detailed piece of myth explored in Beyond A Near Water, the first book in the trilogy, The Long Reflection, where I was able to devote time to what travelling ‘to the edge of the Earth’ meant, and to Otherworld meanings in detail.
Firstly this ‘myth’ suggests that there was a time when the Romanies perceived the world as being ‘flat’, something which has long caused me to ask what I consider to be an important question: did our ancient cousins believe the Earth was flat because they were simply ignorant or did this belief help them gain access to the Otherworld? This is indeed an interesting question and one we should all perhaps be asking. For when the land was perceived as ‘flat’, people were probably still doing most of their travelling in the Otherworld, as it still contained their reality on personal and social levels. The vastness, the distances, the depth and breadth, the beauty and the absolute freedom that existed in the dramatic and powerful Otherworld landscapes were still part of everyday life. Today, for me, it is exactly the same.
Secondly, exploring this ‘myth’ showed me the importance of the idea of death being associated with travelling ‘to the edge of the land’ for the fact that it connects with the West and the sunset, long heralded by ancient people as a great phenomenon with its symbolism of death and the Otherworld.
I would like to believe that we might be inspired to enter a new era where we will be unafraid to explore the Otherworld, recognizing that we are all wanting to come home to those ancient lands again, after perhaps thousands of years of going away. But this seems unlikely, as the human race now seems to be firmly rooted in all that is material, a phenomenon which creates blocks, boundaries and, in fact, dependable stereotypes within us and around us which will not be destined to change.
I do not ask people to believe what I say of the Otherworld; I only ask them to question and to explore for themselves, and to persist and keep persisting, until they find their own answers. That is how we find the Otherworld, and indeed ourselves, and without doubt, we are all now in greater need of rediscovering our own roots than ever before.
If we can simply find the courage and enthusiasm to search for ourselves, we will almost certainly stumble across the ancient Otherworld, as if by accident. We may just come across an old giant slumbering in a realm of the Upperworld, waiting just for us to appear, or a member of a Bitee Fokee clan sitting on a tree root at the edge of the Lowerworld, appearing to be minding his own business but in fact waiting to test our dedication and resolve in those darker lower realms.
Test us many Otherworld beings will, for the secrets of the Otherworld will never be revealed to us lightly.
And that’s as it should be.
Chapter Eight
THE CHOVIHANO’S PATH
The Arduous Road of the Romani Medicine Man
Shadows play behind your eyes and small fears leap up from the depths of your being, stabbing unmercifully at your attempts to calm yourself, but still you carry on, in search of that special something, that antidote that will let you know that everything is all right. You reach out for things to cling on to, to steady yourself, but you can find nothing and no one to help you feel secure, and you are scared, so scared of what will await you on the other side of yourself. Should you go on? You could of course turn back, but something in you tells you that you cannot turn back; you can only move on, trembling, with a ‘now or never’ attitude. You know that all this means that you are ready to take that fateful step beyond your own boundary, where you have never been before.
I don’t know of any serious student of the Romani drom, or any other ‘discipline’, who hasn’t experienced what I have attempted to describe here: taking oneself beyond one’s own boundaries.
This can be quite an arduous business. Yet it is what the Romani Chovihano’s life is mostly about. He is obliged, perhaps more than any other in his clan, to cross any boundaries that serve to keep him separated from himself. He knows the kind of ordeals that can await him and the overall me
ssages contained within ordeals. It has, after all, always been his role to set an example to those who come after him, both his apprentices and the people who live around him.
Many in our times believe that the magical or Otherworldly path is a glamorous one - but then, perhaps people always did! Today many dream of the enviable position of that person called the ‘shaman’ without really knowing exactly what such a position entails. In the Romani community, the Chovihano was certainly envied and revered, and sometimes even feared, but it was also understood that a gypsy Chovihano’s mysterious path was ultimately bound up with gruelling challenges, particularly of a spiritual and emotional nature, which non-shamans were invariably loath to handle.
The psychology of the gypsy Chovihano may be difficult for people to comprehend, unless they have studied tribal culture in depth and are attempting to understand the role indigenous shamans are likely to play within their own communities. Some of the ingredients that make up the Chovihano’s personality could well be considered to be eccentric in our times, but we have to remember that this is all part of the drama created by an Otherworld exercise. In my great-grandfather’s day and before, it was expected of a Chovihano to be at least a little bit ‘showy’ or extrovert in his personality; after all, he had to demonstrate a good helping of confidence in what he was doing, as many people were depending on him. Yet he was also an extremely modest person and rarely talked openly about his magical and healing abilities, preferring simply to put matters right in the community as best he could, and then get out of the way.
The Chovihano or indigenous shaman may often be revered and feared and his powers may be considered to be well beyond the reach of the average person, but he is neither a god nor a deity, neither a prophet nor a guru, although I believe, without doubt, that gods, deities, prophets and gurus have all retained, in some shape or form, elements of what the old shamans and their worlds were all about: devotion, supernatural power, wisdom, mystery and spiritual distinction. We must always remember that tribal shamans or medicine men and women pre-date prophets and gurus probably by thousands of years. As mentioned before, even our Christian God, as another more recent ‘invention’, could be seen to be imbued with Otherworldly powers which were once in the hands of nature’s shamans.
Chovihanos have been placed high on the social ladder in their own communities because they would usually take full responsibility for, and indeed bear the full brunt of, any magical harm that might ever be directed at the tribe. The Chovihano was clever at devising huknies and spells, doing absolutely anything to protect his own people. Even in Jack Lee’s day a story was told of a Chovihano who cast a spell to help his clan become invisible so that they would all avoid being pursued by the law!
But probably one of the greatest difficulties in our times is that we have to look at the Chovihano through Western eyes. We busily link indigenous shamanism with modern therapies and modern religious and social disciplines, and where we actually use these together with shamanism, we do not question whether this practice may in fact serve to weaken the craft. In the West today, we have a need to cultivate the ‘modern’ shaman, to update the ancient figure and adapt it to our own times. To my mind this ‘modernization’ is as controversial an issue as the raising of genetically modified crops! Can we really successfully change, or perfect, what shamans are and have been over thousands of years, with a guarantee that they will still retain their original power? Should we even be attempting to change, or indeed experiment with, a craft which we still know so very little about and which is so ancient that its origins are beyond historical memory?
We may concede that a shaman can start ‘living with the times’ by updating or modifying the techniques, perhaps creating new ones befitting the twenty-first century. We may feel that in order to communicate more effectively with people shamans need to update their clothes, their lifestyle and their personalities, and they may also need to earn their ‘bread and butter’ at the shamanic healing craft. But what of their relationship with the Otherworld? Can this be updated too?
We live in a world now where ‘adaptations’ and ‘reproduction’ of what has gone before are the norm, from rebuilding houses to fashion, and restructuring ideas. We have learned to adapt and readapt at a very fast rate. But we must take care that where shamanism is concerned, we don’t move too far away from the original rhythms that once bound Earth and indigenous shaman together and which were, over a long period of time, a feature of this ancient character’s existence.
It is also wise to remember that although times may change, our souls do not, for they undergo exactly the same educational process on an inner level as they would have done back in prehistoric times, just as a tree growing today will have grown in much the same fashion long ago.
Can it not in reality only ever be our problems that are modern? The natural education of our souls, the workings of the Otherworld and the cycles of the Earth, these all constitute tried and tested methods within nature’s law - tried and tested over many thousands of years - and surely anything surplus to that must inevitably be a product of the times in which we live? Perhaps, therefore, some of these ‘modernizing’ methods are simply superfluous to shamanism and ancient ways of seeing things?
I am probably more aware of this issue because I come from an indigenous line of Chovihanos, or perhaps it is because I remember too well Jack Lee, who made it his business to resist, as far as possible, the many changes threatening the survival of the old Chovihano in the gaujo world.
Some believe that shamanism should be taken out into the world, while others, particularly tribespeople themselves, believe that shamanism should be left in the hands of the indigenous medicine men and women, because that is where it really belongs. I believe that we need to do a bit of both: take the Chovihano out into the world, or society, so that he can re-educate people on what ancient values are about, but at the same time ensure that he practises and educates his own people in the original way - if there are any of his own people left! Anyone, then, who learns from him, be they gypsy or gaujo, will be working solely with natural law and thus living as the old ones would have lived.
Is there not magic in this, in knowing we are all practising as the old ones used to do? To my mind there is nothing more exciting, and there is no reason why non-gypsies with a flair for Otherworld education should not experience this as well. The craft, after all, can no longer be left to the pure-blooded Romani gypsies, because there are sadly so few left. In our times, it is crucial that we preserve the craft involving traditions of the old Otherworld so that we can better preserve the Earth, but it is also crucial that, where possible, we band together to do this. There are times when I have known the passion of the Romani spirit to live and dance in the blood of the gaujo so much, such as in the Nogo Jal Drom folk dance, where everyone dresses colourfully and honours the four Greater Ancestors: Ravnos (sky), Kam (sun), Shon (moon) and Puv (earth), it is thrilling to witness such devotion to an ancient culture.
For anyone who wished to study the role of the Chovihano more seriously, it would certainly be wise to contemplate such issues as the modernization of shamanism, for I believe that we have arrived at a point in time where we need to see exactly what is happening today, particularly here in the West, where we are especially vulnerable to ‘adaptations’. If we are serious about helping the craft survive, we’ll realise pretty quickly that it isn’t purely about ‘techniques’; it’s to do with who you are, how you identify with others around you and making vital changes in yourself regarding your psychological problems, which the Chovihano is liable to draw attention to.
I once hoped that the future would bring a return of the shaman’s craft and that people would be encouraged to study its science with a view to understanding the ancient Otherworld a little more. Now I know that this is not possible, for humans have travelled too far away from the principles which are upheld by ancient people, and their relationship with the Otherworld. It is a sad truth that ancient tribal sh
amanism, and the modern civilized world, do not fit together; trying to make them fit is akin to forcing the proverbial round peg into the square hole.
I believe we have moved too far inward to make any changes now. The inner world which once housed our reflective and imaginative thoughts, nature’s principles and tribal thinking, has now become an enclosed and rather sealed world, housing our terror, fear, egocentricity, as a highly personal and material consciousness takes hold which, by its very nature, can never be disputed.
We have crossed the bridges of religion, science, psychology, sociology and anthropology in recent centuries, all of which are designed to help us understand and take us closer to ourselves, but by degrees these have mostly distanced us from ourselves. So what can possibly come next? With tribespeople being very much now a thing of the past, colonization and civilized ways of thinking were never going to permit such people to live alongside us, so in our lonely and enclosed worlds we are now reaping the rewards of such drastic social changes.
It is not all doom and gloom, however, if we can get our heads around what ancient people have to teach. There have been many times when I have had the most amazing conversations with my students about the way life is today and about the way it could be were society in general to accommodate ancient ways of thinking.
We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture Page 19
