Childhood, diseases and magic recoveries

Shaman’s Stories. Part 2

My roots sprouted into Siberian land as follows. My mother bore me at the age of 37 from a married man with whom she didn’t communicate any longer. When I asked about my father, I was answered that I had never had any father but had three mothers: Aunt Larisa, mother Lyuda and grandmother (Granny). I believed in it until the age of 13 but then began to hesitate. My friends explained that children are born because of “coition” and not of the Holy Ghost. After asking about the details I made sure of it. Then I first tried to escape from the nest in summer when I went to the sports-labour camp. And at the night before the leaving my mother told me who my father was (not to let guys torment me when asking about my father). But I stopped believing my relatives completely. I tried to forget about grandmother’s stories for a long time and become an independent person, but I failed. The three unhappy women’s love was suffocating: they tried to find in me a father, a brother, a husband-defender and a son – the only continuer of the Clan and the successor of the Veda knowledge. It pressed my breast and throat: bronchial asthma, spinal trauma in the breast section, follicular tonsillitis at the least cold, hemorrhoid.

I didn’t let Granny treat me and went to the doctor who prescribed the ultra-sound procedure. When I came to the treatment room, the woman-doctor told me to press the plate to my throat, not to touch the apparatus, and said that when the procedure was over, she would come and switch it off. The procedure was to continue about 15 minutes, and my relatives taught me to be obedient concerning the adults’ orders. The woman-doctor forgot about me, and the apparatus was working from 15.00 to 19.00 when the charwoman switched it off and let me go home. Mother got worried, and the doctors only lifted their hands in dismay: “ they are sorry for the negligence, the doctor will get severe reprimand; and the boy? – they hope he won’t die, just could get bald or have a headache…” Everything hurt, as if it were not my body, but a rusty tin filled with sharp nails scratching my inside; pressure was pressing my eyes out. I didn’t go to school and couldn’t understand anything.

It was early autumn, ‘Indian summer’. Our house was in the sleeping district in the periphery of the town. Behind the house there was a waste area with a lake and burning peat in the bog soil. I went and wandered there for hours accompanied by the Little Spider who suddenly returned to me. He had disappeared until I went to school, and I forgot about his presence in my early childhood. I was imagining different things. Once, suddenly a golden eagle flew up from under my feet clapping with his wings and hovered in front of my face: at one moment his furious yellow eyes were burning in front of mine, lusterless and sunk deeply into the scull. The bird yelled, and I also screamed. The eagle scratched my cheeks with its sharp crooked claws and flew up in the sky. Blood was flowing on my cheeks, the headache was lessening. Somebody was plucking at the leg of my trousers – it was the Spider who was pulling me to the tangle of the 2-meter bur. I wandered into the drying rustling bush and recalled an old episode from my childhood.

I was three years old. We spent the summer time near Devkino, a Siberian village. I had swum too long and had a fever about 40 degrees C. The local doctors with their injections and Granny with her spells could not help. Among the relatives and their acquaintances I saw two women who were sometimes semitransparent, sometimes the black-and white picture (like that of the TV set) became sparkling and coloured. One of them was a burly healthy-looking woman wearing a bright dress and a motley headscarf with a sieve which she constantly clapped, and from its bottom white flour threads were constantly pouring, a firefly flashing at the end of each thread. The other woman was very frightening. She had a white doctor-like gown and huge piercing eyes in the face of “Snow Queen”. She was holding medical scissors with turned edges. With skillful ‘surgical’ movements she was cutting the net threads under the sieve, the fireflies flashed brighter, then turned into black points and disappeared. At once, the new ones flew on their flashing flour threads. The women began arguing about one of the net threads. Surprisingly, in the flashing drop at its end I saw a cartoon about myself. I began shivering which frightened my relatives. “It’s too early for him”, said the multi-colored woman with a rolling voice. “It’s high time, he had enough time”, the ‘nurse’ answered sadly, but at the same time affectionately and carefully. At that moment Marfa, the woman in the multi-colored dress, pushed MaAra in the medical gown (the women’s names appeared in my mind spontaneously) with her fleshy back to the slim hip. MaAra dropped the scissors for a second which fell on the floor having tinkled. “Somebody has dropped scissors”, mournfully whispered my mother. Granny silently picked up the scissors and hid them into her pocket. The scissors immediately appeared in MaAra’s hands again. She smiled sadly and pronounced: ”What a bitch you are, Marfa! It’s your habit to torture little children with life!” Marfa replied merrily: “You are also a bitch!”

I only came to myself in a dressing room of a bathhouse. I was wrapped up in a blanket and taken to the village of Devkino to grandmother Pasha and granddad Sergey. They quickly stroked the furnace in the bathhouse. Sergey started playing the spoons and dancing looking drunk but he smelt of fresh cut grass and not of alcohol. Pasha coated me with honey, strewed me with oats and let a young cock peck the oats. Then the cock’s head with a pink caruncle and stupidly kind eyes disappeared and changed, as it seemed to me, by a warm gushing shower-hose, but the water was surprisingly red. It was because Sergey, having put aside the spoons and taken a hatchet, instantly cut off the cock’s head. Then I dived into the black pulsing darkness, rushed somewhere as if down a very long mountain and fell upon the back of a huge bull-like Cock with a ruby caruncle . It brought me at an incredible speed, first pushing off from the stony soil with its powerful ostrich-like legs, then clapping with its brown wings rose to the icy air. We got to a formidable trunk rising up to the clouds. I realized that I had become an ant and was climbing along the stem of a formidable Bur, and its clusters of ripened and ripening soft balls with small hooks were the worlds existing according to their inherent laws.

Then there was a black emptiness with an Egg in the centre. ‘It isn’t gold, it’s alive’ – I was mumbling repeating that phrase again and again. I myself resembled a ping-pong ball which had rolled away to the bush. I felt I was being looked for and could be found at any moment in order to be retracted again into the crazy circle. The orange-grey spotted Egg managed to tell me by its pulsation that I was needed. I was wanted by not only my relatives. I was able to Help, but in what way – that I would learn later. Then the Egg started to approach to me, and I fell through the rip of the egg shell into the yellow centre and realized that I was lying in my mom’s hands, and a sun ray was tickling my nose. We were outside under a tree in the periphery of the village. I sneezed and laughed. My mom gave a start and also laughed with a release as I was alive and looked healthy.

There is an edge when a new dream hasn’t begun yet, but the surrounding reality is already clouded with the fog of a dream. At this moment it is possible to weigh on the palm of consciousness the mixtures of seen already but forgotten dreams and, having groped for the guiding thread of the recalled events, to travel into the wanted dream while adding the new events of dream life to it. When I was standing in the bush with scratches on my cheeks and the Little Spider was digging among the autumn burs, I recalled the episode with the cock sacrifice and farming out from MaAra-Death so clearly that I sneezed again and laughed like then in my mom’s hands. Then, having squatted down, together with the Spider I dug out a hole half a meter deep between the bur roots. And for the first time in my life I stood up on my head, my shoulders pressing on the top layer of the soil and my head deepening into the hole so that the roots pressed my skull through the hair. I knew nothing about reflex therapy then, but I felt intuitively that the roots were pressing ‘correctly’. I was standing for about an hour, suddenly I heard a woman’s (as it seemed to me) steps. It was a girl of my age who came up to me and started to call my name. Her voice seemed familiar to me. It made me feel ill at ease: she was the medical nurse but with the appearance of a girl. I was standing, and she was stamping her feet and calling more and more insistently. That made the soil fall from the edge of the hole and fill in my nose and eyes. I understood: if I fell down, I would be dead, but I wanted to live greatly. Thanks to the Spider! He jumped into the hole and covered my nostrils with his belly. The girl went away.

Far away, I heard a tram rattle on the tramway near the lake some 500 m away. Then I felt as if rust was pouring from my body and through the places where the roots were pressing was drilling into the ground with tin streamlets, all my body itching like after mosquito stings. Some streamlets were pulled into the lake, all of them fell to the bottom; some other ones were pulled by the tramways; the others ran for nearly 10 km. There was our cemetery ‘Kleshchikha’ there. The streamlets went into the metallic fences, railings and gravestones. I fell on one side, took my head out of the hole. The sun was already setting; the Little Spider started saying goodbye by his legs, then pushed from the ground, became foggy and disappeared. Instead of him I saw the bur roots from my head covered with my blood of the broken nails and scratched head skin. I recovered, and the hair stopped coming out though hasn’t grown until now on my face. A week later I found a magazine “Science and Religion” with drawings and descriptions of three asanas (those of cobra, lotus and stand at blade bones) as well as Scandinavian Runes. In winter I got the book by Richard Hittleman ‘Yoga. The path of physical perfection’ and started doing yoga with it regularly and persistently. In such a way I ‘got intergrown with Siberian roots’.

In my film “City Shamanism. Boiling a lock in beer”, I carry out a magical rite in the real-time mode the purpose of which is to attract the dead ancestors’ blessing into my life so that things go on well and misfortunes evade. I also interpret the occurring Mystery in the spirit of Yungian archetypes. Thereby, I am present simultaneously in two persons: a priest using everyday things as attributes and an interpreter of sorcery in the modern language of profound psychology. The step-by-step elements of the Act are the embodiment of the energy-information potential of Universe Intellect’s spiritual component which is expressed materially by means of interaction of the pronounced formula, the action transforming the familiar everyday thing into the new quality of Artifact – the symbol and materialized attribute of Universe Intellect to attract the needed, definitely structured vibrations into the material world. In this case it is the key to the reserve states of consciousness and ability to actualize the ancestors’ vast experience impressed in the genotype, or speaking in sorcery language, ability to hear the voice of blood.