Introduction into Urban-Shamanism

Reading this text is a kind of micro-initiation, Shaman traveling, communion with the space of Urban-Shamanism forces.

Hi! I invite you to carry out an absorbing and terrifying journey into the world of Spiritual Realities to get Force and Knowledge. It is not necessary to do the rituals suggested by me practically; you can confine yourself to thinking and dreaming on this theme, or simply reading it. The result will come soon.

Sometimes changes happen at once, instantly. It can be recovering from old diseases which not only doctors but the tiered patient himself don’t believe in any longer; or an unexpected phone call from an almost forgotten friend who offers a new and perspective project; or a meeting with your beloved for the rest of your life. And it is a feeling of the incredibly deep and unite existence of yours, the sense of the surrounding world’s support and in the deepest corners of your soul.

Let’s go, my dear person; believe me: I know how to lead you to the room with the buzzing golden sphere which fulfills all your wishes, and how to protect you from disappointments during their fulfillment, and how to lead you back to the starting point. Come on!

Take a mirror in your hand, catch any light source in it, better the light of the morning sun, but it also can be a luster. Direct the light ray to the semidarkness of the place; where are now – in an office, in a caf?, in an electric train with your laptop? Where are you directing your sun ray? Imagine that you are in the forest, and I am somewhere near you as an invisible assistance, as a voice in your earphones. I am practically absent. In front of you there is a small glade; you are in the semi-shade of the trees; mosquitoes are buzzing around you but aren’t stinging you; their buzzing sound isn’t irritating as usual, but calming. The golden and silver rays scattered by the leaves of the surrounding trees are touching your hair which get electrified and rise a bit. Are you feeling goose pimples in the back of your head and the cold of tingling in your backbone? That is the beginning! Look at the glade: can you see the stub with a family of mushrooms? Their thin legs as if are tapping on the place, and the cunning little eyes of the forest men are peeping from under the mushrooms’ hats. But now – look, they are simply mushrooms again! Suddenly, a light butterfly appears and flies above the stub and flashes in front of your eyes so brightly that you want to screw up your eyes as if you are in the darkness and a bright photo flash strike your eyes suddenly and sharply.

It looks like somebody has hidden himself on the other side of the glade in the bushes or behind the trees and plays with the mirror directing the sun rays in all directions, one of them has reached you. But where is the butterfly? There isn’t any. A grayish-brown ball of a football size is running here and there. It stops for a moment looking at you and moving its long ears – a hare! And again it starts running around the glade raising the drops of chirring grasshoppers flying in all directions. Suddenly your perception changes again. It is like the unexpectedly appearance of drunkenness, light and exciting warmth of joyful folly. Before that you were alone, stressed and locked in the shell of dull alertness, but when it came to you – and the world changed: it became brighter, more volumetric and convex, but also fuzzy like in a children kaleidoscope. The hare jumped up and, like during time-lapse filming, started flying over the stub from the right to the left, then grew in size and configuration, and a child of three or fore landed on the juicy grass.

He resembles you like two peas in a pod. He bursts in a ringing long laughter – how much sincere joy and force in a child’s laughter! He is wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he is bare-footed and disheveled. He is looking at you smiling widely. Suddenly, he stretches his arms aside and runs to you crying loudly: ”Hallow! Where have you been all that time? I was waiting for you so long!” He runs up to you and jumps up on you. Be quick – catch him into your arms and embrace him! Press him to your breast! Say good, tender words which come out of your soul! Kiss the crown of his head — it is your childhood! You are embracing a joyful ball of moving light. The child is dissolving in you, intruding through your body behind your back. He stretches his numb, covered with the dry peel of time, stale wings and become a springy wind. Let’s fly! First up over the trees, above the glade, the stub, the sun ray, then over the clouds, into the blue sky. Do you see the glade far below? From here it looks like a cat’s eye – the green eye of a red cat.

Fold your wings for some time, let them warm up your backbone. Here it is cool and wet. We are in front of an old hockey-rink, it’s a rainy late-autumn night. The human-size skirting of the rink board is dull-green. Somewhere in the center of the rink there is the only bulb stayed in a rusted plate of the reflector, it is squeaking in the cold wind. We are to go through the black entrance to the clot of darkness and the white, incredibly terrifying spot of a hockey mask. Do you recognize it? Don’t be afraid – my red cat with a strong body and a hare’s tail, the Kuril bobtail, is with us. He doesn’t even hiss at the figure in a loose overall and mask. He is mewing tenderly and with a low sound, insinuatingly and somehow frightfully. The figure steps aback, the spot of the mask turning into the opaque disk of the waning moon. The cat’s eyes are irradiating, he is growing in size greatly, up to about one meter high, and pressing to you with his strong body very tightly. Let’s go here, under the squeaking bulb, into the darkness. From the complete darkness, we see the circle of the deadly white light. The cat mews again, the light gets brighter, the bulb bursts with a crash. But the circle of the white light stays there. We are standing in the darkness in front of the circle of bright white light, then we step ahead inside bravely and decisively.

The white circle becomes the column of white fire. We understand that we found ourselves in the heart of the column of high-frequency vibrations. And in answer to our understanding, the column flashed, started boiling up and flaring up, then all of a sudden it got quiet having recognized namely you. It is the column of white flame of Universal Love. It goes to the infinity down and infinity up. We are in the middle. Are you ready? We fly down with an enormous speed upside down. The speed is growing: quicker and quicker, as the lightning which is spreading through moments. We stop for a moment in the brownish-grey emptiness with the clot of sparkling consciousness.

It is dark cherry-red and at the same time white colour. The anvil turns into the heart feeling the loud strikes of the hammer through the white-hot metallic bar. The sparks become veins; the skilled actions of a master who is making a horse-shoe become the boiling blood. And the horse for whom the horse-shoe is being made becomes the soul of action, time and place. Thank you, Blacksmith. Let’s fly up, my fiery horse. Have you seen the lightning strike the surface from the dark cloud? Have you seen the volley of rocket mortars in the movies? We are rushing up inside the heart of the Universal Love to the Source of Everything. We have arrived.

How good and quiet it is here like at home! The light is bluish-white with purple and golden flashes. The spirals of constellations and souls are being born in it. They return here and, with the slow rumble of golden cracles, tell about what they have learnt while incarnating in one of the worlds. But we stood for a while and, having communed with that, flew back to the City.

Now you are ready to get acquainted with the five main Spirits of City.

Four Spirits are fierce, furious; the fifth one is quiet, almost unnoticeable but it controls the other four. It is hardly possible to serve or order to these Spirits, you can only give a respect to them or ask for support or intercession.

The First Spirit is the suffocating smell of boiler oil, black fume, fat flame in the iron barrels – these are its eyes. Its height is that of a 9-storey building; its body looks like a gigantic bare doll made of fresh asphalt. Its teeth are the concrete road guards; its mouth is the underground crossing. There is only an entrance to this dark crossing: a sharp and evil cry, a strike into a stomach with a knife, hot pain and falling into the ammonia smell of urine. In the womb of the asphalt bare doll the dead-born frequent customers of gambling machines are boiling in their own juice, as well as the children who escaped from their eternally drunk parents and watching TV cartoons in basements, breathing glue with plastic bags on their heads. The asphalt doll holds a huge paving compactor which is grinding with a deafening sound. It can compact everything under itself – money, youth, attempts to do something and to prove something to someone. Do you remember your feet in summer shoes which sink into the soft asphalt on a hot summer day? That is He, the First City Spirit whose name is ‘Zalepikatok” (roller, paving compactor).

The Second Spirit is an explosion rising nearly fifty meters high and to all sides – the segments of fixtures, bridging, flesh of people. It looks like a huge case of an ancient wall clock where a metallic ball is hanging on a cord instead of a weight, breaking and stirring the debris. It is shuddering with horror caused by an act of terror, earthquake, fire and theft; slow dying under the blockage when you hear the rescuers shoveling the debris near you, but you have no force to call them. The second Spirit’s name is ‘Vzryvomrazorvi’ (‘Torn-by-Explosion’) who comes with the wild exultation of the murderer who feels the victim’s fear.

The Third Spirit is the mixture of a bulldozer and a bump truck that stood upside and crushed flat the pet-dog who tried to cross the street running to its owner and yelping with happiness. It is an expensive car that ran over a child and escaped from the place; or an unhappy man of love who survived after the accident when he stupidly rushed under the wheels of a car, the driver (father of three children) being sent to prison, and he himself becoming an invalid. This Spirit doesn’t pay any attention to the traffic lights, runs everything over and spits its poisonous fume into the souls of mercenary police officers. He stands up and claps with its front wheels like a drunken sadist taunting a child, the wheels are covered with the scraps of the bodies crushed flat. His name is ‘Samosvalomsbey’ (Run-over-by-a bump truck).

The Forth Spirit is unnoticeable, it looks like a telegraph pole silver-painted with the scraps of torn away adverts ‘Dog is lost…’ It has luminescent eyes and wires looking like thin pulpi; there is a plastic wreath “Cemetery with transportation to your home” on its silver cylinder body. It is for all those who went out and never came back, who died by accident, unexpectedly, suddenly, in the prime of their lives. His name is ‘Kladbischeischi’ (Look-for-Cemetery). He is hissing and gurgling like a locomotive that has sneaked up unexpectedly from behind to a person and cuts short the person’s life with loud and wet champing. He is going on the carpet of flowers pressed into the asphalt, shuffling with his fixture legs and whispering in an old-womanish way: ”Oh, he could have lived a long life!”

These four sworn brothers are flesh of City’s flesh: Paving-Compactor, Torn-by-Explosion, Run-over-by-a bump truck, Look-for-Cemetery.

The Fifth Spirit keeps all the four in his small sinewy fist. Here it is – my small one: a child’s drawing made with chalk on the 50×30 piece of asphalt. It is as if screwing up with a small split between the closed eyelids. Through the split, a green sprout tip is making its way towards the warmth of the Sun. The Fifth Spirit’s name is ‘Vyglyaninasvet’ (Look-out-at-the-Light). It has pierced all the concrete interstines of the City with its root net. It is the trees squeezed into the narrow cracks of the lawns and absorbing the metallic tube fences into their trunks. It is children’s laughter in the yards and the kiss of the people in love, and an old woman feeding pigeons. It is herpetic stray cats warming themselves in the sun and waiting for their descendants. It is slippery rats in the trash boxes touchingly embracing each other with their tails. It is the pale faces of people communicating with each other through computers while printing something on the keyboard with a lightning speed and suddenly laughing in the silence of the flat in respect to a joke of a friend thousands kilometers away. It is the disgusting red cockroaches covering with a hissing carpet the food rests in the flat of drunken people sleeping in their own vomit, and a recently confined woman’s smile first pressing her smacking baby to her breast full of warm milk. It is the Goddess of Life embodied in the City Reality and giving the happiness of Life to her children which is precious in all its forms, and at the same time giving the Magic of unavoidable death as well as the new existence behind the covering of Oblivion. Mother-Vseladushka has given me a tambourine made of goat leather, which was lying on a shelf in the city conservatory for long years, and taught me how to make its case out of plywood. She has given a root piece of maple pulled out during street works for a clapper, whispered the texts of songs and incantations, introduced her sons and daughters to me. I serve to you faithfully, City Spirits and City creatures, my dear city dwellers. I wish you quiet Happiness and luck. Let you leave out the four fierce City Spirits; let ‘Look-out-at-the-Light’ bless you!

Our first ritual will be simple. Find a green sprout in the asphalt body, draw a house and the sun around it with a chalk, sit for a while near a children site watching them playing; feed some pigeons; catch a sun ray with a mirror and play with it. I wish you every happiness, my dear!