Walking with the gods

With my 52nd birthday just around the corner, I am reflecting on the path I have walked this half century.

I was, like many of us, brought up in a Christian home. My first experience of God was a low-key Sunday visit to the local Anglican church where a frocked minister led a strictly prescribed service, which as a child, I found captivating and otherworldly at first, but tedious as I grew older and used to it. That was about the sum of religion in our home and the rest of the week was pretty secular. My parents were members of the local Round Table, a charity organisation that held fund raisers several times a year. We spent many weekends playing outside the clubhouse with other kids, while the parents partied inside. When I turned 13, my parents left the RT and went away on a weekend only to return reborn Christians and might I say, very different people.

We joined a new charismatic church which was intriguing at first, but after some years, the church politics and the many questions I had in my reasoning mind, that no-one seemed to be able to answer began to put me off. In my later teen years I became uninterested and drifted away.

My father continuously 'encouraged' me to return, often with emotional blackmail, which spoiled our relationship somewhat. When I went to boarding school, I drifted further away and noticed their influence on my two younger sisters, when I came home on weekends.

Once during high school, and once during my military service, I reached out to God and recommitted myself, during lonely phases, when I felt I needed a spiritual confidant. On both occasions, two older peers approached me, under the guise of Christian brothers that I could confide in, but on both occasions they had other motives. Sexual motives, which once I realized, made me deeply angry.

Seven years later, recently married and expecting our first child, my father again insisted I/we return to his church for the support a young family - 'aught to have'.

After much nagging he convinced me to help him lead a group course over some week, for the purpose of  inviting new members.

The course, in my opinion, was bogus, highly assumptive and full of holes. I prayed to God for real answers to my questions and on the second week of the course, one of the girls in my group offered me a book to read. The book was Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsh. I was captivated by the answers and although I now consider it as only a first step, I was consumed by it and couldn't put it down. It was my introduction to New Age ideas. I got my hands on seven more in the series and read them all in record time.

From there my path led me to Buddhism - reading the Bardo Thordal, ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) Carl Jung and the Dalia Lama's interpretations of Buddhist dharma. I sought out a few visiting monks and spent time with them, learning to meditate. Then I discovered Yoga and enrolled in the local school. I studied Patenjali's Sutras and the Eight Fold Path and became an avid Yoga practitioner and teacher with two of my own classes for more than a year. Then one weekend on an unrelated workshop, I met a Lakota shaman who introduced me to Native American mythology. I was smitten. I joined his medicine society and he took us on regular sweat lodges into the mountains. It was very authentic, men only, with rough and harsh initiations.

During that time I had an encounter with a large Bull Masif that attacked me and put me in hospital for four days. I considered him my 'wolf teacher' and never sued the owners, for fear the dog would be put down.

Soon after that, on my last sweat lodge in the Cederberg one weekend, one of the participants stood up and did an invocation to Odinn, in old Norse. My body shuddered and goose flesh over took me, while my mind drifted far away. I felt as though I had heard these words before, although they were completely foreign.

Some time later, I read Donna Darkwolf's book, Dancing under an African Moon and asked the universe to allow us to 'bump into each other', as I discovered that she lived in the same town as I did.

Within a month or so, I went to the bank one day and there btw the glass doors stood this Egyptian looking woman in a Kaftan, with a large Ank, or pentagram dangling between her braless breasts, like an exhibit in a museum. I introduced myself as she exited and asked for an audience with her, but she was not friendly. Rather suspicious, she wanted to know why. I read your book, I said and have some questions. Ok then, she agreed to meet as long as I had no further agendas. I assured her that I did not. She had received a lot of negative press in our conservative dorp.

Our meeting was short but we got on rather well. She invited me back several times and I eventually began to design rituals and talks for her groups.

A few years later, and a devotee to Odinn, as I remain to this day, she encouraged me to become a Registered Marriage Official since she had the channels to make it happen. I agreed, studied the Acts and took the exam.

Several months later on holiday with my wife and some friends in Thailand, I fell into a fire at a hedonistic beach party in Kho Pangan and burned myself rather badly, after a stupid act that I knew I would not pull off successfully, but did it anyway, as if steered by an unseen force. Not alcohol.hat 

The next morning, licking my wounds as it were, I received a call from Donna, telling me that I had passed the exam and I was now officially CAM's first RMO. I told her about my 'accident' the night before and in her usually blasé manner said, " Its your baptism of fire, Shaman. Odinn is a wiley deity. Be careful what you ask for. When he gives, he also takes away." 

Our professional relationship continued until her passing in 2017. I watched her denounce all her spiritual affiliations and abandon her once huge ego. 

At her memorial I met many of her friends and one in particular had a massive impact on my life. In true Odinic style, completely upturning my world, taking away much that I had held dear, but rewarding me at the same time with many gifts and resources I could not even have wished for. A relationship like this I had never known. To both of us, an indecribable detriment and blessing at the same time. Like meeting your favourite family member, that you never even knew you had.

While my career, marriage and other relationships including with my parents, went through a terrifying metamorphosis, I have been endowed with gifts beyond measure. Like Odinn, who sacrificed one eye, I have also lost 50% of my hearing in this process, and doctors cannot determine why.

Odinn truly hears my calls and knows better what I need, than I do. Far more engaging than the God of my childhood who seems indifferent to prayer, I stand in awe on this road less travelled, but warn any wannabe Odinson, to be very very careful of what you might ask of the All Father. Be ready to have your spiritual house demolished.