THE ENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENT
I have now been walking on the magical mystery road of life for seventy-five years. The magic and the mystery began in my childhood in the early 1940s, but I had no understanding of what was going on then, nor any clear idea of that for which I had signed up. Yet I remember the first time I experienced being enchanted. Perhaps you do too.
In my case, I was about three or four years old, and my family and I lived in an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. One day, my mother took me to Central Park. I remember staring up at the trees from my stroller, taking them all in, and suddenly I had a deep insight. I saw them as living beings like myself, yet different. And then there were the pigeons on the sidewalks, bobbing and cooing, mobbing and hassling each other for the breadcrumbs my mother spread out for them. They were also living beings like myself, yet different.
And then there was the squirrel. It was just your average, everyday gray squirrel. It was perched on the gray trunk of a large beech tree, its curled fluffy tail twitching with alert intensity above its back, its liquid jet-black eye staring straight into my soul. My mother gave me a peanut. In my innocence I held it out. The squirrel, conditioned by countless generations of curious children, approached tentatively, jumped onto the edge of the stroller, and looked deep into my eyes for a long moment. And then it snatched the peanut in one swift gesture from my trembling little fingers, retreating like a flash onto the tree trunk where it shredded the shell and ate the peanut with great gusto. Then it returned for another.
In those moments, I was enchanted. It was as though a spell had been cast over me. I had been entranced by none other than Mother Nature herself through a rather hyper furry ambassador. This initial experience remains with me to this day, and there was more.
There was the zoo. My mother took me there often. The sights and sounds and smells remain with me still—the hippopotamus in its small depressing concrete pool of murky greenish water stained with hippo poo, the crocodile lazing on its cement embankment in deep meditation, the birds shrieking with joyous abandon in their aviaries, the sea lions cavorting in their outdoor pond accompanied always by the odor of fish.
And then one day, one very strange enchanted day, I saw a beast of incomparable beauty in a cage. It was a leopard. It was such an extraordinarily exquisite being that I still remember the wonder and intensity I felt in response to our meeting. I say “our meeting” for that was exactly what it was. As I watched this gorgeous creature pacing in tight, ever-narrowing circles behind the bars, I was spellbound, entranced by its beauty, yes, but also by its power and by my own intuitive perception that within its graceful spotted body, a great will lay imprisoned.
I didn’t know what this meant, of course, but the world as I knew it drifted in those moments, and where it drifted to I do not know, but the leopard and I found ourselves together in a place of utter calm, a shadowy blue place of deep magic where there were no bars. As I watched, the veil over its green gaze silently lifted, and the leopard looked deeply into my soul.
And something happened.
Looking back across the years, I reach for that moment, and it eludes me. Yet it was on that cold, foggy winter day at the zoo that something definitely happened—something that in retrospect I now know had to do with my enchantment. From that time forward, that leopard became my imaginary spirit friend. It was with me whenever I turned my attention in its direction. Sometimes it appeared in my mind’s eye as entirely catlike, and at others it would morph to become a curious composite of human-animal that stood upright on two legs that I thought of as “the leopard man.” More than forty years later I would create a painting of it that graces the cover of one of my books.
Interestingly, in my so-called inner fantasy life, the leopard man would not enter my apartment building. He liked to stick to the bushes in the park. What I didn’t know then was that leopards are ambush hunters and they prefer to engage in covert operations. But when I went to the park with my mother or my au pair, the leopard man was always there waiting for me. Perhaps our clandestine relationship and our imaginal adventures contributed to the reactivation of an ancient aspect of my soul that I had no idea existed at that time. And there was more.
With adolescence in the 1950s, my inner world was steamrollered by puberty, by my growing fascination with what Zorba the Greek called “the female of the species,” and by material culture at large. In response, perhaps, the sense of magic withdrew, but interestingly the mystery remained. When I was out in nature, in the garden, at the pond in the woods, in the park, at the beach, in the mountains, or on the wooded university campus, the mystery was around me as a definite yet elusive presence, and I always had a sense that something I could not see or even understand was just there. I also had a clear perception that it, whatever it was, was always aware of me too.
I knew nothing of mysticism or enchantment or visionary experience in those days, but not surprisingly, I have always loved being out in nature. And when I finally read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Perhaps this is why my college studies in the 1960s at the University of Colorado at Boulder propelled me toward becoming a biological scientist. My inner visionary was on hold, and upon graduation I did a two-year stint as a science teacher with the U.S. Peace Corps in western Nigeria where I connected with indigenous spirituality for the first time among the Yoruba peoples. Although everyone I met was either Christian or Muslim, there was also a deep, underlying animist tribal religion that existed, one that was imported into the Americas with the slave trade, becoming known as Macumba, Candomblé, or Umbanda in Brazil, Vodou in Haiti, Obea in Jamaica, and Santeria in Cuba. I would discover years later that while I lived among the Yorubas, I attracted the attention of some of the spirits they call orisha, yet I didn’t fully understand what this meant at that time.
In my postgraduate studies and scientific professional life that followed in the 1970s, I traversed the entangled trails of evolutionary and environmental biology with relation to paleontology and anthropology. I was in search of insights into the living world of the biosphere on the one hand and, more specifically, the evolution of life preserved as fossils in the lithosphere on the other.
I fell in with an anthropology professor named F. Clark Howell at the University of California at Berkeley who was then director of the American half of the Omo Research Expedition in Ethiopia (the other half was French). In 1971, he graciously invited me into the field, where my research projects involved the excavation and recovery of microvertebrate fossils—bats, insectivores (shrews), rodents, lagomorphs (rabbits), mole rats, galagos, mongooses, and other small mammals that tend to be very habitat specific. Through my analysis of these fossils, I attempted to reconstruct the paleoenvironments of important prehistoric early man sites at the time they were laid down millions of years ago. I also tried to understand the inner workings of the evolutionary process within lineages of fossil animals across time, seeing how they had changed and trying to discern why. This work led me into my scientific investigations of what I came to refer to as “the Mystery” and eventually earned me a doctoral degree in anthropology. I still do this work today.
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MYSTERY
In the early 1970s, I was living for months at a time in a tented safari camp out in the fossil beds of the Lower Omo Valley in southwestern Ethiopia, and I remember having spontaneous, unsought dreamlike experiences that were definitely odd. They often happened at night, but they also occurred during the day when I was fully awake. They were so extraordinarily real that they got my attention. It was as though I was watching films, but I was aware that I was watching them. Through these direct and immediate experiences, I was inevitably drawn into the Mystery.
There was one episode that contributed greatly to what I now perceive as my re-enchantment in my early thirties.
I was involved in excavating a paleontological (fossil-bearing) site that had been dated by geochronology (potassium-argon dating) at about three million years or a little older, a site that had revealed the fossilized remains of early hominids still in the process of becoming human. There were also fossils of various other animals that were their contemporaries—ancestral giraffes, gazelles, buffalos, baboons, fish, turtles, hippos, crocodiles, and the assorted carnivores that preyed upon them.
I was working with a small team of African tribal men. Two of them were Wakamba tribesmen from Kenya named Muthoka and Kaumbulu; the other, a member of the local Dassanetch tribe, was named Lokiriakwanga, but everyone called him Atiko. I had been told that Atiko was a shaman. In fact, he was rumored to be a crocodile-whisperer in that he could communicate with the immense crocodilians that inhabited the Omo River at that time. It was said he could even swim across the river immune to the enormous reptilian predators that resided there. Having seen them myself, I understood this was no small thing.
I didn’t speak a word of Atiko’s language, nor did he of mine, but friendship has a language of its own, and with repeated and ongoing contact over several field seasons we became very close. I could speak a little Swahili by then, above which, or perhaps below which, we had a system of nonverbal communication that worked very well. He always knew exactly what to do without my telling him, and in reverse, I came to suspect that he had a profound influence on me, although I was largely unaware of this at that time.
One blazing hot day, around noon in mid-August, we were excavating fossil beds near the great silt-laden Omo River, which drains the Ethiopian highlands to the north and flows into Lake Turkana in Kenya to the south. The eroded desert landscape under the vast pale sky was surreal. The ground was shimmering with heat, and we were preparing to go back to camp for lunch. I had been aware for several days, usually at odd moments, of a curious feeling that would come over me—the sense that I was being watched by something. We were out in the remote, whispering lands of eastern Africa where there are lions and leopards, hyenas and Cape buffalo, all of whom are dangerous. So this awareness—that I was being watched—was concerning.
On this day, my mind was drifting, hypnotized by the heat and the general boredom of what we were doing, when the sense of being watched suddenly flared. I stood up slowly, dusting myself off and observing my immediate surroundings carefully from under the brim of my bush hat. Muthoka and Kaumbulu were packing the excavation equipment into the Land Rover as Atiko, the Dassanetch shaman, was looking off to one side with some intensity.
As my eyes slid slowly in that direction, I suddenly saw something with my peripheral vision. It was big, about the same height as me, and as I looked directly at it, it seemed to step through a rip in the fabric of the air, which was then zipped closed from the other side, leaving a momentary wrinkle in the space between us. I was startled. As I considered the nature of this unusual visual phenomenon, I was left with a curious certainty. Whatever it was, it had spots. I had definitely seen spots!
I turned my attention toward Atiko, who was now watching me with an alert expression on his thin dark face, and I asked him in Swahili, “Atiko, what was that?” The shaman smiled, revealing his tobacco-stained front teeth. I knew then that he had seen it, and he knew that I had seen it. He simply pointed to the exact spot in the air where it had been and said a single word: shaitani, the Swahili word for spirit.
In those days I worshipped only at the altar of science. I was not one of those worthies who had sat at the knees of the wisdom masters for decades, praying and meditating and hoping for visions and transcendent experiences, and I wasn’t prepared to consider the existence of spirits. But this incident, and the ones that followed, would haunt me for years, and shortly thereafter, Atiko bent a simple honey-colored brass tribal bracelet around my wrist. It remains there to this day, a token of our long-ago friendship and perhaps of something else—something that he saw in me. It became a talisman connecting me, a native New Yorker, to the indigenous world and to our communal, ancient tribal past.
During that same field season in the Omo Valley, another strange experience happened to me.
It was another hot afternoon, and my mentor, Clark Howell, and I had driven out of our field camp in one of the expedition Land Rovers to hunt for the large Grant’s gazelles to provide fresh meat for the camp kitchen. With us was Don Johanson, the same man who two years later would discover Lucy, the now famous fossilized partial skeleton at Hadar, in the Afar tribal lands to the north. Don was one of Clark’s graduate students at that time and my tent mate for part of that field season.
There was a large clay pan surrounded by acacia woodlands about five miles north of camp, and we headed in that direction, driving cross-country between towering termite chimneys before entering the woodlands. When we emerged, the flat expanse of dusty, cracked earth of the pan stretched before us several miles across. During the rainy season, the pan would fill with a shallow sheet of water, becoming a place of great proliferation for both plants and animals. Now it was bone dry, and the dark acacia woodlands that bordered its edges were largely leafless, pulsing with heat and shrouded by dust. It was often there that we found large herds of gazelle and sometimes oryx.
The hunt was successful. As we headed back across the pan with a gazelle and several guinea fowl in the back of the vehicle, we saw in the middle of the pan a whitening orb that at first glance looked like an old dried gourd. Clark slowed our vehicle to a stop and turned the engine off without a word. The three of us got out and walked back across the soft crunchy earth. There on the sunbaked lake bed was a human cranium, and it was fairly fresh.
Don, Clark, and I stood there in the glare and breathless heat of afternoon and stared at the skull in silence. Then Clark reached down and picked it up, gingerly turning it this way and that, noting that a cheekbone and a mastoid process were missing, probably gnawed off by jackals. He shook it, and the shrunken, blackened brain bumped around inside the cranium. There were holes pecked into ceilings of the fragile eye sockets by probing beaks, he pointed out. Perhaps some vulture with a taste for brains had taken it up high and dropped it, he said, hoping the fall would break it open. But the pan was soft and crumbly. I looked around carefully. No other remains. Just the head.
He passed it to me. I smelled the sweet aroma of decaying carrion as I examined the last leathery shreds of sun-dried muscle still hooked on. The bone was greasy with fat. I looked at the delicate facial features as my fingertips traced the parietal prominences, and I perceived the cranium as female. All her teeth were in place and with no decay. They were quite worn, revealing a woman in her thirties, perhaps. I had been told by Serge Tornay, a French social anthropologist doing ethnographic field research in a tribal village to the west called Kibish, that the Nyangatom people who lived in this region did not bury their dead but left them out on the plains to be recycled by hyenas, vultures, and jackals. Whether this was true or not I did not know.
As a paleoanthropologist, I have handled my share of human bones, so this was not an unusual experience for me. But what happened next was. As I looked full into her empty eye sockets, I began to hear a strange whispering sound, like rushing water, but a quick glance to the side revealed only the shimmering emptiness of the arid land. I looked back at the face before me and began to see curious sparkling spots of light, and in the next moment my carefully cultivated scientific detachment simply vanished.
The vacant eyes seemed to merge with the barren land, creating a perceived field that progressed into an ever-expanding sense of emptiness in which, curiously, there was still something. Then, in the same heartbeat, that “something” vanished too, whereupon I experienced an utter and total separation from all the levels on which I had been living my life. My involvement with academia and with science, my connections with friends and even with family, these simply disappeared, and in their place, an awesome, overwhelming vastness opened up before me.
I could see my hands holding the skull, and I was still aware of my surroundings, yet I was also perceiving this unbelievable immensity. It was like an ocean of light in which there were uncountable numbers of sparkling yellow-golden spots or dots. This field of moving points simply absorbed me until it was as though I no longer existed. There was only the vastness—and it was beautiful beyond belief.
Don reached out at that moment and took the cranium from my hands, and suddenly all was as it had been. I was back. The sound was gone. Where exactly had I been? What had I seen?
Clark was watching me curiously, his expressive blue eyes filled with a sudden concern.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I turned and smiled at him, nodding in a semi-distracted way even as my mind reeled. To cover my confusion, I turned and walked back to the Land Rover and took a pull on the canvas water bag hanging from the outside mirror. I splashed water on my face and looked carefully around, taking in details, feeling the sunlight like a force on the skin of my arms and hands and face, smelling the odor of the dust and my own sweat, recovering my sense of control and place, re-establishing a grasp on what was real.
I looked out across the clay pan to the dark line of trees in the far distance to the south, and, unexpectedly, my consciousness expanded once again. There was something there—something watching me from the cover of the trees. I could feel its attention fastened upon me beyond any doubt. Despite the heat, my skin prickled into goose bumps. What could it be? A side of me stepped back and wondered if I was starting to go crazy out there in the bush after several months’ isolation from so-called civilization. I recalled my earlier sense of being watched at the site. Was I another anthropologist gone troppo in the tropics? I considered this thought briefly and wondered exactly what troppo meant. It was suddenly terribly important.
My carefully crafted, well-traveled veneer reapplied itself at this point, and I looked around at my compatriots just as Don put the skull back down on the ground. I was normal once again. Clark and Don walked back to where I was standing and got back into the Land Rover. I joined them, and we returned to camp in silence.
When we went to the river later in the day to bathe and draw water for the camp, that same sense of being watched came into my awareness. I glanced around in the softening light but failed to see anything out of the ordinary.
I looked toward the brown river. There was only a hamerkop, a small, dusky brown water bird halfway between a heron and a stork. It had short legs, a curious crest on the back of its head, and a croaky, mournful voice. It seemed to be doing a walking meditation back and forth at the river’s edge. It paused thoughtfully, as though it was staring at its own reflection in the water, and then it resumed walking.
My attention was suddenly drawn to the hamerkop. I studied the bird abstractedly and wondered why my focus was directed there. I remembered that some African peoples regard the hamerkop with considerable deference, perceiving it as a powerful being associated with omens and portents. For them, it is a bird identified with shamans and diviners. In myth, this bird is also associated with rainmaking and thunderstorms. Accordingly, it is often known as the Lightning Bird. Among the peoples of southern Africa, it is believed that sometimes the Lightning Bird takes it upon itself to appear among them in human form.1
All this passed through my mind as I watched the bird. I was aware that my sense of being watched was not coming from it. The sense was coming from the trees beside the river. I had no sense of alarm or danger, just a sense of being observed by something—a flat, neutral presence of some sort just there at the edge of my mind.
It was during that same field season that I began to have very odd dreams at night. One night, I was in my safari tent, and in turning over on my bed, I found myself bumping against something hard. Upon opening my eyes, I discovered I was up against the ridge pole under the peak of the double roof of the tent. To say I was startled would be an understatement. I turned over and looked down, and there below me was my body lying on my bed. Then suddenly, I was back in my body, wondering what I had just experienced. (I might add that I was not taking any mind-altering substances, and we were hundreds of miles cross-country from the nearest cold beer.)
On another starry night, I had another experience of being out of my body and discovered I could slip through the screened doorway of my tent without zipping it open. There I was, hovering above the camp, seeing with a curious enhanced perspective. I could see everything in great detail, and each of the nineteen safari tents that made up the camp was outlined with a strange halo of light. I discovered I could maneuver myself around in this state, floating above the scene below me, drifting here and there according to my wishes.
As I rose higher and higher, I could see the Ethiopian highlands to the east and the mountain called Nkalabong to the north. The vast, empty, surreal landscapes of the fossil beds near the camp stretched down toward Lake Turkana to the south, and there was the long volcano to the west that Atiko called Kuraz. It was as though I could see in all directions at once. And during the entire experience, my body was infused with the most extraordinary sensation that verged on the ecstatic.
These out-of-body experiences continued. They were spontaneous in that I didn’t intend them, nor did I understand what was actually happening to me at that time, and I didn’t quite know what to make of them. Then one morning, after another long nocturnal flight over the camp, I was brushing my teeth at the water tank before breakfast, and my Wakamba friend Kaumbulu walked up to me. He looked at me strangely and said, “Hey, Mr. Hank. What were you doing flying over my tent last night?” I simply stared at him dumbfounded, and he laughed his crazy laugh and walked away. He never elaborated, yet what he’d said got my attention. I gathered this was not the sort of thing you can talk about with your scientific colleagues, so I made cryptic notes to myself in my field journal and just left it at that.
In reviewing these initial experiences, I realize that they were facilitated by my being immersed in nature for months at a time. I believe now that this immersion had something to do with my re-enchantment.
Ten years later, I found myself attending a weekend workshop in Berkeley led by a fellow anthropologist named Michael Harner. I had never taken a workshop before, and this one was focused on the way of the shaman. I supposed I would get something out of it for teaching future anthropology classes. However, there was also something else—that nagging memory of what had happened during those days out in the fossil beds and those nights in the camp.
As part of the weekend’s experiential exercises, Harner asked us to team up with someone in the group whom we didn’t already know. Then he directed us to engage in a visionary shamanic journey into the spirit worlds to find a “helping spirit” to be in service for that other person. I was very uncertain; this exercise seemed like New Age woo-woo to me, but I found myself partnered with a slender, attractive young woman with dark eyes and long dark hair. Her name was Sandra Ingerman, and at that time she was a graduate student in counseling psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
I lay on my back on the floor in the dark next to this woman, listening to Harner beating his drum in a monotonous rhythm to help us alter our consciousness. I was wondering what in God’s name I was doing there when suddenly Sandra sat up next to me, gave me an intense look, and leaned over, her long hair drifting across my face. She placed her cupped hands and mouth on my chest and blew into my thorax—not once but several times. A strange sense of warmth percolated through my being, accompanied, surprisingly, by something dimly remembered. I couldn’t quite grasp it. Then Sandra helped me to sit up and blew her breath into the top of my head. It was a goose-bump moment.
When Harner stopped drumming and the lights came up, Sandra shared what she had experienced in her shamanic journey. In projecting her conscious awareness (journeying) into the dreaming of the shamanic Lower Worlds of nature, she had encountered a being who revealed to her that it was one of my old allies—one I had forgotten about, one that wanted to come back into my life. When she described it, I reacted with shock. It was my imaginal friend, the leopard man. I hadn’t thought of him in perhaps thirty years. How had Sandra known about him? This experience got my attention and something shifted within me—something that would usher me into the next stage of my life.
Although I didn’t know it then, it was a classic shamanic experience of re-empowerment. It was the next step of my re-enchantment, a reconnection with the inner worlds of spirit that had been part of my childhood. That reconnection enabled an entirely new level of awareness to take form in my life from that time on. I came to understand that it involved the reactivation of one of my birthrights, a revitalization of my soul that led me back onto the path of my destiny, and my life has never been the same. This was how I discovered that I am a spirit dreamer, or as revealed in my other books, a spiritwalker.
I am now at an age and stage where my mind often wanders back across the path that I have walked for all these years, allowing me to reconsider those insights and revelations that I stumbled across along the trail. For stumbling was very much my way. I wasn’t seeking “It,” whatever It was. It simply seemed to seek me, and I just allowed myself to stumble into It. And yet as I say this to you, the reader, allow me to also proclaim that I am still not sure what It is. But I am absolutely certain that It is. I continue to think of It simply and forever as the Mystery.
The writer and Zen master Peter Matthiessen put it this way in his classic book about his experiences in Africa, The Tree Where Man Was Born: “Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.”2
Having had my own long immersions in the African bush across many years, I know exactly what he is talking about.
In sharing these accounts with you, I am extending you an invitation to re-experience something from your childhood, perhaps something that you possessed before your life took over. I invite you to reconnect with that sense of wonder you may have felt in response to a blue-sky, yellow-sun summer morning, the grass glistening with dew, butterflies hovering around the flowers in the garden. Or maybe it was a trip to the park, a visit to the zoo, a walk in the forest, a day at the beach, or the moon over the ocean that triggered that wonder.
That sense of wonder was and is one of your birthrights, one that may enable you to see more deeply into the outer world of things seen, as well as into the inner worlds of things hidden. I slowly came to the awareness that these worlds are always there for us. It is simply a matter of tuning into the right frequency and paying attention to what happens next. It is a matter of allowing ourselves to be re-enchanted.