The shaman’s song stills the night air and the whole forest listens. A jaguar is hunting. An impossibly blue butterfly floats by. The gentle humming of the jew’s-harp is a rhythm in the silence. I follow it as far as I can. I hear a song being sung. The voice is impossibly high and its sweetness is pure medicine for the heart. It reaches out in all directions at once. Through the song, the shaman hears the hearts of everyone in the story. Their stories are invited out into the light to be acknowledged, purified and healed. Each story has its own note and the shaman sings until the cacophony becomes a harmony, like the song of the forest. Only then does the shaman stop singing.
I’ve been yearning to hear this song for so long and tears are falling from my eyes. When I open them, I’m in a room with a wooden floor. The 44 dancers are coming to rest. The stillness in the room is like the stillness in my heart.
And then I realize that the song is mine.
It has come through me.
I have become the hollow bone.
Susannah, my beloved wife and long-time partner on this adventure, and David, a friend of many years, are looking at me. They feel it too.
As I look out into the room, I see that the dancers are deeply engaged with their own journeys. They haven’t noticed at all. And then I know it is the real thing.
The shaman’s song that I’ve travelled the world in search of has arrived.
It’s early spring in 2003. We’ve been in the Arctic now for three days. Anka told me that we needed to let the clean Arctic air blow the noise of the city from us. She’s a big, powerful Sami woman and I don’t really know her very well. I don’t know if I trust her. Last night, we had a sauna in our little chalet and she tried to seduce me. I said no very clearly, but even then I had to say it twice. Afterwards, I wondered if any of what she’d told me was true.
I’d met her a few months before at a workshop I was teaching in Oslo, in Norway. She was one of 44 dancers on a five-day shamanic dance workshop. Life truly has a sense of humour and the fact that I’d ended up teaching movement was proof of that. I hadn’t been the dancing type. Not unless I’d had too much to drink, and even then I’d only dance to ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’ by an obscure band called Animal Magnet. But the dance had called me and had become my teacher and my guide.
Ever since I was a child, I’d been looking for a way to understand and make use of the experience of life I was having. Aren’t we all?
My experiences had seemed quite ordinary early on. Talking to my dead great-grandmother as she sat on her old chair at the top of the stairs was no big deal until I realized that talking to the dead was weird for most of the people I knew.
Since then, my journey had taken me to many places. And on it, I’d met and worked with some extraordinary teachers. They’d shone like stars in the darkness, the light of their souls aflame with the knowledge they’d come here to share. And yet, above all of them, for the past 12 years there had been a presence, quiet but always there, like ancient stone, running deep like the roots of an old silver birch. His voice had been calm and shimmered like the ripples on a fjord. I called him the Old Man of the North. I assumed he was a dream figure, an inner archetypal wise man, but I was wrong. He was a real human being and I’d come here to meet him.
This story, like all stories of this kind, started a long time ago. As we drove along the wide highway, the Arctic tundra rushing by on both sides, my mind stretched back over the years. If the man we were going to meet wasn’t the man I’d been dreaming of, the very foundations I’d built my life on would shatter.
I was awash in an ocean of feelings and doubts, but underneath it all the quiet hum of a shaman’s song calmed me. Despite the doubts that nagged at me, pulling me this way and that, I knew that this man was the man who’d given me such good guidance for all those years.
Unbidden, he’d come into my dreams the week before Susannah and I had been going to teach our first shamanic dance workshop. I’d been terrified of teaching. I’d had no idea if I would be capable of guiding people through the dance. I was barely out of nursery school myself as a practitioner of ecstatic dance. And, as I said, the very fact that I was starting out on the road to teaching through dance was a joke. But as I lay there one night, after another day of intense preparation for our first ‘Life Dance’ event as the newly formed 5 to Midnight Gaia Dance Project, there he was – a calm presence, drumming, reindeer in his eyes, singing in a language that spoke directly to my heart, ‘Be calm. All is well. I am with you.’
I didn’t dare ask him who he was. I didn’t want to break the spell of the dream. I simply sat with him and listened to his drum and his song. And he remained with me all week, coming into my adrenalized sleep every night to sing me into a place of trust. Even when Susannah and I began to teach, he was still there when I closed my eyes, offering me guidance and support.
I came to rely on him. Whenever I walked into a room to lead a shamanic journey, there he was, as constant as a heartbeat. As time went on, he became more and more helpful. He’d often give me a sense of what was going on for the people we were working with, advise me to look out for dangers along the way or give me specific advice about how to work with the group. For the first 10 years of our relationship it never occurred to me that he was a real person. But now I was about to meet him.
We’d arrived at Alta airport in the north of Norway three days before. Anka had told me which flight to get and that she would meet me when the plane stopped in Trondheim to pick up passengers.
It had been six months since we’d met at the workshop. She’d danced deeply and powerfully and many times I’d watched her going into trance and contacting her spirits. She was a shaman too, trained in many Western techniques but rooted in the traditions of her people, the Sami.
At the end of the workshop, she’d come to me to say thank you. Then she’d asked me a question that on the surface had been straightforward: ‘Don’t you have a story to tell me?’
I’d hesitated. Two years before, after receiving guidance from a teacher I had at the time, I’d started my search for the Old Man of the North. For some reason I began to tell her about it.
She asked me to describe him. I didn’t just describe him but also his house and the landscape it was situated in, which I’d seen many times in dreams and visions.
She nodded as I spoke and then answered matter-of-factly, ‘Yes, I know him. I’ll take you to meet him.’
My heart jumped into my mouth. I was both shocked and elated. Could this be real?
She hadn’t finished. ‘I warn you, though, he will test you. Even if we travel all that way up north, he may refuse to meet you. He’ll look for your buttons and push them mercilessly. He’ll want to know what you’re made of.’
The slightest possibility that she actually knew who this man was and where he lived was more than enough encouragement for me to face a few tests. The thing was, I didn’t want anything from him. I simply wanted to meet him and thank him face to face for all the support he’d given me over the past decade. I also knew that if it was him, it would obliterate the doubts that my rational mind had about this shamanism business being more in the realm of science fiction than everyday life.
So now Anka and I were leaving the little ‘sauna incident’ town of Kautokeino and driving towards the Finnish border. We’d spent the first two nights in the tiny hamlet of Láhpoluoppal, staying with a friend of Anka’s who was a children’s storybook writer. She was writing stories in her native tongue to keep the Sami language alive. Her daughter was training to be a lawyer and wanted to work in the local government in Karasjok. From them, I’d learned a little more about the Sami story, which, sadly, was as horrific as the stories of other indigenous people coming into contact with the ‘civilized’ world.
The first night I was there, I’d dreamed that I was hunting with the Old Man. We were hunting reindeer in a strange environment. There was a building there that had a curving, sloped roof that reminded me of a ski jump. And as we hunted, we came across a huge ski jump right in the middle of the town. It seemed completely out of place.
My shaman guide was teaching me how to hunt, and soon enough we trapped a reindeer and killed it. We took out its heart and ate it. I had been a vegan for many years, so eating reindeer heart was a surprising departure from my normal diet! But the Old Man had talked to me at length about the relationship between the reindeer and the Sami people. He’d explained that it was similar to the relationship between the Plains Indians of North America and the buffalo. The reindeer was sacred to the Sami people and to hunt it and eat of its flesh was a very strong welcome to this land.
The next day, Anka had decided it was time to call the Old Man and ask his permission to visit him. He didn’t speak any English, but I could hear from the tone of his voice on the phone that he wasn’t happy.
‘He wants to know how old you are.’
‘Tell him I’m 39.’
She did. There was a pause and then Anka held the phone away from her ear as he responded with a gruff bark of a sentence.
‘What now?’
‘He says, “Tell him to go home.” He’s sick of young men coming to see him and asking him stupid questions. He says he won’t see you.’
I couldn’t help laughing. I don’t know why. It wasn’t funny. We’d travelled thousands of miles to see this man and he was sending me away before he’d even met me. But I felt steady inside myself. As far as I was concerned, we’d been hunting together the night before and I asked Anka to tell him that.
‘And please tell him we’ll be there tomorrow after lunch to see him,’ I added.
I heard a laugh and Anka nodded. ‘He says it’s okay. He’ll see us tomorrow.’
First test passed, I thought, glad that Anka had warned me.
As we left the town, Anka started singing a traditional yoik, the Sami name for the spirit songs through which humans can communicate with the spirit of anything, be it a person, a rock, a place or the many spirits that populate the vast and wild landscape in which the Sami live. She told me it was the Old Man’s yoik and that he would know through her singing it that we were on our way.
I listened and sank into the melody. Something deep inside me recognized the song, and my heart started to beat a little faster.
As we drove south, away from the chalet, I was astonished to see the strange building from my dream and the ski slope right there in the middle of town. Everything about the journey had a familiar feel to it. The boundary between dreaming and waking life was blurred so that at times I really wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep.
It wasn’t long before we drove around a corner and into the scenery that I knew so intimately from the past 10 years.
‘This is it!’ I almost shouted with joy. ‘My God, is this real?’
I pinched myself and looked at the palms of my hands, a reality-check practice that I’d learned from lucid dreaming. My hands were perfectly normal, so I was awake, wide awake, no doubt about it. And yet I was inside the world of my dreams. And there was the small wooden house with a deck overlooking the river.
We pulled off the road and parked. My heart was racing and I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself, to no avail.
We got out of the car and walked towards the house. I saw the small lavo, a structure almost exactly the same as a Native American tipi, and the pile of reindeer antlers that was as familiar to me as my own home. Even the small round stone altar was there.
A small man was standing on the deck, looking out over the river. He didn’t turn around immediately. He looked up into the sky and I watched as a beautiful eagle flew into sight and called out. Then he nodded and turned round.
It was him. It really was. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
As we approached him, Anka introduced us: ‘Bikko Máhte Penta, this is Ya’Acov Darling Khan. Ya’Acov, this is Bikko Máhte.’
We shook hands and I looked into the eyes of the man who had been such a source of guidance and inspiration to me for so many years. I knew him so well. And yet apparently I’d never met him. My mind did a few somersaults and landed firmly on its back and upside down.
At that moment, where the world of dreams and the world of so-called reality fused into one seamless union, my life changed forever. This was an undeniable happening that crushed any semblance of control my rational mind had worked so hard to hold on to.
We all sat down on Bikko Máhte’s wooden bench. I had prepared so many things to say to him, but now that I was there, there really was nothing to say. And so we sat under the cool Arctic sun and the vast sky as the river danced by and the wind sang through the trees.
After a while, Anka asked Bikko if he wanted her to translate.
‘We have been communicating very well already for many years,’ he responded.
For now, there was nothing more to say. My mind became like the sky and we sat quietly, not saying a word, for several hours.
I sensed some tension between Bikko and Anka. She hadn’t mentioned her attempt at seduction and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. But although something uneasy still rumbled in the space between us, I had to acknowledge that she’d done precisely what she’d said she would six months ago in Oslo. She’d brought me here to meet the Old Man of the North.
That first visit went by in a flash. I walked on the Old Man’s land and sat by the river, and every now and again, with Anka translating, we said a few words to each other. I stayed in his house. He watched the TV news. He cooked reindeer stew for us. I ate it – I knew better than to turn down a gift like that.
That first night, I dreamed that we were under attack. As I looked out, I could see the steeples of the local churches. They seemed to be bristling with malevolence as they pierced the night sky. I felt a mixture of fear and outrage. I asked for guidance and was shown a ceremony.
In the morning, I asked Bikko Máhte and Anka about my dream. Anka explained that there were several churches in the area, all competing for the hearts and minds of the local population. They were at each other’s throats all the time, but they all agreed that shamanism was the devil’s work. And, since Bikko Máhte was a practising shaman, he was doing the devil’s work.
I told them about the advice I’d received in my dream and Bikko Máhte asked me to do the ritual I’d been shown. So Anka and I drove into town and found the local store and I bought the four small round pocket mirrors I would need. We returned to the house and I prepared myself for the ritual.
Later in the afternoon, as the sun was going down, I took my drum and the mirrors and went out onto the land. I drummed and sang to the spirits for more than an hour. The more I drummed, the quieter my mind became and the stronger I felt. It was as if the power of the land itself was coursing through me. The ferocity I felt inside me was now as sharp as the edge of a sword. But I wasn’t angry. I had no intention to do harm, only to do my best to offer some protection to a man who was holding the sacred tradition of his people safe.
Bikko Máhte had been drumming on that land for more than 30 years. I cannot overestimate the courage it had taken for him to do that. Since Christianity had arrived in the Sami lands, the Church had instilled the cold fear of hell into the bodies, hearts and minds of these gentle people. A tradition that had kept them living in healthy balance with the land for many thousands of years had been brutally repressed by those who thought they had the sole word of truth written in their holy book and the right to impose it wherever they went. In an attempt to break the backbone of the Sami culture, they had decided to punish anyone found playing, making or owning a drum. The death penalty wasn’t uncommon for this ‘offence’. All drums found were burned. The drum, the very heartbeat of the people, was transformed into a symbol of evil.
Bikko Máhte had grown up in this atmosphere of fear-driven religion. And yet his spirit was the spirit of a shaman, just as his father’s and grandfather’s had been before him. Shamanic dreams started coming to him in his twenties, and in those dreams, he was given a drum to play. And he was told to make a drum.
He was confused and afraid. His confusion stretched him like a skin across a great divide. On the one side, there was all the knowledge of his ancestors and the spirits. They had lived in balance with their environment and, for the most part, in peace. On the other side, there was the new religion, the religion that had brought a mixture of the great light of Christ and a whole bunch of strange and twisted ideas about the devil. He didn’t know where to turn.
But then it came to him. He knew there was an old drum on display in the museum in a nearby town called Karasjok. He would go and stand in front of it and ask for guidance. He planned to stand as close to it as possible and ask everything he believed to be good and true if the drum was evil or a force for good. He felt in his heart that his ancestors had known the power of the drum and had used it for healing and balance. And yet he wasn’t unaffected by the fear that had been so deeply instilled in his people.
So off he went to Karasjok. The drum was so old that the skin had blackened with age. He stood in front of its display case, praying for guidance. After some time in deep concentration, he saw three bright stars appearing on the drum.
The way he understood this message says much about the struggles the Sami people have been through. On the one hand, the three stars represented the holy trinity from the relatively new kid on the block, Christianity. On the other hand, they represented three of the old Sami divinities showing up to remind the young shaman-to-be that the drumming tradition of his ancestors had shone its light in the darkness for many thousands of years and that he needn’t be afraid. The often uneasy relationship between Christianity and shamanism is as present in the land of the Sami as it is in so many places around the world where imported religions have blended into the ancient traditions that preceded them.
So, more than 40 years ago, Bikko Máhte crafted himself a drum in the way his people had done for many generations. At the time he was training in the traditional crafts of his people. He developed into a highly respected craftsman and when I met him he was teaching at the Sami Institute in Kautokeino. He told me that although his teacher at the time didn’t approve of him making a drum, he nevertheless gave him the keys to the workshop so that he could work on his drum project over the weekends. And thank the spirits that he did. I know that his clandestine support of his student has brought immeasurable riches to my life and to the lives of many others. Bikko Máhte’s life as a shaman had begun.
As I drummed, all of these stories presented themselves as images in my mind. I felt the pain of what we as humans have done to indigenous cultures and to the ancient practice of shamanism throughout the world. I felt that pain in my heart and I sang to the four directions, north, south, east and west. As I had been shown in my dream, I planted one of the small round mirrors facing outwards in each of the four directions and I called to the spirits of the elements that I had learned to associate with each direction. Then I spoke to the trees and the rocks and the spirits of the land and asked them to create a circle of protection around the perimeter of Bikko Máhte’s land. The mirrors were planted to do what mirrors do: to reflect back whatever came their way.
When I had completed the ritual and went back into the house, I was astonished to find that three hours had passed. I was tired from my work, but content. We ate and then it was time for me to pack my bags and return to the UK.
Before I left, I made sure that Bikko Máhte knew how grateful I was for all the years of support I’d received from him. I felt sure that we would see each other again. I had the sense that my journey with him had just turned a new corner. A whole new landscape lay ahead.