Deep within the cave I stood in front of the stone altar, staring at the mask. I really was having a hard time believing it, I could barely accept that what I was seeing was real. It was a heavy duty Bat Man replica mask, it appeared to be movie grade quality. Who in the world had put this mask here? What was it used for? How long had it been sitting here in this hidden cavern.
My first thought was that someone had put it there to play a joke on me. Everyone knew I was a huge Bat Man fan. I had even made the comment of "finding Bat Man's cave," when I had first came across the cave. I was silent when my two companions climbed up out of the hole and approached the stone altar. "Which one of you put the mask here," were the first words out of my mouth, to which they both replied to me, "what mask?" I was still not convinced that it had not been some sort of prank because of the comment I had made, but who would've been able to pull it off? My girlfriend would not have been able to come out and do it without me knowing and we hadn't shown the cave to anyone else yet. I took a lighter out of my pocket and lit a candle or two so that the mask was better illuminated. "This mask," I said flatly. My companions walked around me and shined their lights onto the table, saw the candles, saw the mask, and automatically burst out with excited laughs and profanities. "O.k. so when did you find the time to sneak back here and put this mask here?," is what basically what my girlfriend said. Edward made some comment or another about Witchcraft and covens that had been known to practice in hidden hollers between ridges and caves. I had been thinking something similar since the moment I had first seen then amount of candles sitting there on the altar. Something about the whole thing just wasn't adding up to me. Despite my confusion about the situation and still not quite believing that someone hadn't placed the mask there just for me, but I decided that I wasn't leaving this cave without that mask, that it was somehow meant for me. I took a step closer to the altar, I picked up the mask, and I put the mask on my face. An hour later we came out of the mouth of the cave and into the golden sunlight spilling down through the green leaves of the trees. Somehow I felt more empowered than I had ever felt in my entire life. It was a primal, tribal sort of feeling. I took the mask off my face and put it in my back pack and then we started the hike back to our camp.
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Roughly two weeks after discovering the large mouth of a Cave about a half mile inland from Norris Lake, in East Tennessee, I returned to the site with a back back of amateur gear that I had gathered up. My then girlfriend was with me, and so was one of her sons. We each had a flashlight and some spares in the bag as well as some rope, basic first aid, and possibly a couple of more items.
The cave was a hundred yards or so down a rocky slope from an old gravel road that lead to the lake, and up a couple hundred yards from a thin finger of the lake that a nearby farmers cows would drink from time to time. Inside of the mouth of the cave, which was big enough to fit a small house inside of it, the actual entrance to the cave sat low to the ground. The tunnel like opening was maybe 4 feet high and 7 or 8 feet wide which made it low enough that you had to sort of hunker down to fit and move without scraping the top of your scalp off. After moving inward about 200 yards or so the cave opened up into a large cavern with stalagtites and stalagmites all over. I was in awe as I had never seen the inside of a cave other than on TV and in pictures. As we slowly moved along the cave wound around in a sort of natural arc oriented layout. Each decent sized cavern lead way to another and then split apart to form more than one direction to move forward in several times. There were also several drop offs that needed to be avoided. When we reached the "back" of the cave system we took a short breather in what appeared to be a dead-end. If we hadn't sat down to smoke cigarettes before making the hour or so long trek back out of the cave I don't think I would have ever noticed the small black opening of a hole that sat even with the floor of the cave in one corner of the dead-end. I walked over and on one knee gazed into it's darkness. The hole was just wide enough for a person to fit through, shoulders and all, but only if they sort of did an "army-crawl," or laid down on their bellies and pulled themselves forward by their forearms. There was about 2 inches of water that filled the bottom of the hole. I had to know where it lead so I got down in it and began to move forward. I stopped about half way through, which was maybe 15 or 20 feet, and shining a light in front of my I could see a small opening that you could climb up and out of. I yelled back to let my companions know it was safe to follow if they wanted, that it wasn't a dead end. I pulled myself to the end of the passage and lifted myself up and out of the little hole. As soon as I was out I smacked my head sharply against a low point of the ceiling. I cursed and hollered down into the hole to "watch your heads when you come up and out!" but a few minutes later when as Edward came out of the hole he did the exact same thing I had done and began cursing as well. Looking back it was quite comical. The woman was the only one to leave the cave that even without a not on her head. The couple of minutes before my companions had made it through the little passageway I decided to have a look around. First shining my light all around the ceiling to make sure that I didn't run into anything else and knock my brains further out of my skull. There was plenty of head room, in fact the ceiling was quite high. The second thing that I noticed was that this was probably the smallest cavern we had been in yet, possibly the size of a large bedroom or living room. And then I saw it and hollered into the darkness behind me some excited profanity followed by, "You guys are not going to believe this!" Almost directly in the center of the room was an interesting out rock cropping in the shape of an oblong table. On this stone table were dozens upon dozens of various shaped sized and colored candles from tea lights, to votives, and large pillars. But it wasn't the almost perfectly shaped stone altar or the candles that sat on it that had caused me so much excitement. It was the heavy duty Bat Man mask that occupied the center of the space. If I could have seen my own face at that moment it would have been priceless. Confusion, excitement, disbelief, and something like shock and awe would all have been present at once. January 1st 2007 was the day that I first laid eyes on Tennessee. I had seen the upper parts of Appalachia that were Penn and WV, but never the regal green and blue ridges of East TN and West NC that I would come to know and even to consider my true home one day.
As circumstances would have it I had fallen in with the company of my Wiccan friend and her family. I was dating a relative of hers, as we had been room mates for around 5 months, and had made the move back to their home town in East TN together. I had driven the u-hual truck from Northern Indiana to Cambell County TN. I think it is safe to say that I was still somewhat lost and confused at this time of my life. It didn't help matters any that it was so hard to find work at the time, the town we set up in was very small and jobs were hard to find. I ended up spending more time with my young friend than I did with my partner at the time because she was barely around and deeper feelings developed between the two of us. To make a long story short, my partner and I ended up leaving the house we were renting and going out into nature for an extended stay after about 6 months into being there in TN. We were trying to decide whether to part ways or to repair the rift that had been developing. As for my Wiccan friend, I didn't see her for some time afterwards, it was probably 6 years later that we would meet again. Being out in nature for so long was the first time I had camped for more than a couple of days and I really began to "Get back" to nature. 3 months we stayed out there in the ridges a good 30 minute drive away from town on TVA property. A lot of my time was spent alone as my partner was still working and had an hour drive commute both ways. I was becoming attuned with nature. It was during this time that I first encountered a wolf in the nature. It was a large timber wolf and two puppies. I had come down out of the tree line and to the lake bank at the same time as the wolves did on the opposite bank. We sort of stared at each other for a minute or two and then went our separate ways. This is also the same time period I began noticing Ravens and Crows. One of the days my partner had off of work we were hiking and we came across the rather decent sized mouth of a cave. It was the first cave that I had ever seen. The first words out of my mother were, "We've found Batman's cave!" I wanted so badly to explore it right then and there and did start to venture in but it became to dark to see anything and I turned back, but only after vowing to come back as soon as possible with the basic but proper gear needed to explore it's depths. And that is what we did two weeks later. n the spring of 2004 I moved, with my high school sweetheart, back to my home State of Indiana. I had been born in Grant county but ended up living almost exclusively in Huntington county until I was 14 when I left my dads house to stay temporarily with a friend of the family who lived pretty far out in the country. I reckon would be a true statement to say that I was raised up in North East Indiana.
I find it funny how things come full circle from time to time. When I had left Indiana I didn't think I would ever be living with my dad again, but that is exactly what I did in 2004 and it turned out to be a more than enjoyable time. My dad was renting an old farmstead about 15 miles from town, the actual house was from the 1800's. Many many good memories were made that spring/summer. Soon enough Krystal and I had found and rented an apartment in town. Again, it is strange how things can turn a full circle. The apartment that we rented turned out to be one that my mom and dad had rented 20 years earlier, and to make things weirder one of my younger brothers ended up renting the apartment a few years later. Krystal was pregnant with our son Alexander during our 5 or 6 month stay at the rental. We had a falling out with the land lord and ended up moving around a bit during the final period of the pregnancy. During the last few months of the pregnancy while I was stressing out to make sure that our bills were paid, that she had everything she needed both for her and our son that was growing in her belly, I relied heavily on the religion that was still somewhat molded into my mind from childhood, Christianity. I didn't have the time to study, or seek as some might say, but I desperately held onto my spirituality as it helped me through the hardships I was enduring. Alexander was born on January 2nd, at the still somewhat new hospital off of old 24 in Huntington, and very shortly after that we ended up buying a mobile home right off of 24 in a little place called Roanoke. I worked a warehouse job picking and packing with my best friend from childhood Shawn who was staying with us in the room that was going to be Alex's one day. This is the point that things began to go downhill for Krystal and I. Life is a strange road sometimes and at this point in life I was about to experience one of those blind curves, it might have even been a double S curve, and I was going to experience the deepest pain I had ever felt to date in my life. I turned 21 May 31 2006 and that was probably the last day that I would be happy for seemed to be forever. Sometime during the next month things came to a head between Krystal and I and we called it quits, or to be rather honest, I told her it was not going to work out and to go on back to Maryland... and that is exactly what she did... taking Alexander with her. The next year is such a blur of darkness and memories best forgotten that I wont even bother getting into all of the details. I will say this though, I was definitely on a serious mission to destroy myself just to end the pain in my chest. I thought about Alex every single day to the point of being completely and totally consumed with far too many crippling emotions and dreary thoughts to function properly. I don't believe that I could ever possibly come close to accurately describing that sort of soul slaying pain, no, I know that I would never be able to paint that picture nor would I want to. The moral of the story is that during these times I completely lost my faith in the God I had been trying to cling to. No God could allow such misery and suffering to continue. No God could watch a man come a part so perfectly purposefully, so extremely methodical, so very blindly, so steadily needing of a Divine intervention or a sign, a man so steadily losing faith in himself and the entire world. No worthy God would watch this tragedy unfold and not step in, or at least send an angel or messenger offer a flickering light in this pitch black darkness, for a man who no longer cared about anything or anyone. My God had either abandoned me, had never cared for the well being of my soul... or he never existed in the first place. I was lost in oblivion. Lost in that deep dark void and It took me the longest time to even want to try to light a candle to see clearly once again. Part of me wanted to be saved, part of me did not. I had no anchor and I was not really looking for one either. I felt I deserved this somehow, I felt as if all the sorrow and misery in the world should belong to me and sit on my shoulders and plague my mind. It was in this place that I somehow found myself surrounded by other souls. Some were bright and I was drawn towards them, even began to feel something again other than the bitter cold numbness. Some were darker than the void itself and there energy alone was enough to make me spiral deeper into disrepair. There in that place even though I felt strangely frozen, like my very being was suspended and awaiting judgement from some supernatural force, I was somehow blessed to find a kindred spirit or two, one being a young priestess of Victor Anderson's Faery Wicca Tradition whom I become very close with over the next year. We took nature walks, we had long conversations until the stars came out, and I began to gain a basic knowledge of Wicca in general as well as developing the finely honed visual techniques of Victor's Tradition. I had found an anchor. When I was 16 years old, sometime during the fall of 2001, I first felt the calling to become a man of the cloth, or a preacher as I would have called it back then. I was starting to really feel my spiritual self come alive and I wanted others to experience that. At the time I had just kicked a habbit that had been trying to form over the past few months, getting shit face plastered by the end of every night, and so I somewhat knew what it was like to feel lost along the road of life. I knew it was hard to get straight, and I wanted to help others do that.
Ignoring the felling of being called to "spread the good news," or become a minister, I instead dove back into my studies, put a bit more focus towards school, and learned to regulate my intake of marijuana and alcohol so that it was not effecting my life in a negative way. This basically consisted of barely ever drinking and smoking much much less than I had been for the previous year. Turning 17 in the year 2002 is something I remember very well because it was then that I completed my first through-reading of the holy bible in its entirety, the old testament as well as the new testament, and then set aside many many hours to critically think about everything I had taken in in those months dedicated to reading this massive book. I went back and read many many passages dozens and dozens of times. Some things made perfect sense, some things didn't, but what made the most sense to me is that almost none of the Christian churches I had ever attended were teaching what I had discovered in that holy book. My faith in the religion was wavering but I wanted to be right with Jesus. Jesus was still my homie. I had to get to the bottom of this book and its messages so It was at this point that I went out and acquired every version of the bible I could, King James, New International Version, Gideons, The Study Bible, etc., and compared passages for differences in translation. I also went and acquired, mainly online, other extra-biblical texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, the Torah and anything else to do with Christianity that had real credentials. What I found was that I was coming up with more questions than answers for the most part. There were so many contradictions in the reading, so many things that didn't add up. Most of all, deep down inside my soul, something did not feel right about Christianity anymore. I now had formed some ideas about aliens, giants, high technology, magick the occult and a few more obscure sounding things that no Christians I had ever known had ever really spoken about in general, let alone when referring to bible verses or scripture. My mentor at the time would come by and see me from time to time because I had become sort of a shut-in, I was lost in my studies. I was also running a StarCraft clan at the time and had my 16 year old girlfriend living with me due to her situation. At one point my mom came and knocked on my bedroom door to check on me, she said she hadn't seen me for 2 weeks and that I looked white as a vampire. I find it as humorous now as I did then. During the talks that I had with my mentor, and a few select peers namely online, I began to have very theological discussions. History came up, the role of Jesus Christ came up, peoples individual takes on spirituality came up, most of all the Holy Bible came up and most specifically the passages that seemed to blatantly go against what the religion was preaching in their pulpits and on the television as well as scripture that seemed to indicate God being a race rather a being, alien technology, alien beings, ancient wars between other races and so much more. These conversations eventually led me to acquiring and reading large portions of other modern world religions' holy books such as the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Sutras, the Tibetan Book if the Dead, and several others. Some I read completely through, some I just read the supposedly most important areas, and others I glanced through and used for referencing. It was very eye opening study and research, by the time I was 18 I was teetering on the edge of no longer considering myself a Christian, or at least not what the modern Christians seemed to consider a believer. I felt as if much of what was in the bible was being misinterpreted in churches everywhere. That many of the true messages, the same messages found in other religions, were being twisted, looked over, or being singled out as Christian only. I now believed that blind faith was required because if others were to look as hard as I had looked at the holy book of the religion they would come up with severely different thoughts and ideas than those being professed to them by their preachers and parents. I decided to not completely count the religion I had been a part of since childhood out yet. I was to give it a last chance to redeem itself, after all I still felt a connection to Jesus Christ the person, even if I could not feel a connection to "his" church, and I was by this point in my life a deeply spiritual person. The biggest question on my mind now was: could I revive the true messages of Jesus Christ and spread them, minus all of the added mumbo jumbo from the church over the past centuries? If so I had thought, I would then proudly call myself a Christian. Perhaps I did need to become a Christian Minister after all, in order to straighten out societies twisted, or shallow at best, views of the Christs' message. I moved to Southern Maryland at the age of 15, it was the year 2000. My mother and her long lost boyfriend from overseas (they were both military brats) had reunited that year. I will never forget the drive there. I sat in the back of the 1985 fila addition ford thunderbird that my mom's man had the time, listened to metallica's ride the lightning cd on a discman, and stared hard and long out the window and the new scenery. It was the fall and the colors of leaves in the mountains of Penn, Wv, and MD were amazingly beautiful.
In Maryland the first place that we lived together as a family was in a townhouse on Hatfield court, in Waldorf. Behind the townhomes was a decent sized patch of woods for being in the city. There were trails all over those woods and I used them daily. One day will sitting on a bridge with a buddy of mine and packing a bowl, up the path came walking a guy I hadn't seen before. He approached the bridge and my buddy was a little nervous because this fellow was pretty big in size, and we were two white boys in a 90% black neighborhood. There was something about this guy though, I picked up on it right away, at the time I didn't realize it but I was feeling his energy and it felt very positive. I asked him if he smoked and he said yes. We sparked and a long intense conversation about everything from music, to lifestyles, to religion and spirituality followed. This was someone I could enjoy talking to, I had no idea that he would become my first Shamanic mentor and that a deep and life long friendship would develop between the two of us. I began hanging out with this fellow and gradually more and more he became my go to guy in the neighborhood, and at that point in life in general, and we began to develop a mutual trust, a mutual respect, and a mutual friendship. Hiking was a daily thing for us. Quests across the town, more often than not in the search of herb, we also become drinking buddies. All in all we began spending many hours a day together, at our homes and out in nature as well. It was during these first years that I began to have my spiritually conscious mind opened to things other than the ordinary black and white of Christianity. It was also in these first few years that I began to develop a serious interest and fascination not only with Shamanic beliefs and practices, but with the study of other cultures as well. Their history, their belief systems, their religions and spiritual practices, and anything else I could learn along these lines from both mainstream and less well known religions. Well, well, well... I finally managed to get this blog set up. Time to start writing! Thanks for checking me out.
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December 2018
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