#8. Kachina Visions and the Expansion of Cultural Identity
By Gabriel Hartley
Introduction
For this Substack Post I have chosen the text of an essay of mine that appeared in A Journal of Contemporary Shamanism in 2014 (NOTE: the link is to a PDF file). This essay covers a wide range of fields of interest that I plan to pursue in this Substack project, a primary one here being the intersection of shamanism, mysticism, indigenism, politics, and telepathic spirit communication. My engagement with the Kachinas—or Katsinas—lasted for about two years, and I have yet to put the full scope of those experiences together in one place. Perhaps this is a step in that direction! As always, whatever this triggers or stimulates in you as you read through my accounts and exposition, I trust that the experience will serve you well. Enjoy!
“Stupid fucking white man!” This line, uttered frequently by the character Nobody (played by Cayuga actor Gary Farmer) and directed at the naïve Euroamerican Clevelander-turned-Southwesterner William Blake (Johnny Depp) in the movie Dead Man, functions as a cue for viewers to identify with the indigenous perspective of Nobody that permeates much of the film’s humorous atmosphere. In a similar way, mixed-race Laguna writer Paula Gunn Allen elicits reader sympathy when she argues in her book Off the Reservation that some Anglo-Americans perceive “the Southwest . . . as a major loitering place for spiritual trekkers, featuring . . . cliff dwellings in exotic locales where UFOs, Native gods, and spirits still sing and weep among the magnificent ruins of Chaco, Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and Canyon de Chelly” (228-29).
As it turns out, after several years working as an academic-activist for native causes and concepts during which time I have challenged (and continue to) the appropriation of cultural rituals and artifacts, I now find myself evoking and otherwise communing with UFOs, “Native” gods, and spirits as they still sing among the magnificent ruins of Chaco, Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and Canyon de Chelly. So before elaborating on the details concerning popularized notions about Kachinas and then my own revelations in “exotic” locales such as Chaco Canyon and Athens, Ohio, I should first address the question that immediately came to my mind when I was contacted by Kachinas: How can I present this material to the public without appearing to be participating in five hundred years of genocide and colonial erasure of North American indigenous cultures? Given that “Kachina” is a Hopi word, how might I avoid the impression that I am stealing something from the Hopi and other Pueblo cultures and playing Indian when I report on my own interactions with beings identifying themselves to me as Kachinas?
And as it turns out, the Kachinas who have contacted me have indeed had much to say regarding these issues and concerns. In fact, their primary message to me is that the time has come for humanity at large to recognize its affiliation with all natural and extra-natural spirits of this planet and beyond. In fact, human survival depends on just such a recognition of our place in the ecosphere and the larger cosmos. The Kachinas—I will write “the” Kachinas throughout this work in reference to the specific group of Kachina spirits who have addressed me, while I recognize that generally the term refers to a much wider range of spirit entities—the Kachinas insist that their original intention was to come to work with humanity in general, and that they have appeared to many different peoples and have gone by many different names throughout the existence of the human experiment on this planet over the course of the past four “worlds” or eras of evolutionary development. And now as we enter the transition into the “Fifth World” (to be explained more fully below), we as a species must simultaneously recognize our kinship with all beings—including all humans. Their mission, the Kachinas say, is ecumenical and universal.
The recognition that all humanity is one does not in any way erase the fact that the colonial practices of domination and extinction continue to this day. And such practices still need to be identified and recognized as we travel along such empire-building routes as the Lewis and Clark Trail in our communion with the spirits of this continent and beyond. That I have such easy access to ancient sites such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde is due to the fact that these sacred sites are now under the control of the very government that has led the processes of native genocide for several centuries now. But in the same gesture I must acknowledge that entities such as Kachinas came and continue to come to work with all humans, not just certain groups of humans. The spirits themselves do not discriminate according to human social categories. For what the Kachinas are talking about is the unification of planetary consciousness and intention as the primary task in this period of transition. This consciousness must include respect for individual differences as well as universal ties.
So the short and straight answer is that I, for one, have no interest in playing Indian. Nor do I have any interest in playing Celt, despite my biological and cultural Irish-American ancestry and my resonance with the spirits most often associated with the Irish landscape (ah! the Hill of Tara!)—although I do find myself resonating with certain themes developed by earth-spirit-centered cultures such as American Indians, Celts, Sami, and more. When seen from the distance of the stars, such cultural differences among humans on this planet shrink in significance. When seen from the perspective of inter-species and inter-entity community, wherein humans interact with elves and water spirits and Arcturans and Kachinas, the conventional distinctions among humans recede from the forefront—although they do not thereby disappear in terms of human practice and consciousness. I have been capable of fostering my own cosmic planetary awareness without having to appropriate anyone else’s culture or practices. In the end, as defensive as it sounds, it is the Kachinas who came to me and not the reverse. And while my first conscious interaction with Kachinas occurred at Chaco Canyon (for whatever symbolic reasons), they continue on a daily basis here at my home in Ohio—another ancient sacred spirit landscape. In the words of the Kachinas after my Kachina Christ Vision (described below), just as “Christ” exceeds Christianity, the “Kachina” exceeds indigenous expressions of it.
The fact that I follow no specific cultural tradition at all but rather work fairly idiosyncratically under the supervision of spirit guides raises the question not whether I am too closely aligned to another culture’s traditions but rather whether I am aligned with any recognizable tradition at all. Can such a spontaneous arising of practice even be called shamanic? Where, after all, are my elders? Under whose tutelage was I initiated? How might my meditative and spirit-channeling practices be conceived in conventional contemporary or traditional shamanic terms? But if we define shamanic practice generally as the visionary traveling to the Imaginal Realm (or Underworld—which for me most often appears as a glowing Etheric double of our “usual” three-dimensional world) to engage with spirit entities who might provide the traveler with wisdom and medicine to carry back to his or her community, then my experiences of the past years are indeed shamanic, despite their having occurred according to spontaneous rather than cultural impulses. In my Kachina Christ Vision below, for example, I was led by spirit guides (those Kachinas) on a journey of initiation through the portal of Christ’s wounds to a dimension beyond ordinary experience and understanding where I was given certain truths that I—despite my not being a Christian in any recognizable sense—then brought back to share with the multitude of humans and other entities with whom I constantly engage. This essay itself is part of that quest—a quest that involves expanding our categories of understanding so that we might see the larger implications or weavings-together of our terminology, whether those terms refer to entities or cultures or practices.
Conventional Definitions of Kachinas and Related Topics
For the Hopi of Arizona as well as many Pueblo cultures of New Mexico, the Kachinas are spirit representatives who, among other things, serve as guides for humans as they undergo their evolutionary dramas of development as a species, learning through practical and visionary experiences how best to embrace the human and extra-human relationships on this planet. The Kachina dances (in which masked ceremonial dancers are inhabited by particular Kachinas) and Kachina dolls (which reportedly serve as educational tools to accustom children to the particular aspects of the spirit world) are the most common public expressions of human and Kachina exchanges. Many of these spiritual exchanges in indigenous ceremonies take place out of public—and especially nonindigenous—view, so the true nature of the Kachinas is generally enveloped in an air of mystery.
A key parallel to the story of Planetary evolution being offered to me is the Puebloan account of Emergence. An extended popular account of the Hopi understanding of the various stages of Emergence is Frank Waters’s Book of the Hopi. When humans were originally created in the First World, they were granted a pristine wisdom by which “they understood that the earth was a living entity like themselves” (7). “But gradually there were those who forgot the commands of Sótuknang and the Spider Woman to respect their Creator. More and more they used the vibratory centers solely for earthly purposes, forgetting that their primary purpose was to carry out the plan of Creation” (12), and as a result of this and other signs of visionary degeneration, Sótuknang decided to destroy the world and create a new one once certain chosen people were led underground to live with the Ant People (15).
The Emergence story is also a key element of Diné (or Navajo) cosmology. According to the Diné creation myth (see Diné Bahane’), we currently exist in the Fifth World after the earth and its inhabitants (above and below) had undergone four previous manifestations. An important additional aspect of the Diné description of creation and the subsequent stages of Emergence is that it began with the creation of the Holy Wind—a notion I elaborate on in my visionary experiences below. James Kale McNeley, in Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, explains that “Holy Wind gives life, thought, speech, and the power of motion to all living things and serves as the means of communication between all elements of the living world” (1).
Definitions Offered to Me
The significance of my own Kachina experiences, I have come to learn, involves the recognition that Kachinas, as with other spirit entities, are here to guide humans universally, despite the fact that they have historically only been recognized by certain indigenous cultures. I wish to stress here that my own experience did not involve any direct connection to indigenous ceremonies and that I know of no other records of experiences of the Kachinas in their Christ aspect (although I assume this has occurred previously and that I am simply ignorant of such stories).
The particular Kachinas I have been introduced to represent a particular class of deva hybrids whose particular task on this planet is to oversee the evolution of the Planetary Being in terms of the relationships between highly conscious beings such as humans and their kin in their environment— to orchestrate entity energies in terms of the Planetary Evolution. This in itself covers a vast area of existence and activity. It is important for humans to grasp that their own role on this planet is one of aiding in the Planetary Evolution. This is why the souls who have taken human form have agreed to be here during this period that in human terms covers vast aeons of time. One existing culture to have some sense of the temporal scope involved here is the Vedic culture. The traditional Hopi have a sense of this as well.
These Kachinas have played a role in overseeing the development of humans in particular as they make one attempt after another to adapt themselves psychically and energetically to the task before them. This process has been recorded in Hopi mythology, for example, in terms of the various Worlds of human development—the shifts from the First World through the Fourth World and now onto the Fifth World.
Four Kachina Engagements
1—Chaco Canyon
My conscious engagement with these Kachina spirits began on August 25, 2013 when my wife, Anna, and I “journeyed” together in a secluded room of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. As I entered the etheric dimension of the site, a spirit identified him or herself as a Kachina and then led me on a fantastic visionary journey through the structure and functions of the kiva. The vision primarily concerned relationships between inner and outer dimensions and the importance of the circular kiva structures in maintaining the spiral flow of the Holy Wind. The elements of this vision later became crucial for my Kachina Christ vision at Chimayó (discussed below).
While visually I experienced hallucinatory energetic ecstatic flows punctuated by spoken messages, conceptually I experienced the following: One of the primary lessons taught to the earlier inhabitants of Chaco involved the universal sacred formula for understanding the relationships between interdimensional realms: As Above, So Below; As Within, So Without. As with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the peoples who inhabited the Chaco region were instructed in these principles, which came to guide their way of life and its manifestations, especially the ceremonial structures referred to as kivas.
The first structural element of the ancient kiva to attend to is its circularity. The circle provides for the optimal flow of Holy Wind and Consciousness (see McNeley). The Sacred Breath, one manifestation of the Holy Wind, enters the circular chamber through the vent that opens behind the stone deflector. The deflector distributes the Sacred Breath in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions throughout the room. This represents the Sacred Breath from the Heavens as it drops down from above and provides the inhabitants of the room with oxygen and other necessities of life (most of which remain unacknowledged in western culture’s conceptualizations of the function of breathing). The fifth chakra of the human, then, undergoes a transformative charge from the Sky Beings through this circulation of Holy Wind.
The sipapu, alternatively, functions as the Earthly Doorway, the obverse of the Heavenly Doorway, representing the Emergence of humans and other entities from the Underworlds. The spirit currents rising from the sipapu emanate a creative disturbance in the circulation of the Holy Wind exhaled by the Sky Beings. In other words, a circular horizontal channel of Winds is disturbed by the vertical emergence of the Earth Spirits through the sipapu.
The circulations within the kiva chamber, then, engage and unify the elemental forces from Above and Below (As Above, So Below). But this formula also applies to the more “fractal” nature of these relationships to the extent that this circular swirling disturbance is reproduced throughout all dimensions of the Cosmos. The skies above the planet exhibit similar processes of spiral circulations of Holy Wind. Just such a process also occurs in the Underworlds.
The lesson also involves the principle of As Within, So Without. This notion is manifest in the fact that the human head is itself another kiva chamber. Through breathing and other physical and etheric processes of exchange, the human head functions as a kiva chamber within which the identical “magical” processes take place as in the physical stone and dirt structures. Each human carries in his or her own physical body a Sacred Temple—the head. (The heart also serves this purpose, but this point was elaborated on in the future.) This means that every human head serves as the chamber for engaging with Kachina and other spirit entities. The Holy Wind circulates within the human head just as it does within the stone kiva chamber.
At this point the spirits had activated my visionary potentials—what some people refer to as DMT activation. The stucco walls that converged in the corner in which Anna sat began to swirl and to “breathe.” I was told that this was no mere visual illusion. The walls around us two were in fact moving in and out in breathing motions. The entire cosmos participates in the Sacred Breath, as can be seen in visionary engagement with any natural object, such as trees, stones, skies, and bodies of water.
Anna’s face was also undergoing the same kind of visual alterations and hallucinatory flow of colors, shadows and lights, and breathing motions. Her face lit up with the Sacred Light, a light that grew ever brighter as each second passed until her entire body emitted a brilliant yellow-white light with an inner bluish glow—a light within a light. She was immersed in the Holy Wind itself, enveloped by the Sacred Breath of the Cosmos. I then recognized just how conscious she was of this phenomenon herself (as she later corroborated verbally when we shared our visionary experiences).
Having recognized that each of us was traveling on parallel paths during this vision, we began toning (chanting). I was later told that this involved a recalibration of our fifth chakras. We were re-acquainting ourselves with pastlife experiences of the mechanics of the Sacred Breath and the manifesting capacities of the Sacred Tone. This is how Kokopelli came to enter into our lesson, as the conductor of the sacred Vibration of Song Manifestation.
2—Kachina Christ Vision
On the following day (August 26), still very much under the influence of the previous shamanic Kachina encounter, I was asked to participate in another visionary and energetic experience with them, an experience that they referred to as my Kachina Christ Vision. It was, they explained, an important elaboration on these visionary lessons of my day at Chaco.
The Santuario at Chimayó, an early-Nineteenth Century Spanish chapel, is built over a sacred healing spring nestled in gorgeous canyon terrain. Soon after arriving there I began to sense an overwhelming grief coming over me. I was reminded of the extreme sense of grief I felt the day before at Chaco Canyon, a grief expressing the emotional residue of some tragedy predating the Spanish invasion. In years past I had felt grief at Chimayó, but had always taken this to be in response to the deaths of my sons Dylan and Jesse ten years ago. But this time the grief at Chimayó felt very anonymous, unattached to me, as if it were part of the Astral Plane of the site. The whole complex contains a store of unprocessed grief going back to early indigenous time. It also expresses the grief of those whose prayers appear to have gone unanswered.
After visiting the famous Holy Dirt Shrine, we entered the Chapel from the front door. The pilgrims were chanting Hail Marys, the Lord’s Prayer, and songs in Spanish and English. Still moved by the site’s sorrow-effect, Anna and I sat in a moving emotional swirl as we listened to the singers. I felt myself “going etheric,” as my spirit guides call it, and then realized that the Kachinas were addressing me again to elaborate on the lesson of the day before at Pueblo Bonito concerning the consciousness of the role and dynamics of the Holy Wind.
The Kachinas began a new lesson at Chimayó, explaining that the images of Christ behind the altar also functioned as a pictorial embodiment of this Holy Wind. “How is that?” I asked, and they said, “Look at his wounds.” As I did so, I began to see long beams of bright light shooting from each of Christ’s wounds, first from the abdomen, then the right hand, then the left hand, the feet together, and finally the ring of head wounds caused by the crown of thorns. I suddenly felt myself captured by and sucked into the light streaming from the right hand wound. My entire energy body was itself lit up and energized as I was slowly drawn closer and closer to the wound opening out from the flesh of the hand. I was then suddenly sucked right through the wound and out into another dimension on the other side of Christ’s hand.
I had passed through the wound and into another level of existence. This dimension opened out onto a landscape of light, with rich orange-yellow glows as the atmospheric medium. I then saw a spiral of bright white light—the same light that I had seen shooting from the wounds—as it wound itself around and around Christ’s body, which I saw as if I were standing just slightly behind his right arm, facing the backward direction, a point from which I could see Christ’s ribs curve round to his back. The light spiral formed the same spiral image that has so caught my attention in Ireland and in the U.S. Southwestern indigenous sacred sites. I could see that in this dimension the light curving from one hand wound into the other, forming a ring of light around Christ’s body (and my own, now that I was standing at his side), whereas in our normal everyday dimension the light shoots out in straight lines.
I was told that this spiraling energy was the primary energetic nature of the Kachina Christ. (For a Celtic framing of the spiral energies, see MacEowen.) At this point, I believe, I then saw the rays of light that were streaming from his head wounds as they formed rays of the solar disk that is represented in so much sacred art, the halo circling Christ’s head as an image of the Son’s/sun’s brilliance. This then became a three-dimensional sphere of intertwining rays, with Christ’ head (and my body) encircled within the light sphere. We were wrapped up together by the spiral of light. Christ then began flying through the skies with me still bound up in his light rays. I felt the most beautiful, intensely moving warmth shooting through my body and I realized that in the everyday dimension, where I was still sitting in the Santuario Chapel, I was crying, tears streaming down my face as I sat looking at the Christ image in utter ecstasy.
Later as we dropped down from the mountains into Rancho de Taos, we decided to go see the famous San Francisco de Asís Mission Church.
Unexpectedly, I found myself swept away in visionary fervor yet again as I saw the retablos of Christ and the Saints and Angels. My Kachina Christ vision kicked back in gear as I was hearing a rehearsal of some of the themes from the original vision in Chimayó. I never could have imagined how surprised we would be, though, when we turned around and started walking back outside. As we walked towards the main door we saw above it a mural of the stigmatization of St. Francis. It turned out that his vision was almost identical to mine! There was the flying Christ with beams shooting from his wounds, but in his case the beams were broadcasting the blood rather than the spiral light of Christ. Each blood ray penetrated the hands, feet, etc., of St. Francis as he fell to his knees in awe. I had never seen or heard of this image before in my life, and now in less than three hours I had my own vision in Chimayó and then its stigmatic repetition here in Rancho de Taos. I started crying on the spot, this being about the fourth or fifth time for the day.
Later that evening the kachinas returned to explain that, just as in Ireland, the image of the spiral functions in the U.S. Southwest as a powerful talisman and learning key for human consciousness, capturing on many levels at once the multilayered and multidimensional levels of existence. If we join the Spiral and the Sacred Wind, we then have a tool for unraveling the infinite layers of existence for cognitive understanding and experiential knowledge. I was told that the term “Kachina” as it is currently used is simultaneously overgeneralized in that it covers a wide range of entities (with the specific group that first identified themselves as Kachina long ago now lumped in with all sorts of spirit entities) and yet not generalized enough to include the reality that many other cultures have encountered this original specific group, but in very different terms. Each of those cultures has its own way of imagining and representing what and who these spirits are for them. And one key example of this is the Kachina Christ.
The primary point of my visionary experience in Chimayó was the recognition that Christ goes far beyond “Christ”—in ways very similar to those examined by Matthew Fox in his works such as The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. In other words, the spiritual experience referred to as Christ by most Christians and non-Christians alike is identical in potential to certain Kachina experiences. My experience of the Christ yesterday was of the Christ in its Kachina aspect. I had been led by spirit guides on a journey of initiation through the portal of Christ’s wounds to the dimension beyond ordinary experience and understanding where I was given certain truths concerning the universally potential experience of the spiral energies of the Sacred Winds and Lights, energies that in a fractal way manifest themselves on many layers and in many dimensions simultaneously. They clarified their earlier point on the human head as the the kiva chamber by adding that through this kiva-head the Sacred Winds bring forth the experience called Kachina, the experience called Christ when the Christ experience is fully understood in its depths—beyond “Christianity.” As expressed earlier, Christ exceeds Christianity; the Kachina exceeds indigenous expressions of it. These culturally-specific experiences weave in and out of themselves and each other, forming an intricate web of human and extra-human relationships. This is the whole point of the Sacred Wind Kachina experience: To engage the infinite Web of Existence in its universal immediacy.
Like some Kachinas, the Christ Being has always been conceived as an agent of aeonic change, as an avatar of Divine Being whose role is to provide humans with the incentive to undergo a final psychic and energetic shift as this Age comes to a close. In western terms this change involves the shift from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age, the shift from the Piscean water being to the Aquarian water bearer. This is an important symbolic shift in terms of preparing the consciousness of the humans of the Fourth World to take on their new role as the bearers of the womb of existence.
This insistence on reconceiving the Christ Being in terms of its Kachina nature serves many purposes: first, the Christ Being is a Kachina in this sense, as the guide for the ongoing evolution of the human species as they shift from one age to another. The term “Kachina” presents certain difficulties when taken in its general sense as the Hopi term for spirit entity. Yet the Kachinas emphasize that when they first presented themselves to the earlier forms of the Hopi cultures, they called themselves Kachina then. Over time the term became universalized to refer to spirit in general. In this way they as a specific subgroup of the devic kingdom became associated with the spirit world generally. This happened with many different entities who at first appeared to humans as particular species under a specific name only to become generalized with other like entities. The term “fairy” is a good example of this, or the term “Sídhe,” Elves, Tonttu, Hiisi, etc.
I was drawn through the wound of Christ into the infinite ecstatic joy of the light beyond all suffering, the light of joy that is the other side of suffering. We all suffer, the Kachinas explained, and thereby we all are one. In this Oneness, we are all united. In this Unity we experience the joy of existence. We ourselves are the particular point where sorrow and joy become manifest and express themselves through the Infinite Universal Particularity of Existence.
3—The Lamine Valley (Subterranean—People from Below)
I first learned about the People Below just before Thanksgiving 2013 during a drive from Kansas to Ohio, a trip I take each month that often involves spontaneous visits to various ancient mound sites, such as Cahokia in Illinois or Chillicothe in Ohio. I was car camping in a beautiful spot in central Missouri near the cliffs of the Missouri River when I was told by a group of spirit guides I frequently communicate with, especially during this lonely fourteen-hour drive through the sacred heartland of North America, to expect some new information during my drive east on the next day.
Sure enough, before I had even gone five miles my spirit guides announced that the spot I was driving across—one of several places where the Missouri River crosses Interstate Highway 70—was above a massive subterranean hyper-dimensional system of caverns and tunnels. Being a visual dowser—I can “see” various power points and energy formations in the landscape—I suddenly was able to make sense of the mass energy phenomenon that I had always known lay beneath the surface of this part of the continent. As if this discovery weren’t mind-altering enough, I was then told that these subterranean caverns are inhabited by a race of humanoids that I would be interacting with. At this moment I was simply told that they exist on a dimensional plane that humans on the surface of the planet rarely experience, given their habit of existing in three-dimensional space and time. Nevertheless, with the right training and energetic transformation, surface humans could begin to travel and engage with these subterranean humanoids.
The Underworld is truly the Underworld, I learned, and we are currently coming into contact with Beings who continue to live under the surface, in the Subterranean chambers in a different dimensional existence that is reached via various portals. While these Beings are of a different dimension than surface humans, they are nevertheless capable of passing through portals located at specific points on the surface of the globe. Surface humans are helping in the early stages of this new Emergence into what the Hopi, among others, refer to as the Fifth World.
A foundational principle for imagining such a process is that communication is itself an energetic event, the production and maintenance of particular frequencies that allow for specific modes of communication acts. A subsequent principle is that once humans become fully conscious of this fact and then more versatile in their abilities to act on such principles, they can serve as the necessary energetic portals that allow for the Emergence process to take place. The humans on the surface of the Earth can serve as the bridge, in other words, for the transformation of those humanoids from below as they enter into the new Earth configuration referred to as the Fifth World. My own experience and education on such matters involves telepathic modes of contact. Given that I have not yet found other humans participating in this project—although I am assured that such other humans exist out there—my account that follows will necessarily be based on my own experiences and investigations.
I was caught quite off guard when I myself was first approached to provide such a telepathic bridging frequency of communication. Yet I found myself communicating with a conference of extra-human entities through an energetic mode that shot through my entire body and sent my consciousness off into space—not only off into space, but down into the Earth, into the hidden subterranean passageways that serve as the primary means of travel for this species of humanoids now preparing for their prophesized Emergence into our world. Into a world that will itself be dramatically so transformed as to be, in effect, a new world altogether—the Fifth World that will be the result of the transformation of this our Fourth World after its transition is made possible in part by this Emergence of these People Below. Each day I am finding myself involved in some new unexpected form of energetic transmission whereby my entire being is lit up in communicative response.
I now find myself “speaking” through images, musical sounds, light streams, and energy flows in modes that carry far more content and precision than anything I could write to you right here on this page. And I now find myself realizing that this new-found means of communication serves a new-found purpose: To speak as a translator of sorts for a class of humanoids who themselves are unaccustomed to such a relationship except with a very few individuals across a vast stretch of human time—throughout what the Hopi refer to as the Fourth World.
4—The Kachina Portal in Athens, Ohio
The Kachinas, I have learned, have a long-standing presence in and relationship to what is now called Ohio and the surrounding Ohio Valley region. On December 6, 2013 I was contacted by these Kachinas. They normally visit my wife and me at what we refer to as the Third Portal on our property. On this day the Kachinas contacted us to introduce us to yet another class of beings—the Ant People, whom I had just read about the night before in the Book of the Hopi. (The Book of the Hopi, the Kachinas have explained, is a fruitful source, but one that must read symbolically and cautiously, more as an expression of energetic alignment rather than simple fact.)
The Ant People led us through a stunning energetic introduction to the People Below as we entered into the frequencies of their etheric and mental bodies, just as they did ours. This experience of phantasmagoric visions and energy rushes throughout our being lasted for about five minutes. Three nights later, while meditating, I found myself addressed telepathically by the People Below themselves. They said that they chose to remain below with the Ant People in order to maintain a human presence on a subterranean level so that they could monitor the stages of the Planetary Evolution from an Inner Dimension. They then explained that a massive shift in the Earth’s fundamental energetic structure is now occurring that expresses itself on the physical plane in the form of tectonic shifts and increased volcanic activity. Current human practices such as fracking and nuclear technologies are producing such a profound energetic shift in the planet that the balance of things is now at great risk. The energetic frequency that humans operate within in order to engage in such self-destructive activities stands to throw the frequencies of the planet out of alignment. In other words, humans are giving off not so much unhealthy toxins but unstable vibrations. And such a state of being signals the onset of the passage from the Fourth World to the Fifth. This is one reason why the People Below are emerging now. And it is the job of some of us “Fourth World” humans to serve as travel guides of a sort in order to facilitate this Emergence. Moreover, it is our task as humans right now to learn how to harmonize our frequencies with those of the planet as our part in this transition. This kind of energetic shift provides the other concerned entities throughout the multiverse with evidence of humanity’s ability and willingness to contribute in the literal changing of our world.
Conclusion: Spiral Visions and Universality
On the morning of December 16, 2013, as my wife Anna and I were doing our usual pranayama breath sequence, I got to the second stage of the verbal instructions where I normally say that it’s time for the “Spiral Breath.” This morning I felt inspired to add specific details and ended up saying, “Spiral Breath, focusing on the Celtic and Hopi Spirals.” As soon as I said this, one of my spirit guides corrected me, saying, “It’s not simply the Celtic or Hopi Spiral. The Spiral symbol is universal and has been granted to cultures of all times and places!” This is in line with the message I have been receiving since my initial communication with the Kachinas.
At the time of our travels in the U.S. Southwest mentioned above, I was struck by the coincidence of the presence of the Spiral symbol etched in stones there and those had seen in Ireland just two months before in June. I was getting the clear sense that this was not at all accidental but a true coincidence in the root sense of incidents happening in direct relation to one another, things that were co-incident.
The larger point concerning the Spiral that my spirit guide wished to emphasize, beyond what the Spiral symbolizes, was the fact that various human groups at different times and places have been receiving the exact same symbolic images—and neither was this a coincidence in the popular sense. Anna and I were being drawn to the image itself for very specific reasons. As the Kachinas had made clear in August, the Spiral represents, among other things, the circulation of the sacred winds, including the breath. The ceremonial kivas, I was told, are intended to take advantage of and even to stage the expression of these sacred winds. And this symbolic relationship between the concept-experience of the sacred winds and the Spiral image is a universal expression that goes beyond the limits of any specific cultural symbolic system.
Again, the Kachinas and elves have stressed that certain symbolic terms and features should not be strictly associated with a specific culture. No individual person or culture can claim ownership of a particular image. This fact is important not just in terms of universal transcultural access but also in terms of an expansive notion of identity. This expansive notion of identity is related to the idea of universal symbols in that we need to stop imagining that one particular thing is what it is because it has some stable and unique core identity based on specific attributes. In fact, all things are far more mobile and plastic than we normally assume—as Buddhists have been contending for centuries. Each thing is at any moment the result of a specific constellation of frequencies and energies. So our notion of identity should be much more mobile and flexible in order to take this range of constellations into account. There is great power in names, and so such names should be approached with great flexibility. What these beings who call themselves Kachinas are calling on us to do now is to listen to their messages and respond to their energies with an open mind and an open heart.
Works Cited
Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation. Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1999.
Fox, Matthew. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance. San Francisco: Harper, 1988.
Hartley, Gabriel. “Kachina Visions and the Expansion of Cultural Identity.” A Journal of Contemporary Shamanism 7.2 (Fall 2014): 14-21.
MacEowen, Frank. The Spiral of Memory and Belonging: A Celtic Path of Soul and Kinship. Novato, California: New World Library, 2004.
McNeley, James Kale. Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1981.
Waters, Frank. Book of the Hopi. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Zolbrod, Paul G. Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984.