This interview with Inni
Baruch first appeared in PagaNet
News (PNN), in the Imbolg 2001 issue (Volume VIII, Issue I). It was later
reprinted in the Winter 2001 issue of Connections Journal, a magazine published
by CUUPS.
Speaking with Victor Anderson
by
Inni Baruch
On a recent trip to San Francisco
I had the great fortune of spending several days with Victor and Cora Anderson
in their home on the Barbary Coast. I had been introduced to Cora's book, Fifty
Years in the Feri Tradition, five or six years ago, through my work fundraising
for the Reclaiming Tradition Witchcamp in the Mid-Atlantic. This wonderful week
of working Between the Worlds is now called the Spiralheart Witchcamp and it happens
in August of each year near Baltimore and Washington DC.
A
linguist, as much as a Witch, Scientist, and Shaman, Victor can talk for hours
about the things of this world, and other worlds that I do not see, where he travels
frequently in the astral body.
It is
on the nature of the human being that I am most interested, and so the notes I
have taken on his talks with me, relate mostly to these questions.
This
text is directly approved by Victor for publishing and this is very important.
While not yet an Initiate of Feri. I deeply respect the work of my teachers Victor
and Cora Anderson and am grateful to bring this small capsule of their vast knowledge
to PNN readers.
After we spoke back
and forth, and I scribed his words, Victor asked me to give you this footnote
for pronouncing the words of his Hawaiian language.
The
Hawaiian vowels are the same as those in many other languages. They are "a"
as in father; "e" as in they; "i" as in police; "o"
as in so; and "u" as in zulu or the double "o" in moon. In
the diphthongs the first vowel is the one accented usually unless there's a small
dash over the last vowel. This mark is usually called macron and indicates a stressed
vowel.
FROM VICTOR: One of the things that
I want understood about the Spanish part of my heritage is that there are four
racial strains: Arabic, Jewish, Gypsy and Basque. Now, I use Basque in a lot of
my rituals. Like the prayer that starts Eko, Eko Azarak..... which you
can find in a lot of the books on Witchcraft. There are two translations of that
incantation. One of them is cleverly woven together so that it tells the names
of our Gods, the other one tells about the festivals and their times of the month
and so forth. All of those words in there, tell the names of the Gods but, at
the same time they tell other things too, that's the way the Basque language can
be done. For example Eko means "here is." And martillo
is a Basque word taken from the Spanish which means "press down and go into"
and it can also mean the first day of March; in Spanish alone it means "hammer."
The Arabic part of my heritage that has come
through Arabia into Southern Spain, (one branch went to Sicilia) is of royal origin,
and it must be understood, with all of my national origins I am directly related
to the Feri People. I am not old fashioned, I am very much of the new millennium.
I spent my childhood in close contact with the medicine people of Mexico, and
the people who ran away from the Nazis. These people took me to their heart. They
were the real old German Jewish Scientists, and I know what I'm talking about.
There is a disgusting Streisfragen
thing that happens when you try to talk to people about some things. Streisfragen
is German and it means a controversial question or statement that is used to end
a discussion like the question "how do you know?" This is like when
they say, "everybody's got to believe what they want to believe, you can't
change people's opinions, everybody's got a right to their own opinion."
This is B.S. Why bother to teach anything if everybody's got their own opinion?
An example would be I once told another person that I had made the estimate at
186,300 miles per second for the speed of light, the usual figure is simply 186,000.
We know by radar for example that light travels faster than 186,000 miles per
second. When I finished my argument I was told that "you have just as much
right to your opinion as they have to theirs, why don't you just write that as
the speed of light." That's ridiculous. We are all working on the velocity
of "C" which is the velocity of light. Trying to get it as exact as
possible, it's not just a matter of personal opinion.
I
am a little P.O.'d at all the Pagan People. For example they are taking these
things like the Guardians of the Four Quarters, and they're twisting up the meaning.
The Guardians that come to your circle are simply the Holy Ones that come to your
circle, the Gods, and the Spirits who are everywhere. They come and join your
circle and They invoke the great cosmic powers and the great Gods.
It
doesn't lessen the meaning or the importance of the great Gods, but what they
(the Guardians) are there for is invoking the things that we cannot. They invoke
the great Gods themselves, just as we humans do, yet they are much older than
us, and they have more knowledge of these things.
We
are free to invoke as they do because we are all of the Great Spirit/Cosmic Conscious.
It's just as if someone were singing and you were joining along with the choir.
These Gods and Spirits are living parts of nature, they are beings like ourselves.
We
are supposed to advance because evolution is the natural law. However, many people
are making a mistake when speaking about God. All that this word meant in the
beginning is "that which is to be reverenced and worshiped." It never
meant just one single dictator being.
Mana.
This is the life force. It comes from us as living creatures. Just to call it
energy is not enough. It's got to be understood as a definite thing, a definite
substance.
Now this word is not only confined
in the South Seas, it occurs all over the world, even in the bible. It's supposed
to have another meaning in the bible, but it comes from the same word. The mana
that falls from the heavens actually comes down from the personal God. We send
the mana up to the God, and it sends it back down to us. Sure, when we pray to
our personal God, we are not leaving out any of the great Gods. Each one of us
is a triune being. It's like tuning a guitar, and if we can talk to each other,
we can talk to the Gods; it is the same way.
For
example if you're going to take a treatment with a sun lamp, you don't get out
of the sun to do it, that is you don't deny the sun's existence. It isn't for
nothing that it says we're made in the image of God. We Kahuna know how to work
with all three parts of the soul separately and also together.
At
this point I asked Victor: "Why would you work with them separately?"
VICTOR: Because the soul can be afflicted,
especially in cases like extreme paranoia or split personality, and then they
can become separated, and that is the real origin of the doctrine of losing your
soul. These units who are separated are real individual entities just like the
atoms of a molecule that have been broken up. The Unihipili can act much
like a poltergeist. It is always heavily charged with what we call emotion, and
has the memories of the person that it was attached to. I was once called upon
to find the two parts of a man killed in an accident and put them back together.
Now his Unihipili haunted his wife and made sounds like dripping water,
and caused her to smell blood. It spoke like her husband, but without the reasoning
power that is usually associated with a fully conscious being. When I prayed to
his personal God, she found the two lower parts and put them together. One night
he appeared to his wife and said "Francis I am all right now." The word
"soul" can mean all of the spirit, or it can mean the highest part of
it. This is even shown by some of the poetry of early Christianity.
The
South Sea Islands were populated much later than the rest of the world. This is
because they were the last of the land masses to be created. So those who came
to inhabit them came from many parts of the world, and brought the old wisdom
with them. It is now well known among Hawaiians and those like me who are part
Hawaiian, the three names for the three parts of the soul, as we use the word
"soul" in English. The two lower parts are called, Kinowailua
which means "body of two waters." These two lower parts are: the Unihipili
which means "the sticky one." It is called that because it imparts mana
to everything you touch. For example when you shake hands with a person the mana
from the Unihipili forms fine etheric threads connecting you with that
person.
Kinomalamala, which means "body
of light," is the aura, especially the inner aura. The matter that forms
it is less dense than the matter of Unihipili, and more luminous. The area
around the body that is the Kinomalamala is egg shaped and vaguely follows
the outlines of the body as it surrounds it, and the body that is Unihipili
is about two centimeters to one inch out from the physical body on all sides.
Then above the physical body and a part of the whole person, is the personal God
which is called Aumakua which means "I am" or "Self Parent"
One of the Hawaiian words for the complete
soul is Uhane. This word means a conscious entity that can speak or make
itself known. Some of the early missionaries who were more willing to understand
Kahuna used the word Uhane for the Kinomalamala. As did Max Freedom
long many years later. One of the words for a spirit that is speaking strongly
as in a haunted place is Uhanehane. "U" means a conscious entity,
and "hane" means to speak or make yourself known. So the word can be
used for the entire soul or one of its parts. In English the Kinomalamala
is usually called the middle self. We Kahuna object to the word "self"
as it is used here, because it implies that these things are just aspects of your
psychology, but really they are much more.
The
real Jesus as he existed before the corruption of Christianity, said we should
baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Holy ghost. Since we are made in the divine
image, the Aumakua is your personal Holy ghost. The name "Father"
does not have to mean masculine. It means the action of the more logical part
of the soul on what we think of as the more emotional part, and can therefore
be man or woman. The High Spirit is feminine in appearance and aspect over men
and women both. But this spirit can give masculine or male energy as needed, and
is therefore spoken of as Heavenly Father, as well as Heavenly Mother. The word
for the God Self is Neshama in Jewish. The other two are called Nefesh
and Ruakh. The last part is pronounced as the German word "och."
Although this outline is brief, it is necessary to contemplate and realize as
the true structure of the human being. This is not just a theory invented by Hawaiians.
It's part of the knowledge of the ancient human race itself. World Wide knowledge,
no matter what other names are used.
People
often ask me why I say I am Kahuna and then give other names for what I do, such
as Witch, Shaman, Medicine Man, and so on. This is because the word "Kahuna"
means the same thing, but it also means, literally translated from Hawaiian; "the
Science, or the thing that you specialize in doing." In Europe the Witch
word for Unihipili is "Fetch." Use your resources and look it
up from there; these things should be contemplated and researched. All real Witches
are Scientists as we were the first Doctors and Scientists to exist on the planet,
and we must always remember this.