SERPENT MASTER: A True Story for the 21st Century (2024)
From the Preface
This true story is rooted in actual experiences over a period of many decades. I have written about my experiences in many styles, in my effort to find a language that can adequately correspond to a new reality that is emerging from the breakdown in the “glue” that has bound the historical appearances in our world into an intelligible culture for thousands of years. Now we are faced with unintelligibility—an world-shaking crisis. In any such crisis, some individuals are called to step forward and face the overwhelming background forces released by the cultural breakdown in intelligibility, at least in the West. These individuals historically were initiated shamans—servants of both the serpent power and the culture into which they were born. These shamans were often “discovered” through having a life-threatening illness that available cultural healing practices simply could not cure or even understand. In fact such individuals were personally experiencing an illness that the entire culture was suffering, even though nobody else could recognise it as such.
Having nowhere to turn within available cultural healing practices, the suffering shamans-to-be have healed themselves through an initiatory ordeal—an ordeal that is “life or death”. Once healed the new shaman returns to the culture to heal others, not by treatments, methods, teachings, as much as simply showing up as the new being in ordinary life, whose healing presence can initiate a resonant movement in others’ being, a soul movement towards transmuting the same poison in themselves into a healing potion for yet others to drink. I use the words “poison” and “transmuting” carefully and deliberately to evoke the dreadful healing power “behind” such shamanic initiations—the incandescent fire, lightning bolt, meteor, deadly strike of the cobra…
