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Chapter 74 - Kouche

Tamara stopped to marshal her thoughts. “First, I asked Mom this question too,” she went on. “Have you had a chance to practice projecting any emotion to see how it works with others?”

Greta nodded. “Yes, but I feel uncomfortable doing that. It’s a dangerous ability, I think, and I don’t want to misuse it.”

“That’s almost exactly what Mom told me,” Tamara said, “and it’s why I trusted you with that knowledge. What have you done so far?”

“Ah, once, at a faculty meeting, two of the professors began disagreeing about a policy we were discussing and I could tell that one of them felt that the proposed policy was somehow threatening—maybe to his research interests. I caught his eye and projected ‘calm’ to him.”

“Oh, cool. What happened?”

“He stopped his almost shouting and sat, then apologized. It looked like he was thinking. A minute later, he asked to speak again and this time made a very reasonable suggestion. My new sense of empathy suggested to me that he had come to the meeting with a preconceived notion and an oppositional attitude. The calming I sent him helped him reconsider his ideas.”

Tamara smiled. “See, now that was a perfect use and how you did that showed a fine touch. Sending too strong a calming emotion can cloud someone’s thinking.”

“Yes, I can see that. Oh, another instance. Two grad assistants were unhappy with their teaching assignments. Each worked for a different faculty member. This was almost amusing since one TA felt that she was being taken advantage of—her prof actually did have her doing more than her required work; while the other complained that he had too little to do and was getting no benefit from his TA assignment.

“So I met with the faculty members involved. Ah, separately, of course. Both were defensive and not receptive to logical reasoning. So you know the inverse of the ‘truth sense’? Projecting ‘truth’? I guess you could call that persuasion. I used that and to my delight, it mostly worked. Although neither one agreed on the spot to change the way they used their TAs, they both did agree to discuss their TA jobs with them. I later heard that both TAs were satisfied with the accommodations.”

“Nice. It’s good to use gentle persuasion that way. I’ve used compulsion—mainly for my protection—and the target always seems to have a lingering emotion of resentment and nowhere to direct that resentment. Now here’s what I want to discuss with you; it’s about what I’m planning to do in Haiti. The biggest problem that I see right now is two-fold; the personal security of the people who’ll be working on my projects, and both their truthfulness and that of the government’s officials we’ll need to work with.”

“Certainly the latter is something not unique to Haiti,” Greta observed. “I know of this problem existing in many cultures.”

“That’s true. I guess that’s a common problem in economically disadvantaged countries.”

“Others as well. The problem exists in countries with oppressive or totalitarian governments too.”

“Sure, I can see that. So what I thought of is this: To counter Haiti’s security problem, which was caused by a too small and ineffective police force, the idea is to bring in experienced outside security. Forces from Benin, Togo, or Nigeria, whose people have similar cultures. They would work with the Haitian security people, but to avoid corruption, I’d like to have some form of screening to ferret out any problem personnel, especially Haitians. I can’t do all of that myself, obviously. So I thought we might be able to train manbos as screeners for the new police force that will be built. Do you think that this is feasible? ethical?”

“Ethical? I don’t see any problem with that, but I’m not sure about feasability. What’s your idea about training people? When you worked with Werner and me, that took about ten minutes and you looked a bit drained afterwards.”

“Okay, I had something a bit different in mind. When I first figured out how to activate a person’s limbic system, my first subject after Peter was a woman whose husband had a severe psychological problem. Remember? I mentioned that to you—last summer, I think.”

“You showed her something to help keep her husband grounded in reality, as I recall.”

“Yep. And you said that teaching how to do that would cause a revolution in psychiatry. But fully activating the limbic system takes a huge mental effort, even if the person already has some of the system active, like a spiritually trained person. Like a manbo, for example. Here’s what I figured out. I had to give that woman a certain amount of projecting ability, so that needed to involve a partner. Even so, it only took twenty or thirty seconds to do it and that unlocked her ability enough to help her husband. I’m sure that I could activate a truth sense in a receptive person by myself alone, pretty quickly, and I’m certain that you can as well, given your skills now.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure. And I have a likely subject, Claire.”

Greta looked at her doubtfully.

~~~~

Claire was at first dubious too, but when Peter told his mom about how he could sense that someone was lying, she agreed to be a guinea pig for Greta. Peter went off to find Tamara to tell her that his mom had agreed.

“So far, Tamara’s the only one who can unlock the ability in others,” Greta told Claire. “Now she’s trying to see if that’s an ability that others can unlock. Being a human lie detector is useful for a teacher and it works much simpler than the complicated cheating detection one of my colleagues in economics pulled off last term.”

“Oh? What’s that?” Claire asked. “At the Academy we do have occasional cheating incidents but they’re rare. We’ve got a strong code of honor, after all.”

“This was a clever stunt,” Greta told her. “The instructor suspected that some of the students in his class were using their smartphones to cheat because during exams, lots more would take bathroom breaks than during regular classes. So he set up an elaborate ruse. A few weeks before the final, he had his TA post a carefully worded question to an ‘answer’ site that most college kids use for looking up answers to class questions. The question posed a supply-and-demand situation for which there was no valid definitive answer. A week later, the instructor visited the site and submitted a fake answer, one that actually failed to answer the question, but its wording and citation of a specific economic principle made it appear like a reasonable answer.

“On the day of the exam, more than a dozen of the kids took a bathroom break. And lo and behold, most of those students had regurgitated the instructor’s planted fake answer to his question. There was absolutely no way that they could have come up with that answer on their own; the economic principle he had cited on the answer site was bogus, as was its supposed source. So those students were given a zero on the exam and were reported to the dean for cheating.”

“That’s genius,” Claire agreed. “But what about the honest ones? If there was no answer, wouldn’t that have penalized them?”

“He gave full credit to any of the attempted answers—even to those who skipped the question. He only penalized those whom he had trapped if they had used the unique answer only available on that particular website. Ah, here’s Tamara. What do you want us to do now, Tamara?”

“Thanks for helping Greta, Claire,” Tamara told her. “And you’ll like having the ability.”

“We’ll see. Peter says it’s been useful for him. What do we do?”

“Greta gets to do all the work. You just need to relax and kinda let your mind go—don’t think about anything in particular. If you meditate, you can oom-chant in your head. Greta, we’ll meditate together and you know how to try to sense another’s aura? We’ve done that before. Hold Claire’s hand and meditate with me. You’ll feel a kind of different emotion that I’ll try to open in your limbic system; it has a ‘green’ sensation. When you sense that ‘green,’ feeling, try projecting it to Claire. Let’s start.”

On the first attempt, Greta’s concentration faltered.

“Greta, don’t try forcing,” Tamara suggested. “You’re tensing up. Just relax and let it flow.”

After a little more than twenty seconds after Greta relaxed, Claire gasped slightly.

“Jesus! That was... I don’t know what...” she gasped.

“What did it feel like?” Tamara asked.

“Indescribable. Almost like my mind opened to the whole universe and suddenly it was gone.”

“Cool! Excellent!” Tamara gushed. “You must have sensed the entire gestalt of the energies that pervade the world. I believe that there’s actually information in that energy too. Maybe Greta unlocked more than just a lie-sensitivity in you; that was a little unexpected.”

“Is that a problem?” Claire asked uncertainly.

“Oh, no. Not at all,” Tamara reassured her. “You might have become somewhat more empathic. You must have at least some talent ‘cause Peter has half of your genes.”

Meanwhile Greta was looking a bit dazed. “So it worked? You felt something change in your head, then.”

Claire nodded. “Definitely. So how do we test it? One of you tell me a lie?”

Tamara chuckled. “It doesn’t really work like that, so that’s not a good test. Artificial lies—ones told deliberately—don’t produce the physiological changes that an actual lie does. By the same token, you can’t really tell someone’s lying over the phone or video using that sense. The empathic lie-detecting sense works just like sensing a person’s other emotions. Think of how a lie-detector device works; that device measures the body’s physiological changes triggered by the limbic system but needs a trained person to interpret all the device’s data together.

“Some people can detect lies from body language—they notice the mouth may tighten, the eye pupils contract, the eye blinking becomes more deliberate. The body shows the stress too with shallow breathing, raised shoulders, and even certain hand and arm movements. All those body changes are responses to stress and your new sense detects them and interprets them as showing stress, therefore, a lie.”

Greta and Claire looked at each other and shrugged. “Thus speaks Tamara,” Greta chuckled and the two began laughing, hugging each other.

“What’d I say?” Tamara asked, confused.

Greta laughed. “You foisted an existentialist philosopher on me, Tamara: Emmanuel Levinas. I’m playing ‘gotcha’ using Friedrich Nietzsche. Here’s my lecture about your abilities, couched in existentialist terms. ‘Also sprach Zarathustra,’ or ‘Thus speaks Zarathustra,’ is his novel about Zarathustra, the prophet who was the first to repudiate Zoroaster’s committing the so-called ‘error’ of morality. Zarathustra believed that the submission to morality, its traditional form, that is, only serves to perpetuate people’s enslavement to it. The response to that captivity is to create a higher morality, and that takes a higher form of humanity: the ‘superman.’ Tamara, this is where you’re headed. In the direction of Nietzsche’s superman—woman in your case.”

“Jeez, Greta,” Tamara sulked. “No way can that be me.”

Greta just smiled at her.

“Tamara, the breadth of your knowledge is simply astounding,” Claire told her, “and don’t put it off by saying that you like to read a lot. Yes, you do read, but you have a unique ability to synthesize new information from widely different sources and create your own vision to see what others miss.”

“Well then, it appears that Tamara’s idea of giving other sensitive people new empathic abilities was a success, pending the result of your testing it, Claire,” Greta said. “Tamara had an idea of teaching up a cadre of manbos as screeners for an improved Haitian police force. Weed out any bad actors, real or potential.”

“Yes. That’s what Peter had told me she wanted to do and my volunteering could help,” Claire commented.

Tamara was pleased that her idea worked. She knew that Greta had an extremely strong spirituality, stronger than her mother’s, so she was happy to learn that she had the ability to teach others to activate some limbic system functions. The next step was to show her mother how to do it too; her idea was that her mother would have a close relationship with the manbos she was recruiting for her social project and therefore could teach them the skill. But as a safeguard, Tamara decided to show her mother how to plant a subconscious suggestion with the skill to ensure that it wouldn’t be used for evil purposes.

She also wanted to talk with Nadine about her planned kouche. She had made time in her schedule to take ten days for it in early October.

Mid-September

“Manman, I had told you that from part of Granmanman’s memories, that in order to understand my abilities more, that I would need to do kouche. I certainly know that I haven’t been kanzo and that my initiation will not follow the tradition. But my strong feeling is that I must isolate completely and can’t do it where I can sense people. Even when I’m in the resort’s natural areas, I can sense emotional auras.”

“Yes, we did discuss this. Where can you go then?”

“I’ve found some rentals of very remote cabins in western Virginia and in West Virginia too, in the mountains there. I’m planning ten days. Two for travel and one to get settled and make my preparations. Then seven days of meditation. I think baths will be possible in nearby streams.”

“In the mountains? That will be cold.”

Tamara nodded. “I know. But the kouche isn’t about comfort, is it. Can you tell me something about the traditional kouche so I can adapt what I’ll need to do?”

“You’re really doing this, darling. All right. In many ounfòs, there’s a small room called the djévò where the initiate is sequestered for the duration of the kouche. Some traditions call for eight days, some nine.”

“Granmanman’s memory suggests seven ‘cause I’ll have no community support.”

“I see. Interesting. You’re supposed to have an asson with you, a generic one. It might not be the one you’re presented with when the initiation is complete.”

“Since I won’t actually become a manbo, I won’t need the asson.”

“True. The kanzo wears a white tunic, follows a special diet that’s salt-free, and sleeps on a mat on the floor. In my case, Manman gave me a flat stone to use as a pillow. During the seclusion, there’s one particular important ritual, the lav tèt. That’s a washing of the head in preparation for the lwa to enter. The washing is believed to remove the gwo-bôn-nanj, one of the two parts of the human soul, the part having a divine origin, and this makes space for the lwa to enter and create the new soul. The other part of the soul, the ti-bôn-nanj, which is one’s personality and conscience, remains.”

“So the lwa becomes part of the manbo’s soul?” Tamara asked.

“Our belief is that the lwa with which the initiate has the greatest affinity creates the new soul, allowing the new manbo to speak to and hear from the lwa. This gives her the ability to interpret the advice given by the lwa to specific individuals or groups.”

“What’s involved in the lav tèt?”

“That varies by the sosyete and who’s involved, but for the kanzo, it’s typically done early in the morning. An amount of water containing certain herbs and other ingredients, recipes for which are usually secrets of each sosyete, is prepared and consecrated. In my case, it was done seven times. After wrapping a white kerchief around my head, I spent the remainder of the day lying on my mat, which was on the floor and covered with a white sheet, meditating.”

“Ah, this is interesting,” Tamara said. “The symbolism is clear; this ritual is almost exactly analogous to Christian baptism. The water purifies and cleanses the soul to allow for the presence of the Trinity to be embraced by the initiate. I read that Hindus make pilgrimages to bathe in holy rivers or streams, and other religions have similar practices, like Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.”

Nadine smiled at Tamara. “You’re quite correct, my genius child. My studies of anthropology show how these practices are related, too. The symbology of water was a powerful totem in many primitive cultures and with the growth of organized religions, the practices became formalized. So I’m guessing that you’ll try to incorporate a lav tèt in some form in your kouche?”

“I will. That part seems to me to be important for some reason.”

“You’ll be alone in a remote region. Will you be safe? I’m concerned about this, honey. And you said that your electronics will be off.”

“I’ll be safe. Remember my ability. And being so far from people, I’ll be able to sense anyone coming close. But it’s very important that I not have any real-world distractions.”

“Yes, that’s true for the traditional kouche also,” Nadine agreed. “When will you leave?”

“I’m planning on a full week, from a Friday to the following Sunday, ten days. First full week of October.”

They spoke for a while longer, Nadine telling Tamara some details about her own kanzo experiences.

“But I can’t say anything about what happens in the djévò,” Nadine told her. “It’s forbidden to discuss those things with non-initiates. Not that anything bad or naughty happens there,” she chuckled, “it’s just not done and many believe that the lwa punish violators.”

“That’s cool, what I’m doing is kinda distant from the tradition, though,” Tamara said.

“But it works for you. I still recall my Sunday phone call to you, several years ago, after you paid an unexpected visit to the spiritual crossroads as a non-initiate. You’re a trail-blazer—in many more ways than just in Vodou, darling.”

Several days later

Tamara was finishing up her most recent work on her project, getting ready for her kouche. She had told her colleagues that it was something like a retreat, a period of spiritual regeneration. She had to be much more convincing with Peter, however. He was concerned that she couldn’t be contacted and also worried about her safety.

One evening, when he mentioned her trip again, she sighed and went to hug him.

“Darling, remember in Cambridge, how you and I felt just before we went out the building door to the tent?”

“Sure,” Peter answered. “I felt this huge warning sensation come over me and got hyper-alert. Kinda like the mind-set I get before testing for my judo belt promotions. What...”

“Shhh... Me too. We both felt uneasy all morning. And remember what happened when we returned from London the second time? The airport?”

“Your skipping the arrivals customs. What about those times?”

“Doesn’t it look like something’s protecting us, somehow? Our premonition sense.”

Peter’s shoulders slumped. “It’s still hard to understand things which have no apparent basis in reality,” he sighed.

“I hear you. Recall what I quoted in my intro speech for the energy cube. ‘Magic’s just science that we don't understand yet.’ Arthur C. Clarke wrote that line and it’s so true. Besides, I’ll always have my backpack with me. I’ll be taking bear spray and two other gadgets that work much faster than a maser beam,” she chuckled.

“Oh, right. Damn, those two guys’ attack on campus last spring inspired you.”

“Sure did. I don’t wanna be in a position where I can’t use my ability defensively because I can’t lock eyes.”

Tamara had finally settled on the location for her kouche. She had found a rental for a small hunting cabin located on private property in the George Washington National Forest near Blue Grass, Virginia, right on the border with West Virginia and the Monongahela National Forest. From the website where she saw the cabin advertised, the one-room cabin was quite old and very rustic and had no electric service. Power was provided by a solar cell and a set of batteries and that ran a water pump and a lamp. There was a small propane furnace for heat and the cabin had a small propane range and oven. An outdoor privy completed the amenities. It was sufficient. There were two single beds—just the frames and mattresses, but she had planned to use a sleeping bag on a thin mat on the floor.

George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, Virginia: early October

The cabin’s owner, Don Davies, lived in Front Royal, Virginia, so her drive there on the first Friday of October was about 100 miles, much of it on Interstate 66. She’d pick up the cabin’s key and get directions; the owner had told her that finding the drive into the cabin site was tricky and gave her a photo of the turn-in to the access road to help her find it. He had told her a vehicle with all-wheel drive was needed to reach the cabin when she had arranged for the rental. “The trail in can be deeply rutted in places and climbs a steep hill in the last quarter mile,” he had told her.

“Now there’s no cell service out there, so don’t y’all get lost; I wouldn’t be able to help,” he told her when he gave her the key and the driving instructions. “Yer phone GPS will work though. Let me enter it for y’all, okay?”

“Thanks, Mr Davies. You said there are instructions for the power, water pump, and heater?”

“It’s just Don. Yeah. Simple things, got ‘em off’n a old camper-trailer.”

“Good. I know how those work.”

Tamara had seen similar appliances in the bunk camper that she had rented for Kevin’s group.

“What’s the water source?” she asked.

“A spring down the hill t’the south. Granddad ran a pipe all the way into the crevasse there and my dad made some improvements. Until the first freeze, the spring runs good and the pump there sends water up t’the cabin an’ keeps the water barrel on the roof filled. The sink water’s gravity fed, just cold, though.”

“Anything to turn on, then? Or off when I leave?” Tamara asked.

“Nope. I’ll be out for bow-hunting season when y’all’re fixin’ to leave. Me ‘n my son’ll do any fixup work that the place needs and we’ll winterize the place when we leave.

“Should be plenty of propane,” he told her, going on. “Shed in the back has some spare tanks and they all should be full. If y’all wanta go on a hike, there’s bunches of trails all around the area. I put a few trail maps inside plastic sheet protectors; they’re in a cabinet. Take one of those maps with y’all. Keep yer bearings when y’hike. Y’all can get lost out there.”

“Is the place in Virginia or West Virginia? I couldn’t tell on the on-line map.”

He chuckled. “In Virginia. But from the cabin door, if y’all spit north, it’d land in West-Va.”

When she arrived at the road leading up to the cabin, Tamara was glad that her SUV had a high clearance because the road into the site was just a track and indeed had ruts and some were deep. At the cabin, she unpacked the car. One of the items she had brought was a camping refrigerator-freezer; the cabin’s owner had told her that the cabin’s set of batteries could power one. The sun was low on the horizon as she finished a light dinner and cleaned up.

Now the day was over; tomorrow she would survey her surroundings and figure out a plan for the week. She slept on the mat on the floor, albeit wrapped in a sleeping bag. It was chilly. She skipped using a stone as a pillow, though. The following morning, after a quick breakfast, she took two hours to scout out the surrounding trails. She found the source of the cabin’s water supply and followed the little spring from its source downhill to where it joined up with a small creek. About a quarter-mile downstream, the water ran off a three-foot high ledge, making a little pool about ten feet wide. Tamara looked into the pool; it appeared to be three to four feet deep and crystal clear.

I could do a lav tèt complete immersion here, she thought. Bet it’s cold though.

She bent down and put her arm in.

Jeez, that IS cold. Well, the kouche is supposed to be uncomfortable. It was warm in the sun yesterday afternoon, so maybe I could do my full immersion on one afternoon.

She looked at the trees around her.

Yep, this spot will get sun in the afternoon.

Back at the cabin later, Tamara got out her recording of Vodou drumming and spent the rest of the afternoon enacting a worship ceremony. This time she knew that she didn’t need the preparatory rituals. It was several hours later that she again became aware of her surroundings and she thought back to her experience.

She had basically been wondering about some of the fundamental questions of philosophy: what is “self”? What does it take for an entity, able to collect data from its surroundings, to become self-aware? What is thought and how does it work? What is memory and how is it connected to thought? Somehow, during her meditation session, she had the impression that the answers to those questions had been revealed. But now, like waking after a dream, those thoughts were inaccessible.

She went to her car and got out a couple of plastic jugs of water and a plain white smock. With Nadine’s help, Tamara had prepared a quantity of the ritual water to be used during the lav tèt, made according to her mom’s family recipe. She took off her clothes and slipped on the smock. Sitting cross-legged on a grassy spot near the cabin and after reciting the prayers that her mom had told her were traditional for an initiate, she poured a quantity of the water over her head, repeating it seven times. Even though she was chilled a bit by the water, she sat meditating for about an hour.

That night, her sleep was interrupted several times; the intensity of her dreams forcing her awake. However, in the morning, she was unable to recollect the dreams.

Tamara’s week after her first breakfast at the cabin fell into a routine fairly quickly. In the mornings, she took long walks, trying to reach out with her senses to connect with the powers of nature, with the life forces of the animals and even plants around her. Once, when she stopped and sat on a fallen tree, she looked around and noticed a number of animals nearby and some were watching her warily. A small group of deer was half hidden by a grove of trees and nearby, she saw several rabbits, a raccoon, and what looked like a fox. Birds were everywhere; she tried to remember what she had learned about bird calls from the cousins as she tried to distinguish between their different songs.

The next several days were fairly cool and she only repeated the lav tèt once more. But back at the cabin in the afternoon of her fifth day, she noticed that the day was warming up nicely, so she grabbed her white smock and hiked down to the little waterfall and pool. Stripping off her clothes, she slipped the smock on and hopped into the water.

“Yeeks!” she exclaimed. Jeez, this is cold!

She dunked herself seven times, gasping at the cold, and then scrambled out. Pulling off the cold, wet smock, she thought, Shoulda brought a towel, wasn’t thinking.

The sun felt warm on her body as she carefully stepped over to a long flat rock near the waterfall. The rock’s surface felt soothingly warm so she sat down on it, grateful for the sunlight’s warmth and the gentle warmth of the rock, and soon the chill of the water was replaced by the comforting warmth of the sun’s rays.

Lying back on the rock, gratefully soaking up the rock’s absorbed heat, Tamara let her thoughts go free as she looked at the few clouds drifting overhead and tried to use her imagination to force their shapes into recognizable objects. Gradually she became aware of the total lack of any background “emotional noise.” In this completely isolated area, with no people within miles, she realized how pervasive that noise was and how it masked her ability to sense this natural, virgin environment, totally neutral and free of any emotional chatter.

It’s like the difference between seeing the night sky in the city and country, she mused. It’s so clear out here, mentally too.

Dropping into a meditative state, she tried to explore the new, unfamiliar sensations she could feel. She became aware of how the moving air, brushing against the leaves on the trees, was creating tiny amounts of static electricity. She could feel how the motion of the water as it tumbled off the ledge at the little waterfall was adding its energy to the environment. The air itself was filled with energy as the sunlight—its photons—interacted with the air molecules. Some of those interactions resulted in free electrons, adding to the energies surrounding her.

Casting her consciousness wider, Tamara felt these energies ebbing and flowing everywhere.

Jeez, that energy’s forming filaments too, it looks like—it’s kinda like how nerve cells can form nerves, she wondered. I’m sensing bright lines, filaments lit up almost like the way nerve cells connect on the fMRIs. Let me try following a filament...

After about a minute, suddenly in her consciousness appeared a foreign thought.

“So you have finally found us, daughter,” the “words” formed in her mind but they also “sounded” like a deep voice.

“Um, what?” Tamara said aloud. “Papa Legba?”

“Speech is not needed, daughter. And no, Papa Legba is just a single aspect of our being.”

“Being? Was my hunch correct then? The free energy of the world became organized and became self-aware?” Tamara responded in her thoughts.

“This is somewhat true, so you may regard that idea as a working hypothesis,” the mental voice replied. “Simplistically, our being contains the thoughts and memories of all organisms that have ever lived.”

Tamara considered that. “I’ve always wondered how thought and memory work. It’s all based on energy, then? And the energy behind memory must be subject to the first law of thermodynamics; like all energy, it can’t be created or destroyed. It can only be changed in form.”

“You may view this entity in such terms, daughter, if you find it meaningful.”

“Daughter? Why do you use that term?” Tamara asked in her thoughts.

“It is because you are of us. Search your thoughts for the concept of ‘soul,’ the philosophical entity that humans know as ‘self.’ We see in your thoughts that you know of man’s search for an identity which Plato and Augustine wrote about. This is a ‘self’ that lies outside the person. We see too of your knowledge of the idea of the human entity being separated into parts as Descartes describes in ‘Cogito,’ where the suggestion that the personality has a different nature from the indivisible mind/soul is made. Think of what you have learned about the gwo-bôn-nanj of the Fon or the ye gaga of the Adja; both are names for the principle of consciousness and psychic life. This is the energy which survives death and lies behind the principle of immortality. We are of this energy; as you possess a portion of it, you are also of us.”

“Then are the lwa part of you?” Tamara formed in her thoughts.

“What humans know of the spiritual entities that they venerate are constructions which draw on our energies, so the answer is both yes and no. Human belief systems shape the objects of veneration into their needs and our energies give them the experience and affirmation they require. However, we see from your thoughts that you wonder about ancestors. The energies which comprised the souls of all ancestors form a significant portion of our self.”

“So when I believe that a lwa is assisting me...” Tamara’s thought began.

“You are creating a construction which draws on the energies of our self and gives that energy a personal identity. Practitioners of every faith do this and some are quite able to make strong connections, as you can. A major reason why music, rhythmic drumming, and chanting are so effective in worship is that they channel the personal energies of the worshipers, merging their corporeal energies with ours. Any group activity which draws people together into a single shared focus can often accomplish this. Then a desired manifestation of our energies may occur to influence the worshipers’ experience. A strong worship leader is necessary to focus the group sufficiently to accomplish such results, however. Therefore, in your belief system, the lwa do exist and are a reality of your experience.”

“Does this answer how I can translate languages unknown to me?” Tamara wondered.

“Of course. You have an unusual sensitivity to our presence in the world. We are able to sense your mental energies merging with ours, as those in your family have been able to do, for multiples of generations. You have gathered to yourself others who have strong potential too, and begun to teach them the many skills which have been lost over countless years. The memories of myriads of ancestors are part of us and knowledge of languages is only a tiny portion. We see you are also wondering about having the memories of a close ancestor.”

“My granmanman. She had come to me and left me memories,” Tamara thought, as tears came to her eyes.

“This is not uncommon, daughter. It was your own strength, your emotional attachment to your family, and an unusual affinity for the energy comprising our self, that made that connection so powerful. You must return to your own consciousness now, daughter; much time has passed and you are becoming chilled. You do not want to linger until darkness occurs. Now that you have learned how to commune with our energies, future visits will be easier. Fare well for the present, daughter.”

Tamara became aware that the sun had dropped below the trees and she was, in fact, a little chilled. She was awestruck by that encounter, and as she got dressed, she became aware that a small piece of her mind, which had been urging her into doing this “retreat” and justifying it as a Vodou kouche, was now silent.

Huh, she thought, I guess that the energy being was trying to reach me all this time. Maybe that’s why I had to be isolated from people...

At that thought, she received a strong affirming sensation of warmth.

I need a name for ... father? He ... it ... called me “daughter.” But it felt so much like Papa Legba. Maybe I can think of him that way?

This time a sensation of laughter flowed over her, followed by another affirming acknowledgment.

She was dressed now, and picking up her now-almost-dry smock, set off up the hill back to the cabin, her mind awash in thought.

Hmm. Could I get info about dark energy from Papa Legba? She wondered.

The sensation that came to her now was a regretful negative.

Ah, well, she thought. Still gotta do stuff on my own. Jeez, it’s Wednesday already. I gotta turn over the cabin on Saturday morning.

She decided for tomorrow’s hike, she’d go north into West Virginia.

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