Shamans Dance

This is a story about when I was a medicine man who lived in a tribe of good people long before they were ever touched by the hand of civilisation. The people were simple and lived a semi nomadic existence in a land of hot dry dust and sparse vegetation. I was the medicine man or shaman of the tribe. I was well loved and respected, good at my job. This story is about the circumstances of the ending of this life. I was aged around my late forties, strong of body and mind and well ahead with the training of my apprentice. I had lead a full life and had looked after my wife and children well.
The problem was that the tribe had become afflicted. A pestilence had overtaken the normal running of the tribe and left many dead or dying. Drought was starving the land and the people and disease was threatening to destroy everything and everyone I knew.
The only true hope of the tribe was that I, as medicine man with my connection to the earth and the spirits could somehow bring an end to the suffering, restore the land and banish the sickness of my people.
This responsibility weighed heavily on me for many weeks. My herbs and treatments were largely ineffective or insufficient to ease the suffering. My own family were dying before me. My heart hurt, I sought a solution in the spirit world. For many days I journeyed in the world of the spirits to seek the path to heal my people. Nothing came. No guidance and no answer.
When I returned from my journey however I began to see something new in everyone that was sick and in the land around the village. I saw in the space around a dying woman a dark energy which as I reached towards with my mind revealed itself to be an evil spirit. My horror grew as I went around the village and saw more and more the spirits inhabiting and taking the life force from the people and the land.
My heart broke as I realised that I had failed my people and allowed these spirits to move into our lives and take everything from us. I resolved to take action which would restore the beautiful people and our land and banish these evil spirits.
My need was now to understand how I would achieve it. It would take every ounce of my strength and every facet of my psyche to bring influence to these well entrenched bad energies.
The settlement was sited on a plateau, the edge of which was marked by an awesome cliff. This cliff stood straight and sharp in the land like a long fracture in the earth and when I stood on the top of it I could see for a hundred miles across the lower land and straight down to it over the edge. The dizzying distance down to the bottom made real to the eye by the tiny river which ran along the bottom of the cliff. The river was clearly deep and fast because of the white water rapids visible from above but still looked thin as a thread from such a height. I gazed out across this view at a pink sunset, the breeze in my face bringing the smell of warm sand and distant pasture. I contemplated the decision I must make and the life I must leave behind to make it. Death to me offered no fear or sadness as I had lived a thousand lifetimes in the world of my meditations, the spirit world of my ancestors. I felt the great river of life moving back through time into the distant past and on into the distant future and knew that my time in the river in this place and body was reaching its end. It brought pleasure to me to consider that the story of my deeds would be told to my children’s children, and so I would become immortal.
So I began the ritual. As none existed already for the purpose I devised my own way to summon the spirits to me. I brought the tribe together, including all the sick and dying. I set about creating the energy I desired to make it work and called upon all my guides and ancestors to aid me and help feed my energy.
Slowly at first I called forward the spirits from the people and the land into the space around me. I bound them to me and charmed them to stay with me for the time of the ceremony. As I continued the spirits came faster and faster, in my altered consciousness I saw them around me darting and biting trying to feed on me and steal my soul energy. The gathering of my people appeared to grow distant as the mass of spirits around me became like a black cloud, like standing within a shoal of fish darting and whirling around each other and me.
When I sensed I had summoned all the spirits to me I entered the second stage of my ceremony, and crossed the point of no return. I began to take them in. I began to breathe them in and absorb them throughout me. I sucked at them and swallowed them, I grasped them in my teeth and breathed them into my nose. I inhaled them deep into my bowels and down to my feet. I filled myself to bursting point. I could feel my life force ebb and knew my window of time was short.
I made my way as quick as I could towards the cliff edge. I vividly remember the feeling of being bloated full to bursting with the great dark weight. The world as if slowing down, my life draining out of me. The spirits trying to take me over, destroy my mind and dominate me. I fought the onslaught of impending madness.
As I reached the edge of the cliff I looked out into the darkness, into the eternal void. I looked back down the gentle slope to where my people were gathered below, looking up at me.
I turned back to the ledge and with a single step I was in free fall. As I fell the energy of the dark spirits turned. No longer trying to take me over the spirits were trying to flee. Now my soul expanded to hold them in. My single focused thought was to deliver them back to the depths of the underworld myself, even if my fate was to leave me trapped there too. The determination overtook every facet of my being as I felt my spirit grasping theirs tightly.
The moment at which my body crashed into the ground was fleeting and I hardly noticed at all. So far removed from my physical existence was I already that it was as if it had never been as all that was real was my spirit and the evil which I carried down.
Down and down, on and on, deep into the bowels of mother earth I dragged the spirits.


The village recovered. The pestilence was dispelled and the health of the land and so the people of the tribe returned to a balanced state. My memory was kept alive for generations.