An excerpt from As a Shaman Shakes a Tambourine: The Story Behind The Song, In Zechariah’s Kitchen
I was raised in the Big Muddy badlands of southern Saskatchewan, in an old Boler trailer, by my Aunt Aurora, who was a pagan, a Wiccan, a witch, choose your poison. She could cure cancer with something she called “snake oil”.
That was until, of course, she dropped dead of a very mysterious heart attack one night. She ate nothing but raw foods. Had never got within ten yards of a Big Mac in her life.
In the morning, some farmers and ranchers in the area, over their morning coffee at Ming’s Café, said they’d seen a black triangular shaped UFO floating soundlessly west, around about the time the coroner said Aunt Aurora had died.
I wasn’t raised in the conventional school system. I was ‘home-schooled’.
“Where’s the asteroid that rules shamanism?” said Aunt Aurora.
I looked. “Hades[1] is in the third.”
The third and ninth houses, of course, are the houses that rule education. Educational matters in the third house tend to be of the elementary variety. Ninth house educational matters refer to higher education, as in university level, in the mundane dimension.
As for education, on the shamanic level, in the metaphysical dimension, such as was the case with me, the argument could be made, that form of education is actually a twelfth house endeavor.
“Given that such is the case, I think it’s time we started your course in True History.”
The most notable book she gave me, in the True History course, was a tattered copy, photo-copied, kept together with brass brads, of Zechariah Sitchin’s book, The 12th Planet.
This was more than a few years before it was finally published by a company named Stein and Day, in 1996.
How Aunt Aurora got hold of this particular copy, I do not know.
My home-schooling course also included books like The Occult by Colin Wilson, which makes it clear that there is much more to reality than meets the physical eye, The Chalice and the Thorn by Gareth Io, which depicts the evolution of the Knights Templar into the Illuminati, a secret society attempting to rule the world, rooted deep in the Swiss Alps, comprised of bankers, corporate CEOs, politicians, black magicians and eight of the richest people on the planet. As well on the shelf, waiting for my attention, were the works of Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey and Emmanuel Velikofsky, Rule By Secrecy by Jim Marrs, along with many others.
The part of the Jim Marrs book that she asked me to concentrate on was the part about how the Knights Templar first morphed into the Masons and then into the Illuminati.
But it was Sitchin’s book which caught my imagination.
Sitchin’s book comprised the “true” history of the planet, as opposed to “the misconstrued corporate lies and the ridiculous religious dogma”, as Aunt Aurora put it, that was spoon-fed to so-called ordinary children, in the town of Crow Foot, and beyond.
It’s about how a race of space aliens called the Annunaki were spawned from the spittle of the Great Cow Goddess, Hathor.
Although Sitchin, for some mysterious reason, actually fails to make mention of Hathor; that was a detail that Aunt Aurora added.
The Annunaki came down from the heavens, kind of like the Elohim did in the bible, to a place called E.Din, and tinkered with the DNA of Cro-Magnon males and females. So they’d have some slaves to help them mine for gold.
Why such an advanced race of aliens could tinker with DNA and yet not have some fairly superior mining equipment is a question that Sitchin does not address. At least, not in what I’ve read so far.
They did such a good job tinkering with the DNA that they created some, um, drop-dead gorgeous guinea pigs. In my mind, at least. Purely for the sake of some desperate Hollywood head honcho that might some day read this when interactive streaming TV, where almost anything goes, is a reality.
Probably not up to Nicole Kidman standards, the first example that comes to mind, but comparatively speaking. So gorgeous that they somehow just couldn’t help themselves – think hyper psychedelic flashback – they just had to have sex with the Cro-Magnon men and women whose DNA they’d tinkered with.
Think Zeus and Jupiter and vestal virgins here and you may get the connection.
This story was handed down to the ancient Sumerians and they were, apparently, so taken by the story that they thought they should etch the story down in stone. Why in stone? So that it would survive the next pole shift, at least in Aunt Aurora’s opinion. According to her, there’s been at least five or six pole shifts in the planet’s history.
The Annunaki put a stop to the pole shifts by placing strategic magnets far under the earth’s crust in certain places. Like Stonehenge, Easter Island, Egypt.
And survive the stories did, to this day, thanks to Sitchin’s labourious task of translating the ancient Sumerian tablets[2].
Like a rumour heard on a party line, the original story has been changed, perverted, to use Aunt Aurora’s word, into variations that are routinely referred to as the five root religions on the planet.
“Do you know how lucky you are,” Aunt Aurora asked me, “to be getting the truth like this?
“Nope,” I said.
“Well, you’re very lucky. That must mean you’re special. Very special.”
“Special?” I said.
“Special,” she said.
I was what some people call an indigo child, she said. My rate of growth, my intelligence, my spiritual evolution, are all on the fast track, she said, because time was short. The end of the Mayan Calendar was very near.
“What’s going to happen then?”
The solar system is going to line up with the huge black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, she said, something it does every twenty-six thousand years, give or take a minute or two. Which will cause the sun to undergo some major changes which will affect life down here on “Terra”, as she called it. “Our spiritual DNA is going to get a jolt on a number of levels. The planet is going to get hit by massive solar flares. Weather will go crazy. Wars will break out. Lethal pandemics. The paradigm will shift. There’ll even be a black president in the United States of America, if my metaphysical sources are correct. And then, around 2029, as an asteroid approaches, the planet’s magnetic poles will shift. Completely. Maybe even reverse themselves, again, on the physical plane.[3] Nothing will be the same afterwards.”
According to Aunt Aurora, I had an important mission to accomplish in this incarnation. She saw it, she said, in my Chiron, the so-called wounded healer, conjunct my ascendant at four degrees Aquarius. And she’d sensed it, she said, in an ecstatic dream state she’d experienced once, while dancing skyclad on top of Dead Horse butte, under a full moon in Aquarius.
On her deathbed, under the influence of morphine, she provided an additional detail: my grandmother’s ghost whispered it into her ear.
Exactly what that mission was, she wasn’t sure. But it would become clear eventually, she said. “Ghosts,” she said, “can be awful cagey about that sort of thing. They don’t want to be too much of an influence. But even the muddiest cesspool eventually must become clear.”
I wrote In Zechariah’s Kitchen, down at Burning Man, in 2001, just after I’d won the cunnilingus contest, with my partner, Sunyata.
She might’ve been faking it. Only she knows for sure.
Just before the towers fell.
Somebody had given Sunyata a bottle of mescal with three worms in the bottom of it as a prize, and we shared it as we watched the Man burn.
A couple years back, I came across an ad in a bakery in Wakefield, Quebec, which, of course, has one of the best Americana/No Depression bars in North America, the Black Sheep Inn. It was for a free recording session at the Meech Creek Studio, ran by a very cool dude named Neal (meechcreek@live.com).
I happened to be going out with a woman at the time named Caoimhe Hughes. She had a nice voice. She could play piano.
I think she might be on No Depression here, somewhere.
Haven’t seen her for a while.
We don’t talk much, anymore.
This track was done in, well, pretty much three takes.
This song has been sitting on my hard-drive for a while.
In an original draft, it was “ebola” virus, not “bird flu” virus.
I changed it because I thought two syllables scanned better.
[1] Hades doesn’t rule just shamanism, of course. That is probably its most positive spin. On the negative ledger, it rules garbage, pestilence, poverty, vermin, wasting diseases like Krohn’s. Garrett thought it might even rule the Apocalypse.
[2] See appendice no depression~ Craig Grant – IN ZECHARIAH’S KITCHEN.
[3] http://www.youtube.com/user/Audrey6704?blend=3&ob=5#p/u/0/7zvxVZuBuaU
