Back to Africa: Finding the Missing Piece
After learning that Zulu High Sanusi, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, passed away at age 98, Brad dreams of returning to Africa to meet him again. There he retrieves something he left behind many years ago.
In the vision I was driving a small, old jeep in the bush somewhere in southern Africa. I could see wild animals, especially lions, in every direction. Somehow I knew I was heading due north and going in the right direction. Soon I would reach the latitude I needed to find before making a turn. Then I noticed a small house with a gas station ahead. I pulled over and a man in a black suit came over, acting as if he were a guard or gatekeeper. I didn’t trust him—he had the scent of a trickster agent masquerading as trustworthy and knowledgeable. However, he clearly did not radiate warmth like a man of God.
The man asked me, “What are you doing up here?” I spontaneously replied with what I thought was a lie because I did not want him to know my real purpose. However, as I spoke my words conveyed a metaphorical truth. I stated, “I came back to take one photograph. There is a Bushman piece of rock art I forgot to capture in the past. I am here to finish my work.” I knew there was no rock art image that I needed, but I also knew there was definitely a missing piece of Africa that I had left behind.
You Must Go Through the Kitchen
The man thoroughly looked me over as if making sure he could trust my answer and then spoke, “You must drive through the kitchen to get to the other side.” The moment he gave this instruction, the jeep and I somehow landed in the middle of an old kitchen. There was a door just to the left of the oven and somehow I had to figure out how to drive through it. There was only one way to make it happen: both the jeep and my sense of self had to become incredibly smaller. When I thought this, I smiled and broke into a gentle laughter, commenting internally, “Of course, that is how it is. Only little me can pass through the gate.”
I am not exactly sure what happened next other than I felt smaller as the room and door became larger. I drove the jeep through the door in the kitchen. On the other side I found First Creation with its whirling and palpably electric atmosphere. I was taken somewhere and shown that the missing piece was installed within my spiritual body. A voice said:
“This was given to you a long time ago when you were here. Now it’s time that you own it. It is not possible to safely venture across this border until you are so clean that even your lies are true. Anyone trying to prematurely step into First Creation will not get across, nor will they even find the kitchen. Now remember that the passage only occurs once you are in the middle of the kitchen.”
Re-Encountering Credo Mutwa
I woke up unable to remember exactly what I was given in the vision, so I prayed hard to be sent back and shown the gift again. My spiritual father from St. Vincent, Archbishop Pompey, taught me to pray for such a return in order to complete unfinished business in a spiritual classroom. I soon fell asleep and was sent back to an empty room where an unseen voice simply said, “Remember.”
In a flash, while still in dream I recalled the first time I met Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, the Zulu sangoma and high sanusi. I wrote it down in my diary the day after I met him. I was taken to a dark room and could barely see him. He told me a story about a young white man from the past who ventured into Africa and met the Bushmen. He became a healer with them and found his home in the Kalahari. After his long version of this story, he looked at me and announced,
That young man was you. You see, sir, death is not death. Death is a door that opens to another door. . . There is no death. There is not death. When death comes the soul must not be frightened. The mind must not be frightened.[1]
After four hours of talking, Credo asked me to touch him. His lungs were sick at the time and he suffered from an advanced melanoma on his right leg. As I placed my trembling hands all over him, both of us began to shake so wildly that I finally collapsed to the floor. There I fervently chanted and sang as our eyes locked in a gaze. We experienced an intense fusion – when one of us moved, the other moved at the same time. We were in perfect synchrony. I felt his ancestral spirits come into me as I had with the great Zulu healer, Mama Mona, weeks before.
My guide standing in the room said later that “waves of light poured out of me.” It was so electrical, magnetic, and otherworldly that no words can begin to portray how rare an experience it was. I wrote in my diary, “I passed through another spiritual door.”
The next morning when Brad woke up from the dream he read those words again. He now felt as if he “owned” them in a way he couldn’t back then. The dream journey had taken him back to retrieve this experience with Credo and to re-discover the passageway:
All I can say today after all these years is that Baba and I were given a luminous rope of connection. It enabled us to know each other in a special way. To his alternating frustration and delight, he later found that he could not hide secrets from me. This especially included when he was bullshitting someone, which he—as a great storyteller—often did. It also made it possible for me to discern when he was a pure channel for the gods and could convey an extraordinary healing to someone sick with something challenging like antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, cancer, or AIDS. I witnessed all the human forms in that man—the idiocy and the brilliance, the babbling foolishness and the flowing wisdom, the troublemaker and the peacemaker, the trickster agent and the vessel of divinity.
Retrieving What I Left Behind
As I relived many of those moments, I realized that this was the piece of Africa I had left behind—the luminous rope hookup to Credo Mutwa, his ancestors, and the African spirit world. I had this same kind of experience with other strong healers in Africa. Without willful purpose or intention, I was led to them and received whatever download was in store. Tied together, these bonds and luminous cords became a strong numinous rope that functions as a bridge to the other side. Of course the gate is found in the kitchen—that’s where the cooking fire burns away the debris and makes the vehicle as well as your spiritual flesh and bones small enough to get you through.
Before I dreamed the rope to God for the first time many years ago, I saw it awake with eyes wide open. It happened in my first Bushman dance in Botswana. It next happened with Credo Mutwa who last week passed on to the other side. Today, I remember that Baba also recalled the day we met and wrote a poem for me. I leave his words as a gift for you all:
You came from afar, borne on swept-back Wings of Flame
A shining Knight seeking the jeweled Grail!
Of timeless Knowledge left by the Ones of Yore;
Long had you traveled, and long endured the pain
Oh Ulysses of these electron years
Ere you arrived at my sylvan abode!
There, near Lotlamoreng’s pollution-tainted lake
Where I have built a dream that will not live
We briefly shared the Secrets of the God
Gray hours flew by, and soon the Time to Part
Arrived as does the wrinkled Witch of Death
You took your leave and I was left alone.
When you were gone a Voice spoke in my mind
the voice of One I love and call my Light
The Mother Goddess, she of a Thousand Names:
“Doubt not my child ’twas I who brought that man
From a distant land to the doorstep of your home
That he may learn from you and you from him
For knowledge is a stream that hath no end
You cannot say, in your gray and sunset years
‘Knowledge is ended. Behold my task is done!’
For you must learn ’till Death closed your eyed
And beyond Death you shall be learning still!
The time has come, my child, the time is here
When Truth Seekers must form a Wall of Shields
Shoulder to shoulder against the coming Foe
Which is Disease, dark Ignorance and War!You must UNITE! All shamans must join hands
Across the width of this green, tumbling sphere
You must know as Earth, my pure life-giving Womb!No matter how far the skies or wide the seas
You must join hands and start the Dance of Life!
The Drums must sound, the plaintive flutes must keen
And the Ritual Fire within the Stone-Circle must blaze
Death must be crushed and foul illness vanquished
And War be banished from the villages of men!
That is my Command, that is my Word to all!” [2]
Brad wrote back to Baba with these words, speaking the truth he felt about his life and now about his death as well:
Old man with elder tales,
Speak and let us know,
Echoes born of sacred fast,
Mysteries of our ancient past.Release the words,
those streams of words,
truths of ocean depth.
Questions stirred,
Answers disturbed,
to mine the forgotten souls.
Born, reborn,
You fount of light,
Enter our darkest night.
Baba,
Carriage of truth and lie,
Marriage of beast and fly,
Whirl of earth and sky.
We beckon you, Great Awakener,
Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa,
With broken heart,
mended body,
foraged mind,
blacksmithed soul.
Dance the Four Winds!
Summon the Demons!
Voice the Gods!
Embody the struggle that separates,
divides, and threatens Life.
Breathe the Peace that connects,
Relates, and conquers Death.
In this final hour,
Proclaim the Beginning.
In this recycled birth,
Proclaim the End.
For the Ancestors,
With the Ancestors,
Makhosi, Great King, Makhosi![3]
A Final Reflection from Brad
I want to publicly confess that I was not ready to completely own the rope or key to the gate of Africa’s spirit world until now – a week before my 69th birthday. Though these numinous gifts were permanently installed decades ago, completely owning the feeling of possession and trusting that I could safely operate it took many more years.
Here we find a teaching for everyone: don’t be in a hurry to mess with trickster before you are fit as an ecstatic fiddle, that is, clean and wise enough to handle two-sided mojo. Here the seduction of inverting what is only true in the big room as a practical means for small room trickery and cold magic will set you further back than where you began.
For example, the high truth that trickster mentation and divine emotion are twins is meant only for those spiritually cooked and living in the big room with a high and holy ratio. In small rooms, using trickster as a way to meet the divine is almost always a lazy, bullshit excuse for “anything goes” from drugs to canned rituals, magical names, and exaggerated claims.
Sweeping the room means clearing away any trickster connotation or explanation. Resist all temptation to chase trickster seduction—if it is your destiny and you are fortunate enough to survive enough bullshit over many years, you might be allowed to use a trickster key, but only if you know how to become small enough to drive a car through the kitchen door.
-The Keeneys, March 31, 2020
Music and a Blessing from Credo Mutwa
[1] Keeney, Bradford P. Shaking Out the Spirits: A Psychotherapist’s Entry into the Healing Mysteries of Global Shamanism. Hill, 1994. p. 117
[2] Mutwa, Credo Vusamazulu, Bradford P. Keeney, and Kern L. Nickerson. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa: Zulu High Sanusi. Philadelphia, PA: Ringing Rocks Press in association with Leets Island Books, 2001. p. 178
[3] Ibid. p. 179