Tag Archives: Framework

Esoteric Foundations, Workings

Spirit Bridge Foundations 1 – Animism

At the core of spirit bridge technology is the awareness that awareness is not unitary. Consciousness is complicated, made of many moving parts, each of which is also conscious on some level.

This is the “physics” behind Frazer’s “sympathetic magic“, not just the “law of contagion” but also the “law of similarity”. It is worth noting that the concepts are far more ancient than The Golden Bough, being noted in folklore as far back as we have records of said folklore.

Parallels can be found in the Bhagavad-gita’s “atomic soul”, though interpretations of this seem to frequently fall into the traps of Monism and a unitary human soul. Rather, it is important for us to come to grips with a world in which everyone and everything is a gestalt consciousness.

Similar to the biological concept of a holobiont, our singular “soul” is a holonoont– a whole comprised of many different consciousnesses that express themselves as one spiritlife “organism”. Just as we practice symbiosis, we (and all things) exercise symnoesis.

The grand irony here is that the term “symnoesis” was coined by the atheist Richard Dawkins as part of his meme hypothesis– an idea that cannot be tested by modern science. The very refusal of mainstream scientists to entertain non-materialistic explanations makes it impossible to understand why and how memetics works. Rather, it is only those scientists who’ve gone “through the looking glass” while searching for the seat of consciousness who are on the right track.

By this I mean the recently-rediscovered field of panpsychism, which is what guys who want to sound important call animism once they accidentally stumble on it. Put simply, panpsychism is animism with a varnish of upper-class snootiness applied.

Why is all this important?

Because if the universe is conscious “all the way down”, that means that some parts of our soul exist in places where spacetime begins to behave very weirdly. Am I talking about quantum physics? Yes… and no.

Quantum physics is the best our primitive science can do to explain the weirdness that happens as one approaches the Planck length. Divorced from the resolutions provided by animism, concepts like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle break the brains of our smartest physicists.

Similarly, New Age “gurus” latch onto the comparatively rare phenomenon of quantum entanglement in an attempt to explain how we are all “ONE” or some nonsense like that.

So no, I’m not going to try to use quantum mechanics to explain why animism is important to esoteric practice- whether or not you choose to believe in it. Rather, I will note that quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain various phenomena- it is a map, not the territory. Animism is simply the acceptance that these phenomena, specifically the exercise of choice at the smallest observable scales, are real and that the pattern holds “all the way up”.

In other words, if we accept that the tiniest fractions of reality have some measure of awareness and free will, then as we add size and complexity, choice and consciousness will be found at all scales of size and complexity.

Therefore, rocks, trees, humans, birds, insects, mountains, rivers… all embody complex consciousnesses. They all have (and are) souls and can therefore be interacted with on more than a purely physical level. Indeed, human experience has long noted the existence of both embodied and disembodied spiritlife.

The acceptance of disembodied spiritlife can easily be explained by other concepts that physicists are still struggling to integrate into materialism and determinism– namely alocality and atemporality. One of the reasons that quantum entanglement freaks people out is that it defies our understanding of the limits of spacetime by seeming to ignore both time and distance constraints.

Yet, humans have long known that many Powers exercise some degree of alocality by being able to manifest Their presence in multiple places at the same time. Similarly, many also evidence some degree of atemporality by being aware of future events or at least future possibilities.

I find it interesting that some physicists have even postulated that space and time are products of consciousness instead of being inherent qualities of energy and matter. Of course, once we accept that consciousness is an inherent quality of energy and matter, the whole heap turns on its head.

It seems therefore that at the smallest levels, our universe is aware, but doesn’t fully comprehend time and space. At the Newtonian levels (what we think of as objective reality), matter and energy are organized into units large enough to comprehend a shared concept of time and space, but are deeply limited by it. At a more divine level of complexity, the Gods and other Powers both perceive our shared spacetime and are also aware that it is not truly binding- space and time are somewhat malleable to sufficiently complex and powerful consciousnesses.

The important takeaway for us as landworkers building spirit bridges is the recognition that our environment is itself comprised of many potential allies and that we and they (and They) are not entirely bound by spacetime.

More on the practical expressions of that next time.

– In Deos Confidimus

 

Community-Building, Land Health, Landwork, Workings

Spirit Bridges (and Death Stranding)

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There is a pretty popular video game named Death Stranding that centers around the concept of tying places together via a “Chiral Network” that routes information through the Otherworld. While the game is fiction, the core esoteric concept is not.

Starting in the early 2010s, a good chunk of my landwork involved “spirit bridges”. These are point-to-point connections constructed using an exchange of materials, usually stone.

Originally, my spirit bridges were tiny, no more than a few hundred yards- usually much less. The rationale was to permit spiritlife to move more freely around their environment, unhampered by humanmade obstacles.

For example, connecting two sides of a road for the benefit of very small entities who previously had unfettered access to each other. The idea is analogous to “wildlife crossings“- tunnels or bridges erected to help biological wildlife move from place to place.

Then, in 2012, a friend and I set out to address a blockage in Vermont that was inhibiting the attempts of healthy spiritlife from the Lake Champlain watershed to help heal some of “The Sick” that was infecting the Connecticut River watershed.

While the physical crossing was small, and should have been easy to bridge, the entire area was under the control of a hostile, unidentified Power that drove us off. Clearly said Being did not want the traffic running through Their territory and was likely the cause of the break in the first place. While I’m now fairly certain of the Entity’s identity, there wasn’t much I could do about His decisions.

This led me to start working on longer-range spirit bridges, ones that were more complicated to erect and maintain. These were built on the same esoteric foundations, but would be consecrated to and mediated by Holy Powers for safety reasons.

Between 2013 and 2014, I erected four spirit bridge cairns:

A map showing four completed spirit bridge cairns and numerous candidate sites.

By the end of 2015, between life stresses, vandals, and just plain entropy the strain of maintaining just the Austin cairn by myself became too much. I convinced myself that the system wasn’t actually working and stopped.

At the end of 2015, Hideo Kojima began work on Death Stranding.

Do I think certain Gods made Kojima make this game so I’d realize the system wasn’t a failure?

No.

But I am more and more convinced that Someone(s) wove meaning into it, something Holy Powers have been doing for centuries. And I don’t think I’m the sole target audience.

Remember, one of the big problems that led me to abandon the Spirit Bridges Program (ooh, now it sounds important!) was the strain of doing it myself. This is in part my own shortcomings. I’ve always been a solo operative and struggle to involve others in my work. However, part of it was also an operational security fear.

As mentioned elsewhere, landwork has been both a tool of conquest and of resistance. Being more open about the spirit bridge technology meant increasing the risk of sabotage. It also increased the potential that it could be hijacked by faiths hostile to our attempts to heal our environment and restore right relations with our spiritlife neighbors.

On the sabotage front, I was clearly overly concerned with secrecy. In vain it turns out, since the Austin cairn kept getting destroyed even without anyone knowing what it was. Had I assistance with maintaining it, perhaps it would still be there. Instead, afraid of sabotage, I tried to do it all myself and it wound up destroyed anyway.

Of course, the esoteric connection is still there, but it’s much weaker without regular maintenance.

While the plot of Death Stranding focuses on expanding the Chiral Network (technobabble spirit bridges), the actual “core loop” involves strengthening interpersonal connections. This is done explicitly- as you help people, they give you more access to resources, and the like. However, it is also implicit in the game- the more you connect, the more you see evidence of other players in the game world.

For instance, the first time you pass through an area, you might see a ladder or a rope left behind by another player that helps you climb a cliff. The second time, you might see more ladders and a postbox. Each time you cross a section of map you might see more and more features, bridges, charging stations, watchtowers… All of these are structures built by other players to make it easier for them (and you) to traverse the map.

You never see the other players, only their work.

I suspect that this was the point that certain Gods were trying to get across by nudging Kojima’s team throughout the making of Death Stranding:

We are not alone. There are others doing the work.

And we need to connect.

– In Deos Confidimus

 

Landwork, Workings

Hamilton Pool

I made it to Hamilton Pool yesterday.

Aside from a stone I’d planned to offer disappearing in under a minute, I can’t report any clearly supernatural anything.

Which is par for the course.

I’d hoped the cold weather and overcast would thin the tourism. It might have, but I was still sharing the area with 100 people or so. Many of them chattering away like humans should not in such places.

A panoramic photo of Hamilton Pool from inside the grotto.

The photo above shows a panorama, but of course the aspect ratio is a bit weird. You have to imagine the far left and right edges almost meeting behind you.

Two dominant features of the site are a waterfall near the left side of the opening and a moss-covered area near the right. There is a wavering line of drips from above that forms an arc between the two.

I say dominant because after walking all around the site, those were the two places that most drew my attention. The Texas Problem was still in evidence here. Though intellectually I could tell this was a place of power, between the other humans and the “cloak” I was barely picking up much of anything.

The first couple of hours was spent meditating in different spots, trying to do basic centering and grounding. This was a bit easier here than in the city, but not by much because there were still so many humans making disruptive noises.

I had fasted since the night before, not long, but enough to feel the drag of it. My hope was that it would sharpen my focus, which sometimes it does. I’m not sure if it helped, hindered, or neither.

After slowly making circumnavigating from the waterfall side to the beach (washed out in the center of the picture), I decided that the mossy area and the waterfall were the focal points where I needed to make offerings.

While the tourists thinned out, I sat on the beach and used a tiny rock with sharp edges as a burin to etch a horned serpent into a small cobble.

Once all but 30 or so tourists had departed, I made my way from the beach to the mossy area. From certain angles, it bears a resemblance to a large, sunken skull overgrown with moss. It also appeared to host a spring or seep that was coming from deeper than the water falling from above.

Still dodging tourists and park rangers (they often try to interrupt offerings), I first presented tobacco:

I offer you this tobacco, in honor and gratitude.

Then I offered a handful of toasted corn:

I offer you this corn, in honor and gratitude. Thank you for allowing me to visit this place.

Then, I had more people show up from out of nowhere, so I got flustered as I was packing up the corn. Somewhere around this point, I lost track of the etched rock. I may have left it on a post nearby or stuck it in my backpack and lost it in there.

I next moved clockwise around the inner section of the grotto, stopping periodically to meditate again. At one point, I noticed that the drips from above formed a pretty clear horned serpent motif- but only from that angle.

From another angle, I noticed several very faint, sinuous ripples on the surface, like invisible snakes 40′ long or more with their heads in the waterfall and their tails very slowly swishing back and forth to maintain position. I had not noticed them from that same vantage point earlier.

The waterfall was also flowing stronger than earlier for no reason I could discern. It was not raining in the area, nor anywhere upstream that I was aware of.

By this point, I was down to less than a dozen tourists, and I clambered down to the base of the waterfall. There, a massive red stone, like a huge egg some ten or twenty feet across, emerges from the pool and is drummed upon by one branch of the waterfall.

Here I readied four offerings:

  • The rest of my tobacco.
  • More toasted corn.
  • A red stone from Lake Champlain, triangular in shape and flat.
  • A smaller stone from a cenote in New Mexico, which I set atop the red stone.

These I carefully arranged on a flat-topped boulder nearby.

I turned, stood directly next to the waterfall with my hands and arms wide and invoked my hosts.

O, Great Serpents of Central Texas- you who dwell in this sacred place, your kindred, your ancestors, and all of your kind who call this region home…

While I was primarily trying to get the attention of the immediate locals, I wanted to make sure I was indicating an attempt to show respect to and communicate with the large “body politic”- for lack of a better term.

I am Keith, son of Michael, son of Eugene, of the line of Cormac.

This bit served multiple purposes:

  • Firstly, placing me in a context of lineage not only asks my own ancestors for help, but gives my hosts something longer-lasting than me to wrap their minds around. As humans, our individual lives are short compared to much of the spiritlife we are dealing with.
  • Secondly,  the overly formal recitation establishes gravitas and that my purpose for being there was diplomatic, not simply a friendly “how-do-you-do” visit.
  • Thirdly, that last bit is significant in its own right. While the “Cormac” in question is not necessarily Cormac mac Airt (probably isn’t), the name establishes a longer ancestral tie back to Europe and invites said blood ancestor(s) and said High King of Ireland emeritus to step in if they want to.

It’s worth noting that none of the genders are important. The wording feels right to me, but others may want to name their lineage differently or by tradition instead of blood relations. The important thing is to outline a lineage of strength.

I come to you humbly and to apologize. My people have not been respectful of you, nor of the land. Most of my people’s ancestors came from across the sea to the east. We live here now.

Once, my people knew better- they knew how to show respect and to live with the inhabitants of the land. But they were deceived by a new god, who led them astray, who blinded them to you. I wish to help my people learn again.

I turned back to the boulder, took up the tobacco, and placed it with both hands into the waterfall.

I offer you this tobacco, in honor of you and in gratitude.

I turned back to get the corn, and its lid had blown off (I’d loosened it already). The cenote stone was also gone.

Just… Gone.

I took up as much corn as I could hold, and with both hands placed it in the waterfall.

I offer you this corn, in honor of you and in gratitude.

I turned back to look for the cenote stone, which weighed about half a pound (not a pebble). It wasn’t on the ground around the boulder, and it certainly wasn’t atop the several-pound red stone, where I’d left it!

I took up the red stone instead and with both hands placed it atop the large red stone at the base of the waterfall.

I offer you this red stone from Lake Champlain, the land of Odzihozo, that you might have this as a connection to Him and to his land. I also brought a stone from a cenote in New Mexico, for the same reason, but now I cannot find it. I hope that you already have it.

I stepped back, now sopping wet despite my duster and wide-brimmed hat.

I ask that you help my people to see you, to hear you, to recognize you, to learn respect for you. Help them understand what their ancestors once knew. Let them see the land as it is, as it should be, that they may be good neighbors to you and to the land.

I waited.

I thank you for allowing me to come here and for listening.

Sensing no particular response, I packed my things and began huffing and puffing my way back up the trail from the floor of the canyon. I stopped at one point to offer the rest of the corn to the other inhabitants of the area after eating two pieces to demonstrate that it was safe.

I also picked up some trash here and there while exploring and on the way back. There wasn’t much- the rangers do a really good job policing rubbish.

Once back in my car, I thanked Hermes and Hekate for guiding me in and out of that liminal zone.

Then I ate the meat stick and candy bar I’d left in the car for post-working food. If you’re not in the habit of setting food and drink aside ahead of time, you should be. It’s a good safety precaution.

That’s about it.

So far, no further indications of anything.

-In Deos Confidimus

Community-Building

Towns Before Temples

Yes, towns before temples. Now that I have your attention, let me assure you that I’m not advocating towns before devotion. Rather, I’m approaching a frequent question in polytheisms from a practical standpoint, to wit-

Why are there no temples near me?

This question comes up a lot, and there are many valid, concrete, and utterly unhelpful responses. In short, it’s easy to know why there are no temples of our faith near us- it’s a solution that is hard.

Galina Krassova recently shared a video called “Strictly Kosher“, which is a British documentary about the Jewish community in Manchester, England. While the associated post was specific to marriage and childrearing, I found the video inspiring in a much broader context.

It is also raised issues intimately related to landwork, at least the sort that this blog is concerned with. How so? Much of esoteric landwork is about the marriage of a place and the people who live there.

In most of “paganism”, let alone the more narrowly-focused label of “polytheism”, people tend to live where they live and then attempt to forge some kind of connection. Like most Westerners, we lack indigeny (or “indigeneity”). We move around, we don’t know our neighbors, we shop at the MegaMart, and we drive long distances to meet others of our faith.

I used to have something approaching indigeny. When I lived in Western Massachusetts, I lived two miles from the birthplace of my maternal grandmother. She and her husband are buried a few miles from where my mother grew up, which was in turn a few miles from where both of her parents grew up. My mother’s family has lived in that general area since sometime around 1638.

For about twenty years, I stayed there for that very reason- despite it hurting my job prospects (among other things). Since giving in and moving to Texas, I have become more acutely aware of the problems associated with this lack of indigeny- not to mention the Texas Problem.

While it’s painful, it has helped sharpen my awareness of this as a larger-scale problem affecting polytheists (and “pagans”) in general. Because so many of us either come from (or have been taught to identify with) the homogeneous white middle-class assumption of automatic indigeny wherever one dwells, we are perhaps blind to a simple truth-

It is okay to live near people like yourself.

Most of our ancestors lived in ethnic neighborhoods at some point. Those neighborhoods waxed and waned based on immigration patterns- but typically by the second or third generation, children began to leave these segregated neighborhoods.

The story is a bit different for African-American communities, in that legalized discrimination and segregation kept many Black neighborhoods together for more than a century. However, in parts of the country where such discrimination is illegal, we are seeing many of those communities aging out and facing gentrification, too.

However, I’ve recently noticed a movement in some traditionally ethnic neighborhoods to specifically recruit younger members of their culture to move into the area and start businesses. Whereas these were once places for young people to escape from– they are in some cases becoming places to aspire to.

From a practical standpoint as well, it’s much easier to start a successful business, become a “mover-and-shaker”, find a date, or even just a decent job if the people around you know you and have common cause with you. It’s also easier to build a temple.

The Jews of Manchester understand this.

Doing a bit of research after watching the video, I came to find out that constructing a “Mikveh” (ritual bath) often happens before the construction of a synagogue. Why? Because strictly speaking, nobody can stay spiritually clean enough to enter a synagogue unless they have access to a Mikveh.

In some cases, it is the first building erected in a new village- even before permanent housing!

In a more general sense, there is a certain amount of groundwork that must take place before humans are ready to build a temple. Roadside shrines? Okay. Home altars? Definitely.

But temples are, by their nature, buildings that require a community. A community to build them, to support them… Frankly, I worry that without a community we could build it, but They would not come.

This idea that we need to strengthen our communities before we can build temples has been said before- in many, many places.

I’m going to go one further:

We need to have neighborhoods before we can build temples.

What would we do in those temples? Do we even know?

We could build the largest, most opulent temple in history equidistant from all the adherents of Tradition X in America and no one would ever use it.

As we know from studying our polytheistic history, the worship of a particular deity varied widely from place to place. Unlike the folks in the video, we are not following a set of written rules dating back thousands of years- nor should we. We should be developing living traditions rooted in a time and place.

Our traditions are broken, our liturgies muddled at best- wholly absent in many cases! If we remain broken from each other physically as well, how will we repair or replace that which was lost?

It is not enough to simply raise children in our faiths if we are raising them to live alone.

Multigenerational traditions alone will not save us- I know a devotee of a familial Hellenistic tradition dating back several generations. She now faces the extinction of her tradition because her only child has converted to another religion.

We need to look beyond the blinders of our homogenizing over-culture and recognize that our generation carries the responsibility of creating more than academic treatises and solitary rituals. To do what is required of us requires that we recognize something unusual:

We are immigrants in our own homeland.

Like the Jews, the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Germans, the Belarusians, and many, many of our ancestors- we are a people set apart. In time, our polytheisms will hopefully grow and become widely accepted.

For now though, we need to recognize that we are barely treading water until we have places of our own. These need not be specific to a particular tradition or pantheon, either- only specific to a polytheistic worldview.

Back in Europe, Christians and Jews from a given country often lived in segregated communities. Here in the United States they often had more in common with each other than with the general populace- language, if nothing else. The Irish-American tradition of boiling corned beef (instead of bacon) derives from the formerly close contact between Irish immigrants and Jewish butchers in cities like New York and Boston.

We need to establish polytheist neighborhoods in several parts of the country.

We need to start moving close together. We need to start creating new traditions (in the informal sense) there. We need to start supporting each other there and helping others to move there.

Only then can we begin to staunch two thousand years of bleeding. Only then can we begin to move beyond healing into growth.

Maybe then, we can build a temple. Or two… or hundreds.

-In Deos Confidimus

Research, Troubleshooting

The Waco Site & Its People

From some earlier point through sometime in the 1830s, a particular site along the Brazos river near the mouth of the Bosque was home to a group of people who spoke a dialect of the Wichita language.

The Spanish recorded two villages in the vicinity, El Quiscat and Felchazos, both assumed to be Tawakoni (another Wichita dialect). El Quiscat was named after a leader- Quiscat, who met with the Spanish at San Antonio in 1772. His village was said to sit west of the Brazos atop a bluff near springs and to house some 750 people.

This village is recorded again in 1779, in 1786, and in 1795.

In 1824, official reports to and by Stephen F. Austin claim a village  some 40 acres in size of between 33 and 60 grass houses enclosed by a defensive earthwork and farming an estimated 200-400 acres of fenced cornfield. The earthwork was recorded again in 1829 and was apparently visible to Anglo colonists for many years after they settled in the area.

This number of houses was echoed by Jean Berlandier around 1830, who added that the Waco ranged widely on bison hunts in the cooler months.

There is some suggestion that the Waco, Wichita, and Tawakoni were themselves invaders to Texas, based on Coronado’s account of a Wichita city in Kansas that he called Quivira. Here’s the thing, though- Wichita is a Caddoan language, meaning that these people were linguistically tied to the Caddo, who we know lived in in Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas for hundreds of years before Coronado.

Furthermore, Coronado describes the people of Quivira as having settled towns with substantial populations and large-scale agriculture. This is in contrast to their western neighbors, the Apache and Teyas, whom he claimed lived in wandering bands and ate raw meat.

That’s because the Caddoan peoples, including the Wichita, Tawakoni, etc. were connected to the Mississippian Empire. This was a multicultural, hierarchical society that ruled the central Mississippi basin for more than half a millenium. Amongst its distinctive features were massive earthworks, social hierarchy, intensive maize (corn) agriculture, widespread trade networks, and certain pottery techniques.

While it’s not clear if the Caddo were subjects of Cahokia or not, they were clearly connected with the Mississippian culture, as they began building complex earthworks in a similar style. This was actually true of native peoples from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and as far east as North Carolina (Cherokee country, if you’re keeping track).

What all of this tells us is that while the Caddoan peoples did move around, they displayed a preference for establishing long-term bases of operations. Bases of operations with earthworks. Earthworks that sometimes took centuries to construct. Earthworks that were tied into a complex set of spiritual technologies of which we have no written record.

Earthworks like the one at Waco.

Sure, the Waco wall wasn’t very big by Mississippian standards- but 40 acres is nothing to sneeze at. Even if the wall surrounded only part of the village, say a ceremonial center or fortified granary- we’re still talking about a village that planned to stay put.

Nor do we find accounts of earthworks at all of the sites associated with Wichita, Tawakoni, Waco, or other Caddoan villages. There are accounts of settlements here, there, and everywhere- almost as far south as San Antonio. Yet, in Central Texas, I’ve only found an account of the village at Waco having earthworks.

And this is nearly two centuries after the Mississippian Empire collapsed. However, the post-contact Kadohadache (a major Caddoan tribe somewhere around the Oklahoma/Arkansas border) appear to have maintained the hub-and-spoke village organization of the Mississippian culture.

What does that tell us about the Waco people? Chances are they are, as many claim, an offshoot of the Tawakoni. It appears that by the late 1700s, one of those villages (probably “El Quiscat”) was important and influential enough to become the hub of its own group of satellite villages, including one along the Guadalupe River near New Braunfels.

The ancestors of the Waco tribe probably lived in Central Texas for centuries before that, but on a more mobile basis. However, by the early 1800s, they’d invested substantial effort into establishing a permanent, fortified stronghold in the style of their downstream cousins- the Caddo.

During this same period, massive change was going on in other parts of North America. The Spanish were invading from the south and west. Anglo-Americans were pushing eastern native nations west. The Mississippian culture’s core had collapsed, but certain traditions continued on along the former empire’s frontier. Finally, plains tribes like the Apache, Comanche, Osage, and others were pressing down from the north- many on horseback.

The result seems to be that sometime around 1820, Waco became one of the last strongholds of the beseiged Caddoan peoples. The eastern groups, such as the Kichai and Hasinai were swamped with refugees from displaced Caddo villages in Louisiana and Arkansas- as well as members of other nations.

The Texians debated war with the Wacos for much of that decade, but generally prefered to negotiate because of the tribe’s perceived strength and agricultural nature. Alliances between settlers, tribes, and nations seem to have waxed and waned at the drop of a hat, with Tonkawas, Apaches, Comanches, Caddos, Tawakoni, Karankawas, and about fifty other groups all alternately offering to fight each other and the Wacos.

Suddenly, but unsurprisingly- things went sideways. At some point between 1829 and 1839 (possibly 1837),  the primary Waco village was sacked by Comanches, Cherokees, or perhaps even a joint force. Within a short span of years, the Wichita-speaking peoples in Central Texas relocated much further upstream, in the vicinity of the Wichita River. The river got that name from the ill-fated Sante Fe Expedition which marked the location of a “Waco village” along the river in 1841.

History, by which I mean Americans, were not kind to the Wichita peoples thereafter. Even after moving west, conflicts between settlers and tribes continued to escalate, and by the late 1800s the natives had pretty much all been forced onto reservations in Oklahoma.

So here’s the question- what happened at Waco between 1829 and 1839?

Was it simply a violent attack and the locals decided to leave for greener pastures after years of escalating tensions?

Possibly.

Or did someone do something at Waco that seriously messed up the surrounding region on a spiritual level?

If so, we’re talking some extremely powerful working(s) to affect an area hundreds of miles across. At the same time, it wouldn’t be the first case in history of someone “salting the earth” to deny land to their enemies.

Is it possible that the Waco, finding their position untenable, self-destructed the spiritual framework that allowed people to bind to that land? Could the Cherokee (who likely also understood Mississippian spiritual technology) have blown it up to drive out the Waco- only to themselves have been forced out by Anglo-Americans before they could rebuild it?

Why am I blaming the natives?

Well, to be clear- I’m not. I’m speculating- casting about for answers in a sea of questions.

On the other hand, while the Spanish missionaries likely had, via Catholicism, the spiritual tech to blow up said framework- we don’t have a lot of evidence that they did tried to do so in Central Texas north of San Antonio. So, while Spanish missionaries are likely a contributing factor, the damage they did was probably secondary to (or a compounding factor to) the primary cause.

Protestants of the time, which most of the Anglo-Americans were, tended to reject spiritual technology altogether. They almost certainly did not possess the mojo to do something esoteric on this scale.

Which leaves either:

  • A purely natural or divine event in which humans had no agency beyond their own foibles; or,
  • A deliberate or accidental act by some organized and spirit-technologically-advanced group of people.

While I suspect some divinities were involved in what transpired, I believe that humans catalyzed it.

If I’m correct, the question now becomes- exactly what actually happened and how do we repair the damage?

-In Deos Confidimus