(Thanks to RMA to correct the style in 1999 July)

Three histories of chamanes

These are three histories on chamanes, that several doubts clarified to me on dark principles of the chamanismo.

Attention: These histories can be very instructive, but they are beside the point violent. If you are of squeamish nature, DOES NOT READ THEM.

I repeat, if you are of squeamish nature, does not read these histories.

The wolf and the sword

Let us travel by a time to the Earth of the ice, to those places where the sun is during six months, and the cold causes that the women lose their teeth when washing the clothes, by the necessity to bite it to soften it. In those sites where the core of the man as soon as it begins to know the weapons of the white man; in those earth where the appraised possession but of a man rifle is his and its dogs.

What the man of these latitudes gets dressed? Of animal skins; What eats the man? Fish.

In that earth many animals do not exist, single wolves, bears, and dogs. The dogs are the friends of the man, those that load by him the things.

What happens when the man is hungry and the rivers are congealed? What can do? At the moment at which the man decides to hunt, one faces a serious problem: The bears are physically very strong: To face them the naked hands or a knife is suicide, the appraised dogs cannot against the white giant, and the bullets are too expensive and slow against the power untied of the nature.

What has left to the man? To hunt to the wolves. But the same problem arises again. The wolves move in herds, preventing that a single hunter can overcome them; the wolves have the force of the number, and the dogs are allied of the wolves or incapable to face to it them. And they are too valuable to risk them.

It is then when the men must leave to the hunting, of a very instructive way and that he is not repeated in any other part of the world. As the bears never will approach a trap, and to dominate them can be difficult, the traps put the wolves. The man greases a knife to skin with dog or bear fat, and nails the knife of 20 centimeters in the entrance of his house, while he locks in himself.

Of the distance the wolf smells the fat, and is going to look for the bear. But what surprise for the wolf, that finds the defenseless and quiet bear, a perfect mouthful. And the wolf begins to bite the knife and to smell the blood, without occurring account that what eats is not bear blood, but blood of wolf, and attacks with that fury of which fights by the life, and it is fed on his own blood, and it struggles and it does not understand because the bear does not die and continues fighting.

In the morning, the man leaves of his home and gathers the dead wolf.

They count the legend that the wolves that leave their own blood, will return to this earth like chamanes.

The hunting of the monkey

Let us travel to the heart of the African forests, to the place where the tigers and the lions, where the elephants are the kings of the forest, and the track of man exist has not profaned the nature, where the natives eat to the light of bonfires and sleep in huts or the glass of the trees.

But, what can the lances against a tiger or a lion? By each dead animal three men die; the tribe cannot risk her people; the elephant falls easily in traps but, but it does not have case of killing to an animal with the skin so hard and difficult to eat, and the quick zebras are impossible to catch.

But he is the small demon, which the white men we called monkeys, chimpanzees, or changos.

Small animals of smooth meat and that cannot fight against the man, but too fast to be captured.

Then the man creates a trap, does holes in a pumpkin or watermelon, creating in the fruit hollow like which we see in a pumpkin of halloween, with triangles in the eyes. Within the pumpkin, the man leaves peanuts, strawberries and nuts, and he goes away.

At night the monkey arrives, it puts its small hand and it takes the peanuts, and oh surprise, when it tries to remove the hand, the full hand cannot leave. And the monkey does not think at least about loosen the peanuts, and is there, imprisoned, when really this free one. The pumpkin is too heavy to drag it or to break it, and the monkey that cannot loosen, tries to do force putting the other hand in another triangle, taking hold but peanuts.

In the morning, a single man can kill to twenty monkeys with this method, giving eaten all his tribe.

Mamilapinatapei, or the fire of the love.

Mamilapinatapei, is the word but difficult to explain that it exists. It is used in the Earth of the fire to talk about to a pair of young people who this watching themselves, wishing that the other offers to do something that both wishes, and that neither it is arranged to do.

When the esquimales notice in some young people these glances, a serious problem is created; by a side the social conveniences, and on the other hand, the laws that cannot be broken and that can make to everything a town unfortunate. It is then when chamán makes the decision; or to command to the exiled man to the ice plains, or to force the young people to choose between the death and to become chamanes through the love.

How is made this? A grave of two meters of depth in the snow digs, it undresses both to young, and it is thrown to them to the well. If the love does not exist, in the morning the grave with snow fills, and the corpses are buried; if there is love, both young they will be even until the his day end and, when chamán dies, they will be those that execute the ritual dances and the treatments.