the timboucher experience

“You can’t afford it,” he told me. Not a barb, but a statement of fact. “Ten thousand dollars, okay? And it must first be verified. Then twelves priests are required. I can’t give this to you.”

“Okay,” I told him, speaking through my computer, which I’d been using as my phone ever since I smashed my cell with a rock years ago. I wasn’t really sure where this was all coming from, and hence had no problem backing down quickly from whatever arcane initiation he was advising against pursuing.

“Maybe it was just a spirit guide,” his voice floated out of the computer, “just introducing itself.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Listen, this is the orisha who governs liminal spaces. Have you been doing any major pathworking?”

“No,” I admitted, not knowing if what I’d been doing would fit his definition of pathworking. “Just lots of research.” That wasn’t exactly true – there was a lot of experimentation as well.

“Research wouldn’t do it,” he clarified. “I’m talking like going to graveyards and digging up skulls.”

I was relieved. “Oh, no, definitely not.” That much was true.

“This is the orisha who decides whether witches live or die. This is an area where you must seek the guidance of spiritual elders.”

I believed him. His voice sounded so earnest, pleading, and yet he wasn’t trying to get me to commit to anything, or to give anybody money. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason I’d contacted him again, after many months without communication relates to a dream I had during a peculiar series of what might be considered spiritual experiments.

In the dream, there were four interlocking fields. The fields were not an abstract thing. The image that appears associated with it in my mind’s eye is the interior of a hut. There was a teacher, more of a voice with a sort of presence, as opposed to a physical entity. The four fields, it explained, where they came together, is the ground at which the phenomenal world comes into existence. Only it wasn’t explained quite in those words. But that was the teaching. And there was a mouse… And the voice told me its name, one of those words you hear in a dream that seems like something important, so important that when you wake up, the effort you expend in remembering it completely buries it. Something with a bunch of k’s, r’s, a’s.

When I spoke to the santero on the phone, he was very serious. I had emailed him out of professional curiousity, merely to see if the dream called to mind elements of the West African Yoruban religious tradition he was an initiated priest in, Santeria. I’d expected only an email back with maybe a little bit of info, but instead he insisted I call him right away. He started the conversation by listing three African-sounding names with which I was unfamiliar at the time and which immediately left my memory as soon as I heard them.

I said no to each one in turn, and when he was done decided that of the three it was the most similar to the first. Thus began the above conversation. I found the santero originally years ago on the web while trying to locate someone who could do a traditional Yoruban divination for me. My initial conversation with him years earlier had been the same, him trying to dissuade me from following this course of action, that the religion wasn’t for outsiders, and that if I were to do it, I had to follow whatever the spirits told me to do. For unlike the advice given out by divinatory systems like the Tarot deck, which most Westerners interested in the occult dabbled with, the Dilogun readings he did were revered as literally the voices of the ancestors. I agreed, shortly thereafter visited him for a paid consultation and found the experience to be quite extraordinary and entirely worthwhile. That, however, is a story for another time and included here only as context for why I trusted the advice of this man, one of a stable of assorted strange characters and references whom I turn to occasionally for help tracking down esoteric information.

I promised the santero I would take his advice, thanked him profusely and signed off, closing my computer to meditate on the conversation. The past few weeks had certainly put me into a peculiar head-space if nothing else. But it was intentionally done, these experiments, these artistic projections into waking dream-spaces. Liminal spaces indeed. It was while I was studying for my ham radio license that I got involved in this line of experimentation. I was, I guess you could say, trying to sandblast my mind or soul or something. An extended vision quest mediated by technologies both ancient and modern. I was attempting to see the future, connect with the past and inject my own code directly into the swirling data-stream of the universe. My tools were: an old crystal CB radio borrowed from a friend, huge amounts of white sage leaves, incense and frankincense. I would tune the CB radio to channel 9, the one I’d been instructed truckers talked on. It was mostly static, but it was the static, the white noise I was seeking. The sage was burned to cleanse and disrupt negative energy, the incense to sweeten. It was a neo-primitivist ritual, I guess you could say. On top of that, I would layer randomized audio samples from my computer of indigenous spiritual and ritual music from around the world. Magical songs, songs sung for a reason, to affect the nature of reality itself, for healing, to bring game, to contact the dead. Mixed in with those were prayers and chants in as many languages as I could find, scattered throughout with the sounds of amateur radio: blips and bleeps, CW transmissions (Morse Code to the layman) and endless variations of static. Then I would load up anywhere from three to eight videos from YouTube on a variety of topics: anything related to the above. Spiritual subjects, arcane esoteric topics juxtaposed alongside instructional videos relating to radio and communications technologies.

And then I would just sit back and let it all wash over me. Oh, that and I was stoned. Out of my fucking mind. But maybe you already guessed that, based on the above description. The point was, I guess if there was a point, was to overload my perceptual filters to such a degree that something miraculous would happen. Something unexpected. Something like ancient deities from other cultures contacting you to teach you things in your sleep.

I didn’t tell any of this to my santero though. How could I over the phone? It was too much to explain, to put all into simple words my methodologies of occult experimentation. So I called up my palero for a second opinion. A palero is a priest in a neighboring African religious tradition, that of the Kikongo. It’s called Palo Mayombe in Spanish. And the tradition is much more commonly associated with straight up black magic. That’s why I liked this guy, he’s okay with that. Always good to have a counterpoint to any advice get in the far out realms of the fantastic and strange. My palero also happens to be a a well-known web artist who operates under a pseudonym to keep his real life corporate office persona separate from his internet weirdo persona and his secretive black magic persona.

“Well, I guess the key thing,” he said after I explained what my santero had told me and what I’d been actually doing, is “how do you feel about it?” He was referring to the dream and to everything else.

“I feel fine. Good even,” I told him. “The dream wasn’t a negative thing by any means and his reaction to it all surprised me.”

“Well,” he paused. “Then I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

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