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CHAPTER 1
In the Land of Oz
Childhood and Adolescence
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
THE WIZARD OF OZ TALKING ABOUT HIMSELF
One of my early memories, perhaps at four or five, was becoming ecstatic at the bright-colored pages of a library book about dinosaurs. Who knows what ran through my childish mind? My guess is that it had something to do with the monstrous and the fantastic, which really existed. I was so happy about that.
Another early memory has me on the living room floor, playing with some tiny little Disney figurines that my mother gave me. I believe they were marketing giveaways, treasures retrieved from boxes of Jell-O powder. I do not remember simply playing with these brightly painted plastic objects, however. In words that I did not possess as a child, I remember relating to them with awe, as if they embodied some special presence or bright power. They were numinous. They were little gods.
There were other early hints of my later life, signs that the psyche really is all there early on, that the acorn seed will grow up to become an oak and not a maple tree or a radish. Here's one. When my brother and I were little boys, our parents gave us two kittens. My brother Jerry named his "King Kong" and grew up to become, among other things, a football player, a body builder, and a rock climber. I named mine "Magic." Go figure.
I grew up in a little farming community called Hebron, in Nebraska (population: 1,800, or so). Already we are in the realm of a cultural fusion and a colonial history, in this case the fusion of biblical and Native American histories and the colonizing of the prairies by white settlers. The original town of Hebron, of course, is on the occupied West Bank in Israel. It is most famous for the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and much of his family are said to be buried. Nebraska, on the other hand, is an indigenous Omaha word for "Land of the Flat Water," or what the French called the Platte, quite literally, the Flat (River). It is.
My memories of childhood are many and various and reflect, as one might expect, the land and its people. I have two memories of the Native American cultures that spirit and haunt the prairies both where I grew up and just west of there, in Colorado. The first involves my first contact with real religious difference. I still do not know what to make of the second.
As a teenager, I knew an elderly Indian man named Dewey. Dewey was what we called a "character." He was a horse trader who lived on the river road outside of town. He dressed poorly, probably because he was poor, to put it mildly. Most people didn't trust him. He used to come into my parents' hardware store, and I used to visit with him in the town restaurant. He was very fond of my parents, no doubt because they treated him with respect and affection, and he also took a liking to me. Dewey knew that I was interested in the religious life, and so he was always telling me gently critical stories about "the white man's religion" and how different the Native American's notion of "Spirit" is. It never occurred to me to argue with him.
It also never occurred to me to tell Dewey what happened to me in Colorado a few years before our conversations. We were out there on a summer vacation with my cousins, who lived in a suburb of Denver. I believe that we were just outside of Golden, Colorado, visiting Buffalo Bill's grave. The gravesite and memorial sit high up in the foothills, overlooking the city. I wandered away from the group into the trees for no particular reason. Suddenly, something white flew by me — fast. Really, really fast. At first, I thought it was a mountain goat, but that didn't make much sense, since I saw nothing, even immediately after it ran by me. The thing, or so it seemed, just vanished into thin air. Flustered, I ran back to the group and asked my cousins and brother if they had seen anything. I don't think anyone took me seriously. They just brushed it off, as if nothing had happened.
I didn't give the whole event much more thought, but to this day I can't help wondering about the fact that we were at Buffalo Bill's grave, and that seeing a "white buffalo" is a central feature of some Native American mythologies. Whether you can call what I did "seeing" or whether you can call what I saw a "white buffalo," I do not know. I barely saw anything. It could have been an immense white owl as easily as it could have been a small white mountain goat. Or a ghost, for that matter. Still, I cannot quite shake the thought that the thing did not so much run by me, as through me or into me. Was that the beginning of my weirdness?
Then there was the raw violence of the Nebraska prairies and the manner in which this metereological chaos spun into myth, and into me. Hebron happens to sit in the Little Blue River Valley, otherwise known by the locals as Tornado Alley. The town, which is also the county seat of Thayer County, was pretty much leveled in 1953 by a monster tornado. It took out most of main street, much of the movie theater, the Catholic church, and the high school, and it shaved the roof off the county courthouse building like a crazed boy dismantling his little sister's doll house. Both of my parents were adolescents and remember the event well. So does anyone else there who happened to be alive at the time — it is difficult to forget the back of your car lifting off the ground as you try to escape town on a Saturday night; or your church reduced to rubble with your priest hanging, still very much alive, by a rafter; or the fact that you attended, as I did, a high school that in an earlier version had met its end in the winds earlier in the century.
I was not alive in 1953, but I grew up in the long cultural shadow of this monster storm. This colored, or thundered, everything. I have very distinct memories, for example, of fleeing to my grandparents' storm cellar at the threat of a similar storm. Disturbingly, storm cellars were dug out away from the house, so you had to run through the storm to get out of it.
THEOSOPHICAL OZ
I also remember being scared out of my wits as a little boy watching The Wizard of Oz.
The 1939 classic is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's children's books by the same name, which first appeared in 1900. The movie begins with a Kansas farm and a tornado, that is, with my world. Although I never would have put it this way as a boy, space and time both morph from those opening scenes into one long altered state of consciousness or technicolor dream. As Dorothy famously describes the situation to Toto, "We're not in Kansas anymore." Or Nebraska. And then there were those damned flying monkeys. God, I hated those monkeys. They scared the shit out of me. Finally, there was the bumbling, deceptive, and yet somehow still kind and wise Wizard of Oz.
Interestingly, I played the Wizard, not very well, when my elementary school decided to stage the play. I've been playing him ever since, trying to teach young people that things religious are never what they seem to be, that there is a bumbling but profound human nature behind the curtain, and that the "great and powerful Oz" that so frightens us is an insecure fake — a projection on the screen of culture and history. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" The study of religion follows the little dog Toto and encourages the precisely opposite attitude. "Go ahead," we say. "Pull the curtain back. Take a peek."
I was a terrible actor and remember only one other role in a school play — when I played Hermes, the silver messenger of the Greek gods and the patron deity of hermeneutics, the intellectual tradition with which I most identify today. Go figure.
I have thought a great deal about the shaping influence of The Wizard of Oz on my young psyche. Does it have something to do with the fact that Frank Baum was a Theosophist; that, when Baum's family lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota, they held séances in their home; or that Baum even wrote a piece for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on the powers of clairvoyants in which he discussed the existence of elementals or nature spirits? Later, he would fill his fairy tales with similar subtle beings. One of these found its way into the Hollywood movie as a conscious ball of light that floats into an early scene and takes the shape of the Good Witch of the East. I would not realize until much later how similar this scene is to multiple reported UFO encounters. Little wonder, then, that when Jenny Randles was looking for an expression to capture the shifts in consciousness that are so common in encounter events, when space and time change shape or speed, or a strange mental tingling signals the activation of a visionary display, she landed on the phrase "the Oz factor."
Baum summed up the basis of his own understanding of Theosophy in the notion that "God is Nature, and Nature God," not a bad gloss on what I would later call the "super natural." In a similar spirit, Baum portrayed magical powers in his stories as real forces of Nature that we do not yet understand, but will someday, after which we will be able to work true wonders. This same notion would later become the American "paranormal."
As a child, I knew nothing of Baum's Theosophy, of course, but this fictional enchantment certainly worked its way deep into me. I used to have a very distinct kind of lucid dream around four or five. Alas, I was always being chased in my dreams by this or that monster. Oddly, I knew perfectly well that I was dreaming inside the dream, but it was no less scary, and, worst of all, I couldn't get out. Until, that is, I figured out how. Eventually, I learned, still in the dream now, to cover my body with a sheet and tap my shoes together three times. With that, the dream would end, the monster would disappear, and I would wake up in my room, "back in Kansas." Okay, Nebraska. But close enough. It was southern Nebraska, after all.
Believe it or not, it never occurred to me where I had learned this little bit of lucid dream magic. Which is all to say that all this tornado and Wizard of Oz stuff was not just about weather and early Hollywood. It was also part of my little psyche. I may have lived in Nebraska just north of Kansas, but I also lived in that Theosophical, ufological dreamworld called Oz.
WONDERS IN THE BACK OF A COMIC BOOK
Television cartoons were really important to Jerry and me. That and sugar-loaded cereal that functioned as a kind of crack cocaine for kids. I still fondly remember getting up early every Saturday morning (the only morning of the week for cartoons), eating five, six, seven bowls of candy posing as nutritious cereal (whose artificial dyes colored the milk in truly unnatural ways), and then sitting in front of the television set, much too close, completely buzzed, for four solid hours watching psychedelic cartoons that neither of us knew were psychedelic, one of which, I kid you not, was called "H. R. Pufnstuf" (1969). The latter marvel featured an evil witch named Witchiepoo, a brightly colored happy dragon named H. R. Pufnstuf (the mayor of the island, of course), a British boy named Jimmy, and a talking magic flute named Freddy, who looked pretty much exactly like a talking penis. Disturbing. Who wrote this stuff? And puff'n on what stuff?
As I grew into adolescence, my enthusiasms shifted from the prehistoric to the superheroic. I imagined myself as an artist. I wanted to draw comic books. No, I wanted to draw those bodies. These human forms — both male and female — were glorious, sensuous, and ecstatic. There was also something transcendent about them: they glowed, flew, and disappeared in flashes of energy and light. They also turned me on, whatever that means at the age of eight.
I didn't just want to draw those bodies, though. I wanted to be one. Jerry and I would spend countless hours pumping weights in our basement toward this end. We spent one summer month, for example, following the grueling instructions of a poorly produced pamphlet that we purchased (for $4.99, plus $1.25 shipping and handling) from an ad at the back of a comic book. It promised us the secret to putting a whole inch on our biceps. This "secret" basically involved curling dumbbells every other hour all day long until we turned blue and couldn't lift our arms any longer.
It was awesome.
And that was just the beginning of the wonders at the back of those comics. There were the decoders and spy cameras (ordered'em), the Martial arts secrets advertised in martial arts comics (yep — don't mess with me), even underwater sea monkeys (nope — drew the metaphysical line about right there). Okay, the latter ads were peddling freeze-dried brine shrimp, but we didn't know that. We thought we were looking at naked monkey people in a fish bowl. We also ordered, believe it or not, Chinese throwing stars. These were basically weapons punched out of cheap steel in the shape of sharp stars. When you threw them at trees or buildings, they stuck. Heaven only knows what they would have done to a neck or a chest. What conscienceless man (it had to be a man), I now ask myself, was punching out deadly weapons in his garage and selling them to kids in the back of comics? And on and on it went, breathlessly, at the back of a single twenty-cent comic.
Depressingly, comic books today sport professionally executed ads that sell respectable things like milk. Not then. Comics were disreputable. They were slightly dangerous (and the throwing stars were really dangerous). We felt just a little bit naughty. Most of all, though, the world was magical. Anything was possible. We felt immortal. We felt like minor gods in the making, and those superhero comics were our instruction booklets on how to imagine our own inner superhood into being. We knew, of course, that the stories were "not real," but that's not how our imaginations related to their bright plots, or to the ripped male bodies and busty, leggy female forms arching, aching across the interior pages. No one, after all, had yet told us that our crystalline sense of awareness was just a froth of neurons firing; that we were just biological robots locked into our local language and cultural games; that life is really about money, power, and politics. We didn't know any of this. Not that it would have made any sense.
It still doesn't.
THE FALL
Something else happened in my youth, in the summer of 1971, when I was eight, that has often struck me as potentially significant, perhaps as some kind of neurospiritual opening. I fell out of a tree and landed on my spine and elbow, breaking both. The elbow was obvious enough. It was a compound fracture, and I was rolling around on the ground, screaming in agony. The broken vertebra was invisible and went completely unnoticed until decades later when I visited a chiropractor for some back pain. He took a standard X-ray and commented casually that I had broken a vertebra that had healed.
I have since wondered about this. Was something in my spine "opened up" by that fall and break? I ask this because one of the things that I have noticed in my readings of various mystics and psychics is that they often come to their gifts through some kind of physical injury or neurological event, often involving the head or spine. I do not claim such mystical or psychical gifts, but my life took some very unusual and, by almost any local cultural standards, very anomalous turns shortly after that fall and those injuries. Things got very weird. As did I. So maybe it wasn't the white buffalo. Maybe it was the fall.
One manifestation of this weirdness was my odd "nonviolence" in high school football, a sport that up until high school I had loved, if not actually worshipped (my room was a veritable temple to the Dallas Cowboys and my boyhood idol, Roger Staubach). Then, in high school, I became anxious about "hitting," as they called it — a euphemism for putting one's head down and ramming it into the body of another player. Was I unconsciously protecting my spine? I cannot help thinking that I was. This odd football nonviolence was also an expression of another entire psychosexual complex: puberty.
Oh, boy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Secret Body"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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