Looking at Yourself

[The following story is absolutely true, although I've changed location and traceable details to preserve total anonymity. -- JHF]

A very interesting fellow who lives outside of Taos told me a story a couple of years ago that lifted the top of my head clean off.

He’d been digging a hole to install a cistern when he discovered an ancient Indian burial site. (You’d think all these sites had been excavated long ago, but you’d be wrong.) He brought out whole pots, arrowheads, and some very special artifacts he wouldn’t describe to me in detail. He also found a complete skeleton with an intact skull!

The nature of the artifacts told him he’d uncovered a medicine man’s grave, and he constructed an altar in his hand-built home to hold the skull and shaman’s tools. He set aside the pottery — quite valuable in this day and age — and for a long while kept the skull out where he could see it and learn whatever secrets it might reveal. Now, this person is extremely respectful when it comes to Native Americans and the goods of the dead: he never told a soul except his partner (and later me, of course) and made no attempt to sell the objects. He’s also an artist and spiritual warrior like the best of us and felt an energy or presence in the relics that gave him pause. The skull especially fascinated him. It seemed to be full of power (big medicine) when he held it, as if it were trying to speak. Then one day, the truth hit him like a thunderclap: the skull was his own…

There was even a kind of physical confirmation that I can’t recall just now, something that proved the identity of the skull enough for him to accept it. Somewhere, somehow, he’d been alive several thousand years ago as a medicine man, and now had dug up his very own bones. Once that sank in, the tensions my friend had been feeling made perfect sense and told him what to do.

He didn’t sell a thing. Instead, he carefully returned the artifacts to the grave, foremost among them the skull. Today I doubt there’s any part of this discovery that hasn’t been reburied, right beside his studio where he found it. (Being the kind of man he is, with friends in the Native community, I know he had guidance from living medicine men and did this in the proper way.)

These kinds of mysteries are all around us. You may be skeptical, but THE SKULL WAS HIM! He was looking at himself from over 1,000 years ago and knew it. He just knew, and took appropriate action as soon as he could.

You have to respect these things, or else they won’t turn out so clean.

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