Manny was on a mission to unearth the most authentic, raw, and perfect form of Sundance, so the world could see it’s ultimate power.
He loved that I was on a mission to revive shamanic traditions for witchcraft, and thought our missions were aligned.
Manny had found an old system of Sundance that he believed was fractured. A lost relic over time for his culture.
He needed my help to fill in the missing pieces.
We worked for months to decode the ancient Sundance techniques until the ritual was ready to perform.
And… after slaving away for so long, I must have really earned his respect…
Because the next thing I knew, he invited me to not only attend the Sundance ritual…
He wanted me to be PART of the ritual itself.
I couldn’t believe it.
It was very rare for a woman, let alone a white woman, to be part of a Sundance.
They let me drum. This was also not usual for a woman.
As I sat there drumming, I could see why.
Most outsider’s can’t handle the intensity…
Or the fact that some Sundancers die.
The energy was so thick the hair on my neck stood up.
The more we drummed, the deeper the Sundancer went into a trance… allowing him to sustain levels of pain that would make most people faint.
The louder he cried, the harder we drummed.
It was all connected.
The ritual came to an end as the Sundancer’s hallucinations began to subside.
That’s when it hit me:
This Sundance ritual was just like many other shamanistic rituals I’ve studied over my 31 years as an anthropologist and a witch.
The dancing. The trance.
The intense crying out for a vision.
The life changing results afterwards.
This was Shamanism on it’s highest level.
But it wasn’t the hooks that made it work.
It wasn’t being dangled ten feet in the air.
It wasn’t the flat-out torture that Sundancers endure.
It was, in fact, the drumming.