August 18, 2000
 

Dear Ms. Brightman,
    Heaven knows I've listened to you often enough so I feel that I know you. You and your divine voice are a constant companion that bring me quiet comfort. My other favorites are Loreena McKennitt and the music of Java, which I profoundly recommend that you get to know. Like all our art, Java's music basically comes out of Java's mysticism (kebatinan), which is primarily and ultimately a communal rather than an individual pursuit which ties our entire society and culture to the purpose:

Mamayu hayuning bawana
Mamayu hayuning jagad
Serve the harmony of the world
Serve the harmony of the universe

There are now some excellent recordings from one of our palaces in Surakarta, the home of two of Java's four kings. These were produced by the King Record Company, Ltd. from Japan and are called Music of Mangkunegaran Solo I and Music of Mangkunegaran Solo II.
    I currently live here in Brazil where the most obvious approach to existence is expressed in what is called Gerson's law:

Levar vantagem em tudo
Take advantage in everything

Evidently Brazil is just expressing the Modern trends more aggressively than most of the world, in that this does seem to be the tenor of our times. At times I must admit to despairing altogether for the souls of Western man but then I listen to your lovely voice and my pain and rage is somewhat assuaged.
    Like you, my blood comes largely out of the Celts, though from among the Cornish, Picts and Scots for the most part. My great great great great-uncle is Robert Louis Stevenson. In addition, on my Grandfather Ash's side, I have druid sorts lurking in from Cornwall within as well. Howe means valley or depth in Scottish (the howe of the night, the howe of hell). I was born in the United States, but in as much as I started as a druidic nature worshipper when I was eleven or so, looking down the long line of those that define my being, I find it rather hard to relate to being an American. My sense of the Celts (in as much as I do not despise us altogether) doesn't have much to do with our often overbearing families and clans which clearly attend to the usual human interest in setting up hierarchies where authority can easily be abused (and frequently has been). What I like is our tradition of insisting on reality in relating to events. A good example of this comes in Stevenson's Kidnapped in the person of Jennet Clouston (who is much of our dear Morrigan):

    The woman's face lit up with malignant anger. "That is the house of Shaws!" she cried. "Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down. See here!" she cried again. "I spit upon the ground, and crack my thumb at it! Black be its fall! If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear: tell him this makes the twelve hunner and nineteen time that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him and his house, byre and stable, man, guest, and master, wife, miss, or bairn--black, black be their fall!"
    And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of eldritch singsong, turned with a skip, and was gone. I stood where she left me, with my hair on end. In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside omen, to arrest me ere I carried out my purpose, took the pith out of my legs.

    As a result of my sense of things not conforming to that of those about me (there aren't too many practicing druids where I come from, I suspect because ice for a gin & tonic is so hard to find in the forest), I took an interest in the great things of existence and the great questions of being. I looked for the broadest area of concern possible in plumbing the depths of being human and ended up an anthropologist. In 1978 I went off to Java to do Ph.D. research and found my heart and soul there (including an openly defined and still understood druidic tradition in their sutapa). Home at last. I've been struggling to serve the love and beauty I have found there ever since.
    When I got back from Java in 1980 I finished up my Ph.D. with a dissertation about the kebatinan group I became a leader of while I was in Java, which is called Sumarah: A Study of the Art of Living. I produced the work, which was ranked in the highest category, in a flashing period of four months, the inspiration was so urgent (though the reason for this rush has never become clear to me). I wrote articles afterwards while I was trying to present myself to anthropology and fortunately for my sense of worth and pride (but unfortunately for my erstwhile career) started out with the challenge:

Are we irresponsible? Does our work too often reflect the Faustian hubris of our times and constitute intellectualistic humbuggery which obfuscates our subject matter? Who do we respect? As Sapir (1928:41) asked concerning our denial of traditional wisdom and our "fragmentary and experimental analysis," are we not "throwing away a greater wealth for the sake of a lesser and more dazzling one?" This article discusses a part of this old wealth, "traditional holism," and the perspective it gives on the problems of existence and being together.

The article, "Traditional Holism: Reflections on Natural Law", is a beauty but no one took up the gauntlet. Neither this, nor an article called "Open and Closed Psychology: How Different Can We Be?", was accepted for publication and I found no place among the lot that make up anthropology these days. So with a six-month-old baby girl in arms, in October 1981 we were off to Brazil where I began to teach English and study my next people, who were and are rather less to my liking than the Javanese and the Balinese. I suspect you already have an idea of how I feel about the rampant hedonism of a place where Carnival and institutionalized irresponsibility mark the character of social reality though my home is now here and my little corner of this confusion is a truly wonderful town.
    My experience in practicing Sumarah and in nature worship has shown me that there is a commonality, a mutuality, in the definition of experience that cannot be denied. In other words, the way you feel largely depends on others and often shows their influence on you. Believe me, after living in the hyper-materialistic United States and divine Java and knowing the feelings or rasa I had there and then coming to the distinctly different and often openly demonic level of experience here in Brazil, it's hard to deny our impact on one another. Relative to you, through your music, your influence has been salutary and clearly evident.
    Like São Paulo, Surakarta (my city in Java) used to be called "The City that Never Sleeps." But unlike São Paulo, this was not because of nightly revelry and escapism but rather came due to kebatinan peoples' nocturnal application to meditation on the problems of being. For example, when my daughter was born in the United States I did a ngebleng fast (no eating, talking or sleeping) for a week to try to establish the being she brought to us. I hadn't expected it to carry on for so long, but in the cocktail party and country club environment of suburban New Jersey my meditation just didn't clear and I was forced to wander through the emotions that kept it turbid.
    In Java we have some special forms of fasting (ngebleng, mbisu (no talking) and pasa tai (consumption of excrement)) for entering into contact with other realms or forms of being. I have done a lot of this and have entered into association with beings like Hecate and your own point (soul) source the noble and majestic Ma'at whose beauty is unimaginable (Has anyone ever identified your source being for you?). My own experience with Ma'at goes back to 1973, when she openly expressed with me and became my "protectress". She did "save" my life once but considering the rather rocky road since then, we have a hard time viewing the incident as an unalloyed blessing. I was on Route 80 going across Pennsylvania back from college (Spring break) with a girl driving my car and me sleeping in the front seat. She distractedly started to make a very dangerous entry into an exit (entry to another major highway) far too fast for the conditions and Ma'at came through my hand (she wasn't asleep) and grabbed the steering wheel pulling us into a harmless spin which left us safe but somewhat discomfitted. Awkward moment sitting in the sun wondering what to say.
    I am also deeply aligned with the traditionally recognized Furies (ErinueV), such as Tisiphone and Annis, among others, as well as many others of a confrontational resolve. I fight for Justice and so do they (ErinueV min DikhV) so we have joined forces. Oh how I adore them! They have been with me since 1993 during the distinctly unpleasant junun period in our practice while I was awaiting a gathering of divine being that would allow me to enter the open and unprotected experiencce of suhul properly speaking.

April 28, 1993
The sense did steady and develop into an open rasa being. At about 4:00 pm on April 17 Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone came in to confront me. It was quite a jolt. We share the same sense and the same view of being and have gotten on well together. It would appear that the Union will involve true Common Sense, that is, the Furies do not seem at all interested in standing above me in feeling or in sense, an unprecedented event in my experience and one that will take a bit of getting used to: I'm still watching for dips in the being and when they don't appear I get kind of happily nervous.
     When Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera first came in, I was standing in front of the mirror in the hall. They got me into the traditional Fury arrest posture, with the arms up and bent at ninety degree angles out to the front. They were indeed furious spirits but I found them refreshing and open (so nakedly and fiercely and defiantly open, so lovely and shy and embarrassed), far less complicated than the goddesses and I hope I did not offend by making a comparison to other divine spirits I know. Soon I began to play with them, saying, "Could I put my arms down. This position isn't too comfortable." They allowed me to come forward and put my hands against the wall beside the mirror. Their presence brought me peace and when they released me I felt like a little boy with them-happy and a little silly. They couldn't believe this reception in that they are more accustomed to generating terror in those they confront. They said that they have participated for a long time but had been afraid to enter into direct contact for fear that I would not be able to bear them. We went downstairs and I ate something and told them they gave me joy and that I was very happy they were here with me. They were still very skeptical.
     I soon found out that they are among the spirits that have brought me joy in my relationships with Pierrina and Magali in that they are absolute expressions of Open Being, serving Natural Law just as I do.
     The following day or two we got used to one another and generally things got easier. However, after a while I checked with Tisiphone and asked if she was okay and she said that no she was not very well. I asked her to let me share the sense with her and found an old nightmare sense of absolute betrayal that I suffered into silence some time ago affecting her being. I went into a rage and went straight to the relevant Kree (Divine Natural organizing being) dimension, demanding an explanation and threatened to dissolve the being if necessary. The local Kree being was with me so we were ready for an all-out war if necessary. As it turned out the shield of this nightmare sense had been placed on purpose by the Kree masters just beyond my normal sensitivity as a kind of protection. They had rather forgotten about it and since Tisiphone's sensitivity is greater than my normal range she was straddling it. We did a quick examination of the situation; found that they had been correct in what they did; and they then quickly pulled the shield out just beyond Tisiphone's range, which instantly gave us great relief.

What a joy they were and are! I honestly believe that any human who does not seek out experience with the greater and nobler forms of being is just pathetic (let's be honest: there just ain't that much that's good about humanity, i.e., "Dust in the Wind" to be sure). As a child one is likely to have exposure to such things. It strikes me as very strange that in the West we carefully define our childhood associations along these lines (imagination and all that) as off limits for adult experience and end up pursuing the empty path of personal ambition rather than seeking and serving our open association with those worth loving.
    My loving best wishes and as Plato would say, continue with your eu prattein ('well-doing').

Yours in Ma'at,
David Gordon Howe

PS I would like to invite you to visit my Webpages which, in my humble estimation, rather say it all:

THE BOOK OF BEING: "Look for Causes in Consequences"
 

SUMARAH: A Study of the Art of Living