Part of the experience of Baghdad immediately before the war and often since has been the unexpected meetings with people from all over the world: the students from Congo and Chad, a young Serbian woman with stories of war and peace, the Vietnam vets, the refuseniks, the African American reverend, the Buddhist monks, the Japanese with their drums and the South Americans with theirs and yesterday the Siberian Shaman, the Native American chief, the Mexican Keeper of the Mayan Prophecy, the Kenyan mother and traditional teacher, the Israeli Jew, the Sufi men with their loud and soft rhythms and plaintive song for peace, the Shia and Sunni Muslim clerics and the Chaldean Christian preachers all in one room, all on one stage, all repeating together the words, “Assalamu aleikum,” [may peace be upon you] and “May peace prevail on earth.”

I think the bravest man in Baghdad on the anniversary of the start of bombing was Eliyahu McLean, a Jewish man from the Holy Land: “I refuse to use the politicians’ names for the land, to divide it into Israel and Palestine.” He talked on the stage about the need for spiritual solutions, that it won’t be politicians with their agreements who make the peace in the region but people reaching some kind of spiritual accommodation with one another.

He knows, of course, that the politicians have to be dragged along, that they have to withdraw their armies, knock down their walls, respect human rights and so on, but knows too that it’s the people who have to lead. He’s just come from the UK talking to various groups about what needs to be done.

I carefully mentioned that there’s a lot of prejudice against Jews here, as in, “We welcome anyone to our country. You’re not a Jew are you? Because you can leave now if you’re a Jew,” and as in, “Ya Yahud [Hey Jew] Mohammed’s Army is coming back” on banners in the street and Raed getting threats at his shop because someone who saw Luis arriving thought he might be Jewish. That’s before we made Luis shave his beard off.

Eliyahu started laughing. “Prejudice. That’s an interesting thing to call it. I’d say it’s more like intense hatred. Yeah, I have to admit I do feel a bit nervous here.”

But that’s what it’s going to take, in the end: brave people to walk into the places where they know they’re hated and say let’s talk this through, let’s not be divided and ruled by fear anymore. Let’s talk this through and work out a solution and not wait for a politician to sign his name on the bottom of another politician’s “peace plan”.

Jose is a Mexican man who has spent the last 50 years translating the Mayan Prophecies after their rediscovery. He talked both on stage and off about the cycles of time, about the ending of the current cycle in 2012. That’s not the end of the world, but a time of enormous change. Looked at in this context, Jose says, the increasingly intense rate and nature of events in the last few years is understandable and explicable.

The Mayan calendar, like a lot of others, has thirteen months corresponding to the average cycle of the moon: thirteen months of 28 days and a ‘Day Out of Time” on July 25th. Zabibu, the Kenyan woman who is the keeper and teacher of her people’s spiritual traditions agreed that living by a 13 month calendar fundamentally changes your way of thinking, releases you from lots of constrictions in your creativity and allows you to live much more in touch with natural cycles of time.

The use of a calendar which artificially splits the year into twelve sections of unequal lengths with random names is fundamental to the distancing of people from nature, the Mayans’ successors say, which destroyed our harmony with the world around us and allows us to pollute and abuse it.

I don’t know. I don’t know whether thinking in terms of a thirteen month calendar would change anything, anything within for the individual or anything global if it was widespread: I’m not sure whether a global consciousness shift is the end of the revolution or the beginning, but from Jose flows the kind of calm that seems to take what’s happening to the world in the certainty that positive change is coming, that we’re about to evolve, ready or not.

“What an extraordinary time to be alive on Earth,” he said. After four and a half months in Baghdad it feels good to sit next to someone like that.

It’s a short visit – they arrived the day before the anniversary and are leaving the day after so I didn’t manage to talk to any of them as much as I wanted, to Chief Looking Horse, like a man from a storybook in his full feathered headdress in Baghdad, and his daughter Grace, to Zabibu, to Jose and to Stephanie who works with him, about their lives and stories as well as their spiritual beliefs and practices and to Anis, the Siberian woman who travels the world as a translator for the Shamen from the Russian Academy of Esoteric Happiness.

I can neither pronounce nor spell the name of the Shaman she was travelling with so I’m just going to call him Alan. Born in Siberia in 1970 he first healed someone when he was about five years old but didn’t realise for several years that it was a talent, not something everyone went about doing. “In the town I came from you didn’t boast about what you could do. It was dangerous to boast.”

On stage he was in full costume, a thick fur coat covered in bells coming down close to his knees, fur boots also covered in trimmings and a tall fur hat with fringes and decorations so that when he moves he jangles and rattles and when he dances and drums he seems like a ball of furious energy in the middle of a whirl of flying stuff.

Healing is a big part of his life and work now as well as teaching. All Shamen do different things, he says. Some run businesses, some marry and have children, some live in monasteries. “You could not have two Shamen working together on something. They would have different ways of doing it, they would disagree and fight each other. But we have understanding. I have never met Chief Looking Horse before but he is a Shaman from the Americas, Jose too, and we understand each other without words.”

Someone once asked him how he knows which herbs to collect. He described leaving the city for Lake Baikal, an immense fresh water lake where the air is clear and cold and fresh and he can be alone, fast and clear his mind for two weeks and then he knows which herbs to pick. He can smell, he can feel.

There’s no elected or hereditary head of Shamen but when you meet someone who is stronger than you, you know and you respect them. He loves telling stories to illustrate the point and his blue eyes smiled as he started. “Once another Shaman met a man at sea who used to be in a circus. He could juggle 5 clubs but there was a man there who could juggle 7 clubs and to him this man was a god. Every day he practised for 16 hours a day but he could never do 7 clubs. There was no elected or hereditary head of jugglers but you just know when you meet someone stronger.”

And no, he doesn’t drink reindeer piss.


To find out more about Jose’s work: www.foundationforthelawoftime.org and www.tortuga.org

To find out more about the Siberian Shamen: www.bogomudr.org

To find out more about Eliyahu’s work I’m afraid you’ll have to do a Google on Eliyahu McLean as I’m rubbish and I’ve lost his card.