Amelia Kinkade is such an amazing lady. She really is so nice and such a good friend to Grue. I would have never thought in a million years that after watching Night of the Demons and the film becoming my favorite horror movie of all time, that I would be friends with Angela!
Amelia has a new book out WHISPERS FROM THE WILD that is a deep and interesting read. “With Author’s Permission from Amelia Kinkade” we have an excerpt from the book below in which Amelia talk’s about her time in Africa, fear of snakes, the beauty and importance of animals, and even some memories from shooting Night of the Demons 2. We also get a look into the many thing’s Amilia has learned in life. Very profound stuff that I truly enjoyed reading.
We hope you do too!
BLACK MAMBA CHAPTER: EXCERPT
Black Mamba Snakes: Dancing with Death
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
— “Sonnet 18,” by William Shakespeare
“Amelia, dah-ling, there’s a black mamba waiting for you in the ladies’.” This deadly snake business was nothing new to me. Usually when I landed in this African lion camp, the owner, whom I’ll call Cassandra, would just greet me with something like, “Do be careful on your way back to your hut, dah-ling, because if you meet a spitting cobra, if they spit in your eyes, dah-ling, you’ll go blind. So do wear your sunglasses to bed. Have a good night!” This was, of course, delivered with a wicked grin. But this black mamba announcement was actually a first. Cassandra continued with glee, “She must be waiting for you, dah-ling, because she arrived in the camp just this morning, exactly when your plane landed, and we’ve not seen her for months, so she must have come just to meet you.”
I asked, “Is there . . . um . . . by any chance, a bathroom that she’s not in?”
“Of course not, dah-ling. She’s the keeper of the sacred Nile meridian, and she can go anywhere she wants anytime she wants. You could wake up in the middle of the night with her in your own hut.”
Silly me. For those of you who don’t know, the Nile meridian is the longitude line that connects the home of the lions in the Kruger Park with the Sphinx in Cairo. In certain circles, the mamba is thought to be a dark aspect of the goddess who could be the counterpoint to the lions and their light. (Some people might think these “circles” are rings of Froot Loops, but I’d been wading out in this psychic cereal bowl for years and floating with the best of ’em. I find these fruit-flavored crunchy people far easier to swallow than the milquetoast majority, and usually not only more colorful but sweeter too.)
Of course, I went into the bathroom looking for snake. I’d heard about this mythical mamba for years. I’d been visiting the lions in the Kruger National Park yearly to pay homage every time I flew to nearby Johannesburg and Cape Town to teach. This trip was the first time the mamba had shown up when I was there. I was disappointed to find the public restroom empty and mamba-less. And she didn’t appear again during the three days I was there that year. For some reason, she gave up on me before I could see her.
The black mamba has a reputation for being the deadliest snake in the world, and the fastest land snake on earth, traveling at speeds up to 20 km per hour. We need some musical accompaniment here, so I’ll hum my favorite old Blondie song, “One way or another, I’m gonna find ya! I’m gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha!” I asked Cassandra over dinner, “If by some chance she were to bite me (ridiculous, I know), how long would I have to live?”
“Well, dah-ling, that depends on how long you can control your breathing. If you can’t control your breathing, you’ll live about twenty minutes, and if you can control your breathing, you may live for hours.” Whew. What a relief. I jest here, but the fact is that if a human is bitten by a black mamba, it strikes multiple times, up to twelve strikes, each carrying 100–120 milliliters of venom. Two drops can kill a human being, and the mortality rate is 100 percent. The final moments or hours for a human victim are ugly ones, where one goes blind and becomes paralyzed as the venom kicks in. An antivenom drug exists but isn’t very effective, and most victims don’t get to the hospital in time. Cassandra went on to comfort me by saying only one person had died that year from a black mamba attack, and the fool had poked the coiled snake with a stick to try to move her. I took mental notes: It is best not to try to move them. It’s even better to not poke them with a stick. Then, with her own brand of certainty, Cassandra assured me that this particular mamba was the singular guardian of the Nile meridian and the lion camp and that she was indeed the queen of all black mambas everywhere. Such declarations are not uncommon in this mystical camp. So of course, this made my desire to see my first black mamba even stronger. Thus, in danger or not, I spent the next three days looking for the mamba. I was very disappointed when she didn’t slither up.
Ah, but the next opportunity was only a year away. I had been staying in a hut with my then-boyfriend, Jeff, and we managed to get through the entire week mamba-less. On our final day we moved from an open-air hut, where anything and everything could and did crawl in from outside — primarily gargantuan insects but no snakes — to a proper house that had glass in the windows and doors that locked. As I was about to find out, the illusion of being in a sturdy wooden house created a false sense of security. We unpacked bags of groceries in the kitchen, thankful to be in a house that had a kitchen. Eager to explore the house, we waltzed out of the kitchen and into the living room, which was separated from the kitchen by a glass door. Jeff disappeared into the bedroom with the luggage, and I turned around, ready to come back into the kitchen to get a pop out of one of the bags. Something had called me back into the kitchen. Maybe it was more the desire for a grape soda. I looked down and noticed that one of the cabinet doors was opening . . . all by itself. This was a cupboard door right under where I had been standing to unpack the groceries.
What came out of this cupboard put the fear of God even in me. First her big gray head poked out of the door, and then the door opened slowly, an inch at a time. Her body started rising out of the cupboard, dancing through the air, elevated weightless in space. She was a very big snake. And as you may know, the mamba has a “smile” painted on its face, like the Joker in Batman, and the inside of its mouth is black. So mambas are sinister-looking — and rightly so, because their bite is certain death — but they also seem to be mocking you with this laughing expression just before they kill you.
I was surprised at the level of panic I felt as the adrenaline started coursing through my veins and every hair on the back of my neck stood up. She continued to move up into the air, swaying and rising. And my panic continued to escalate. Now, of course, this uncontrollable fear is against everything I teach and know to be true about the attitude to take when greeting wild animals, no matter how deadly. But for the first time in my life, I truly couldn’t control my fight-or-flight instinct. It seized me completely. Fortunately, I was also captivated by her beauty, and this feeling of awe and reverence for her allowed me to keep my wits about me enough to not do something really stupid . . . like scream. Or run. But I had some foolish moves yet to make.
I opened the door between the living room and the kitchen very carefully, and then I tiptoed across the kitchen floor only a few feet from her and opened the kitchen door to the outside — wide open so that she could see the open air in the front yard clearly. I crept back through the kitchen and manned my watch station behind the living-room door, where I hid shivering. I said to her, “There’s the door. Now please leave.”
I tried to remember my skills. I visualized her dropping to the floor and slithering out the door. Despite the fact that this was insanely rude of me, and the feeling behind it was the opposite of everything I teach, I was uncontrollably afraid, and I hoped she would make a quick exit. She obeyed me without question — she dropped to the floor and started sidewinding herself toward the open door. The length of her massive body was shocking, at least eight feet, and as the long, sinewy body slithered out of the cabinet, it just kept coming and coming and coming, making wide graceful S curves across the kitchen floor. She was simply massive, and in a moment of unthinkable stupidity, something in me snapped. I had a knee-jerk reaction where an old silly damsel-in-distress program kicked in. In lost-little-girl mode, I did one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever done in my life. I screamed for my boyfriend to come “save me.” He rushed into the room, saw the colossal snake, and picked up the doormat. Then he did the stupidest thing any human could ever do. He smacked the tip of her tail with the doormat. Now, at this point, she was almost out the door — all eight feet of her. But when she felt the attack on her tail, she flew — and I do mean flew — across the room in a full-scale aerial attack.
God knows where she got the torque to do a one-eighty on the floor and hurl herself six feet in the air across the kitchen like a bolt of black lightning, targeted directly at his face. The speed of the assault was horrifying, but more shocking still was how she stopped herself mid-air just inches from his nose. She hung suspended, right in front of his pale eyes. Her body filled the length of the kitchen, but somehow she had managed to contract her body, coil back, and cut off her momentum just before her fangs reached his face. She dropped at his feet with a soft smash of pure muscle gone limp on the tile. It was the most chilling sound I’d ever heard — like a dead body falling to the floor. But no one was dead. She spared his life. Without turning around, he backed away. And she let him. She didn’t strike. She whirled her head around to the direction of her safe haven in the cabinet and, in a flash, opened the cupboard door with her chin. The entire length of her body followed like a whip of melted steel. Like quicksilver, her eight-foot-long body disappeared under the kitchen sink.
Somehow I came to my senses and said to my shell-shocked boyfriend, “Please leave me alone with her. Let me handle this.”
And to his credit, he did exactly that. Whether it was faith in my ability or just the uncontrollable panic that this snake instills in any human being, I don’t know, but he high-tailed it out of the kitchen and left me alone with her. He and I had retreated into the living room in horror, shut the door to the kitchen, and allowed her to go right back into her hiding place. Something in me shifted, and I remembered who I was. This time I vowed to do everything right.
I opened the glass door to the kitchen. I dropped to my knees a few feet in front of the cabinet where she hid. The kitchen cabinet door was shut and the stillness in the room was eerie, as if time had stopped and life beyond this moment ceased to exist, but I’d left the door to the outside world open. I remember hearing birds chirping through that open door and seeing particles of dust whirl in the atmosphere, still electrified by her flight. I remember that the sunlight in the room was too bright, whitewashed in the presence of death, as if the gates of heaven had already opened and I had been ushered into the blinding light. There was no going back.
In my mind, I “asked” her to come back out, while I visualized her opening the cabinet door. I knelt there for I don’t know how long. I was in a slow-motion dream. Several minutes must have gone by before the door started to open again, ever so slowly. She peeked out tentatively, probably no less afraid than we were. We’d done a great job of scaring the hell out of her. Once again I saw her incredible face, and she began to lift her head right in front of my eyes, but this time I refused to see her as an evil menace. I saw her as the goddess that she was. Her graceful neck and regal head arced up until she was again showing herself, but this time meeting my gaze as I knelt in front of her. I apologized for my horrendous behavior. I told her she was indescribably beautiful, perfect in every way, and that I’d spent years wanting to meet her, but now that I was actually having that honor, I was grateful that she allowed me in her territory. I thanked her for wanting to see me, and I told her I was sorry that humans were afraid of her and failed to see her beauty.
You might not believe that black mambas can smile — what with the creepy grin already painted on their lips — but even snakes have facial expressions. I could see a change come over her face. Her eyes softened, and she danced before me, grateful for the wave of love and admiration I was emanating. You might also think I was a crazy fool to kneel four feet in front of Africa’s most dangerous snake — courting death, tempting death. But if that’s the case, you fail to see the point. I was already dead. I was looking death in the eye. If she had wanted to kill me, with one lightning strike I’d be dead. If I did not find a way to escort her out of the house, either my boyfriend or I, or even both of us, would most certainly be killed if one of us stumbled on her late at night.
But aside from that agenda, this meeting was important. I told her that I now knew without any question that she was indeed the queen of the black mambas and that I was sorry to have upset her, but now I was so grateful to be in her presence. I assured her that she was the most beautiful snake I’d ever seen. Then I thanked her for her benevolence and told her that I was proud of her for being so dangerous. At this, she smiled more and danced gracefully. I admired her for a moment, an hour, an eternity — I didn’t know what was happening back on earth. We were somewhere else together, in a cosmic dream where no one could hurt us, another world where we would naturally never think of hurting each other.
Eventually I dropped my focus back down into normal reality for the sake of our safety. I realized that if someone came crashing in on this sacred moment and broke our spell, she could startle and become dangerous. I suggested that when she was ready, she could drop to the floor and exit out the open door. I told her that she must be very careful to keep on moving, because if any human tripped over her, especially on the porch late at night, they might try to kill her. I visualized her slithering out the door and all the way across the porch, disappearing into the bush. I explained to her that if a human found her, she would be in great danger. I knew that Cassandra would never harm her, but one of the workmen at the camp might not share Cassandra’s sentiments about black mambas in his path, especially not if the men got spooked late at night in the dark. So I encouraged her to keep moving until she was safely out of sight from the humans.
She relished the moments of being in communion with me. We had a peaceful moment of prayer together, just admiring each other, just loving each other, being respectful for each other’s ferocity — but also of each other’s tenderness, joy, and hope, and the melancholy of being misunderstood. We had a moment of sharing some knowledge of injustice, of vulnerability, of being plagued by the fears, prejudices, and misperceptions of others. I told her that it was the greatest thrill of my life to get to meet her face-to-face after all these years. I knew she heard me. I could see it in her eyes. Then when she was ready, she dropped to the floor ever so softly and started crawling toward the sunlight through the open door. I didn’t rush her this time. Nor did I call anyone to come rescue me. I just let her huge body slither and snake and make S curves for what seemed like forever until she found her way out of her dark hiding place and into the sunshine, safety away from the humans who could do her harm. Would that we all find our way into the sunshine.
The Deathwalk
So what happened in that moment when I dove into such an uncontrollable trance, such a bottomless state of bliss, that I had no fear, no logical thoughts, no course of action other than to drop to my knees and simply love her? I might call this a shift operating from my higher self, a concept I teach. We all must locate this higher level of consciousness when we want to communicate psychically with animals or each other. Arnold Mindell, a Swiss psychologist and author of The Shaman’s Body (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), might say I was operating from my shamanic “dreambody,” or what he calls “second attention,” as opposed to first attention, where my only awareness would be of my own ego and its limitations. He calls this other self a “double,” which I interpret to mean that we all have a spiritual doppelganger that is closer in essence to the Creator than our personalities, and this “double” can make choices with more focus and less fear, simply concentrating on the task at hand.
Although its presence is always available, because this double is superimposed on our normal waking selves, most people only experience it in crisis situations. Remember that Mindell renamed this double the “dreambody,” a term I like even better, because it suggests that we can learn how to access another dimension of our identity that houses the powers of the subconscious, usually available only when we are asleep. I encourage my students to become aware of this spiritual aspect of themselves even in ordinary moments of day-to-day reality, so that its powers are readily available when we need them most, such as when we need to communicate with animals. But in every situation in life, recognizing this presence allows us to make better, less emotional, choices with the assistance of our newly found God-self. The Shaman’s Body was a cult hit twenty years ago and caused quite a stir back then, but I only just discovered it while teaching in Portugal, and it’s a big wow! Just listen to how perfectly this passage explains what I went through with my “demon” (the fear I felt when I met the snake), and shines light on my meeting with Ms. Mamba:
If you wrestle your demon, you find moments of pleasure, freedom, and exceptional energy — whether you win or lose the battle with yourself. Perhaps best of all, you have moments of feeling real and congruent, free from the fears and symptoms of phantomhood. Now you know you have a double and sense your shaman’s dreambody. But sometimes you forget these experiences and wonder just how much of the dreambody can be lived in this life. On the one hand, your love for the world tempts you back to pester and play with everyone else. But on the other hand, the ecstasy of experience may entice you to leave forever.
Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan saga scales more wild territory in each progressive book. In the last pages of Tales of Power (Simon & Schuster, 1974), Don Juan explains to his apprentice that the place in which they stand is their last crossroads together. Few warriors, he says, have ever survived the encounter with the unknown, which his apprentice are about to face. The “nagual” is so intense that those who go through the final encounter find it unappealing to return to the “tonal,” “the world of order and noise and pain.”
Mindell offers the terms “warriors” and “apprentices” to describe those of us who are on a spiritual path, willing to fight for what we love and believe in while we seek lost pieces of our own souls. And for the other term, I had to do some sleuthing with the help of Merriam-Webster:
nagual
a personal guardian spirit or protective alter ego assumed by various Middle American Indians to reside in an animal or less frequently in some other embodiment.
the animal double or guardian itself.
Wikipedia takes the definition one crawling step further:
In Mesoamerican folk religion, a nagual or nahual (both pronounced [na’wal]) is a human being who has the power to transform either spiritually or physically into an animal form: most commonly jaguar and puma but also other animals such as mules, birds, or dogs and coyotes.
Such a nagual is believed to use their powers for good or evil according to their personality. . . . Nagualism is linked with pre-Columbian shamanistic practices . . . which are interpreted as human beings transforming themselves into animals. . . . Mesoamerican belief in tonalism, wherein every person has an animal counterpart to which his life force is linked, is also part of the definition of nagualism. In English the word is often translated as “transforming witch,” but translations without the negative connotations of the word witch would be “transforming trickster” or “shape shifter.”
We will explore the concept of this “witch,” a source of power not just outside of us but within us, but what struck me about the dictionary definition was the word guardian after I’d been told that in some African mythology the black mamba is known as the sacred guardian of the Nile meridian. I admit that after this encounter with the nagual, I found it challenging and depressing to go back to a humdrum life in Los Angeles, a way of life that Mindell might call “phantomhood.” I was surprised at the depth of my feelings of hopelessness and disappointment when I got back to America. I was feeling truly lost. Fortunately, this insightful therapist goes on to make rational sense of my seemingly irrational emotional reaction:
Remember those feelings of wholeness that accompany the discovery of the dreambody? It is difficult to leave such an experience and go back to ordinary reality. Returning from a wonderful vacation, a meaningful relationship, or an intense inner experience is painful, because you fear losing the connection to your whole self. Thus you experience difficulties after your encounter with the nagual. Returning to the state of ordinary affairs — the world of the tonal, where dreams, body processes, and secondary processes are not valued — is not easy. Don Juan warns his apprentice that if he does not choose to return, he will disappear, as if swallowed by the earth. But if he does choose to return, he will have to wait and finish his particular task on earth. Once this is finished, the apprentice will have command over the totality of himself.
All connected to the myth of consciousness have at least one task in common — to develop the second attention and revitalize the one-sidedness of our awareness, enabling ourselves and others to live more fully. Castenada’s task, for example, was to bring the powers of the night into the day via the teachings of Don Juan.
The Powers of the Night into the Day
When I discovered Mindell’s mesmerizing book, I realized for the first time that there may have been other ways to react to the black mamba in the kitchen. A more “normal” person may have run out of the house screaming to find Cassandra and insist that we be moved to another camp because there was a snake in the house. Or perhaps a more normal reaction would have been to (again) run out of the house screaming and try to find someone more qualified to remove the black mamba from my house.
But in this moment of ecstatic crisis, neither of these thoughts occurred to me. In this dreamlike altered state, no other thought entered my mind but the task in front of me. My only option, as I saw it, was to get on my knees, just a few feet from her face, and tell her that I loved her. My job was to face death and not just accept it but worship it, because death, too, is God.
I now realize in retrospect that any other course of action may have gotten me killed. Had I run screaming, she could have chased me and in one lightning strike killed me. Or if I had had her forcibly removed by someone who “knew more” about snakes than I do, she could have killed them or returned that night to greet me on my way to the bathroom. This is not the bathroom attendant one hopes to find in a hotel loo, no matter how posh. No mints, no tissue, no squirt of cheap perfume. And the tip she might expect could be more than a few coins dropped resentfully in her tip jar. In what currency do we pay the demon? How do we pay off our inner demons when the scariest of all nightmares suddenly becomes real?
Tiptoe through the Twilight
Where do we go when we get “lost” from this world? Yes, it could be a world more beautiful, more scary, more magical, where the rules aren’t the same as what we’ve been taught. Where did I go when faced with death? Mindell might say that after the first snafu with the boyfriend and the doormat, I found my way back to my “whole self.” This is what I meant when I said, “I remembered who I was.” That is an identity blended with the dreambody, the higher self. From this more sublime vantage point, I found it easy to fall into her beauty, devour her ferocity, worship every curve of her wicked smile, every sway of her cocky dance. I left myself behind and fell into her. I fell into loving her. I fell in love with her. Do you catch my meaning? Do you want to learn how to “talk” to your animals and actually perceive the messages they relay as they “talk back”?
Only if you fall in love with your cat or dog, your horse or your parrot, so that they become not some disdained object outside of you that stands to be judged or corrected, but someone you can fall into and love completely — someone you can love and identify with at all costs — will you hear them “speak.” They must become someone you respect and take seriously, so much so that you’re always willing to take their side. This is what I do with the cats and dogs I work with. I take their side. With the most glorious Olympic show horses on earth, I take their side. They win gold medals because I take their side. So if you have a four-legged loved one at home that you defend, protect, and adore — someone who requires more compassion than you are willing to give, but you give it anyway, honoring their feelings, their relationships, their trauma, even when they require that you search the depths of your soul to see their point of view — then you will know what it means to be on your knees in front of a black mamba. She saved me because I took her side, knowing that I was an inconvenience in her house, not the other way around. Honoring her point of view proved that I was willing to show the qualities worthy of being saved: compassion, respect, tenderness, humility — and these same qualities apply to the treatment of our domestic animals no matter how “tame” they may appear to be.
A lesson about being “tame.” What does it mean to be tame? Did I turn my back on her and ask my knight in shining armor to come save me, or let my need for a man’s love skew my intuitive wisdom the way I had done with the tigers? Did I defer my own stealth sense of inquiry and intelligence to a man or any other human being? With the tigers, I had. With this snake, I also had — but only for a moment. The old programming of “conform if you want to be accepted,” “lie if you want to be loved,” suddenly was replaced by a much larger sense of knowing. Then my true “common” sense kicked in: not the sixth sense but the first sense, when the God within me jumped out and became the primary operator of my reality, and He said, “Let me handle this.” In that instant, I chose not to be tame.
Am I learning? Ever so slowly. Are you learning? Just watch. Remember my elephants: their noses. Something gooey and foreign, totally unknown, rough on the outside, the “finger” of a massive majestic giant comes searching toward your face. Do you flinch? Or do you trust that God is here too, perhaps bringing you something more beautiful on the other side of the fear than you ever could have calculated for yourself? Did I hope, “Please don’t kill me”? Or did I hope, “Please step into my heart and touch me”? Both, maybe. But did I ever hope, “Please go away”? No. I only hoped, “God, come near.” Because God created this animal too; therefore, it was a divine creation. I only thought: “In all your forms — scary forms; terrifying forms; scaly, winged, aquatic, and slithering; terrifying, huge, mammoth, and ancient — come near and touch me. Whisper to me your secrets. Let me be the keeper of your secrets.”
Are there words for this awe? For a reverence so great that I think my heart, body, and mind are going to explode into a trillion smithereens? If my only thought is “Come love me as I love you,” and it always is, what happens then? What would happen if you could generate that reservoir of love and call on it in times when you were desperate, confused, or afraid?
What do you love?
Let’s play a little game called:
I Love
I love really strong filtered coffee in big mugs. I love espresso. I love kettles that make hot water. I love electric adapters that make those kettles work. I love ceramic coffee cups. I love little silver spoons. I love local honey. I love honeybees. I love fresh sour lemons squeezed into my water every morning. I love the sound of birds singing: Hadedahs are my favorite, as they fly overhead in the middle of an African night, irritating everybody but me, waking me with a smile. I love to feed wild birds, to share my breakfast with pigeons and songbirds in the morning. I love to pray. I love churches. I love classical paintings of angels in medieval churches. I love to lie in bed before anyone else is awake and start my day with a blissful prayer of thanks. I love pine trees. I love tall sycamore trees and the way they smell. I love jacaranda trees in bloom and the carpet of violet blossoms they leave all over the Johannesburg streets. I love workout clothes. I love dance clothes of every sort. I love the soreness of my back when I stand up and stretch, moving my hips for the first time every day and beginning each day with my first morning dance. I love the rhythmic pounding of my feet on a treadmill. I love stationary bicycles in the gym. I love rock ’n’ roll. I love pounding music, be it from hip-hop, funk, disco, hard rock, punk rock, oldies, or the latest hottest bands. I love to sweat. I love to dance. I love R and B first thing in the morning. I love rattles and drums around a big bonfire. I love Native American flutes. I love people who suddenly announce they are musicians and burst into song in public places. I love saxophones played in the depths of the London and Paris subways. I love jazz piano and jazz pianists. I love men who can sing and play the guitar. I love half-melted dark chocolate. I love people who can tell jokes around the dinner table. I love cats of every shape and size. I love lightweight laptop computers that remember my every thought. I love to cook. I love to eat. I love caramel apples. I love sharp kitchen knives. I love having scissors. I love hot showers. I love good soap. I love Mr. Bean movies. I love roses, the morning’s first sunlight on roses, dewdrops on roses, and yes, raindrops on roses. I love whiskers on every creature that grows them. I love small rodents. I love animals with wings. I love finding feathers because it makes me think angels are watching. I love tiny prey animals. I love finding tree frogs in my luggage. I love gigantic whales and their mammoth smiles. I love sharks with big teeth. I love things that scare me and make me squeal with delight. I love things that go bump in the night. I love waking up with hippos in my front yard. I love finding elephant poop on my doorstep. I love finding notices taped to my bathroom mirror that say, “Please do not leave food stuff in the tents because elephants will damage the tents.” I love signs that say, “Please be aware that the monkeys and baboons will remove all your belongings from this open-air bathroom.” I love sleeping in a tent in Africa and smelling the night air. I love big fluffy white pillows. I love stars, especially the Southern Cross. I love candle flames. I love needing a flashlight. I love vervet monkeys who steal the toast off my plate at breakfast. I love airplanes. I love sparkling pools of water on the tarmac glistening and reflecting the sun just as my plane takes off. I love airports with their hustle and bustle. I love buying new lipstick at the airport. I love having accessibility to the whole world. I love real books and the smell of paper and ink, and the feel of real books in my hands. I love pen-and-ink drawings and watercolor paintings. I love to draw cartoons. I love writers who send my imagination reeling and remind me that there’s magic but also order in this universe. I love Tom Robbins books. I love Middle Earth. I love words. I love to write them. I love to write them for you to read. I love a flickering candle in front of a picture of Jesus that I can gaze at every night as I fall off to sleep.
Okay, you get the idea . . .
Now it’s your turn to list 133 “I loves.”
The Monster in Me
Can I say, “I love horror movies. I love making them”? “I love the monster in me”? Well . . . it’s taken me a while to admit to a string of scandalous horror movies I starred in in the 1980s. Scott, one of my most insightful fans, a drag queen in Atlanta, Georgia, creates a character that is very oh-so-seriously scary. He approached me at a Days of the Dead movie convention for an autograph, wearing the most outrageous costume I’d ever seen. His character is a possessed clown. His kind gay demeanor couldn’t be any further from the villain he plays for fun. He once said to me, “You humanize monsters. That’s your job. Sharks, tigers, snakes. Monsters. And you side with them and give them feelings.”
He gave me a new perspective on my shameless acting career and also my unconscious drive to defend the underdogs, the other “scary” animals on this planet, because apparently as a child, I must have felt like one of them. The misfit, the outcast, the lonely misunderstood tiger or shark or, in this case, poisonous snake, represents the part of us that feels “different” from the other kids, yet it’s where the love is, where the soul is, where the supernatural connection to God is, because it’s outside the conscious reasoning mind, and yet it is, and there’s nothing any of us can do to make it go away.
In my movies, I played the most terrifying female demon in movie history, and I can say that with no ego, but only in understanding that it must be true — that this thing that flew out of me one night was so universal and resonated with so many of my fans on an archetypal level that I now have an entire website devoted to nothing but their tattoos of me on their bodies. I am, of course, in full disgusting demon makeup in almost all of these tattoos, and when I ask the fans in person why this vicious unconquerable force of evil that I invented means so much to them that they’d have my pockmarked, fanged, demon face tattooed on their chests, arms, legs, backs, be they male or female, they always have the same answer: “I don’t know.”
But one fan, Chris McGibbon, who’s writing a book about the movies, did come up with a more conscious description: “You protected me as a child,” he said. “Angela protected me.” This explanation fascinated me, so I started accepting more invitations to these conventions, intrigued to talk to my fans about their feelings. Fans terrified to meet me, standing in front of me trembling with tears, said things like, “I drove three days to meet you and slept in my car” or “I had to have a shot (of whisky) before I could even stand in your line, I was so afraid to meet you.” I began to pry the truth out of these people, and they all seemed to have something in common — this need for a ferocious savior. One told me that she’d hide in her bedroom as a child watching Night of the Demons over and over to drown out the screaming of her parents in the next room, and that when her stepfather came into the room to rape her, she used thoughts of Angela to comfort herself. She was using my character as an emotional anchor to help her cling to fantasies of interference. She told me it was these fantasies of my helping her fight back that helped keep her sane. This same story came from a fan who was a gay man — now a dear friend of mine — who said that the characters in the movies were his “friends” as a child, the only friends he had, and once again there were these words: Angela defended him. The Kali-inspired destroyer goddess was the emblem of courage and justice for these abused kids, and that’s why they wear tattoos of me on their bodies. Or maybe some fans just like it.
Why do I mention this in the snake chapter? In Night of the Demons 2, written for me by Joe Augustin, I was the only character brought back from the first film. Steve Johnson, the most celebrated special-effects wizard in Hollywood, who had won an Oscar for Ghostbusters, turned me into a thirty-foot snake. I spent twenty-seven hours in special-effects makeup and broke a Hollywood record. I was transformed into a giant anaconda who could stand up and hover like a cobra. To this day, when I see the film, I don’t recognize myself and can’t believe that it was created before CGI. Steve Johnson tied the tip of my tail to a string of dental floss — which was invisible on the screen — and he stood off-camera whipping my tail around. The effect is utterly devastating, and I admit that when I try to watch the scene, I can’t see through my fingers plastered over my eyes. I remember at the end of the twenty-seven-hour shoot, when I’d been strapped into a trench and glued to a teeter-totter, so that when the teeter-totter stood up, my unrecognizable reptile body would “fly” and “float” in midair, the director, Brian Trenchard-Smith, said to me, “And now, Amelia, you’re going to throw a fireball.”
“Are you going to set my hand on fire?” I asked, because Steve had indeed set my fingers on fire in the first film. (I’d had six seconds before the gel burned through to my skin, and I had to douse my burning fingers into an ice chest full of ice water.)
“No,” my director said. “We’re going to do it in post.”
“Post? What’s that?” I asked.
Nothing about my being a snake was faked — nothing on the outside or inside. You can see the outside when you rent the movie. But the inside is something different. It comes from such a deep place inside me. Those of you who are my movie demon fans know that the most famous dance scene in my movies was in part 1, where I choreographically shape-shifted into a black jaguar. Carlos Castaneda might have called that my big naughty feline nagual caught on camera. This connection to nature and magic was the source of my power, and why my likeness is tattooed on kids’ chests all over America. Even if you can’t grasp the shamanic qualities of my energetic transformation, you can see the feline qualities in my choreography as I crawl across the floor with slapping paws.
But the anaconda transformation is different. I’m not remotely human in this scene. The snake I portray is unapologetic. I’m an indomitable deadly force of nature, my life has been threatened, and I’m about to strike, ready to kill everybody in sight. In retrospect, I can see that I really might have been dancing with my scaly reptile nagual, the energy that voodoo high priestesses tap when they shape-shift into another form to create a portal of energy for the entire community. These shamanic shape-shifters and priestesses take on this possession as an extreme act of healing for their community, and some members of the congregation of my church do it every Sunday, possessed by the Holy Spirit. I did it on film, not knowing that it could touch the hearts of so many abused kids in this world.
A Safe Place
Why are movies made in Tinseltown such a safe place for so many people? Could it be that on the silver screen, actors can create an archetypical haven for all our viewers to find an outlet for their most ferocious wildness as well as shattered helplessness, where their only hope of survival is an allegiance with a raw Kali force? Angela gave my movie fans a safe place to “put this” passion and pain. Kali, for definition, is the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, wife to Shiva. In her malevolent role as a goddess of death and destruction she’s depicted as black, red-eyed, bloodstained, and wearing a necklace of skulls. She chops off people’s heads (which is not very nice), but in her most dazzling depictions, she surveys the universe as she rides on the back of a tiger (which I think would be very nice).
I’m honored and flattered that so many movie watchers sense that I, the owner of all that primal force, am protective and good at heart. I would never decapitate someone, but I would very much like to ride around on a tiger. We all need a place for our fantasies. My movies gave me an avenue to express all my feral wildness and to honor the unnamable parts of my psyche that are connected with nature, no matter how “ugly” and “scary.”
Could it be that if I didn’t have it within me myself, I couldn’t have gotten down on my knees four feet from a black mamba dancing in my face and say, “You’re beautiful and I love you. And I’m sorry for what the humans have put you through”?
“I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes!”
I’ve found in my life that there seem to be two species that produce blind irrational fear in human beings: spiders and snakes. These are the most common prejudices I find on earth, and I believe that some of this terror may come from past-life experience where humans have some mystical memory of the deadliness of these beings. When defending them, which I do often, I will say that this spider or snake is just an innocent critter trying to make a living in the world. We make this very hard for them. Most spiders and snakes are not poisonous, but the fear of them seems to be hardwired into human DNA, and they invoke such terror that it’s beyond rational control.
I experienced that for a minute with my mamba friend, so I had to remind myself that I’m not just a nincompoop Muggle bumbling around on a planet covered in poisonous snakes. I had to remember who I am — one of God’s children — and let the spirit of God’s grace shine through me even in the most terrifying of moments. I had to acknowledge that what James Joyce called “otherness” is an illusion, and if I honor the “otherness” in me, I can see that she also saw me as “the other” and melt the illusion of separateness into one flowing stream of energy. I danced with her soul. And when I did, she let me live, but also the encounter gave me new life. I can only hope that the encounter gave her some life force in return. I had to go into a “not all snakes are bad” state of mind in order for her to let me live, and I hope she slithered off with a new “not all humans are so bad after all” opinion as well.
Animal Stereotypes
One of the ways I can break through the blind panic my students have toward these animals is by joking that humans are afraid of animals that have “too many legs” and also afraid of animals that have “no legs.” Why do we have such prejudices against animals who have more legs than we do or fewer legs than we do? The humor of it seems to challenge the fear for a moment and shine a bit of reason into the darkness like a shard of sunlight through a cracked window. The other way I challenge the fear is by beginning to understand that this being is not “a snake” and “I hate snakes.” This being is an individual, who is and will react to a particular situation (an encounter with you!) in a fresh new moment that has never happened before.
There is no scientist who can tell me “Snakes act like this” or “Hippos act like that,” because no scientist has ever been there with me in the moment I encounter a particular snake or a particular hippo for the first time — one who may not behave in a fashion that any snake or hippo has ever acted before, because it’s never encountered me before, nor has it encountered you. I grew up in Texas, where rattlesnakes abound and were then, and still are, shot on sight. My own father shot one under our trailer when I was a kid. I grew up in the world of “Rattlesnakes act like this . . . ,” so the information I’m about to give you is new, not only to this world but even to me.
I had to acquire a sense of compassion for spiders and snakes, probably just like you will have to, because in truth, they have not always been my favorite animals. When I started my career as an animal communicator, I found quickly that I could have no prejudices about insects or snakes because people were emailing me asking me what to do about them, and I had to extend the same God consciousness in dealing with them as I do with anything else. I was soon to find that I would not only learn to tolerate snakes but love them. And I mean truly love them.
So let’s explore this integration. Before we talk about them as individuals, let’s put a different lens on your point of view. Let’s start by viewing them as male and female. Now that spider up in the corner of your bedroom is just a young mother trying to make a living in the world, and that sac of eggs is her most precious treasure, so if you wanted to have a heart and take care of that young unwed mom and her unborn kids, you might extend some compassion to her instead of just seeing her as a “spider.” At least now she is a “she,” and this gives her some more identity and a way to identify with her a tiny bit more so that you’re creeping toward love and compassion.
I knew the mamba was a “she,” and I knew that if I didn’t love her, I’d be vanquishing the most important part of myself, not the angelic parts of myself that my ego has claimed — the aspects I don’t acknowledge yet and struggle to excavate into the light. She represents the part of me that is in shadow, the dangerous part, and that’s what brings me to this conversation about what she means to me. When people are afraid of snakes, they think of them as sexless terrifying beings who do not have feelings, do not fall in love, do not grieve, do not feel lonely, scared, or threatened. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This mamba was the closest thing to a real-life witch I have ever encountered, so I wanted to share with you some ideas from one of my favorite books, The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality (Clarion Books, 1987), by the beyond-brilliant Ann and Barry Ulanov.I devoured this masterpiece in my late twenties, the same time I was playing a witch in the movies. I now realize it was this integration of my own dark side, my shadow, that makes it possible for me to work with some of the world’s most “shadowy” creatures and meet them with great reverence and even love. Most humans view poisonous snakes as “not feminine” because they are deadly, and God knows, I was not acting very feminine by facing off with her, at least not in the traditional sense of how we categorize femininity. This passage gives us a way to not stay stuck in a perspective. Although the authors are talking about “the witch,” I think there is no more perfect way to describe my mamba as well as all the snakes we fear.
Which Witch Is Which?
Let’s apply this passage to the witch inside the snake, and the witch inside you:
The witch is an archetypal picture of the masculine element within feminine identity, of that opposite sexual dynamism that belongs to the feminine personality. She is an easy butt for grudges, a made-to-order container for blame, even in emancipated societies far removed from witch-diviners, witch-hunts, witch-trials, and executions. There she stands, always in an exaggerated pose, a caricature of what society and culture call masculine, of power, intellect, logic, and precision. Even more challenging, she embodies these elements in her own peculiar feminine way. Thus her logic is one of association, not of cause and effect; her precision, one of focused intensity, not conceptual clarity. Her power is that of nature’s secret life, not society’s; her intellect, that of the unconscious, not of reason. She personifies an issue faced by all women, one way or another: how to integrate this contrary sexual dynamism, with all its unmistakable masculine characteristics, within a feminine identity.
The black mamba ushered me into “nature’s secret life, not society’s,” and brought me into an alignment with nature where my adversary’s intellect helped me discover a new way of relating to animals, to the world around me, and even to myself: “that of the unconscious, not of reason.” This was where true safety lived, you see. The following passage eloquently parallels my surprise encounter with my inner and outer witch:
For women, the witch is a major missing piece of sexual identity, a culturally elaborated piece, even in its most exaggerated and caricatured forms. In her negative guise, the witch offers a picture of a woman possessed by the masculine elements in her. The witch is masculine in appearance, with whiskered chin and strident manner. She shuns the traditional female roles of helpmate and hearth, supporter of the dependent and needy. She goes after her own power and power over others. She wants secret knowledge and the craft to use it for her own ends. She wants weapons that will force others to do her will. She thrusts her ambitions at us. She must be acknowledged as a superior being, whose purposes others cross at their peril.
I propose that because humans haven’t integrated their inner witch — and the authors go on to explain that men too have the archetype of the witch buried inside them — some people might project this exaggerated negative portrait onto wild animals like my snake. Some men project this caricature onto lions; perhaps that’s why they must feel the need to murder this part of themselves, to conquer their own wildness and ferocity, or maybe they feel that they gain power by hurting innocent animals because they themselves have been abused in some way — by their fathers most likely — and rationalize that “hunting” a lion or elephant or shooting a “dangerous” snake somehow makes them more of a man.
I related to the snake as a person and ultimately decided to defend her instead of harm her because I identified with her feelings of being outcast. The Ulanovs write:
The environment ascribes to her powers that are altogether outside the conventional definition of female — a trafficking between the seen and the unseen, the determination and skill to color outside the lines drawn by social custom and constraint. That is her crime — not consorting with the devil, not embezzlement of the emotions, not rape, not cannibalism of children. She poses a danger because she enjoys contact with the hidden secrets of nature; she knows things, she goes after things. But her human environment is spell-fixated and blames its spell-binding power on the witch as if it were entirely her doing, whereas in fact her scapegoat role, designed by the community, is clasped in a secret handshake by the whole community.
Tell me this isn’t true of my mamba friend; it seems our crime is that we enjoy “contact with the hidden secrets of nature.” In my moment of euphoria, she and I shared our secret. For a few unforgettable moments, we were not alone. The “trafficking between the seen and the unseen” is my profession, and “the determination and skill to color outside the lines” is a perfect way to describe animal communication. My teacher was the mamba, and I was willing to let her take me as far outside the lines as she wanted me to go. My ability to completely disassociate from “social custom and constraint” let me go with her as I slithered right behind her into the secrets of nature’s mind, not humans’ rules — into the darkness, into the hidden secrets of nature. And in the same moment, I allowed her out of the box of fear, hatred, and prejudice. For the first time, she was praised for her beauty in the light — a light she deserved to bask in, where I could truly see her beautiful face, and love every crack and crevice, adoring and appreciating her closed-mouth smile. (If her mouth had been open . . . ouch! Adios, amigos!)
“Why do the witch and the clown remain so strongly alive for us?” the Ulanovs ask. “Because they are archetypes and as archetypes act as indomitable resources against a stereotyping that straps actual men and women into preformed sexual identities and will not let them loose.” Most of us, especially women, are revolted by the sexual stereotypes. The most reductive ones define men as strong and tightlipped, never showing feeling, and women as soft, never going openly after power. Women lack intellectual power; men, feeling. These wooden simplifications should enrage us; many of us are committed to changing these demeaning, persistent typologies.
I’m addressing the idea of sexual stereotypes here because I want to ask you this question: Is it possible that we have somehow let our sexual stereotypes bleed into our perception of animals? Wouldn’t it make sense to consider that perhaps our ideas of what a man is supposed to be — emotionless and stealthy — are the stereotypes we’ve put on our little leggy or legless animal villains?
We seem to think of certain animals as ferocious and emotionless, while we think of others as docile and angelic. I personally have known some bunnies that would kick your butt for fun, and I’ve even owned some hamsters that would gladly bite your thumb off. But we’ve been brought up with some stereotypes about animals that are simply unfair. What I’m challenging here is our tendency to think, “Here is an animal that can kill me, so it is bad,” as opposed to, “Here is an animal that can kill me, but she is beautiful.” In that moment where I got down on my knees in front of the mamba, I had to consecrate the differences between us and the emotions I felt around them, surrendering not to the idea, “This is what scares me about my world,” but to the insight, “This is what scares me about myself.” I had to honor the fact that she reflected the opposite side of my personality. In that way, I was not afraid of what could happen in the outer world. I had to acknowledge her presence in my inner world — and be able to say, “You are dangerous, but you are one of God’s children, too.”
This discussion of male and female sexuality could address the inner clockworks of Adam and Eve, but no chapter about snakes would be complete if we didn’t talk about the mythical serpent, and what he represents, Satan. I’m going to once again refer to my beloved book Edgar Cayce on Angels, Archangels, and the Unseen Forces to give you some artillery in a battle with the Devil. Of course, he exists, even as just a concept. All we have to do is look at the presence of laboratory experiments on animals, factory farming, global warming, the leveling of our rain forests, the pollution of our oceans, and the tragedy that the world is still at war to know that there is something terribly askew in the human psyche. Whether you believe there is a devil “out there” or you can acknowledge that there is a devil “in here,” let’s take a look at a very uplifting new way to view an age-old problem.
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