by Tobias Reckermann
translated by Graeme Phillips; translation first published in Cyäegha [Number 23, Spring 2022] ed. Graeme Phillips
„…and African outposts report ominous mutterings.“ – HPL „The Call of Cthulhu“
Deep drums, the sounds of the jungle, approaching horror…
I have experienced moments of enlightenment. I know that, and it is a lot worse than completely forgetting all about them. Because what I can’t remember is what insights I gained during them. And so I know that something is missing.
They are like dreams that are still present the moment you wake up and then disappear with your very next thought. So every revelation of a higher existence fades away and what is left is a sense of longing.
Everything I aspire to in life vanishes in these moments, because I think I know so much during them, and I am free. Free, and yet I cannot even say how. Now I plan to try and remember them using the method of lucid dreaming.
They say that you don’t really forget. That, even if you don’t have access to them, the memories are still there, like tracks that can be followed, like a pattern that can be traced and thus recreated once again, however fleeting its imprint on the brain may have been. The revelations I speak of must have left a deep imprint. Retrieving them, I assume, would be like slipping into a dream fully awake. Learning the techniques involved takes a lot of time and discipline, but they make a lot more sense to me than, for example, using mind-altering drugs, with their associated risk of psychosis. Besides, it isn’t really that different when you are high, the state can be consciously brought about, but what you see during it simply slips away after the fact. And once you are sober again, most of these insights seem terribly banal and stupid.
I would describe what I am seeking as a sort of hyper-consciousness, the luminous peaks of which cannot be compared to the dull levels of everyday consciousness. Again, this would be quite similar to dreaming, for seldom, if ever, does one succeed in keeping the dream experience alive during wakefulness.
I pay attention for signs. Firstly, the variability of things, anything that is incompatible with reality as we understand it.
An object in a dream can change its shape, its properties, even its meaning, and can eventually become a completely different object. Likewise, a being, such as a human being, can become something else. We ourselves can slide from one entity to another, thus changing our perspective and our level of influence on the dream itself. Thus we can be observers one moment, doers the next. And along with us, other things can change, such as the environment, maybe even the entire connection between all of these elements, so that we dive from one dream into another and another.
If we are able to become conscious of the fact that we are dreaming during a dream, then we should—and I have made a habit of doing this—also remind ourselves that we are awake during our waking hours.
To my eyes, the solidity of reality, not the dreamlike state, has an intensity that I can only describe as inexorable. This harshness, this resistance to all spiritual activity, can only be overcome by means of language, even if this tool is extremely imprecise and only imitates the truth.
I use language, in the form of a diary, to capture as much of my dreams—and of my moments of enlightenment as well—as I can snatch away from the ebb of forgetfulness.
Lastly, the method of lucid dreaming should, at the very least, allow me to lower the threshold that lies between the very different states of consciousness. The transition from waking to dreaming and vice versa should no longer be like falling off a cliff. Likewise, after years of practice, I should now be able to make a smooth transition from moments of enlightenment to being awake.
I have experienced moments of enlightenment and their traces are still imprinted like tracks in my memory. I now plan to embark on a spiritual journey in the hopes of bringing one such trace back to light.
The starting point for my journey is obvious: I am twenty years younger, so twenty-eight, and I have just arrived in a country in Central Africa in search of knowledge, of enlightenment, of freedom. I studied archaeology and ethnology and specialised in early human history and shamanistic practices.
I drink kuri with Gbaya tribesmen and visit a village of traditional M’Baka, deepening my knowledge of Ubangi before heading deeper into the jungle of the Congo Basin. After the urban nightmare of the ancient capital of French Equatorial Africa’s Ubangi-Shari province, I promise myself what my clichéd mind describes as the freedom of the wilderness, and what I soon realise is a mirage.
I feel anything but free when the green of the jungle rushes in on me like a flood and I think there are eyes everywhere watching me from concealment. Where, behind every giant tree and in every tree’s mighty branches, lurking behind the endless foliage, evil may be lying in wait in the form of beasts of prey, insects, poisonous plants. And perhaps also in the form of people—although these are just clichés that I can’t quite overcome.
I have a very special goal for my journey. My intention is to seek out a people known in cultural anthropology as the Aneoi or Muette, who pose a seemingly insoluble puzzle to that science. To the Gbaya they are Dua, expressing the belief that these people are imbued with a material form of evil witchcraft, possessed or even, since the term is applied to them collectively as a tribal designation, a humanoid embodiment of the mystical substance known as Dua, which they believe can be found in the stomachs of evil people and animals. There are documented instances of Gbaya shamans slitting open the bellies of living people, including those of their own tribe, to reveal the Dua to which they attribute responsibility for that person’s wrongdoing. The evil influence can be banished in this way, and the damage to the body can be healed using shamanic powers.
There are also known cases, in which the Aneoi’s bellies were slit open during the rite and their innards were then burned.
Since the discovery of the tribe, the number of Aneoi has shrunk and it is now estimated at a few hundred. Their villages are hidden deep in the jungle. They avoid contact with all other tribes.
Anyone who wants to conduct research on a people with a magical worldview must have an understanding of magic themselves. Observing from afar, through the distorted lens of our own logic, will get us nowhere. In order to gain insights into the meaning of cultural practices, such as shamanic rites, we must become participating observers, become as one with the subject of our research. I am determined to take on a role in the social fabric of the Aneoi and have prepared myself intensively for this.
Jean Mirelle, my guide on this journey, is an archaeologist from the Institut d’art et d’archéologie at the Sorbonne. In a camouflaged „Wolf“ we drive over the umber and ochre slopes, over which the sky first hangs heavily before the leafy crowns of the jungle giants appear. Mirelle has been in this area for three years and talks about the war in the Congo, which he has become an involuntarily witness to. My French isn’t very good, but I understand that it has had a lasting effect on him. His work on Iron Age archaeological sites has suffered greatly over the past two years.
We cross the border on the right hand side of the river. Mirelle knows the officer on duty and negotiates with him that a jeep with three soldiers will escort us through the still unsafe border region.
Africa’s pole of inaccessibility lies more than a thousand kilometres to the east, but here I feel infinitely removed from everything, from any escape across the sea, from any civilisation.
I set up camp with enough provisions to last me months without the need for supplies from the outside world. Only Mirelle and two of his colleagues know exactly where I am and will keep in touch via the radio, and by visiting me at intervals of several weeks.
I set out alone for my first encounter with the Aneoi, feeling like one of the early French explorers in this country, who laid the foundations of their science here in the jungle. To the people of the jungle they must have seemed like beings from the spirit world.
In one afternoon I reach my destination, a village on the western flank of a mountain, and I stop to observe for a long period before making my first contact. What makes the Aneoi special among all of the other tribes of the jungle, or should I say, among all of the other peoples of the world, is that they don’t use any language, not even sign language, and that, as all of the seemingly incredulous research on them has ultimately shown, they have no form of communication with each other at all.
Their social fabric seems to function entirely without one, as if they are all following a prescribed protocol that regulates every interaction like a script. Theirs, like any other human community, is characterised by cooperation and the division of labour. Everyone in this village goes about their duties, harvesting, processing, building, transporting as necessity dictates. Even when I enter the village, I attract no attention. They notice me, yes, but as a stranger I am not surrounded, I encounter no curiosity, no aggression, no interest. If I stand in the way of one of them, they walk around me, if I speak to them, they ignore me, even if their eyes briefly meet mine. But their look says nothing.
These people live in round, leaf-roofed huts made of wood and mud, they use tools and fire, and wear rudimentary clothing, without any jewellery. Women who become pregnant are cared for by other women, the children lend a hand to the adults, and only the smallest among them, the few infants I can see, cry out loud for food and love. I feel like a ghost among the characters in a silent film. A play is being performed here, and although I am on stage, I have no role in it.
After the first few weeks, I’m glad when Mirelle visits, it makes me feel human again, even if it’s just for one evening. He looks at me with eyes searching for the first signs of social deprivation, and finds them, and then carefully helps bring me back to the reality of myself.
Strengthened inwardly by his support, I proceed to the second phase of my project. In the Arab world, before the modern age, the Aneoi were considered a worthless people. They were useless as slaves, because as soon as they were removed from their community they would become inactive, to the point of complete catatonia and death. After the curiosity of the nineteenth-century researchers had been exhausted to the very last unsatisfying discovery, they were all but forgotten about for decades. The French colonists viewed the Aneoi as mindless beings, little more than beasts. The primeval forest has been their natural reserve to this day. Edmond Bertrand, an early twentieth-century ethnologist, wrote a series of treatises on them which, right up to my student days, formed the basis of our knowledge of this strange, some say impossible, people. One insight we owe to Bertrand is this: the Aneoi are quite capable of communication. He investigated reports from French settlers and researchers forced interactions with the tribesmen which reached a point where, probably out of sheer desperation, they resorted to hand signals to prevent further disruptions to their orderly processes. Hand signals, nothing more than raised hands and fists, in addition to some very inarticulate sounds, which probably only expressed their displeasure, or perhaps even their anger.
Their genealogical ancestry places the Aneoi among the pygmies and thus among the oldest Homo sapiens populations on earth. Compared to other tribes in the same population, the Aneoi are large, averaging roughly 160 centimetres in the females and 170 in the males.
In all likelihood, the Aneoi have lived in the very same area where I find them today, for thousands of years. The enigma of how a people can survive entirely without language, while remaining resilient to influences, such as the occasional admission of individuals from other tribes into their community, cannot be resolved by forcing them to speak, as Edmond Bertrand tried to do. My chosen method is to immerse myself in their way of life.
After intensively studying the behaviour patterns of the village members over the past few weeks, I barely manage to fit into their daily routines at first. As soon as I pick something up, I seem to be interfering with what the others are doing. I put down what I’ve touched, step back, watch and try again. I fetch water, harvest fruit from the trees and gather wood for the village’s only fire, which incidentally never seems to go out. Everyone does these tasks, some a little more of this, some a little more of that, but there is apparently nothing that just one person does.
After many attempts, I finally find my feet. I eat among them, sit by the fire, feed the little ones. Not that they need me, but I certainly need them, need their acceptance, which is expressed in me being able to do the simple things without getting in their way.
Weeks later I finally feel like I am almost part of the system. Mirelle’s colleague, after Mirelle himself only the second person from the outside world to have visited me here, doesn’t find me in the camp, and only finds me when they make their own foray into the village, where I’m busy turning palm leaves into a rain cover. He says that if I didn’t stand out because of my height and skin colour, he would hardly have recognised me. His language seems strange to me at first, and then, after such a long silence, so does my own, as meaningless as the patter of the rain or the whistling of the wind. It takes minutes for those parts of my mind that work together to create a consistent continuum of language and world, to find each other again.
It’s only after the man has left—after he has sternly warned me not to lose myself—that I realise that the community I live in is actually beginning to shift my consciousness. The temptation to just let it happen is great, but my research won’t be served by losing myself completely in its subject matter. I haven’t stuck to the times I was supposed to spend in camp, nor the regular radio updates with Mirelle. The camp looks deserted when I visit it that evening, as if its occupant has been swallowed up by the jungle. At first I find it difficult to operate the equipment, to regard the tent as my home and to become myself again. It’s been ten days since I’ve written a proper report, and as I stand there, alone and like a stranger amidst the evidence of civilisation, I feel myself being drawn away again. I want to go back, back to my mute people, to take on my self-chosen role. Never before has anyone dived so deep, perhaps come so close to making a crucial discovery.
The real challenge that the Aneoi pose to us is to imagine being human in a very different way than we think we understand. We think there is no alternative to language. But there is more: Without language, we believe there can be no development, no progress, but where did the Aneoi get their technology from? Even if it is only at the level of the Neolithic, it still represents progress. And furthermore: We can barely imagine a society that can function without leadership, but without language there are no orders, there is no leadership. And finally: We cannot imagine any society that does not at some point in its development develop the idea of higher powers, but without language neither the idea of gods nor an invocation to such beings can arise. Therefore, what I am searching for is the ritual, the ceremony, the basic concept of religion and the associated basis of social cohesion. What I’m searching for is the one among the Aneoi who has taken on the position of shaman.
But I have a hard time distinguishing individuals who differ in little more than their looks. Their eyes shine like jet and have a sea-green tinge, this and the stillness of their mouths make their faces look like masks. The only way I can see is to go deeper into their world. To let myself fall a little bit more.
I stay in camp one night, leave it the next morning and resolve to go there at least once every five days to write down only what is absolutely necessary, to give Mirelle a sign of life, but nothing more.
I can’t tell if they noticed my absence. I find myself again and close off my verbal thinking until a later point in time. More like a blind being, I orient myself in the meanders of the day’s work, flow with them wherever necessity directs me. Commit myself to them…
My commitment to them seems to deepen our relationship. On one of the following nights one of the women approaches my bed. With no question or demand in her eyes, she lies down next to me. Without asking, I meet her need.
In the morning I feel something unexpected. After having given them something that could make me part of their genetic heritage, I feel bereft. As if I have crossed an invisible yet obvious boundary, I see myself slipping beyond it, into the jungle, into the depths of this tribe which knows no change and into which I must dissolve. On this day I meet the Aneoi with a burgeoning fear, seeing their faces only as masks, their bodies and mine as vessels of a river flowing out of primeval times into infinity, in which no individual can sustain himself.
That threatened remnant which I call I is trying to cling on to a piece of driftwood in a river that swallows all rivers and aspires to be an ocean that swallows all oceans. The days go by, I don’t let go and continue to drift downstream.
My resolve to visit my camp is fading. I’ve been there a couple of times, the last time I didn’t know what to do with myself, I only sent a short radio message to Mirelle and I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back again for many days now.
Something is happening that has never been observed before. A man is dying from a savage disease that is consuming his body, leaving his skin looking like a shroud. Convulsions make him twitch wildly, his eyes are wide open and seem to be looking into the sky far away. Perhaps it’s a tumour that has turned this man into a restless shadow of himself within days. What I observe pulls me back into my half-forgotten role of researcher. The critical step from a prehuman to a human social being is dealing with death. People invent rites to send their dead to posterity. No one knows what the Aneoi do with their dead, so I sharpen my focus on what is happening now.
A few of the women are always with him, sitting by his bed and watching the progress of his death. Over the course of the next few days, more and more of the Aneoi give up their usual activities and approach the sick person, standing by and watching over him. No one takes any action to try and cure or alleviate his suffering. No medicine man emerges, no shaman appears to prepare his mind for the final journey. The man dies during the night and no tears are shed, no lamentations are made, and no rites are performed.
In the morning his emaciated body lies there like a forgotten doll. But the Aneoi begin to dismantle their village. Provisions are wrapped in leaves, tools are packed, even the fire is extinguished and finally the corpse is wrapped in blankets and lifted onto the shoulders of two men. During this process I am at a loss, I don’t know what to do, where to help, whether I should return to my camp now to inform Mirelle that we are leaving the village. I decide against it. A great deal of excitement and restlessness has seized hold of me and I am convinced that there is only one right way to act now. By joining in with this change as if I were one of them.
Hours later we have walked so far through the jungle that I no longer know where we are. I assume we are somewhere southwest of the mountain but without a view of the sun I could be wrong. Massive fault lines in the forest floor, huge rocks, tree-paths, swampy depressions and rushing watercourses, root caves, shadowy ditches—no map could help me find my way around here. But the Aneoi certainly know where they are going. At no point do they show uncertainty about the direction to be taken, at no time do they seem to be following a clear path that I alone cannot see.
At the same time I am being drawn along with them, and with every step it feels like I am being further removed from any possible return to another life. I’m afraid of them, afraid of the determination that pushes them toward a goal that I don’t know.
We are in the great Zaire basin. As delusional as the hope of surviving alone for weeks in the jungle is, I would only have to follow the water to someday…
But of course there can be no turning back now, no going it alone in this wilderness, besides, I’m on the trail of something significant here. I just need to keep my fear in check and I will find out where they are taking the dead man. There must be some sort of ritual significance for them to have travelled such a long distance.
We rest for the night and then hike the next day until late in the afternoon. Suddenly the ones at the front stop. As I catch up with those following along behind, I see why. We must have reached our destination and it is something I could not have foreseen. There is no longer any doubt that we are on the southern flank of the mountain. In front of us the view opens onto a vast plain of swampy forest framed by the mighty trunks and canopy of the trees closest to us. They stand on the sides of an almost level step of the slope. In the reddening sunlight the edges of Cyclopean walls rise sharply out of the plant kingdom. My eye, trained in recognising such structures, immediately makes out an extensive complex of Neolithic buildings that have not previously been accessible to researchers. Like an epiphany, the significance of this discovery hits me. The Aneoi are descended from the very first people to have entered this region, and their ancestors established permanent settlements when nobody had previously suspected such a thing.
Leaning on a branch, I watch as they carry the body to the centre of the site, and deposit it there on the densely overgrown threshold of a walled area which, to my eyes, has the look of a meeting place. Three entrances to the circular hollow remain open, and the foundations of the surrounding chambers stand like the tumbled-down walls of a bulwark. Corridors connect the depression with the periphery. Just enough of everything is still visible so that I can quickly compare a rough outline of the layout with anything comparable that springs to mind. The possible references are overturned, knocked out of contention. What remains is the realisation that nothing really makes sense. The layout is too complex and too large for the Neolithic period, and at the same time it is too archaic for later epochs. The geometry is odd, and is inconsistent with any of the ethnically related cultures. On its own, it is surprisingly simple and almost too perfect. These are all just first impressions that my racing pulse drives like hammer blows into my researcher’s brain. It’s time for me to calm down. The walls will still be there later, it is more important now to observe the Aneoi and to become part of their group again.
Night falls and we light a fire. Faces light up as they line up around the dead man. He lies in the middle of the hollow, by the fire, and I’m waiting to see what will happen next. Someone should now step forward and reveal their true role as a shaman. One after another I look into each of their mask-like faces and their deep green eyes. The old, the young, the few children, the women—they seem like totems to me now in their diversity, each a single characteristic of their tribe.
Two men and a woman do step forward, holding stone blades. Together they bend over the corpse, and start cutting it open with their tools. I hold my breath when foul gases emerge, and my mind takes a leap forward that makes my heart recoil. Events unfurl as I foresee: They dig out the entrails, which they throw Into the fire, where they sizzle and burn. Then the woman grabs the heart and cuts it out with two slashes, closes her fist around it and squeezes out the blood before bringing it up to her mouth. The two men cut chunks of flesh from the body and pass them to the Aneoi, who approach without making a sound. I want to refuse, but then I wouldn’t be one of them—wouldn’t be one of those people who bury their dead within their bodies. A hand holds out a piece of stinking human flesh and I take it. My remaining resistance is being crushed by the actions of the group.
It is cold and teeming with independent life of its own. I bite into it and almost choke, chew then swallow. The fire burns hotter and at the same time less brightly.
We eat everything, except for the bones, which we put into the fire and look at each other with eyes that can see deeply into primeval times. That’s how it starts. Like a dream. I am one of them, the heir to a lore that is thousands of years old. It’s as if the wind or the rain is speaking. Maybe I’m dreaming now inside my memory or I am remembering a dream that I had that night—or I experienced something that felt like a dream because the things in it changed their nature, I myself am different in it and it is like I have fallen out of one dream and into a completely different one. My heart and breath catch when I realise that it is we who are speaking, all at the same time: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Xulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
But this is it, the moment of enlightenment that I wanted to achieve. The mind is a strange mechanism, you put something in and you follow a certain path, but you don’t always get the result you expected.
This language is the key. The language of another state of consciousness, filled with consonants and booby traps for the waking mind—it’s ugly and evokes something ancient. I no longer see a jungle in front of me, but the endlessness of an ocean from which a jet-black city emerges, dripping wet and with an oceanic green tinge, profoundly non-Euclidean. That is, its lines are neither straight nor even, and the angles are oddly exaggerated, outside of the possible three hundred and sixty degrees, and so what I see must go beyond the known dimensions. My mind tells me it’s impossible, but my perception insists it isn’t. The structures are polyphemic, as if a single eye is perched on top of each like at the end of an obscene stalk. It is a mask that hides the dreaming spirit within from my eyes. And for that alone, I am grateful. I don’t want to see it revealed. This moment is already too clear, far too clear.
I see this distant place and hear the dreamer’s language and I understand that we are at an outpost of its realm that reaches through time and is ready for its awakening. An age before and after mankind, greater than the fleeting moment of Homo sapiens, greater than the ages of the earth. Now I understand what freedom is.
My consciousness explodes.
I wake up in a sick bed and picture myself fleeing alone through the jungle like a madman, without any sense, before regaining consciousness here.
I was found and cared for until the fever released my body, leaving my mind scarred like a battlefield. I still cling to the freedom that lies in having overcome all logic. But that moment is already starting to fade.
Freedom is something that cannot be held onto.
Disclaimer
Why would I write a Lovecraftion story? Why not?
Firstly, why: Because I was asked to do so by an editor for his anthology of Lovecraftien stories by contemporary writers. Secondly, why not: because Lovecraft has been a racist and bigot and even decades after his death still leads the field of most influencial writers of weird fiction. But again, why would I write a story in the vein of a racist and bigot writer’s fiction? The answer is: to undermine the Lovecraftian spirit, to use it for reflection, in some way to pervert it, yes, to have my fun with it and to do with it as I feel right, which is my freedom. He is dead after all, isn’t he? Or is „That […] not dead which can eternal lie“?