GodsAmongstUs

I have not yet read America Gods by Niel Gaiman. But I know a little bit about Gods. It is true, and it happened, and it causes people to have problems accepting me as credible. My ancestors on one half of my family (I am mixed blood) are "the vikings". 

So one day while living in a forest with witches, one of them asks me if I ever heard of Hanuki. "Nert relly" I replied, my mind going sideways so I could speak from the truth of my heart without my mind getting in the way, and causing my vowels to slur. 

 "He is the American Indian trickster god. He teaches through Trickery."

I was full up of studying the Common Law of Our Ancestors which all the pre-historic tribes of invaded Britain agreed to abide by as The Law, it is so simple even a child can understand it: 'No Harm, No Theft, No Trickery, Keep the Peace.'The idea of a god who teaches by trickery is an interesting facet of the whole story. 
 

"Oh, my ancestors called him Loki." referring to the viking god of trickery. 

That is when i made some mental associations. Several months before I had been talking with an AmeriCanadian Indian girl online and she told me her tribe are the Hanu tribe, which means "low people" because all the other tribes used to regard them as below them, until Buffalo Bill's Circus brought knowledge of indigenous peoples culture to the rest of the world because of the invention of television. After that their tribe has been honored ever since. 

Hanu, means Low. Hanu-ki is the same as Lo-ki, they are both the same trickster god. I had known that vikings settled east America and Canada yet I had not known how far the integration of the two peoples cultures went. Now i was beginning to understand that they are both talking about the very same character. They are not talking about two different tricksters who coincidentally have the same name - it is the same guy. 

Later that night my witch companion took me to her friends house on "the most violent estate in ..." being on the border between England and Wales it variously gets assigned to both nations. We walked past a burnt out and rusty police car which the police had not dared to retrieve, one can only assume from their fear of what would happen if they tried to. 

Events happened which I will not write down in the internet for social and legal reasons, and involved examples of why it is such a rough housing estate. Through the nights events, there was one guy who sat in a chair in the room and did not speak. He did not interact with anybody and it seemed as if he was not even there. I was not sure if anyone else could even see him. It was peculiar. At one moment I said something and he raised his head and looked directly into my eyes and smiles. He had the most trustworthy eyes i have ever seen. They glowed. They appeared somehow to mirror my own were my own more perfect. It was itself a strange phenomena. I trusted the guy with my soul, he was so powerful. I smiled back and quickly broke the gaze because I was falling in there. The light in his soul was radiant although all night he had been invisible and dark. 

Sometime later I left the forest and returned to the city. In the study of a local expert on artifacts from around the world i looked in a book, the catalogue for an exhibition of African artifacts which had been 'stolen' ahem 'brought back to civilization' during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a section of photographs which although appearing as art objects to western eyes, are in fact utilitarian and used by shamen for communicating with spirits and deities, is a carved wooden face of the African trickster god. I know his face. I have looked into his eyes in a room on the borderlands. He's alive and real. The very same face. The very same trickster. 

I have been through a lot of strange and out-of-the-box events and experiences in my life, which many people simply refuse to believe because it is beyond their own experience. This is a very true thing. The ancient Gods are still roaming the earth in the form of mankind. We can believe it or disbelieve it but that does not change that what we have been taught to call 'mythology' - it is real. 

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