Not At All What I Expected

By Karen Shearer Voorhees

Draft 2021.01.27

I am in labor with a novel. A story that has been gestating in me for three decades insists on coming forth into the world. Like a gravid woman whose contractions have begun, I have no choice but to go through with this, breathing and bearing down and pushing.

Conception took place late in 1990. I was not quite forty years old, a refugee from academia living comfortably with my husband in the famed Gourmet Ghetto section of Berkeley, California. Life was good. Any stresses were mild, positive and freely chosen except for one: I'd begun to feel a jarring irritation with a man in my social circle.  

It made no sense. There had never been a problem in all the years this this normal, reasonable man had been attending a weekly gaming group in my home. Still, though nothing had changed outwardly, I’d begun to dread his arrival. The instant he walked through my front door I’d feel tense and jumpy, as if someone was running fingernails down a chalkboard, or screaming just at the edge of hearing. I’d want to scream. It would take every ounce of self-control to hide my heebie-jeebies. 

I assumed that my reaction must be about me, not him, but I could neither figure this out nor shake it off. I tried everything I could think of for months and months, but nothing seemed to help. Even time wasn't healing this. It was like having poison oak that Would. Not. Go. Away. 

Then one day I came across a Jungian technique called "active imagination,” which is supposed to help resolve a persistent, bothersome mood.

"Just what the doctor ordered," I thought. 

The text also warned that we should only attempt this technique under professional guidance. But I was desperate to get to the bottom of my misery. 

“I'm mature and my personality is stable,” I told myself. "I can handle whatever comes up.”

So, in my naiveté and arrogance, I tried it alone. With years of meditation under my belt it was easy to follow the induction into a state of one-pointed focus. Then, following instructions, I asked my “mood” to speak to me.

What I got was not at all what I expected. I got a vision that lasted just an instant but hit me like lightning: a brief image of a tribal woman. Three decades later I can still see her in my mind's eye with hallucinatory clarity. She's in her early forties, lean, naked except for a loincloth, with dusty black skin and thick, coarse, straight black hair. She sits cross-legged on bare ground and stares into my eyes with a knowing smile. 

She's a past life of mine. 

How did I know this? I have no idea. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to me before. To this day it’s one of my most intense memories; right up there with the time I electrocuted myself by turning on a light switch while standing in a puddle. 

That split-second vision delivered her name—Embe—and her life story. The story came not in words or images but in an instantaneous spurt, rather like a zip file, that I was able to examine later on in detail. 

Another piece of information landed on me in the instant of the vision: a reason for my heebie-jeebies. That normal, reasonable person in my life, the one on whom I'd become so unpleasantly fixated, had been the cause of Embe’s horrific death. His name in that life was Batumivir.

For the next three days I did little more than sit huddled and shivering in a corner of my house while I unpacked Embe’s story in my mind. It wasn't hard to do, just really, really intense. All I had to do was put my attention on any aspect of her life and knowledge about it would come flooding into my awareness. 

Born about eleven thousand years ago in Asia Minor and raised to be a tribal shaman, Embe spent her life helping the tribes in her region come together around this new-fangled, revolutionary technology of farming that was changing everything. When a total lunar eclipse passed over the region, her terrified people begged her to go to the gods for them as a human sacrifice. The ceremony was meant to be sacred and healing, bringing people together, but her political enemy, the warlord Batumivir, sabotaged it. Things went horribly sideways. Her last embodied days were hell. 

Did I mention that this was intense?

After those three days, further revelations about Embe’s life slowed to a manageable trickle and my life pretty much went back to normal. A few months later I wrote a five-page summary of Embe's life. By then I knew not only her character arc but also that of her nemesis Batumivir. 

In the years since then, I have worked out my putative karma with the putative current incarnation of my former arch-rival. With careful effort on my part it's gone well. He, thank heavens, has no clue about any of this. I think. But, as it turns out, that’s not the main point. Embe is. Her life has hijacked mine in a way I did not at all expect. 

During the busy quarter century that followed my vision of her, Embe retreated to a back corner of my awareness. Then, five years ago, I retired and considered what to do with my newly freed time and energy. 

"Hey," I said to myself, in my arrogance and naiveté, "why not write a novel about Embe's life? That should be a fun project. Maybe I can turn that old five-page outline into a mass market novel. " 

Famous last words. Everything to do with Embe turns out to be intense. By now the passion and purpose don't seem to be coming from within me but from somewhere outside, sweeping me along, as if I've been carried away by a river in spate. And during the five years since I started working on this novel, I've had more synchronicities than during my entire previous life. They just keep coming, in all sizes from frequent tiny ones to the occasional shatteringly cosmic blast. Apparently the universe wants me to be doing this. 

One of those cosmic blasts lit the fire that drives me to get this story out into the world. By the middle of 2015, my draft had reached 75 pages. I’d sketched out all of the novel’s major plot points and analyzed Batumivir’s personality according to three different psychometric typologies. Then Donald Trump floated down that escalator and announced his candidacy for US president. 

Some months later I had a flash of realization. "Holy Toledo!" I thought, only I didn't use the word Toledo. "Trump is the one who's really Batumivir!" 

Trump matches Batumivir far more closely than does that harmless man (at least, harmless in this incarnation) who unwittingly triggered my vision a generation ago. Both Trump and Batumivir are wealthy, powerful alpha males. While both can be charming when it serves their purpose, they are narcissistic bullies with few to no scruples when it comes to winning. And they are driven to win big above anything else. They crave the acclaim of others like a junkie craves his next fix. (Batumivir, though, was highly competent. Unfortunately for Embe).

That much was coincidence enough, but here’s the part that shivers my timbers. In the years since 2015, current events have eerily followed the story arc of Embe's life and community eleven thousand years ago, with Trump today playing the role of Batumivir then. The story of Embe’s life as she laid it on me three decades ago has turned out to mirror the apocalyptic events of our most recent years. 

So many of the underlying dynamics are the same. We today are experiencing a change of era that’s as massive as the one Embe’s people lived through, when they went from hunter-gathering to the first farming communities in human history. Just like Embe's people, we are rocked by new technologies that are overwhelming existing systems, one after another. Just like them, we are in the throes of co-creating a new life-way that has never before existed. Just like them, some of us are contracting in fear, re-tribalizing, and blaming scapegoats. And, like them, a regressive populist backlash has mauled our political system.

In her lifetime Embe was a visionary; a seer. She grasped that the people of her day were creating a wholly new lifeway. She lived and died trying to help midwife the birth of their new era. 

I am more pundit than visionary, and my way of working is not at all Embe’s, but I believe that I too have some insight into what we are going through. Speaking from my scholarly background (a Ph.D. in cultural history) I see a big picture that makes sense of current events. 

The emergence of agriculture, Embe’s era, was the third of six such passages in human history, when an old era crumbled under the impact of an emerging new era. In other words, humanity has already gone through such transitions of era not once or twice but six times. Today we are in the throes of a seventh.

Written records exist for three of our past six transitions. From these we know that the people who lived then were just as confused and terrified as we are today. The crises they faced were as dire for them as ours are for us today. They were just as sure that the world was ending. And their distress too triggered regressive backlashes. It seems that frightened people are vulnerable to demagogic voices in every era.

In the midst of this seventh change of era, however, we have a perspective that people in past ages did not. We are aware that we've seen this movie before — six times, no less. Therefore we can predict with some confidence how it's going to end for us too. Just as Embe’s people did, eventually we will make it through our own dark passage and emerge into another bright new era that as yet we can barely imagine. 

By now Embe has become more to me than the memory of a vision, and more than the protagonist of a novel I’m writing. She’s taken on a vivid life of her own in my head. And she’s kicking my butt to deliver our joint message of hope into today’s world via her story. She wants us to learn from our past and be wiser than the people were in her day. 

I echo her sense of passionate urgency. Even though as a historian I am confident that another new era will inevitably emerge, I also know how much worse things could get for us before they start getting better. Dark Ages have featured large in some of our past transitions. Some of them, too, have included eco-system collapses as well as human-system collapses. 

But we don’t have to go the full Dark Age route. So far, believe it or not, we’re getting off relatively lightly. I say let’s keep it that way. In spite of the many doom-sayers (who have also existed in every age), there is still time to set a gentler trajectory. Embe and I share the hope that a clearer understanding of the forces that drive current events will help us lessen the suffering this time around, instead of multiplying it through ignorance. This is the blessing that High Priestess Embe wills for us.

The pounding drive to get her story out into the world has upended my hitherto placid life. But with it comes an unexpected and lovely perk. Embe’s voice in my head is terrific company. She's articulate, irreverent, and full of snarky comments on current events from her Stone Age point of view. I think of her as my imaginary Best Friend Forever from eleven thousand years ago. 

For example, before the pandemic she loved to tag along when my husband and I shopped for food. In her day, life’s biggest challenge was getting enough food to survive. Not for us. Within easy strolling distance of our flat lies an array of gourmet-quality choices from the cuisines of the world. As we would saunter home pre-pandemic, unafraid of being jumped by predators or hostile tribes, our ecologically correct canvas bags bulging with fresh produce and superb take-out, Embe-in-my-head would exult, "This is my idea of hunter-gathering! You people are living in the Happy Hunting Grounds!"

(Mid-pandemic, of course, we have home delivery instead. “Even better!” laughs Embe).

She’s not just talking about those of us who are lucky enough to live in first-world affluence. She likes to remind me how well off the great majority on this planet are today compared with past eras: "You people expect to be safe and comfortable! All the time! You're angry when you're not! You expect to live to grow old! All of you! You're upset when you don't!" 

As a writer, I think she speaks in an awful lot of italics and exclamation points. As a historian, I take her point and agree completely. The farther back we go in history, the shorter and more brutal life generally was, for a larger portion of the populace. No doubt some who romanticize the distant past will disagree with me, but I stand by my reading of the historical record.

To put it in a different way, with the emergence of each of the six previous eras, life has gotten significantly better on many fronts, for more and more people. And we can step up to yet a higher level once again. In fact, I’m sure we will. Eventually. 

(Yes, even with climate change bearing down on us—but that’s a separate subject). 

Let me offer a metaphor. Both Embe and I see today’s apocalyptic current events as a great birth process of its own. Like a neonate in mid-labor, our coming new era has already left the womb of the past and entered its birth canal. The upheavals that scream at us in our headlines are the very contractions that push us forward. 

As yet, very few of us see light at the end of the tunnel. We don’t understand that we are in a tunnel; a passage from one world order to the next. Most of us only know that our old ways of life are collapsing, and that we are in darkness and crushing distress. But eventually light will appear ahead of us. Then we will emerge into a bigger, brighter existence. We’ve already done this six times. Humanity, we can do it this time too. Yes, we can!

This is the message, embodied in Embe's life story, that I am straining to deliver into the world the way a gravid woman labors to give birth.

Did I mention that this is intense? 

Thank you for listening.