Integration Strategy Firewalk – January 5th, 2013

Organize and focus the coming year behind a single powerful strategy for your small business, consulting or coaching practice.

Live an integrated life. Make it all work. Your entire life, health, finance, relationships AND career.

Without prioritizing or sacrifice in any one area. Create momentum that will propel you towards success [right out of the gate].

Do you find yourself spending too much time, money, and energy building your business while not getting the results you want?

Do you continuously undermine other areas of your life such as health, family, hobbies, or travel to achieve success in your business?

Make a bigger impact in 2013 without finding yourself pulled in multiple directions on how to get there. Prioritize ideas, both your own and the ones presented to you.

If you are like most people, you go into January with high hopes for the future, and will likely be disappointed by what you actually accomplish.

Take a stand. This will be your year for aggressive business growth. Choose the right approaches for you. Live a lifestyle that actually coincides with the hopes that led to the creation of your own business.

During 2013 Integration Strategy event you will:

  • Move beyond the failures and build on your achievements of 2012.
  • Create an integrated growth strategy for the new year.
  • Develop clear and achievable goals with the help of peers.
  • Achieve momentum that will carry your plans through to fruition.
  • Retain the confidence to know now where you will be in one year’s time.

There will be a firewalk at the conclusion of the event where you will bring together all your strategies and aspirations for the year and fuse them as one when you walk on the coals.

2013 Integration Strategy

Date: January 5th, 2013
Time: 3:00-7:30 p.m.
Location: Marina Village Conference Center (Mission Bay)

Fee: $125
Discounted: $95 extended until Jan 3rd, 2013

You will have a profound “wow” experience that you will remember forever.

Register Here

Firewalk Experience:

Firewalking has been an integral part of many cultures for many centuries. Typically communities Firewalk together as a group to experience oneness and unity as a group.

Firewalking creates an environment of immediacy. It fuses the mind, body, and spirit together into one focus. Creating powerful breakthroughs and new energy. Removing artificial limitations. Releasing the pent-up desire to move forward and achieve success.

The firewalk portion of the 2013 Integration Strategy event will drive home the lessons and make real the promise of the event.

 

Register Here

What Price Firewalking, Measuring Aka, etc?

1951

BY

Max Freedom Long


Charles W. Kenn, HRA and F. H. F., our good friend who is rapidly becoming the recognized authority on the Hawaii of yesterday, and who gave us the book reporting on the Honolulu firewalking (eg. walking on hot coals) tests some months ago, questions the experimental work of the summer. He writes, as of October 3rd, from Honolulu:

      “Your last Bulletin was interesting. But I still believe that it is not important that we find some logical reason to explain why things happen as they do in Huna. The very fact that they do happen is all that is necessary to know. The Polynesians tell the story of Maui, the culture hero, who succeeded in accomplishing six deeds for the benefit of man, but with the seventh, in trying to find the secret of indefinite earthly life, he perished.  This gives us a deep insight into the ways of thinking of these peoples, as well as the suggestion that they, too, realized that it is folly to inquire into the why of spiritual things, The Huna concept of immortality lies in the idea of ancestor worship, ho`omana kupuna, that a descendant is only a continuation of ancestors, a germ of that spark within him was taken from all ancestors down the line, and the ceremony ofoki piko cutting the umbilical cord of the first born starting a new clan, lahui, is for the purpose of perpetuating that new line indefinitely through descendants in a straight line. … The idea of measuring this or that aka body seems rather far-fetched from where I sit. I presume. that every man has his own ideas about certain things which appear to govern his actions more than what really is or is not basic Huna philosophy. Remember the story of the boy who took his father’s watch apart to see what made it tick, but found that the ticking had stopped and that he could not get the watch together again? Maui, in search of the secret of immortality (his seventh deed), entered the open mouth of the sleeping monster (mo`o) and went on into its insides to examine its heart.. On his way out, having learned the secret, the mo`o awakened and closed its jaws, crushing Maui to death.”

      THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN…HRA Kenn is on firm ground when he objects that the measuring of aka bodies of men and thoughts are not a part of basic Huna (Ho`omana). In self-defense I must make my position clear. Years ago, when I was trying to learn what the na kahuna of many kinds and classes knew or had known, believed or had believed, and did or had done, I found myself up to the ears in the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle mighty few of whose parts matched.

While I learned after a fashion what rites were observed and what things were attempted and what were accomplished, I was not at all satisfied. I wanted to know WHY. I still want to know WHY. I am made that way. And, by the same token, I affirm that UNTIL one knows the hows and whys of any action of body or mind or energy, one is working more or less in the dark. That was where I came in. I'm irresistibly urged to go on down and have a look at the heart to see what makes it tick, to get at the Secret. When and if I come up with that Secret, and it the jaws close on me, I will at least have followed the paths dictated by my particular cast of mind. I am not content at all to know the exact ritual and precise facts of the rite of cutting the umbilical cord of the first born. I want to know how those ancestors of ours got to be na Aumakua and WHY they should be worshiped. At this point in my long search after thirty years I still have not learned exactly how I should construct a thought form cluster to make my prayer, or exactly how to generate and use the mana which I am convinced that the na kahuna used. If an instrument, be it a pendulum, a Biometer or HRA Cameron’s invention, will measure the size and shape of a thought form cluster I make, and. tell me how long it endures or where it goes or how to make it radiate more strongly — even if that isn’t basic Huna — I'm all for it. After all these years of sniffing around in the facts, beliefs and all pervading superstitions, of other men — most of whom have been dead for a very long time — I now want a few simple things which will WORK.

I know that this seems very much like the seventh deed of Maui, and I admit that some of the matters touched upon in our HRA studies are indeed far-fetched in their relation to what we accept as “basic Huna” the Huna of almost no ”whys” at all.

   " I DO BELIEVE…HELP THOU MY UNBELIEF.”

      This quotation from Mark 9:24 describes the state of mental confusion of most of us.

We accept some set of rites and beliefs, affirm our complete faith in their verity and in the fact that if we believe completely, we can get our prayers answered. But, even as the hopeful but fearful father in the New Testament story, we affirm and beg for help to confirm our belief — all in the same breath.

      CHILDHOOD FAITH AND DOCTRINES has been derived for most of us from early BELIEF IN Church training, teaching, contacts and personal observation and experience. As children we have been encouraged to believe, and to pray. Most of us learned very early in life that our prayers were seldom answered. We may have felt a great sadness because of this or because we observed the prayers of our elders go unanswered. In any event, our forming minds received deep impressions of doubt which lasted down the years,

What renews and strengthens? Evidence? Is “seeing believing?” Yes, our greatly weakened belief to both, provided there has not been an emotional reaction in childhood or later, to the lack of answers to our most earnest prayers — a response amounting to an emotional storm which left in its wake a series of fixed hurts and doubts, to say nothing of almost inevitable resentments. To get rid of these fixations or to hurdle them, requires far more than a single convincing piece of evidence showing that God is in His heaven and that He or His angels hear and answer prayer.

Where a at strong set of fixations exist, no amount of pounding with evidence will cause the slightest change. Ancient Huna and modern Psychology teach us this. Then how to “…help thou my unbelief?” Will some Savior do it for us? Improbable at this late date. The only way we know to get rid of fixations is (1) to find them,. and (2) to rationalize their cause and thus drain them off.

      For a number of years I have advocated this approach. I still advocate it. I am still busy using it myself. I have gone back to my early days to search for the origin of my personal fixed doubts. When I find such a source, it always is accompanied by the damning rationalization and complete and irrefutable proof that I first prayed, and that, as a result, secondly, I got no resultant answer. The instant I touch such a sore spot — unhealed for all the years — I am slapped in the face and across the heart by that old logic which is the blind behind which the emotional content of the fixation lurks. That Is why, some years ago, I saw that, at least in the majority of cases, it was necessary to make a fresh start, to find the best possible set of beliefs, to accept them logically and emotionally, and to begin the slow work of rebuilding the crushed belief in a Higher Power, and faith in the possibility of an answer to prayer.

Armor against fresh frustration and the danger of awakening and strengthening the old fixed doubts, lies, at least for me, in having in hand and ready for use at all time, a LOGICAL EXCUSE OR REASON by which to explain to myself WHY I made a prayer action and WHY I got no results. Huna has been a godsend to me. It tells me (1) what I have to do, and do correctly, to make a successful prayer-action. It tells me the conditions that will or will not permit the proper action on my part the limitations under which I must be willing to work. I must not hurt another. I must not have a guilt sense to prevent the low self from making the contact with the Aumakua and sending the mana, the carefully readied thought-structure of the condition desired, etc. (2) I must keep doubts from entering in as I make my picture of the desired conditions lest the structure contain the things I desire to avoid, I must water my prayer-plant in the Aumakua garden each day with the water of mana. I must not change my picture — pull up my plant to see if it is taking root. I must hold the faith unfalteringly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, and, if the game is worth the candle, year by year. (3) I must make certain that I do not mention my prayer-action and the follow-up to someone who will curse the entire project with a sneer of scorn or word of doubt. This is to be avoided at all costs. Mental attitudes rub off of one of us on to another like soot and black contagion. The slightest whisper of doubt will hit us with trip hammer force as powerful suggestion because old doubt fixations are so easy to revive. The need to “go into your closet to pray” is a very great need indeed. Nothing Is so fragile as the thought picture of the prayer, so easily shattered -or so brilliant with the light of Faith and that Love whose overshadowing we must come to know as Real beyond reality.

To the simple mind of an islander — a kahuna of yesterday – there was I grant you less need for the elaborate rationalization and complete understanding which are an utter necessity for me. He had not been treated to such large doses of a religion which bad retained outer form but had lost its workable knowledge of both low and high magic. Perhaps, as a child, he had seen the prayer-actions made, the rituals gone through, careful step by careful step, and had seen the gods respond and the fire-walk made possible. Contrast such a proof ,such a powerful physical stimulus, with the vague or even contradictory answers to prayer in Christian circles . Even a simple belief must be based on something, but a belief complexed by fixations resulting from repeated failures in demonstration cannot be rebuilt except on new and massive foundations of proof and repeated proof. I would that each of us could perform the rites and be given the proofs of fire-immunity before every major effort of prayer.

      Lacking an ever-ready firewalk for proof, to help my unbelief, I grasp at all straws. My need is immediate, not a matter of tomorrow or something to talk to death or fritter away in speculation, I sit twice, or more often at times, each day in the TMHG ritual, and I have the burden on my heart and the uplift under my spirit, of the needs of those who work with me.

Some of my friends are ill, a few are blind, many are in trouble of one kind or another. Anything that will bolster up my faith and help my unbelief is priceless. If Verne Cameron can let me make a thought picture of a vase on a shelf, then find it with his gadget and measure its size and outline its shape tell me how long it remains there as a real structure, that helps me to know that Huna is right. —my accepted belief — and that I can and do make forms by thinking, actual and substantial forms, even if of matter too fine to be seen by the eyes or felt by the hands.

The same can be said of every bit of corroborative proof that there are thought-form-structures, that things do radiate a form of energy, that invisible cords do connect people, things and man with his Aumakua…Heaven knows that I have one answer to prayer after another; and that hardly a day. passes without the arrival of letters telling that my friends are getting definite answerers to their prayers and to their TMHG prayers in which we work together as a congregation through telepathic aka thread contact. These proofs would be far more than sufficient for a simple and unhampered mind which remained a stranger to the doubt fixations I have known, but for me, such proofs need to be renewed as the offices on the altar, daily, yes, almost hourly.

No, not basic Huna — but for me, basic necessity.

The Relentless Majesty of Huna

Chapter 3: Na i ke Umu Ki
(The Hunian Firewalk)

And how the Umu Ki Ceremony was returned to Huna

2006
by Ho`anoiWahinenuiho`aLani

      It was about 800 years ago that the gods decided to offer us the means to the acquisition of faith again, for those who wished to perpetuate it, to end their confusions and involuntary suffering. And the Created World was drenched in the fire-made-sacred of the Firewalk.

A number of religions were close enough to reality to see the path towards faith there, and kept that flame alive. It was somehow transmitted to the na Kahuna (Priests) of Polynesia at about that time.

And Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA,  of our Hunian lineage tells us this of that time:

“It is to be seen that their purpose was accepted along with the theory and practice. In the lands of origin the rite had been used to provide or to give proof of, “purity” or “purification” in the religious sense. It was supposed to bring clairvoyance and clairaudience so that the fate of lost voyagers might be learned, lost articles recovered etc. It was a thanksgiving ceremony. It called down a blessing on crops and people and animals. It brought rain. It replenished the fish in waters nearby. In India one fire walked to fulfill a vow when prayers had been answered. Walking on hot coal was supposed to cure sterility. In Japan firewalk was used as a healing ritual for various forms of sickness.

In Polynesia firewalking was used more or less for the same purposes, but as an additional rite and not to replace older rites already in use … Once a set of ideas has been accepted, it is fitted neatly in with other ideas already a part of the scheme of things, and soon takes on the aspect of having been a part of the older systems for centuries back.”

-Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA

Six hundred years passed. Firewalking spread all over the World again, giving many pomaika`i all over for the Children of God (all beings having a capacity for the loss of faith). Crops came and were watered, sicknesses healed, lost faith restored.

But then it began to die out all over the world again. And in Hawaii, no young haumana could be found, and the last of the na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki (Priests of the Fire-made-sacred) called out to the na Aumakua, and were heard. Their plea heard even decades before they cried out.

And the cries  were heard by the gods, some of whom came together as our first Po`e Aumakua (Council of God-selves), and they presented kokiki before the child they had found in Boston. And all the painful, fearful choices made, and he arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, a sturdy young man, but shriven of all hope but for the Aloha of his friends who had called him to them in the time of his need.

It was 1872.

He spend several years creating the great Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the center of all scientific investigations of Polynesia and Micronesia. Dr. William Tufts Brigham was its designer, and first Curator and Director.

But like the super-heroes of the 1930's Comic Books, he had a secret life and identity. To the native Hawaiian with whom he had constant relationships with for the gathering of artifacts and researches, he was, “Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William”.  [Great White Priest]

Around 1890 one of another of his prayers was answered and he experienced one of the great mysteries and wonders of this world—the Firewalk…

As Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William told it to Kahuna Nui Max:

      “When I'm gone”, he [Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William Tufts Brigham] said to me [Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long] one evening, " you may tell what I am now telling you. I know you will tell it as nearly word for word as you are able. If I thought you would put words into my mouth which were not mine I would tell you nothing, but I trust you. You have the proper cautious approach and understanding needed in a study of the kahunas. You may say for me that I gave my word as a student and a gentleman that I would, and had, told the exact truth about what I saw and did. This is all either of us can do. Both of us will be branded unholy liars by a certain class. That class you can afford to snub, and, as I will be dead, I will have lost my childish fear of losing standing as a scientist. However, I trust that before you are as old as I am, the thing we call 'magic' will have been taken into the laboratory, in some way, and made a part of the working equipment of the world."

      Dr. Brigham, in his earlier days, made frequent trips to the " Big Island," or Hawaii. There were many kahunas working there at that time. In the course of his investigations on firewalk he made friends of a number of them. He posed as a ha`ole, or white, kahuna, and discussed beliefs and methods with the brown magicians on intimate terms-trying always to get from them the secret of secrets which they guarded so carefully.

      Among his kahuna friends were three Hawaiians who knew the fire-magic. They used it mainly to prevent lava flows from damaging the property of clients. One of them had 'been called in by Princess Ruth at the time the town of Hilo was being approached by a slow-moving lava flow. Everything had been done to stop the encroaching mass of lava, which was kept hot by the burning of self-generated gases in its substance. In a doughlike mass, and with a wide front, it continued day after day to tumble slowly forward, rolling and grinding, toward Hilo. Stone walls were built in front of it and promptly torn aside and absorbed.

      A large number of men spent days throwing earth and rock into the flow to thicken and stop it. Even water was ditched to a place in front of it. Nothing availed. Closer and closer it crept, destroying everything as it went. The Princess came from Honolulu by ship. She met the Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki at Hilo and went to the face of the flow. There she cut off locks of her hair at his direction and, while he recited the proper invocations, threw the locks into the slow-tumbling mass.

      It is recorded in history that the flow went but two rods farther before stopping. The town was saved.

This old kahuna and two others had agreed with Dr. Brigham that they would demonstrate their fire-walking art when opportunity offered. They also had promised to let him do some firewalking under their protection.

At a time when the volcanic mountain Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, was active, Dr. Brigham happened to be close at hand. I will present the story as I reproduced it from my notes a few days after he gave it to me. As he tells the story, see him : a huge old man in the eighties, hale and hearty, although recently having suffered the loss of a leg ; mentally alert, enthusiastic, eager, humorous, and withal very earnest. It is night and he is seated in a great easychair beside a ponderous oak table which stands in the centre of a long low room.

" When the flow started," related Dr. Brigham, " I was in South Kona, at Napo`opo`o. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, asking them to meet me at Napo`opo`o so we could go to the flow and try the firewalking.

" It was a week before they arrived, as they had to come around from Kau by canoe. And even when they came, we couldn't start at once. To them it was our reunion that counted and not so simple a matter as a bit of fire-walking. Nothing would do but that we get a pig and have a luau (native feast).

" It was a great luau. Half of Kona invited itself. When it was over I had to wait another day until one of the kahunas sobered up enough to travel.

" It was night when we finally got off after having to wait an entire afternoon to get rid of those who had heard what was up and wished to go along. I'd have taken them all had it not been that I was not too sure I would walk the hot lava when the time came. I had seen these three kahunas run barefooted over little overflows of lava at Kilauea, and the memory of the heat wasn't any too encouraging.

" The going was hard that night as we climbed the gentle slope and worked our way across old lava flows towards the upper rain forests. The kahunas had on sandals, but the sharp cindery particles on some of the old flows got next their feet. We were always having to wait while one or the other sat down and removed the adhesive cinders.

" When we got up among the trees and ferns it was dark as pitch. We fell over roots and into holes. We gave it up after a time and bedded down in an old lava tube for the rest of the night. In the morning we ate some of our poi and dried fish, then set out to find more water. This took us some time as there are no springs or streams in those parts and we had to watch for puddles of rain water gathered in hollow places in the rocks.

" Until noon we climbed upward under a smoky sky and with the smell of sulphur fumes growing stronger and stronger. Then came more poi and fish. At about three o'clock we arrived at the source of the flow.

" It was a grand sight. The side of the mountain had broken open just above the timber line and the lava was spouting out of several vents-shooting with a roar as high as two hundred feet, and falling to make a great bubbling pool.

" The pool drained off at the lower end into the flow. An hour before sunset we started following it down in search of a place where we could try our experiment.

" As usual, the flow had followed the ridges instead of the valleys and had built itself  up enclosing walls of clinker. These walls were up to a thousand yards in width and the hot lava ran between them in a channel it had cut to bedrock.

" We climbed up these walls several times and crossed them to have a look at the flow. The clinkery surface was cool enough by then for us to walk on it, but here and there we could look down into cracks and see the red glow below. Now and again we had to dodge places where colourless flames were spouting up like gas jets in the red light filtering through the smoke.

" Coming down to the rain forest without finding a place where the flow blocked up and overflowed periodically, we bedded down again for the night. In the morning we went on, and in a few hours found what we wanted. The flow crossed a more level strip perhaps a half-mile wide. Here the enclosing walls ran in flat terraces, with sharp drops from one level to the next. Now and again a floating boulder or mass of clinker would plug the flow just where a drop commenced, and then the lava would back up and spread out into a large pool. Soon the plug would be forced out and the lava would drain away, leaving behind a fine flat surface to walk on when sufficiently hardened.

" Stopping beside the largest of three overflows, we watched it fill and empty. The heat was intense, of course, even up on the clinkery wall. Down below us the lava was red and flowing like water, the only difference being that water couldn't get that hot and that the lava never made a sound even when going twenty miles an hour down a sharp grade. That silence always interests me when I see a flow. Where water has to run over rocky bottoms and rough projections, lava burns off everything and makes itself a channel as smooth as the inside of a crock.

"As we wanted to get back down to the coast that day, the kahunas wasted no time. They had brought ti leaves with them and were all ready for action as soon as the lava would bear our weight. (The leaves of the ti plant are universally used by fire walkers where available in Polynesia. They are a foot or two long and fairly narrow, with cutting edges like saw-grass. They grow in a tuft on the top of a stalk resembling in shape and size a broomstick.)

" When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far

worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, but all across it ran heat discolourations that came and went as they do on cooling iron before a blacksmith plunges it into his tub for tempering. I heartily wished that I had not been so curious. The very thought of running over that flat inferno to the other side made me tremble-and remember that I had seen all three of the kahunas scamper over hot lava at Kilauea.

" The kahunas took off their sandals and tied ti leaves around their feet, about three leaves to the foot. I sat down and began tying my ti leaves on outside my big hob-nailed boots. I wasn't taking any chances. But that wouldn't do at all-I must take off my boots and my two pairs of socks. The goddess Pele hadn't agreed to keep boots from burning and it might be an insult to her if I wore them.

" I argued hotly-and I say 'hotly' because we were all but roasted. I knew that Pele wasn't the one who made fire-magic possible, and I did my best to find out what or who was. As usual they grinned and said that of course the 'white' kahuna knew the trick of getting mana (power of some kind known to kahunas) out of air and water to use in kahuna work, and that we were wasting time talking about the thing no kahuna ever put into words-the secret handed down only from father to son.

" The upshot of the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots. In the back of my mind I figured that if the Hawaiians could walk on hot lava with bare calloused feet, I could do it with my heavy leather soles to protect me. Remember that this happened at a time when I still had an idea that there was some physical explanation for the thing.

" The kahunas got to considering my boots a great joke. If I wanted to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, it might be a good idea. They grinned at each other and left me to tie on my leaves while they began their chants.

" The chants were in an archaic Hawaiian which I could not follow. It was. the usual' god-talk 'handed down word for word for countless generations. All I could make of it was that it consisted of simple little mentions of legendary history and was peppered with praise of some god or gods.

" I almost roasted alive before the kahunas had finished their chanting, although it could not have taken more than a few minutes. Suddenly the time was at hand. One of the kahunas beat at the shimmering surface of the lava with a bunch of ti leaves and then offered me the honor of crossing first. Instantly I remembered my manners ; I was all for age before beauty.

" The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across-a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet-when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having my choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.

" I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run ! I flew ! I would have broken all records, but with my first few steps the soles of my boots began to burn. They curled and shrank, clamping down on my feet like a vice. The seams gave way and I found myself with one sole gone and the other flapping behind me from the leather strap at the heel.

" That flapping sole was almost the death of me. It tripped me repeatedly and slowed me down. Finally, after what seemed minutes, but could not have been more than a few seconds, I leaped off to safety.

" I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smoldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.

" I laughed too. I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on

my feet-not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.

" There is little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves had burned off their soles.

" My return trip to the coast was a nightmare. Trying to make it in improvised sandals whittled from green wood has left with me an impression almost more vivid than my fire-walking."

It is one of the tragedies of Huna, although something which adds spice and potentialities and turbulence to our lineage, that Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William Tufts Brigham, first Mo`i of Huna, didn't pass on this miracle to his only haumana and mamo, Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long. But if he had, this would have been a very short story indeed!

But like my descendant, Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, Kahuna William performed “experiments” on the actions to convince themselves that fire is really hot—and that fire burns:

"It's magic," he [Kahuna William] assured me [Kahuna Max]. ” It’s a part of the bulk of magic done by the kahunas [Priests, Ministers] and by other primitive peoples. It took me years to come to that understanding, but it is my final decision after long study and observation."

" But," I objected, " didn't you try to explain it some other way ? "

The doctor smiled at me. " Certainly I did. It has been no easy task for me to come to believe [religious] magic possible. And even after I was dead-sure it was [religious] magic I still had a deep seated doubt concerning my own conclusions.. Even after doing the fire-walking I came back to the theory that lava might form a porous and insulating surface as it cooled. Twice I tested that theory at Kilauea when there were little overflows. I waited in one case until a small overflow had cooled quite black, then touched it with the tips of my fingers. But although the lava was much cooler than that I ran across, I burned my fingers badly-and I'd only just dabbed at the hot surface."

" And the other time ? " I asked.

He shook his head and smiled guiltily. " I should have known better after that first set of blisters, but the old ideas were hard to down. I knew I had walked over hot lava, but still I couldn't always believe it possible that I could have done so. The second time I got excited about my insulating surface theory, I took up some hot lava on a stick as one would take up taffy. And I had to bum a finger again before I was satisfied. No, there is no mistake. The kahunas use magic in their fire walking as well as in many other things.

"There is one set of natural laws for the physical world and another for the other world. And-try to believe this if you can : The laws of the other side are so much the stronger that they can be used to neutralize and reverse the laws of the physical."

…All in all, it would appear that fire-magic works in strange ways which are little related to the " laws " of Science. -MFL

The loss of the fire-made-sacred under the adoption of Kahuna Max to Kahuna William, was a deep loss for Huna.

Kahuna Max longed for that experience all his life—but it never could break free to come to him.

In 1949 the Po`e Aumakua almost panicked to bring the fire-made-sacred back into Huna hands. There were only two na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki left in Polynesia at all, and none of them Hawaiian.

From the Society Islands, a kokiki was presented to a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki. His fellow Tahitians had come to ruin in Hawaii. Wanted to come home, but had no way to do that. No money. Would he go to Hawaii and put on several Firewalks to make money to send them home?

He would. He chose his wyrd, his kokiki, and the kumu hua of the Firewalks were ho`oikaika in the manawa. (The thought forms strengthened in the Time/Space Continuum until they ua and became a reality in the NOW.)

And Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu came to his kinfolk in the time of their need.

In the unfolding of the Huna Wyrd, he needed help in arranging matters, and our HRA member, the greatest Hawaiian Scholar, Arii-Peu Tama-Iti (Charles Kenn) was right there to help him! As the Po`e Aumakua of Huna intended, but they each had to chose their kokiki themselves. All the na Aumakua can do is create a Kumu Hua in the Manawa and bright the coincidence into fruition. The decisions are always up to us.

 

Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu, kumu Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA and an honored Sacred-Fire attendant

1949, Honolulu Firewalk

      Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu decided to initiate kumu Arii-Peu Tama-Iti into the Firewalk cult. Thus the fire-made-sacred would have been returned to Huna, through the HRA.

But the Po`e Aumakua of Huna is not unopposed. There are two opponents to Huna, and all other truly important and good changes to humanity's Wyrd. Evil (The Will to Win at Any Cost), and The Opposition. Indeed, it is the mark of a potential success to attract the attention of Evil and/or The Opposition. They show interest in things which matter. Their entry into a scene emphatically points to the seriousness and potential good a thing might accomplish.

We are on ke alanui e pono ia `o huna (the great path of Huna righteousness), are the Path, Evil are as the bandits on the Path hiding behind the boulders, ready to snap out at the sign of weakness. They offer corruption and the winning, they are free of Service. They seek to titillate one's Evil inside us to answer their call.

But The Opposition is on a different plane of existence. It is the incline of the Path. The faster the climb, the more exhausting. It seeks to block progress by titillation of one's virtues into the making of decisions which cause others to fail.

Arii-Peu Tama-Iti: February 20, 1949.

      As I stepped down to the first stone in the walk, any misgivings I may have had, left me. My mind seemed to become strangely empty or blank. The very uneven surface before me suddenly seemed to become smooth almost like a pavement. I stepped slowly forward, planting my feet firmly on the stones, but found myself doing as most of the others had done, using my arms to help keep my balance as I stepped from one rounded surface to the next.

      I felt no sensation of heat on the bottoms of my feet as I entered the pit and began my crossing, but the heat on my face and hands was terrific.

      I was nearing the end of the pit, with two steps to go, when a friend standing at the side called out, “Atta boy, Mr. Kenn!” My attention was momentarily distracted and I involuntarily glanced up at him. I did not falter in my deliberate pace, but at the instant he called out to me, there came a sharp stab of pain in the ball of my right foot and in the toes—this foot was just coming down. My pace automatically quickened and as the other foot made contact with a stone for the last step, a similar stab of pain was felt in it. I stepped out of the pit and found both of my feet continuing to pain me with a sharp tingling, but not with the familiar sensation of burns. I examined both feet and nothing was to be seen in the way of markings or blisters. Later, at home, I made another inspection and found what seemed to be hard lumps under each toe. The stinging sensations resembled the pricking of many needles, but the soles of my feet were not hot to the touch, or sore. This condition lasted for about five hours. In the morning my feet were back to normal in every way and the strange lumps had vanished completely.

      The feeling of having the mind a blank was a common experience among the fire walkers I talked to. It is evident that a break in this peculiar mental state, or an interruption of the successful course of the walk, acted in some way to “break the spell,” and that burns then occurred as if no protection had been offered”

That assumption, although specious, is only partially true, isn't it? The Goddess Wahinenuiho`alani and his Aumakua were still able to protect him a little. There were no burns, only the tingling which can signal the work of the mana loa of healing.

February 19,1949

Mazeway

      Any which has a “Mazeway” is a “religion”, anything which duties not, isn't a religion.

We all live our lives as if we are in a Maze. When food, shelter, love, etc. are plentiful, everything is smooth and easy, there is not great need for a religion, except as a form of entertainment.

But when things get scarce, and hard, and in desperation, we seek a map to our Maze—a Mazeway. The Mazeway are the moral instructions on how to live a good life in our Maze, it is the instructions given to us to help us in our choices.

One such fundamental Moral teaching of Huna is: Affiliations over Acquisitions. In other words, in all choices between our duties and our desires, we must choose our duties first. To fulfill our duties to our `ohana before increasing our own treasure or hungers.

It is a tool of The Opposition to corrupt us by turning our virtues into vices. But these situations are rare in life, but their effect on us is devastating upon us and all we know when they sneak up on us. When we are confronted by kokiki corrupted by The Opposition—there are no good choices. It is a time of our inevitable condemnation under a doom. It is our pono that death comes to us all, and we may start another lifetime innocent of the decisions made in past lives (but not the consequences to our souls).

Although Evil (the Will to Win) is too subtle and Metaphysical for Science to ever discover or know, The Opposition is so powerful that it exists both in the Eternal Metaphysical World and the Cr4eated World of physics as well. Here the Scientists call The Opposition—Entropy.

In 1980, I was in a conversation with Arii-Peu Tama-Iti about his resignation from Huna three decades before, and what it meant that he was an honored speaker at the International Huna Conference in Napo`opo`o on the Big Island of Hawaii.

We were alone except for the HRI BoD John Bainbridge, who taped the conversation—then lost that tape.

Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, now very old, told me the story of what had happened after the Firewalk of 1949.

His initiation into na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki was incomplete, and his kumu had gone back to Tahiti. He received an invitation to join him, and finish his initiation. Live his family for a time.

At about the same time, he received word that his friend Melville [Leinani Melville, I think], was dieing in San Francisco and was calling for him.

Now, the Huna moral precept is: Serve your friends before you serve yourself. IN a situation between becoming a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki or sitting with your friend as he dies, the only choice is to go to your friend. Even if there was foresight of what was about to happen, he would have understood that in going to his friend he would fail his gods, and fail generations of HRA in Huna. Still, Huna would have said to go to his friend.

But The Opposition was involved in…not trying to prevent the fire-made-sacred from returning to Huna, but ensuring that the person who brought it was a person who had the right to do it, by self-sacrifice and cost.

He didn't know. The Kalo wasn't with him yet. He knew of the prophecy, of course. That the next Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki would rule all of Hawaii. But he didn't know that a Death Prayer Priest knew of his initiation, and the invitation to come to Tahiti to complete his initiation.

Or in Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's own words, in his book, Firewalking from the Inside which he had the HRA and Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long publish, he relates:

      “Chief Tu-Nui Arii-Peu let down the bars and made the inevitable welcome. Being permitted by circumstances to let down the bars, he opened his heart as well, and with his customary generosity offered me everything.

      …[H]e has adopted me as his blood son, has given me an honored place in his family line, and has made me the proud possessor of his distinguished ancestors. He has also given me a new name to use as a member of his family. I am using that name in the author’s signature of this report. I am Arii-Peu Tama-Iti as well as Charles W. Kenn. At this writing I plan to accept his warm invitation and go to spend most of the coming winter season with him on Huahine where I can continue searching for information of value. I shall also, in all probability, complete my initiation into the cult of the fire-walk to the point of being able to use for myself what has been taught to me. If I succeed, I shall be one of the three remaining fire-walkers in Polynesia.

      As a candidate for initiation as a fire walking priest of the Ti Oven Cult, I was allowed to see every step leading up to the final crossing of the hot stones. Of necessity I was permitted to forgo the long and arduous training of other days, but was given the assurance that once I learned every step in the rite and all of the invocations, I would undoubtedly be able to perform the ritual. I would then have been consecrated to the work and would have been properly ordained, or introduced to the gods so that they would, thereafter, respond to my invocations.

      So following the Huna precept: Affiliation over Acquisition, and never suspecting what would happen, he came to San Francisco and held his friend's hand as he died.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH, the Kahuna `Ana`ana saw his chance, and took it. He set himself against Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu in far away Tahiti, and took his life.

As far as is known, Arii-Peu Tama-Iti never Firewalked again. His soul turned `awa olelo (bitter mouth) and he resigned from the HRA and spent many years preaching against Huna to all the Polynesian organizations which would have his lecture to them.

His error was in Externalizing (Other-Sourcing) the results of his decisions of which kokiki to follow. And knowing that he was trapped by The Opposition and Wyrd, so that no decision would have led to a good outcome. SO he decided to hate Huna and Kahuna Max rather than himself. But if he had been Self-Sourcing, he would not have needed to hate at all. Nor to despair. (For in desperation, we destroy what we love.) If he had changed his attitude to Self-Sourcing, he still would have grieved his losses and Huna's losses. But inside, he would have known his purity of intention, and that would have sustained his soul. For that is all Oiai`o calls upon us to do—to  Serve as best we may. We arenot called to Win. Although that's always nice and fun. It isn't always possible.

And so, in 1980, I wondered why he was there with us Huna na haumana. He told me that is was simple, Huna had ho`ikaika (persisted) through the death of Kahuna Max Freedom Long, he never thought it would survive, and since it had, it should be given a chance to perpetuate itself and do the good it would do.

He was a grand gentleman, although no one ever knew of his turning around in the matter except for John Bainbridge and myself. But what could I do but forgive him. A couple of months later he died of old age. And anti-Huna, anti-ha`ole Polynesian folks still quote Charlie Kenn's bad opinion of us to me to prove to me how Evil Huna and Kahuna Nui Max and I am.

The anti-white, anti-Huna militants are strange. They complain that Huna isn't Hawaiian (it isn't), the word huna has no religious connotations in the Hawaiian language, where it means secrets or dust. Then they complain that since it is Hawaiian, we must have stolen it from them…? And besides we“didn't get it right”.

<SHRUG> Huna is its own thing, it always was.

From Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's letter of resignation:

Charles W. Kenn, HRA and F. H. F., our good friend who is rapidly becoming the recognized authority on the Hawaii of yesterday, and who gave us the book reporting on the Honolulu firewalking tests some months ago, questions the experimental work of the summer. He writes, as of October 3rd [c. 1949], from Honolulu:

“Your last Bulletin was interesting. But I still believe that it is not important that we find some logical  reason to explain why things happen as they do in Huna. …The Huna concept of immortality lies in the idea of ancestor worship, ho`omana kupuna, that a descendant is only a continuation of ancestors, a germ of that spark within him was taken from all ancestors down the line, …I presume. that every man has his own ideas about certain things which appear to govern his actions more than what really is or is not basic Huna philosophy. Remember the story of the boy who took his father’s watch apart to see what made it tick, but found that the ticking had stopped and that he could not get the watch together again? Maui, in search of the secret of immortality (his seventh deed), entered the open mouth of the sleeping monster (mo`o) and went on into its insides to examine its heart.. On his way out, having learned the secret, the mo`o awakened and closed its jaws, crushing Maui to death.”

[MFL:] THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN. …HRA Kenn is on firm ground when he objects that the measuring of aka bodies of men and thoughts are not a part of basic Huna. In self-defense I must make my position clear. Years ago, when I was trying to learn what the kahunas [Priests and Ministers]  of many kinds and classes knew or had known, believed or had believed, and did or had done, I found myself up to the ears in the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle mighty few of whose parts matched.

…I am not content at all to know the exact ritual and precise facts of the rite of cutting the umbilical cord of the first born. I want to know how those ancestors of ours got to be Aumakuas and WHY they should be worshiped. At this point in my long search after thirty years I still have not learned exactly how I should construct a thought form cluster to make my prayer, or exactly how to generate and use the mana which I am convinced that the kahunas used. If an instrument, be it a pendulum, a Biometer [Psychometric Analysis]  or HRA Cameron’s invention [the Aurameter], will measure the size and shape of a thought form cluster I make, and. tell me how long it endures or where it goes or how to make it radiate more strongly — even if that isn’t basic Huna — I'm all for it. After all these years of sniffing around in the facts, beliefs and all pervading superstitions, of other men — most of whom have been dead for a very long time — I now want a few simple things which will WORK.

CHILDHOOD FAITH AND DOCTRINES has been derived for most of us from early BELIEF IN Church training, teaching, contacts and personal observation and experience. As children we have been encouraged to believe, and to pray. Most of us learned very early in life that our prayers were seldom answered. We may have felt a great sadness because of this or because we observed the prayers of our elders go unanswered. In any event, our forming minds received deep impressions of doubt which lasted down the years. What renews and strengthens? Evidence? Is “seeing believing?” Yes, our greatly weakened belief to both, provided there has not been an emotional reaction in childhood or later, to the lack of answers to our most earnest prayers — a response amounting to an emotional storm which left in its wake a series of fixed hurts and doubts, to say nothing of almost inevitable resentments. To get rid of these fixations or to hurdle them, requires far more than a single convincing piece of evidence showing that God is in His heaven and that He or His angels hear and answer prayer.

Where a at strong set of fixations exist, no amount of pounding with evidence will cause the slightest change. Ancient Huna and modern Psychology teach us this. Then how to “…help thou my unbelief?” Will some Savior do it for us? Improbable at this late date. The only way we know to get rid of fixations is (1) to find them,. and (2) to rationalize their cause and thus drain them off.

For a number of years I have advocated this using it myself.  I still advocate it. I am still busy, I have gone back into this method of approach to my early days to search for the origin of my personal fixed doubts. When I find such a source, it always is accompanied by the damning rationalization and complete and irrefutable proof that I first prayed, and that, as a result, secondly, I got no resultant answer. The instant I touch such a sore spot — unhealed for all the years — I am slapped in the face and across the heart by that old logic which is the blind behind which the emotional content of the fixation lurks. That Is why, some years ago, I saw that, at least in the majority of cases, it was necessary to make a fresh start, to find the best possible set of beliefs, to accept them logically and emotionally, and to begin the slow work of rebuilding the crushed belief in a Higher Power, and faith in the possibility of an answer to prayer.

Armor against fresh frustration and the danger of awakening and strengthening the old fixed doubts, lies, at least for me, in having in hand and ready for use at all time, a LOGICAL EXCUSE OR REASON by which to explain to myself WHY I made a prayer action and WHY I got no results. Huna has been a godsend to me. It tells me (1) what I have to do, and do correctly, to make a successful prayer-action. It tells me the conditions that will or will not permit the proper action on my part the limitations under which I must be willing to work. I must not hurt another. I must not have a guilt sense to prevent the low self from making the contact with the Aumakua and sending the mana, the carefully readied thought-structure of the condition desired, etc. (2) I must keep doubts from entering in as I make my picture of the desired conditions lest the structure contain the things I desire to avoid, I must water my prayer-plant in the Aumakua garden each day with the water of mana. I must not change my picture — pull up my plant to see if it is taking root. I must hold the faith unfalteringly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, and, if the game is worth the candle, year by year. (3) I must make certain that I do not mention my prayer-action and the follow-up to someone who will curse the entire project with a sneer of scorn or word of doubt. This is to be avoided at all costs. Mental attitudes rub off of one of us on to another like soot and black contagion. The slightest whisper of doubt will hit us with trip hammer force as powerful suggestion because old doubt fixations are so easy to revive. The need to “go into your closet to pray” is a very great need indeed. Nothing Is so fragile as the thought picture of the prayer, so easily shattered -or so brilliant with the light of Faith and that Love whose overshadowing we must come to know as Real beyond reality.

To the simple mind of an islander — a kahuna of yesterday – there was I grant you less need for the elaborate rationalization and complete understanding which are an utter necessity for me. He had not been treated to such large doses of a religion which bad retained outer form but had lost its workable knowledge of both low and high magic. Perhaps, as a child, he had seen the prayer-actions made, the rituals gone through, careful step by careful step, and had seen the gods respond and the fire walk made possible. Contrast such a proof ,such a powerful physical stimulus, with the vague or even contradictory answers to prayer in Christian circles . Even a simple belief must be based on something, but a belief complexed by fixations resulting from repeated failures in demonstration cannot be rebuilt except on new and massive foundations of proof and repeated proof. I would that each of us could perform the rites and be given the proofs of fire-immunity before every major effort of prayer.

Lacking an ever-ready firewalk for proof, to help my unbelief, I grasp at all straws. My need is immediate, not a matter of tomorrow or something to talk to death or fritter away in speculation, I sit twice, or more often at times, each day in the TMHG ritual, and I have the burden on my heart and the uplift under my spirit, of the needs of those who work with me.

Some of my friends are ill, a few are blind, many are in trouble of one kind or another. Anything that will bolster up my faith and help my unbelief is priceless. If Verne Cameron can let me make a thought picture of a vase on a shelf, then find it with his gadget and measure its size and outline its shape tell me how long it remains there as a real structure, that helps me to know that Huna is right. —my accepted belief — and that I can and do make forms by thinking, actual and substantial forms, even if of matter too fine to be seen by the eyes or felt by the hands.

The same can be said of every bit of corroborative proof that there are thought-form-structures, that things do radiate a form of energy, that invisible cords do connect people, things and man with his Aumakua…Heaven knows that I have one answer to prayer after another; and that hardly a day. passes without the arrival of letters telling that my friends are getting definite answerers to their prayers and to their TMHG prayers in which we work together as a congregation through telepathic aka thread contact. These proofs would be far more than sufficient for a simple and unhampered mind which remained a stranger to the doubt fixations I have known, but for me, such proofs need to be renewed as the offices on the altar, daily, yes, almost hourly.

No, not basic Huna — but for me, basic necessity. -MFL

But there would be no response back from Arii-Peu Tama-Iti for thirty years. He had become `awa olelo (bitter mouthed) about Huna.

Kahuna Nui Max would have to spend all his days without the miracle of the Firewalk in Huna. That was a part of the cost of Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's choice at his kokiki.

Then in 1968 I was standing in Kahuna Nui Max's home. We were talking about how I was to live my life to come. What would I do? Move to Pine Ridge Rez and raise Appaloosa horses with my girlfriend, then wife? Or become a Kahuna `o Huna?

He had, for the first and only time been yelling at me. That becoming a rancher would be a waste of this lifetime.

  1. And since Kahuna Nui had sent me a set of the HRA Bulletins and Huna Vistas Newsletters in 1962, what, if any duty would I assign to myself (I asked this of myself, Kahuna Nui Max never asked me for anything but to choose).

But the fire of the Firewalk always scared me silly.

I have no idea who I ho`ohiki Kahuna Max that I would return the fire-made-sacred to Huna. Unwind the pilikia of Arii-Peu Tama-Iti and kahuna Ha`ole Nui William's decisions which had lot it to us.

Years passed. Kahuna Nui Max died. I met Arii-Peu Tama-Iti in Hawaii.

My mom died, my best friend died, and I moved to the San Francisco area. In time, that ho`ohiki was definitely on a back burner. I never really thought of it.

Then the Po`e Aumakua commenced to start to give me kokiki to fulfill my ho`ohiki I had made kahuna Nui Max just before he shamanistically adopted me and ordained me as a Kahuna `o Huna of the Huna Fellowship.

One day there came a phone call. It was a lady representing Tony Robbins. I had never met anyone associated with him or his organization.

The lady told me that they were aware of me, and that Tony Robbins wanted me to attend his upcoming Firewalk in the Disneyland Hotel in Buena Park. It was on a Scholarship and there would be no cost for the materials and the five hour Seminar before it. We didn't discuss how she had gotten my phone number.

A few weeks later I found myself in the Disneyland Hotel at a Seminar costing hundreds of dollars, but I scholarshipped in for free. And I knew no one there, nor how they knew of me. The Po`e Aumakua rules.

I Firewalked for the first time that night. I warned Tony Robbins about his danger in doing a Firewalk the following month in Hawaii. Once he landed there, he got in touch with a native Kahuna who blessed his Firewalk, and carefully explained his purposes in a radio interview he did on Honolulu radio. Because he heeded my warning, and took my suggestions, no harm came to him. I never saw him again, nor was I ever contacted by his organization after that night. What happened? I have no idea.

I was still scared to try to lead a Firewalk. Even after my conversation with the Huna Goddess of the Firewalk, Wahinenuiho`aLani, whom I was even named after by a Hawaiian Kahuna to assist me in my desperate kainoa.

But still my fear blocked me.

Then the WWW Internet was created, and the BBS left behind. I was in conversation one time with a Methodist kahuna, Reverend Larry. I was grousing as I usually did, about the Firewalk. And Rev. Larry asked me if I could chant the prayers of the Firewalk which had come down the Hunian lineage. I said that I could. He asked me if I could build the firepit and light the fire. I said I could. Then he asked me something which opened the door to me: “Just what part do you expect God, and not you, to play in all this?”

And I was enlightened in the matter, and changed from Other-Sourcing to Self-Sourcing. I can't be expected to win, Oiai`o and the Po`e Aumakua only can ask me to be willing to Serve. “Winning” is always out of my hands.

Search engines brought me at last to kahuna Paka. And the story of Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Keonaona's and my initiation into the Po`e I Ke Umu Ki is related here. Once you have read it, return here for the rest of the story:

Initiation into the Body of Firewalk Priests => Click here

 

The Hopi Prophecies of the Ending of this, the Fourth World

      The date for the return of the fire-made-sacred was March 21, 2001. That date had been set for over twenty years before. A place for the Firewalk had always been inserted by me into the Makahiki Celebration. In all the years before, that space of time had just been blank. All the festivities had just stopped for about three hours, a place was set for the Firewalk, but there was no fire.

On the day we would do our first Firewalk since 1890 or 1949, depending on how you counted it, the earth shook in Tahiti. The final prophecy of the Hopi of the ending of this, their “Fourth World” depended on a “Home in the Sky falling with a huge noise and looking to be a blue star”.

The earth shook when the Blue Star fell from the heavens. Mir, the Russian Space Station, that “House in the Sky” was headed straight for out Firewalk! The noise shook the ground. It was a brilliant Blue Star.

Natch, I figured we would all die. We didn't. That was the last of the Prophecies, all the rest have been fulfilled in their order. Now only two things had to happen, and we could kiss our butts good-by. The Hopi would have to cease their ceremonies, and a chip of the tablets the prophecies were carved into so many hundreds of years ago, would be returned.

An Indian friend of mine recently told me that the Hopi have just ended their Ceremonies.

Bummer. I wonder if that means something interesting is going to happen now? Other than the return of the fire-made-sacred of the Firewalk to Huna, that is.

So then the first Huna Firewalk on a Makahiki was conducted by me in 2001. Was conducted by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Keonaona on Makahiki, 2002. The next by our kumu, Kahuna Paka in 2003. The next by recently initiated, Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Manawanui in 2004. Then by Kahuna Akahikane in 2005 (now where has that boy gone to?), the next by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Ulana in 2006. And in the year of 2007, after that Firewalk, I will retire from Firewalks, so long as everything goes as planned, and my slot taken by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Manawanui.

The Malamaka`opuahiki

      It was 1980, and I was in Napo`opo`o on the Big Island of Hawaii for the HRI International Huna Conference.

I had been asked to come there because it was feared by some that the teachings of Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long were all but lost amongst the Huna people, and was being replaced by New Age teachings.

As far as I know, I am the only person in the history of Huna who has operated a Huna Healing practice in Professional Offices, for over a dozen years. Huna lone.

At one point, Dr. E. Otha Wingo, the President of HRI came up to me and told me that he had had several complaints against me for quoting Max Freedom Long, and he asked me not to quote him any longer…

For my Huna Healing Practice, I had had inexpensive Business Cards made up. Kahuna Max had defined what a “Huna Practitioner” was, and since I had fulfilled those requirements, that's how I was identified. I gave out those cards to the haumana there.

By 1983, at a HRI Regional Huna Conference in San Francisco area, Otha had tested me, and along with BoD John Bainbridge, approached me, and asked me if I would be insulted if they honored my depth of skill with Huna, by certifying me as a Certified Huna Teacher. I told them that I would be delighted and they did as they said they would do.

It also came to my attention there, that many people, not Huna Teachers or Practitioners in any way, had also had Business Cards printed up with the words, “Huna Practitioner” on them.

Rather than fight that, and be all Other-Sourcing and all, I decided for once to be Self-Sourcing, and I just when to a printing company and had the most magnificent Business Cards made up I could conceive of. In the process of looking through all his catalogs, I came across a symbol of three selves in harmony. It was an unnamed gold foil stamp. I had it stamped into all the dark brown ripple Business Cards with now identified me as a “Kahuna”. I had been a Kahuna ever since Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long had ordained me, but I thought it would be an arrogance to identify myself as such. I didn't know at that time that “Kahuna” just means any Priest, Minister or Pastor, etc. in the Hunian language. But I knew that I needed to distinguish myself from the others.

When I moved up to the San Francisco area, got professional offices, I needed a letterhead, and my great looking business cards were still looking great, so I had my printer take a photo of the symbol and use that as our letterhead.

Then I discovered that in the Hawaiian language, that symbol is called: malamaka`opuahiki (ma lama ka `o pua hiki), “the light, obscured by the cloudbank, persists”. I have no memory of how I found that out.

That was about in the year 1985. During that time, an artist, “Ki” wanted some healing work done and offered to trade his artistic labor for healing. He painted our Hunian altar painting. We didn't know what image to use, so I looked on my desk and handed him our letterhead, and he painted the Malamaka`opuahiki.

But he painted it strangely, mystically.

At first as I looked at it, I just felt a tingling in my mind. Later he explained it to me.

Twenty years later or so, I had just completed my first Firewalk on the Makahiki.

For days before the event when I was smoking my pipe in our backyard, I had visions of me memorializing the experience. In the visions of the future time of Huna (which is why I am the Mo`i. It isn't because I am good organizationally, but because I see the Hunians in the future, and move myself to become that, and the others join me in fellowship as we journey into the Light towards our Hemolele and our eventual reunion with out Beloved and Graduation into a new Aumakua) I looked at my outer left wrist, and saw the Malamaka`opuahiki ho`ailona`aku (tattooed) there.

I go the next day or so to get the ho`ailona`aku. Some of the people who are my first companions in Huna fellowship come as well. They will get the Malamaka`opuahiki where I get mine.

      And then that night, something unexpected and wonderful happens as I am outside smoking my pipe.

In a vision I am back to Kahuna Nui's front room in 1968, and I see myself ho`ohiki (vowing) to Kahuna Max that I will return the fire-made-sacred to Huna. And now I see the shadows of all those in my fellowship, now and to come, in that room with me. They are holding their wrists towards Kahuna max, showing him that I would succeed. He never knew…

Later that night, I take the Hunian members who had Firewalked successfully, and who had had ho`ailona`aku sunk into their skin to honor their kumu, and I honored them at a special Hiwa Ceremony. (Hiwa=the warm, embracing darkness=Shamanic).

I wondered if the ho`ailona`aku of the Malamaka`opuahiki remained in the Dreamworld section of Po, so I could show the beauty to my bud, Donl and my mom when I join them (die). And that night I had a dream, and in the dream I looked at my left wrist, and there it was. It had followed me even into Po! I'm so happy.

I imagine that you want to know what happens in the Hiwa Ceremony. But what goes on there is the deepest mysteries of Huna which I have explored. And it must remain a mystery to all who have not undergone it.

The next Makahiki approaches, and another Firewalk is prepared, and other things, the Aha`aina (Ritual Feast), The Makahiki Games. The `Awa Ceremony prepared. Many things. The pono of Huna abides!

The First Huna Firewalking

1890s
by William Tufts Brigham
as Transcribed by
Max Freedom Long
and originally published in
Recovering the Ancient Magic

 

     Dr. Brigham, in his earlier days, made frequent trips to the “Big Island,” or Hawaii. There were many kahunas working there at that time. In the course of his investigations he made friends of a number of them. He posed as a haole, or white, kahuna, and discussed beliefs and methods with the brown magicians on intimate terms—trying always to get from them the secret of secrets which they guarded so carefully.

      Among his kahuna friends were three Hawaiians who knew the fire-magic. They used it mainly to prevent lava flows from damaging the property of clients. One of them had been called in by Princess Ruth at the time the town of Hilo was being approached by a slow-moving lava flow. Everything had been done to stop the encroaching mass of lava, which was kept hot by the burning of self-generated gases in its substance. In a doughlike mass, and with a wide front, it continued day after day to tumble slowly forward, rolling and grinding, toward Hilo. Stone walls were built in front of it and promptly torn aside and absorbed.

      A large number of men spent days throwing earth and rock into the flow to thicken and stop it. Even water was ditched to a place in front of it. Nothing availed. Closer and closer it crept, destroying everything as it went. The Princess came from Honolulu by ship. She met the fire-kahuna at Hilo and went to the face of the flow. There she cut off locks of her hair at his direction and, while he recited the proper invocations, threw the locks into the slow-tumbling mass.

      It is recorded in history that the flow went but two rods farther before stopping. The town was saved. This old kahuna and two others had agreed with Dr. Brigham that they would demonstrate their fire-walking art when opportunity offered. They also had promised to let him do some fire-walking under their protection.

      At a time when the volcanic mountain Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, was active, Dr. Brigham happened to be close at hand. I will present the story as I reproduced it from my notes a few days after he gave it to me. As he tells the story, see him: a huge old man in the eighties, hale and hearty, although recently having suffered the loss of a leg; mentally alert, enthusiastic, eager, humorous, and withal very earnest. It is night and he is seated in a great easy-chair beside a ponderous oak table which stands in the center of a long low room.

      “When the flow started,” related Dr. Brigham, “I was in South Kona, at Napoopoo. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, asking them to meet me at Napoopoo so we could go to the flow and try the fire-walking.

      “It was a week before they arrived, as they had to come around from Kau by canoe. And even when they came, we couldn’t start at once. To them it was our reunion that counted and not so simple a matter as a bit of fire-walking. Nothing would do but that we get a pig and have a luau (native feast).

      “It was a great luau. Half of Kona invited itself. When it was over I had to wait another day until one of the kahunas sobered up enough to travel.

      “It was night when we finally got off after having to wait an entire afternoon to get rid of those who had heard what was up and wished to go along. I’d have taken them all had it not been that I was not too sure I would walk the hot lava when the time came. I had seen these three kahunas run barefooted over little overflows of lava at Kilauea, and the memory of the heat wasn’t any too encouraging.

      “The going was hard that night as we climbed the gentle slope and worked our way across old lava flows towards the upper rain forests. The kahunas had on sandals, but the sharp cindery particles on some of the old flows got next their feet. We were always having to wait while one or the other sat down and removed the adhesive cinders.

      “When we got up among the trees and ferns it was dark as pitch. We fell over roots and into holes. We gave it up after a time and bedded down in an old lava tube for the rest of the night. In the morning we ate some of our poi and dried fish, then set out to find more water. This took us some time as there are no springs or streams in those parts and we had to watch for puddles of rain water gathered in hollow places in the rocks.

      “Until noon we climbed upward under a smoky sky and with the smell of sulfur fumes growing stronger and stronger. Then came more poi and fish. At about three o’clock we arrived at the source of the flow.

      “It was a grand sight. The side of the mountain had broken open just above the timber line and the lava was spouting out of several vents—shooting with a roar as high as two hundred feet, and falling to make a great bubbling pool.

      “The pool drained off at the lower end into the flow. An hour before sunset we started following it down in search of a place where we could try our experiment.

      “As usual, the flow had followed the ridges instead of the valleys and had built itself up enclosing walls of clinker. These walls were up to a thousand yards in width and the hot lava ran between them in a channel it had cut to bed rock.

      “We climbed up these walls several times and crossed them to have a look at the flow. The clinkery surface was cool enough by then for us to walk on it, but here and there we could look down into cracks and see the red glow below. Now and again we had to dodge places where colorless flames were spouting up like gas jets in the red light filtering through the smoke.

      “Coming down to the rain forest without finding a place where the flow blocked up and overflowed periodically, we bedded down again for the night. In the morning we went on, and in a few hours found what we wanted. The flow crossed a more level strip perhaps a half-mile wide. Here the enclosing walls ran in flat terraces, with sharp drops from one level to the next. Now and again a floating boulder or mass of clinker would plug the flow just where a drop commenced, and then the lava would back up and spread out into a large pool. Soon the plug would be forced out and the lava would drain away, leaving behind a fine flat surface to walk on when sufficiently hardened.

      “Stopping beside the largest of three overflows, we watched it fill and empty. The heat was intense, of course, even up on the clinkery wall. Down below us the lava was red and flowing like water, the only difference being that water couldn’t get that hot and that the lava never made a sound even when going twenty miles an hour down a sharp grade. That silence always interests me when I see a flow. Where water has to run over rocky bottoms and rough projections, lava burns off everything and makes itself a channel as smooth as the inside of a crock.

      “As we wanted to get back down to the coast that day, the kahunas wasted no time. They had brought ti leaves with them and were all ready for action as soon as the lava would bear our weight. (The leaves of the ti plant are universally used by fire-walkers where available in Polynesia. They are a foot or two long and fairly narrow, with cutting edges like saw-grass. They grow in a tuft on the top of a stalk resembling in shape and size a broomstick.)

      “When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, but all across it ran heat discolorations that came and went as they do on cooling iron before a blacksmith plunges it into his tub for tempering. I heartily wished that I had not been so curious. The very thought of running over that flat inferno to the other side made me tremble—and remember that I had seen all three of the kahunas scamper over hot lava at Kilauea.

      “The kahunas took off their sandals and tied ti leaves around their feet, about three leaves to the foot. I sat down and began tying my ti leaves on outside my big hob-nailed boots. I wasn’t taking any chances. But that wouldn’t do at all—I must take off my boots and my two pairs of socks. The goddess Pele hadn’t agreed to keep boots from burning and it might be an insult to her if I wore them.

      “I argued hotly—and I say ‘hotly’ because we were all but roasted. I knew that Pele wasn’t the one who made fire-magic possible, and I did my best to find out what or who was. As usual they grinned and said that of course the ‘white’ kahuna knew the trick of getting mana (power of some kind known to kahunas) out of air and water to use in kahuna work, and that we were wasting time talking about the thing no kahuna ever put into words—the secret handed down only from father to son.

      “The upshot of the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots. In the back of my mind I figured that if the Hawaiians could walk over hot lava with bare callused feet, I could do it with my heavy leather soles to protect me. Remember that this happened at a time when I still had an idea that there was some physical explanation for the thing.

      “The kahunas got to considering my boots a great joke. If I wanted to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, it might be a good idea. They grinned at each other and left me to tie on my leaves while they began their chants.

      “The chants were in an archaic Hawaiian which I could not follow. It was the usual ‘god-talk’ handed down word for word for countless generations. All I could make of it was that it consisted of simple little mentions of legendary history and was peppered with praise of some god or gods.

      “I almost roasted alive before the kahunas had finished their chanting, although it could not have taken more than a few minutes. Suddenly the time was at hand. One of the kahunas beat at the shimmering surface of the lava with a bunch of ti leaves and then offered me the honor of crossing first. Instantly I remembered my manners; I was all for age before beauty.

      “The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across—a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet—when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having my choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.

      “I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run! I flew! I would have broken all records, but with my first few steps the soles of my boots began to burn. They curled and shrank, clamping down on my feet like a vice. The seams gave way and I found myself with one sole gone and the other flapping behind me from the leather strap at the heel.

      “That flapping sole was almost the death of me. It tripped me repeatedly and slowed me down. Finally, after what seemed minutes, but could not have been more than a few seconds, I leaped off to safety.

      “I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smoldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.

      “I laughed too. I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on my feet—not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.

      “There is little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves had burned off their soles.

      “My return trip to the coast was a nightmare. Trying to make it in improvised sandals whittled from green wood has left with me an impression almost more vivid than my fire walking.”

      Comment:

      There you have Dr. Brigham’s story. You will now doubtless be interested to know how a scientist tried to figure out the reason for his being able to do what he had done.

      “It’s magic,” he assured me. “It’s a part of the bulk of magic done by the kahunas and by other primitive peoples. It took me years to come to that understanding, but it is my final decision after long study and observation.”

      “But,” I objected, “didn’t you try to explain it some other way?”

      The doctor smiled at me. “Certainly I did. It has been no easy task for me to come to believe magic possible. And even after I was dead-sure it was magic, I still had a deep-seated doubt concerning my own conclusions. Even after doing the fire-walking I came back to the theory that lava might form a porous and insulating surface as it cooled. Twice I tested that theory at Kilauea when there were little overflows. I waited in one case until a small overflow had cooled quite black, then touched it with the tips of my fingers. But although the lava was much cooler than that I ran across, I burned my fingers badly—and I’d only just dabbed at the hot surface.”

      “And the other time? “I asked.

      He shook his head and smiled guiltily. “I should have known better after that first set of blisters, but the old ideas were hard to down. I knew I had walked over hot lava, but still I couldn’t always believe it possible that I could have done so. The second time I got excited about my insulating surface theory, I took up some hot lava on a stick as one would take up taffy. And I had to burn a finger again before I was satisfied. No, there is no mistake. The kahunas use magic in their firewalking as well as in many other things. There is one set of natural laws for the physical world and another for the other world. And—try to believe this if you can: The laws of the other side are so much the stronger that they can be used to neutralize and reverse the laws of the physical.”

      In this case we have an instance in which the magical control of heat was of such a nature that it did not protect the leather in Dr. Brigham’s heavy boots, but did protect his feet.

      This feature of the case is interesting when we remember that the soles of the author MacQuarrie’s shoes were undamaged in his firewalking. All in all, it would appear that fire magic works in strange ways which are little related to the “laws” of Science.

      I affirm that I have proved that the case for Magic is properly grounded on such facts as anyone so desiring may investigate.

      Instead of investigating Magic, Science has chosen to scoff at it, and either try to explain it away or deny its existence. I further affirm that the child of Science—the Scientific Attitude-is guilty of a grave offense against the layman.

      This offense is grave in that it is utterly unjustified and in that it has fostered a misconception so deep-seated that it is now all but impossible for the average layman to bring his conscious mind to bear on Magic because of the prejudicing complex in his subconscious mind.

      Max Freedom Long

Te Umu-Ti, A Raiatean Ceremony of Firewalking

The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1893

by

Miss Teuira Henry, of Honolulu

 

[As no member of the Council has been privileged to witness the ceremony described herein, the Council cannot undertake to guarantee the truth of the story, but willingly publish it for the sake of the incantation.] 

The ti-plant (Dracana terminalis) is indigenous to a great many islands of the Pacific, and the leaves being long and broad, are widely used for wrapping purposes by the natives in their method of cooking food. 

The ti-leaf, in the Society Group, was supposed to possess great magical power, and was much used for wands, or as garlands, by warriors or priests, and was also said to have enabled fugitives–by waving the branches before them– to fly over precipices and ravines away from their pursuers in troublous times. The yellow leaves are very much used in decorations, and have a sweet smell. It is stated that the ti-plant has been held in high esteem also by the Hawaiians, and is still supposed to possess great virtue. 

The ti-root is frequently two feet long, and varies from six to ten inches in diameter. It has something of the texture of sugar-cane and its thick juice is very sweet and nourishing, but it requires to be well baked before eating. 

The ti-ovens(firewalking pit) are frequently thirty feet in diameter, and the large stones, heaped upon small logs of wood, take about twenty-four hours to get properly heated. Then they are flattened down, by means of long green poles, and the trunks of a few banana trees are stripped up and strewn over them to cause steam. The ti-roots are then thrown in whole, accompanied by short pieces of ape-root (Arum costatum) that are not quite so thick as the ti, but grow to the length of six feet and more. The oven is then covered over with large leaves and soil, and left so for about three days, when the ti and apeare taken out well cooked, and of a rich, light brown colour. The ape prevents the ti from getting too dry in the oven. 

There is a strange ceremony of firewalking connected with the Umu Ti (or ti-oven) that used to be practised by the heathen priests at Raiatea, but can now be performed by only two individuals (Tupua and Taero), both descendants of priests. This ceremony consisted in causing people to walk in procession through the hot oven when flattened down, before anything had been placed in it, and without any preparation whatever, bare-footed or shod, and on their emergence not even smelling of fire. The manner of doing this was told by Tupua, who heads the procession in the picture, to Monsieur Morne, Lieutenant de Vaisseau, who also took the photograph* of it, about two years ago, at Uturoa, Raiatea, which being on bad paper was copied off by Mr. Barnfield of Honolulu. All the white residents of the place, as well as the French officers, were present to see the ceremony, which is rarely performed now-a-days.

* The photograph of fire walking event referred to is evidently taken from a sketch by hand, and is not therefore a photograph from life. –EDITORS.

No one has yet been able to solve the mystery of this surprising feat, but it is to be hoped that scientists will endeavour to do so while those men who practise it still live. 

E PARAU TAHUTAHU NO TE HAERERAA I TE UMU-TI.

NA TUPUA TANE, RAIATEA 1890.

TUPUA'S INCANTATION USED IN WALKING OVER THE UMU-TI.

E tapea na te rima i te rau ti, a parau ai:"E te Nu'u-atua e ! a ara, a tia i nia te haere nei taua i te Umu-Ti ananahi." Mareva na, e atua ïa ; e mau na te avae i raro ; e taata ïa. A hiotia ra i te vairaa o te umu ra, e a ofati i te rau ti, – mai te nao e :"E te Nu'u-atua e ! E haere oe i teie " nei po, e ananahi tatou atoa ia."Aruru ra i te au ti ei tautoo tahutahu, moemoe i roto i te marae, mai te ota-ataa i roto i te rau fau, e ia vai i reira hoe ai rui, a naô ai te poroi atu :-"Ae! a ara, e te Nu'n-atua e! to " avae e haere i te Umu-Ti. Te pape e te miti, e haere atoa. Te to'e uri, ma te to'e tea, e haere i te umu. Te ura o te anahi e te ruirui o te auahi, e haere ana'e; na oe e haere, e haere oe i teie nei po e ananahi o oe ia e о vаu ; e haere tana i te Umu-Ti."   TRANSLATION. Hold the leaves of the tt-plant before picking them, and say"Oh hosts of gods! Awake. arise!. you and I are going to the ti-oven tomorrow."If they float in the air, they are gods, but if their feet touch the ground they are human beings. Then break theti leaves off and look towards the direction of the oven, and say :"O hosts of gods ! go to-night and to-morrow you and I shall go"Then wrap the ti-leaves up in hau (hibiscus) leaves and put them to sleep in the marae where they must remain until morning, and say in leaving :-Arise! awake! Oh hosts of gods! Let your feet take you to the ti-oven; fresh water, and salt water come also. Let the dark earth-worm, and the light earth-worm, go to the oven. Let the redness, and the shades of the fire all go. You will go, you will go tonight and tomorrow it will be you and I ; we shall go to the Umu Ti." (This is for the night.) 
la aahiata ra, a tii a rave mai i te rau ti, a amo e i te umu roa, a tatara i te ineineraa o te feia e haere i nia i taua umu ra; a faatia ai i mua a nao ai :—E na taata e tahutahu i te umu e ! a ta pohe nal E to'e uri! e to'e tea ! te pape, te miti, te aama o te umu, te ru'i- ru'i o te umu, a hii atu i te tapua'e avae o te feia e haere nei, a tahiri na i te ahu o te roi. A mau na, e te Vahine-nui-tahu-rai e ! i te tahiri, e haere na taua i te ropu o te umu !  When the ti-leaves are brought away, they must be tied up into a wand and carried straight to the oven, and opened when all are ready to pass through ; then hold the wand forward and say :—"Oh men (spirits) who heated the oven! let it die out! Oh dark earthworms! Oh light earth-worms ! fresh water, and salt water, heat of the oven, and redness of the oven, hold up the footsteps of the walkers, and fan the heat of the bed, Oh cold beings, let us lie in the midst of the oven, Oh Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies! hold the fan, and let us go into the oven for a little while!"(Then all are ready to walk in we say: 
" Te hii tapua'e tahi !
Te hii tapua'e rua !
Te hii tapua'e toru !
Te hii tapua'e ha !
Te hii tapna'e rima !
Te hii tapua'e ono !
Te hii tapua'e hitu !
Te hii tapua'e varu !
Te hii tapua'e iva !
Te hii tapna'e tini !
Te Vahine-nui-tahu-rai e !
poia!" Haere noa 'tura ia te taata, mai te ino ore na ropu, e na te hiti o taua imm-ti ra 
Holder of the first footstep !Holder of the second footstep !Holder of the third footstep !
Holder of the fourth footstep !
Holder of the fifth footstep !
Holder of the sixth footstep !
Holder of the seventh footstep !
Holder of the eighth footstep !
Holder of the ninth footstep !
Holder of the tenth footstep !
Oh Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the- skies !
all is covered ! "Then everybody walks through without hurt, into the middle and around the oven, following the leader, with the wand beating from side to side. 

The Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies, was a high born woman in olden times, who made herself respected by the oppressive men, when they placed women under so many restrictions. She is said to have had the lightning at her command, and struck men with it when they encroached upon her rights. 

All the above is expressed in old Tahitian, and when spoken quickly is not easily understood by the modern listener. Many of the words, though found in the dictionary, are now obsolete, and the arrangement of others is changed. Oe and taua are never used now in place of the plural outou and tatou; but in old folk-lore it is the classical style of addressing the gods in the collective sense. Tahutahu, means sorcery, and also to kindle a fire.

EXTRACT OF AN ACCOUNT OF THE UMU-TI, FROM A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED

IN SAN FRANCISCO, BY MR. HASTWELL.

"The natives of Raiatea have some performances so entirely out of the ordinary course of events, as to institute inquiry relative to a proper solution.

"On the 20th September, 1885, I witnessed the wonderful, and to me inexplicable, performance of passing through the ' Fiery Furnace.'

Firewalking Ground:

"The furnace that I saw was an fire walking pit of three or four feet in the ground, in a circular form (sloping upwards), and about thirty feet across. The excavation was filled with logs and wood, and then covered with large stones. A fire was built underneath, and kept burning for about a day. When I witnessed it, on the second day, the flames were pouring up through the interstices of the rocks, which were heated to a red and white heat. When everything was in readiness, and the furnace still pouring out its intense heat, the natives marched up, with bare feet, to the edge of the furnace, where they halted for a moment, and after a few passes of the wand made of the branches of the ti-plant by the leader, who repeated a few words in the native language, they stepped down on the rocks, and walked leisurely across to the other side, stepping from stone to stone. This was repeated five times, without any preparation whatever on their feet, and without injury or discomfort from the heated stones. There was not even the smell of fire on their garments."

Mystic Isles of the South Seas

1921

by

Frederick O'Brien 

 

 

Introduction

This is a simple record of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams, in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, with whom I was joyous or melancholy; the adventures at sea or on the reef, upon the sapphire lagoon, and on the silver beaches of the most beautiful of tropics.

In this volume are no discoveries unless in the heart of the human. I went to the islands below the equator with one thought—to play. All that I have set down here is the profit of that spirit.

The soul of man is afflicted by the machine he has fashioned through the ages to achieve his triumph over matter.

In this light chronicle I would offer the reader an anodyne for a few hours, of transport to the other side of our sphere, where are the loveliest scenes the eyes may find upon the round of the globe, the gentlest climate of all the latitudes, the most whimsical whites, and the dearest savages I have known.

"Mystic Isles of the South Seas" precedes in experience my former book, "White Shadows in the South Seas," and will be followed by "Atolls of the Sun,"  which will be the account of a visit to, and a dwelling on, the blazing coral wreaths of the Dangerous Archipelago, where the strange is commonplace, and the marvel is the probability of the hour.

These three volumes will cover the period I spent during three journeys with the remnants of the most amazing of uncivilized races, whose discovery startled the old world, and whom another generation will cease to know.

Chapter XXV

I meet a sorcerer…Power over fire…The mystery of the fiery furnace…The scene in the forest…Walking on hot stones…Origin of the rite.

WALKING to the neighboring district of Pueu with Raiere to see the beauties of the shore, we met a cart coming toward Tautira, and one of the two natives in it attracted my interest. He was very tall and broad and proud of carriage, old, but still unbroken in form or feature, and with a look of unconformity that marked him for a rebel. Against what? I wondered. Walt Whitman had that look, and so had Lincoln; and Thomas Paine, who more than any Englishman aided the American Revolution. Mysticism was in this man's eyes, which did not gaze at the things about him, but were blinds to a secret soul.

Raiere exchanged a few words with the driver of the cart, and as they continued on toward Tautira, he said to me in a very serious voice:

"He is a tahua, a sorcerer, who will enact the Umuti, the firewalking. He is from Raiatea and very noted. Ten years ago, Papa Ita of Raiatea was here, but there has been no Umuti since."

"What brings him here now?" I asked. "Who pays him?"

Raiere answered quickly:

"Aue! he does not ask for money, but he must live, and we all will give a little. It is good to see the Umuti again."

But, Raiere, my friend," I protested, "you are a Christian, and only a day ago ate the breadfruit at the communion service. Firewalking is etene; it is a heathen rite."

"Aita!" replied the youth. "No, it is in the Bible, and was taught by Te Atua, the great God. The three boys in Babulonia were saved from death by Atua teaching them the way of the Umuti."

"Where will the Umuti be?" I inquired. "I must see it."
"By the old tii up the Aataroa valley, on Saturday night."

That was five days off, and it could not come soon enough for me. I was eager for this strangest, most inexplicable survival of ancient magic, the apparent only failure of the natural law that fire will burn human flesh. I had seen it in Hawaii and in other countries, and had not reached any satisfying explanation of its seeming reversal of all other experience. I knew that fire walking as a part of the racial or national worship of a god of fire, had existed and persisted in many far separated parts of the world.

Babylon, Egypt, India, Malaysia, North America, Japan, and scattered Maoris from Hawaii to New Zealand all had religious ceremonies in which the gaining and showing of power over fire was a miracle seen and believed in by priests and laity. Modern saints and quasi-scientists had claims to similar achievements. Dr. Dozous said he saw Bernadette, the seeress of Lourdes, hold her hands in a flame for fifteen minutes without pain or mark, he timing the incident exactly by his watch. Daniel Dunglas Home, the famous Scottish spiritist, was certified by Sir William Crookes and Andrew Lang to handle walk on red hot coals in his hands, and could convey to others the same immunity. Lang tells of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly blistered by a coal Home put in his palm, Home attributing the accident to the churchman's unbelieving state of mind. Crookes, the distinguished physicist,  took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home had wrapped live coals, and found them "unburned, unscorched, and not prepared to resist fire."

The scene of the Umuti was an hour's walk up the glen of Aataroa, which began at our swimming-place.

On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad. Oranges and lemons, which had sprung decades before from seeds strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds; and the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hundred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between them. Mope-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene.

On a level spot, under five ponderous mape-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven. They had dug a firewalking pit twenty-five feet long, eighteen wide, and five deep, with straight sides. It had been done with exactitude at the direction of the tahua, who was staying alone in a hut near by. The earth from the pit formed a rampart about it, but was leveled to not more than a foot's height. At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau- and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut, the mape. On the trunks were laid basaltic rocks, or lumps of lava, boulders, and the stones about, as big as a man's head. The firewalking pit was completed for the lighting.

To the north stood a giant phallus of stone, buried in the earth, but protruding six feet, and inclined toward the north. It was a foot in diameter, and was carved au naturel as the Maori lingam and yoni throughout Polynesia, and in India, where doubtless the cult originated. Before the break-down of their culture, this stone had been sprinkled with water, or anointed with coconut-oil, and covered with a black cloth, as in Hawaii. The Greeks called their similar god, Priapus, the Black Cloaked.

A trench had been made on the west side of the firewalking pit from which to ignite the fuel, a torch lit by fire struck from wood by friction. I did not see the lighting, which occurred Friday morning, thirty-six hours before the ceremony. The ordinance was set for eight o'clock. I swam in the river at five on Saturday, and lay down in my bird cage to be thoroughly rested for the night. It was not easy to fall asleep. There was a thicket of pandanus near my house, the many legs of the curious trees set in the sand of the upper beach, and these trees were favorite resort of the mina birds, which were as familiar with me as children of a family, and in many cases impudent beyond belief. They were the size of crows, and had bronzed wings, lined with white; but their most conspicuous color was a flaring yellow, which dyed their feet and their beaks and encircled their bold eyes like canary-colored rims of spectacles. Their usual voice was a hoarse croak that a raven might disavow, but they also emitted a disturbing rattle and a whistle, according to their moods. They were thieves, as I have said, but one was more audacious than the others. He would come into my open house at daybreak, and perch on my body, and awaken me pecking at imaginary ticks. He picked up a small compass by its chain and flew away with it.

This particular wretch had learned to speak a little, and would say, "Ia ora na oe!" sharply, but with a decided grackle accent. Despite the irritating cacophony of the mina, I must have slept more than an hour; for when I was suddenly awakened, the sun was almost lost behind the hills. The talking mina was dancing on my bare stomach and calling out his human vocabulary.

I sprang up, my tormentor uttering a raucous screech as I tossed him away. While I hastily cooked my supper, the colors of the hiding sun spread over the sky in entrancing variety. I could not see the west, but to the northeast were rifts of blood-red clouds edged with gold over a lake of pearly hue, and to the right of it a bank of smoke. Against this was a single cocoa on the edge of the promontory, a banner my eye always sought as the day ended. Rising a hundred feet or more, the curving staff upheld a dozen dark fronds, which nodded in the evening breeze.

There was the slightest chill in the air, unusual there, so that I put on shirt and trousers of thin silk and tennis shoes for my walk, and with a lantern set out for the tii. Along the road were my neighbors, the whole village streaming toward the goblin wood. Mahine and Maraa, two girls of my acquaintance, unmarried and the merriest in Tautira, joined me. They adorned me with a wreath of ferns and luminous, flower-shaped fungus from the trees, living plants, the taria lore, or rat's-ear, which shone like haloes above our faces. The girls wore pink gowns, which they pulled to their waists as we forded the streams. Mahine had a mouth-organ on which she played. We sang and danced, and the tossing torches stirred the shadows of the black wold, and brought out in shifting glimpses the ominous shapes of the monstrous trees. With all our gaiety, I had only to utter a loud "Aue!" and the natives rushed together for protection against the unseen; not of the physical, but of the dark abode of Po. In this lonely wilderness they thought that tupapaus, the ghosts of the departed, must have their assembly, and deep in their hearts was a deadly fear of these revenants.

When we approached the umu, I felt the heat fifty feet away. The fire walking pit was a mass of glowing stones, and half a dozen men whom I knew were spreading them as evenly as possible, turning them with long poles. Each, as it was moved, disclosed its lower surface crimson red and turning white. The flames leaped up from the wood between the stones.

About the oven, forty feet away, the people of the villages who had gathered, stood or squatted, and solemnly awaited the ritual. The tahua, Tufetufetu, was still in a tiny hut that had been erected for him, and at prayer. A deacon of the church went to him, and informed him that the firewalking pit was ready, and he came slowly toward us. He wore a white pareu of the ancient tapa, and a white tiputa, a poncho of the same beaten-bark fabrics. His head was crowned with ti-leaves, and in his hand he had a wand of the same. He was in the dim light a vision of the necromancer of medieval books.

He halted three steps from the fiery furnace, and chanted in Tahitian:

O spirits who put fire in the oven, slack the fire!
O worm of black earth,
O worm of bright earth, fresh water, sea water, heat of the oven, red of the oven, support the feet of the fire walkers, and fan away the fire!
O Cold Beings, let us pass over the middle of the oven!
O Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, hold still the leaf that fans the fire!
Let thy children go on the oven for a little while!
Mother of the first footstep!
Mother of the second footstep!
Mother of the third footstep!
Mother of the fourth footstep!
Mother of the fifth footstep!
Mother of the sixth footstep!
Mother of the seventh footstep!
Mother of the eighth footstep!
Mother of the ninth footstep!
Mother of the tenth footstep!
0 Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, all is hidden!

Then, his body erect, his eyes toward the stars, augustly, and without hesitation or choice of footprints, the tahu walked upon the firewalking pit. His body was naked except for the tapa, which extended from his shoulders to his knees. The heat radiated from the stones, and sitting on the ground I saw the quivering of the beams just above the fire walking pit.

Tufetufetu traversed the entire length of the umu with no single flinching of his muscles or flutter of his eyelids to betray pain or fear. He raised his wand when he reached the end, and, turning slowly, retraced his steps.

The spectators, who had held their breaths, heaved deep sighs, but no word was spoken as the tahua signed all to follow him in another journey over the white-hot rocks. All but a few, their number obscured in the darkness, ranged themselves in a line behind him, and with masses of ft'-leaves in their hands, and some with girdles hastily made, barefooted they marched over the path he took again. When the cortege had passed once, the priest said, "Fariu! Return!" and, their eyes fixed on vacancy, six times the throng were led by him forward and back over the firewalking pit. A woman who looked down and stumbled, left the ranks, and cried out that her leg was burned. She had an injury that was weeks in curing.

At a sign from Tufetufetu, the people left the proximity of the firewalking pit, and while he retired to his hut, several men threw split trunks of banana-trees on the stones.  A dense column of white smoke arose, and its acrid odor closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, my friends of our village were placing the prepared carcasses of pigs on the banana-trunks, with yams, ti-roots and taro. All these were covered with hibiscus and breadfruit leaves and the earth of the rampart, which was heaped on to retain the heat, and steam the meat and vegetables.

I examined the feet and legs of Raiere and the two girls I had come with, and even the delicate hairs of their calves had not been singed by their fiery promenade.

Meanwhile all disposed themselves at ease. The solemnity of the Umuti fell from them. Accordions, mouth-organs, and jews'-harps began to play, and fragments of chants and himenes to sound. Laughter and banter filled the forest as they squatted or lay down to wait for the feast. I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mope-wood in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea, and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of the1 silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they leaped unscathed through the roaring blaze of the sacred fire, and trod the burning stones and embers in their dances before the Great Spirit.

The Umuti was not all new to me. Long ago, when I lived in Hawaii, Papa Ita had come there from Tahiti. His umu was in the devastated area of Chinatown, a district of Honolulu destroyed by a conflagration purposely begun to erase two blocks of houses in which bubonic plague recurred, and which, unchecked, caused a loss of millions of dollars.

The pit was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet long. Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili church. The fire burned until the stones became red and then white, and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even. I inspected the heating process several times. At the hour advertised in the American and native papers, in an enclosure built for the occasion, with seats about the fire walking pit, the mystery was enacted. The setting was superb, the flaming furnace of heathenism in the shadow of the lonely ruin of the Christian edifice.  Papa Ita appeared garbed in white tapa, with a wonderful head-dress of the sacred ti-leaves and a belt of the same. The spectators were of all nations, including many Hawaiians. The deposed queen, Liliuokalani, was a most interested witness.

Papa Ita looked neither to the right nor left, but striking the ground thrice with a wand of ti, he raised his voice in invocation and walked upon the stones.' He reached the other end, paused and returned. Several times he did this and when photographers rushed to make a picture, he posed calmly in the center of the firewalking pit and then, with all the air of a priest who has celebrated a rite of approved merit, he retired with dignity. As he departed from the inclosure, the natives crowded about him, fearfully, as viewed the Israelites the safety of Daniel emerging from the lions' den. Did I not see the former queen lift the hem of his tapa and bow over it? It was night, the lights sputtered, and I was awed by the success of the incantation. A minute after Papa Ita had gone, I threw a newspaper upon the path he had trod, and it withered into ashes. The heat seared my face. The doctors, five or six of them, Americans and English, resident in Honolulu, shrugged their shoulders. They had examined Papa Ita's feet before the ceremony and afterward. The flesh was not burned, but, well— What ? I confess I do not know. A thermometer held over the umu of Papa Ita at a height of six feet registered 282 degrees Fahrenheit.

There could be no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of Tufetufetu. I had tested it for myself. No precaution was taken by the walkers. I knew most of them intimately. There was no fraud, no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not the same thickness of sole. At Raratonga, near Tahiti, the British resident, Colonel Gudgeon, and three other Englishmen had followed the tahua as my neighbors had here. The official said that though his feet were tender, his own sensations were of light electric shocks at the moment and afterward. Dr. William Craig, who disobeyed the tahua and looked behind, was badly burned, and was an invalid for a long time, though Dr. George Craig and Mr. Goodwin met with no harm. The resident half an hour after his passage tossed a branch on the stones, and it caught fire. In Fiji, Lady Thurston with a long stick laid her handkerchief on the shoulder of one of the fire walkers, and when withdrawn in a few seconds it was scorched through. A cloth thrown on the stones was burned before the last man had gone by.

What was the secret of the miracle I had witnessed? How was it that in all the Orient, and formerly in America, this power over fire was known and practised, and that it was interwoven with the strongest and oldest emotions of the races? That from the Chaldea of millenniums ago to the Tautira of to-day, the ceremonial was virtually the same? Our own boys and girls who in the fall leaped over the bonfire of burning leaves were unpremeditatedly imitating in a playful manner and with risk what their forefathers had done religiously.

In Raiatea, the chief Tetuanui informed me, the membership of the Protestant church of Uturoa walked on the firewalking pit, and embarrassed the missionaries, who had taught them, as the Tautirans were taught, that the Umuti was a pagan sacrament.

In some islands it was called vilavilairevo, and in Fiji the oven was lovu. According to legend, the people of Sawau, Fiji, were drawn together to hear their history chanted by the orero, when he demanded presents from all. Each, in the brave way of Viti, tried to outdo the other in generosity, and Tui N'Kualita promised an eel that he had seen at Na Moliwai. Dredre, the orero, said he was satisfied, and began his tale. It was midnight when he finished. He looked for his present at an early hour next morning.

Tui N'Kualita had gone to Na Moliwai to hunt for the eel, and there, as he sank his arms in the eel's hole, he found it a piece of tapa that he knew to be the dress of a child. Tui N'Kualita shouted: "

Ah! Ah! this must be the cave of children. But that does not matter to me. Child, god, or new kind of man, I'll make you my gift."

He kept on angling with his hand in the hole, and caught hold of a man's hand. The man leaped back and broke his grasp, and cried:

"Tui N'Kualita, spare my life and I will be your war god. My name is Tui Namoliwai."
Tui N'Kualita answered him:
"I am of a valiant people, and I vanquish all my enemies. I have no need of you."
The man in the eel's hole called out to him again:
"Let me be your god of property."

No," said Tui N'Kualita; "the tapa I got from the god Kadavu is good enough."
"Well, then, let me be your god of navigation."
"I 'm a farmer. Breadfruit is enough for me."
"Let me be your god of love, and you will enjoy all the women of Bega."
"No, I've got enough women. I 'm not a big chief. I'll tell you: you be my gift to the orero."
"Very well; and let me have another word. When you have a lot of ti at Sawau, we will go to cook it, and will appear safe and sound."

Next morning Tui N'Kualita built a big oven. Tui Namoliwai appeared and signed to him to follow.
Maybe you are fooling me, and will kill me," said Tui N'Kualita.
"What? Am I going to give you death in exchange for my life? Come!"
Tui N'Kualita obeyed, and walked on the lovu. The stones were cool under his feet. He told Tui Namoliwai then that he was free to go, and the latter promised him that he and his descendants should always march upon the lovu with impunity.

When I returned to my bird cage at Tautira, I sat down and considered at length all these facts and fancies. I believed in an all inclusive nature; that the Will or Rule of God which made a star hundreds of millions of times larger than the planet I had my body on, that took care of billions of suns, worlds, planets, comets, and the beings upon them, was not concerned in tricks of spiritism or materializations at the whim of mediums or tahuas. But I had in my travels in many countries seen inscrutable facts, and to me this was one. Nobody knew what was the cause of the inaction of the fire in the lovu or umu. It was not a secret held by anybody, or a deception.

One might believe that the stones arrive at a condition of heat which the experienced sorcerers know to be harmless. One might conceive that the emotion of the walkers produces a perspiration sufficient to prevent injury during the brief time of exposure; or that the sweat and oily secretions of the skin aided by dust picked up during the journey on the oven was a shield; or that the walkers were hypnotized by the tahua, or exalted by their daring experiment, so that they did not feel the heat. Even this theory might not account for the failure to find the faintest burn or scorch upon those who fulfilled the injunction of the sorcerers.

The people of Tautira, from Ori-a-Ori to Matatini, had the fullest confidence that Tufetufetu had shown them a miracle, and that it was not evil; but to the American and European missionaries the Umuti was deviltry, the magic of Simon Magus and his successors. This was shown clearly in the statement of Deacon Taumihau of Raiatea, which I give in English:

This is the word of the oven of Tupua.
This is the way he did that thing. He cut three fathoms of wood. The oven was three fathoms long and three wide. Heap up the wood the first day, and carry by sea the stones for the oven.
Do not take the stones of the marae, for the marae receives the evil spirits, the spirit of the god of the night.
The first night of the ceremony, the sorcerers of Raiatea, Tupua and his kind, march around the oven. They seek the spirits of the men of the night, and they go about the oven, but they do not light the fire.
That same night one goes to find the sacred leaves of the ti. He takes the leaves that float in the wind; those called raoere ti, and which are used as medicine. He gathers the leaves and carries them to the oven.
The fire is lighted at four of the morning. When the fire is burning brightly, and the oven is very hot, the sorcerer gives his assistants charge of the fire, and instructs them as to their duties.
When the flames are down, Tupua approached the oven, and before walking upon it, he pronounced the following prayer.
"0 men about the oven! Piraeuri and Piraetea! Let us join the army of the gods in the furnace!"
Then, said Tupua:
"0 water, go in the fire! 0 sea water, go in the fire!" Waving the ti leaves on the border of the oven, Tupua said:
"0 Woman who puts the fire in the heaven and in the clouds, permit us to go on foot over fire walking pit!"

Then those who wish to, pass onto the oven, one after another. If but one falls all will be burned. The last must watch the sorcerer, to return when he makes the sign.

 That is the way this deed, the deed of the devil, is done by Tupua.
The woman called Vahine tahura'i is an evil spirit
Concerning Piraeuri and Piritea, Tupua would better not have spoken, as it was a useless prayer.
Do not introduce the sorcery in the land of the whites!
Do not carry there this custom of lighting the oven! It is the work of an evil spirit of the night; this act of Tupua.
For that reason I have said little of him in my story. I have spoken.

—Taumihau, The Man.

Initiation Into na Po`e Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki

(Initiation Into the Body of Firewalk Priests)

2001

by Ho`anoiWahinenuiho`aLani

Firewalking

   The: "Are you an idiot?" Test

 The body of the course of initiation I took seems to have been based on two major activities a day, nearly all of which are terrors. And unlike Disneyland thrills, the dangers were all too real.

I’m going to describe to you some of the things we did, but in doing so I am deliberately leaving out major and utterly essential material, without which a person trying these tests will be hurt or harmed or mutilated or killed in an awful way. Why?

Because that’s what would probably happen to you anyway if you tried these things on your own. If you want to do the things done in the initiation of a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, then find one to initiate you! Or tlak to the Mo`i of the Hunians about that Path.

So to be redundant: Don’t try to do these things without the spiritual guidance of someone who can already do them, and is willing to initiate you.

If you do try it without a spiritual master to guide you, then you ARE an idiot. Don’t bother writing to me from your hospital bed, if you should survive, I will be unsympathetic.

 

 Synchronicity

 "Paranoia strikes deep" the old hippie song says, and you know, reality is so complicated that you just can’t but wonder if something isn’t going on sometimes.

I say things sometimes which make me wonder about myself. One can always resort to the idea of e ho’oulu ia, your Aumakua or Divine Nature whispering things into your unsuspecting ear. But even that begs the question.

The Poe Aumakua of Huna exist. They have existed since the last three Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki prayed to them to find someone to carry on their lineage.

They found Dr. William Tufts Brigham and tricked him into coming to the islands where he eventually walked on the fire of a recent lava overflow.. Then when Dr. Brigham was about to check out, they found Max Freedom Long and tricked him to coming to the islands, where Dr. Brigham eventually initiated and adopted him into his sacred lineage.

Then when Max was about ready to pop the cork, Dolly Ware, and E. Otha Wingo and I were pulled in and Max adopted us, although we didn’t know each other. There are others too, William Glover being one who could make that same assertion of adoption even if he might be in the  Dreamworld now, and be sustained.

But the plans of the mighty often go astray. Same for the Po`e Aumakua who are our guardians. Dr. Brigham dropped the ball. He passed on the stories of his initiation, but not the Firewalk itself. He had let our fire die out, and no one had the courage to approach the sentient fire again whilst he lived.

Kahuna Nui Max felt the loss of the sentient fire like an itch from an unknown place in his mind. Like the fear that you can’t find your car keys, even though you are holding them in your trembling hands.

Then the Po`e Aumakua was antsy and frustrated. In all of Polynesia the sacred fires went out one by one, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Then by 1949 there were only two Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki left in all of Polynesia, none of them Hawaiian. So Te–nui Arii–peu, one of the two remaining, came from the Society Islands to make a Firewalk to try to raise money for passage to get his stranded Island folks home. Another trick and trap by the Po`e Aumakua?

This was to be a series of Umu style Firewalks. Which means they are done on white hot rocks instead of glowing embers. Which means that they invalidate David Willey’s thesis about fire not burning because of low conductivity. Many HRA (Huna Research Associates) came for it. One of our members, Charlie Kenn was chosen by Te–nui Arii–peu to be initiated into the lineage, and a good start was made, but the Kahuna died before it could be finished. And Charlie never walked on fire again as far as anyone knows.

I pretty much knew from the get–go that I had been called to return the sentient fire to Huna, but I could never see how to do that. Never dared to dream that I would actually pull it off.

The major thing which blocked me was the fear of what would happen to those who followed me into the fire. Afraid of their pain, their loss of respect for me and therefore my ultimate disservice to Huna itself.

Then a Methodist Minister friend of mine, Rev. Larry Olson talked to me about it. While I was scared for my own self, I was far more scared for the others. I had Charlie’s book, I had been named after the goddess of the Firewalk, I knew my intention—but saw no way to proceed. I didn’t, and don’t yet know how to protect anyone from being burned.

Larry asked me if I could build the fire, do the chants, and get myself to walk. I said that I could do those things. Then he asked me what part I intended for God to play in the whole thing?

And the only answer is that after a certain point you have to give up and let yourself fall into the arms of your Aumakua or Divine Nature or allow yourself to be hurt or even die. But if you are sustained than you actually know what anyone else can only speculate on. Although many will tell that they "know" about the religious or spiritual, these are only speculations for the most part.

That opened the Path for me to enter into the sentient fire as a priest of it. To search out, finally, a kumu to initiate me into the Firewalking.

Now it seems so far away; I sat listening to my kumu while he played a videotape by the number–one leading debunker of the Firewalk. On the screen is a photograph of the 1949 Firewalk in Honolulu, and led by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki ,Te-nui Arii-peu! That’s pretty damn strange, don’t you think? The camera which took that photo was being held by a member of my religion. That photograph was copied from an obscure publication published by my religion, and created by Max Freedom Long. With whom I sat and talked over matters with in 1968.

In my lap was the Firewalk Handbook my kumu made up for us. In it, and not for that reason, is a photograph of the founder of my religion—Huna—Kahuna Nui William Tufts Brigham.

Surrounding the photograph is an article written by my kumu Max Freedom Long himself on the Firewalk!

Makes me feel strange or as if I am caught up in a drama far greater than yourself. Like going into a stranger’s home, and knowing everything that is in his refrigerator without looking, since it is the same as yours. You don’t say anything, of course. If he didn’t believe you, you’d lose respect in his eyes. And if he DID believe you, he would have to be awfully gullible.

So I sit there in class and gripe about David Willey improperly using that photograph, but don’t mention the impact of having all these Huna icons surrounding me. Like a crazy man, I am seeing Huna vectors everywhere I look now. How did I end up being the temporary focus of something beyond me? I just wanted to be a Chiropractor. Or am I just Paranoid with delusions of grandeur? Lala-land for sure for the Lanimeister.

But this story and all continues anyway…

Well I got back from the Firewalk Initiation. I returned well, as does Kahuna Keonaona who accompanied me. She is such a trooper. I present her with such unusual vacation opportunities.

There are lingering effects. Some kind of secret cognitive dissonance going on in my mind. Mostly I notice it when I am falling to sleep listening to the TV news. I sort of jar awake over and over as the subject turns (in my mind alone) into Fire walking. Then I say suddenly, for example, "what does the trouble in Palestine have to do with the Firewalk?" then I turn over and slip into the arms of Morphius once again.

There is far too much to try to remember.

 

Closure # 1

 You have to understand about dogs. Each breed is made for a specific purpose.

The most ancient lineage of the Dog beings are the Lhasa Apsos of Tibet. They were bred to be sacred. To do exorcisms on their own. To telepathically sense danger to their Lama from hidden bandits, etc.

They are fellow participants with humans in some Buddhist religious ceremonies.

It is they who decided to join the Huna Heiau. My little guardian and companion now is "Buxton", my little, shaggy, Lhasa Apso.

Our kumu, Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, Michael McDermott, DD, told us about the only animal he had ever seen do a Firewalk.

A lady had been coming to several Firewalks he led or was at. She walked and was healed of her partial paralysis.

At one point, her little dog, quite independent of her, walked the glowing embers. No blisters, no rush, his hair which he dragged thorough the embers wasn’t even singed. That little dog was a type of Lhasa Apso, called a Shi-Tsu!

Of course …

That was the only time he ever saw or heard of an animal do a sacred Firewalk.

Kahuna Lani and Kahuna Michael McDermott

 Closure #2

 During the initiatory week we were shown David Willey’s video on Firewalking. In it he, the world’s leading "antichrist" of Firewalking or "debunker" starts off with showing a photo of a Firewalking event.

His assertion is that glowing embers have "low conductivity", hence, fire doesn’t burn. When I showed him photos of Firewalking burns, he just slid over the material.

In 1949 the Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, Tu-nui Arii-peu came to Honolulu and put on several Firewalks. This was attended with many HRAs (Huna Research Associates).

This wasn’t an "American" style Firewalk, but an "Umu" style Firewalk. Done on large stones heated until they are white hot. The stones are very heat conductive. If there is an Umu style Firewalk, then David Willey’s thesis is blown to pieces, and remains where it started. It is a lie. Designed to prevent people from experiencing this sacred, and frequently life-transforming event.

Now, one of the HRA was chosen to return the sentient Fire to Huna, and started to be initiated, but the Kahuna died before he could complete the training.

He put together a little book on the Firewalk and put in it eight photos from the Firewalk he had taken.

Now bear in mind that David Willey’s thesis depends on the idea that no one walks on hot stones. When I put this in an e-mail to him, he denied that it was possible. I didn’t pursue it. After all I didn’t know. HRA Charlie Kenn’s little book was published by my religion, the Huna Press in 1949. It was never reprinted. It is a little obscure publication produced by a little religion many years ago. But in it are photographs which disprove the entire "Scientific debunking" of the Firewalk.

Can you imagine my befuddlement when upon starting the David Willey video, he starts off with one of the photographs from that very same book!?

Then the slime and spin starts. There is no attribution or credits given to the source of that photograph, which is us. It is never described nor explained. David Willey merely ignores it. Ignores a photograph which discounts all of what follows!

How bizarre, unwholesome and arrogant. To spin your story to pretend that you are being confirmed by that which would in fact debunk YOU if the audience only knew the story behind the photograph!

So much for Science and its Scientists …

The Spirit Dancers

 It was the last Firewalk of our long week of experiences which seemed to place us all in some kind of borderland between mundane reality and sacred reality.

It was Kahuna Keonaona’s turn to make the fire bed. It was to be a big fire. The stack of firewood became smaller as each night’s Firewalk took its toll on it. But there was still a lot of wood there. More than we had ever burned before. Our kumu didn’t want to haul it back from the hideaway we were doing these things at, so he decided we would use all that was left.

I had wanted to blow a firebreath on the fire to start it, but when time ran out, we just used a Butane lighter.

Once it was started, Kahuna Keonaona made the Polynesian religious and ceremonial drug, `Awa, for us. I had created a simplified yet still formal ceremony to take it.

We drank the `Awa, and made the formal claps and oblations to the fire.

Keonaona and I chanted the "E Ho Mai" Chant.

Then the "spirit dancers" came. I was the first one to see them. I asked another haumana there, Ed, who had walked about two or three dozen times if he had ever seen such a thing. But he had not, and was full of wonder too.

Our kumu has done many hundreds of Firewalks in the last decade and more. But he had never seen anything like it before either. Never heard of it in all his travels with other Firewalk leaders.

It was a big bonfire. There was little smoke, but what there was would collect at the edge of the bonfire and go downhill to the earth.

Arriving at the earth, it would collect and rise as a pillar of smoke, bending and dancing all around the fire. Mostly one at a time, but sometimes two or three.

They would circle around the fire. It was beautiful. Keonaona tried to get a photo of them, but I don’t think those kinds of things photograph. If they come out, I’ll post them.

Then Keonaona raked out the coal bed. Man what a job that is! And this was by far the largest and hottest fire we had had.

It was viciously hot. It was the second deepest bed of glowing heat, about six inches deep. About four feet wide and about fifteen feet long.

It was shaped sort of like a Kidney bean (which is sort of shaped like a Kidney, I suppose).

It was scary. Really scary. When I looked at the shimmering glow, there was a face clearly to be seen looking at me. When I reached my mind into the fire, I could feel the same challenge I had faced all week, it seemed to say, "Try to pet me if you can. See if I love you and accept you, or tear you to pieces. Maybe I’ll protect you from harm. Maybe I won’t. You have to be a man here. It isn’t safe."

Our kumu announced that to honor the fire, this was to be a nude Firewalk, for those who decided to go without any pretense of artificial protection. Most of the haumana got nude, I wasn’t so disposed. My loss. But I just don’t feel that I’m that decorative in the buff.

I walked through the fire. It was my only walk that night. I was accepted, but the fire also bit me several times in a playful way. I’m not sure now, I might have walked twice. After a time of fright, day after day, they all begin to concatenate.

There was the supernatural protection, and the blisters were completely healed by morning, and no residual tenderness remained.

One of the nude haumana ladies slowed down on her walk, then simply stopped and stood in the fire. She walked three times that night and there were no symptoms. In fact on that night, I was the only one whom the fire had kissed (other people may remember things with small differences).

One of the major sources of peace, Ed, a nude Firewalker that night, slowed his walking until it looked like he was in slow motion. No symptoms.

Our kumu stood in the fire too. The fire accepted him for a minute, then got tired of the game and bit him a little on his left foot only, to get him off the firebed.

One of the finest things was that every night he faced the sentient fire he was scared. Boy did I feel at home with that!

Whatever else you may hear about it, don’t ever take it for granted! It isn’t safe! People who are scared stiff usually do just fine. Those who believe that fire doesn’t burn, the fire enjoys teaching them something new.

It isn’t safe. But it is sacred, and many if not most enjoy the acceptance and supernatural protection of the goddess Wahinenuiho`alani, through their own Aumakua.

What is a "Firewalk"?

The word "Firewalk" is an idiom. That is, it is defined as really a phrase meaning something else than what appears on the surface. A Firewalk is anything which requires the sacred fireimmunity to be present to accomplish the task without undue injury.

Normally and usually when Firewalks are presented to the public they are done on fire made sentient. But this is only a small example of the protective miracle of Fireimmunity. Unfortunately for me, just about all Firewalks require you to actually endanger your life to see if "God" or your Aumakua or the goddess Wahinenuiho`alani or Jesus or Allah or Krishna or Miriam or the Saints Constantine and Helen in the Christian tradition of the Firewalk, etc. will save you.

It isn’t a game, although it can and should be approached with a cheerful heart. It is a serious thing. It is dangerous. If your God doesn’t do something to save you, you will really be harmed.

But if you pass through the test you will actually know yourself what you could only have guessed before. You are known to the Universe, or however you conceive of God. And you are precious and if approached in the PROPER way, it will respond to your cry. BUT if you are arrogant or do not approach it correctly, the sentient fire will hurt you and injury will become your teacher. It doesn’t seem to make any real difference to the sentient fire. It doesn’t seem to get coarse or cross with us. If our soul is on the mark, it saves us from harm. We are arrogant or distracted, it burns us. No problem.

 Why Firewalk?

Oh, that’s easy for me. But you’ll have to find your own need. For me it is the ONLY way to actually prove the nature and character of Reality all around us.

I have spent my life doing religious healings and exorcisms, but they all require you to be sick in body or mind or spirit for you to actually feel the Grace or mana of Io. If you were well, this knowledge was beyond your grasp. Now it is here. The Truth stands before you, if you have the courage to grasp it. Otherwise your fear will lead you away from it.

The Fire walk has been said by some that it is a metaphor for life. It isn’t. Life is a metaphor for the Firewalk.

I stood at the edge of the Firewalking pit. My body shaking in the fear. I melt my mind into the fire and it challenges me to love it, and take what consequences I may have to live with. It may hurt me greatly, for REAL!, or it may love me and hold me harmless (as it usually does for the Firewalkers). But my fear isn’t a joke. Isn’t a metaphor for anything else. It is real. And has perfectly sensible reasons for its existence. My "normal" life isn’t this clean cut. My reality not so quick and personal and very real. A few people have to be hospitalized after a Firewalk in which they didn’t listen to their own heart. A few people die in the sentient fires each year (usually not in the USA).

No. If I am afraid to ask my boss for a raise, if he denies it, he won’t also cut off my feet. If anything, life is a metaphor for the Firewalk. I am beginning to see now why some tribes worship the fire. I never really saw faces in the fire before…

The only common denominator is the fact that we allow our fears to block us. And here the fear is very real. We stand at the edge of the raging inferno. Our fear blocks us from passage. Suddenly someone we know overcomes their fear and calmly walks across the fire. We are encouraged. We slowly overcome our fear, and wonder of wonders, we are sustained.

What it looks like on the outside isn’t what it looks like on the inside. On the inside, you can’t really think too much. You’re trying to remember the mental steps to take. You remember that you have to surrender something. But what?

You feel a sudden wind which no one else can feel. It comes for you alone. You have to actually STOP your body from walking into the fire if you listen to your fear. You have to actually stop yourself from your arising fear, to not prevent your body from walking. Your body will carry you over the fire harmlessly if and only if you have already gotten your duckies in a row, then give up completely in faith.

There is the fire before you. There is a feeling of a spiritual wind. You hammer your fear for a second. Then the fire is behind you.

And I'm wondering, how did it get behind me? People are congratulating me. Why? What happened? Did I miss something. Are my feet OK? Am I hurting anywhere?

Others now who were behind me have found their courage. They too face their fears. They seek to overcome their fear. To master their own lives, oddly, by submitting them to their God; in whatever name or guise it has for them. Sometimes the fire will nip at them to teach them they are a little off. Or throwing up some arrogance or distraction or thinking that the fire doesn’t burn.

My kumu calls these bites, "symptoms". That is so much more friendly than "burn" isn’t it?

Upon no occasion are all of us "kissed" by the fire or have any symptoms on the same night. On almost no occasion are not at least one of us bitten in playfulness and instruction by the fire.

But even then there is the sacred and disturbing fireimmunity. The blisters disappear later that night. In the morning, normally, nothing remains of the hurt.

I have never in my life before had a blister disappear on me. In the sentient fire, it happens all the time, to all of us. I wonder why I find this also disturbing. Again I feel the mental sand and floor of my reality shifting. It sort of numbs my mind. Each morning when the night before I had symptoms, now there is nothing on my feet to give testimony. There is no soreness left in them.

The Firewalk of the Arrow

All my Firewalks scared me. I can overcome my fear usually about them. But the fear never goes away. In my ignorance beforehand I had imagined how things would be. They didn’t turn out that way. What a surprise.

I had thought it might be a hunting arrow. But it isn’t. The only others I’ve used are target arrows, but this isn’t one either. The metal point is shaped like a metal leaf. It stands off from the shaft a little.

Something in-between a hunting arrow and a target arrow. It is new and obviously a common commercial arrow.

I had imagined that there would be a slow pressure. I would never have thought that it would demand speed. I thought there would be some warning if the fireimmunity failed and so one could stop the process. I was wrong.

Usually the nock of the arrow is braced against a wall. The point of the arrow is placed in the small of the neck, right there just below the Adams apple. In that little "v" shape on the lower front of the neck. The fireimmunity state achieved. And then a quick thrust of the whole body into the arrow.

If it is a scientific thrust, your neck will be punctured, your throat pierced. If you don’t die from asphyxia or blood flow into your lungs, you might survive the trip to the hospital. but Martial Arts students will recognize that spot as the most lethal part of one’s body.

Nothing can save you but your God. It is simple. Your God protects you or you die or are badly wounded.

Our kumu, Michael McDermott decides he wants to be looking at us during this, so that he can do the best he knows how to open us to our deity’s miraculous protection.

I can’t really believe this is happening. I recognize the danger. Nothing here is faked. There are no tricks. It is real. Too real.

He holds a board up to him. I place the nock end of the arrow on the board. The point I place on my neck. Then apply a little pressure to hold the arrow in place, and let my hands drop down to my side.

Michael is talking to me, I’m trying to follow what he is saying, but I really can’t, the sudden fear is too great. I feel a sudden wind at my back. I don’t make my body move forward, but I don’t prevent it. I feel my body’s motion. There is a loud report. I’m looking down at the pieces of my arrow now on the floor. People are congratulating me. Why? I don’t really know what happened. It all seemed to happen so fast.

I am really beginning to feel sorry for Keonaona. What have I gotten her into now? An odd vacation opportunity I have presented her with.

The Firewalk of the Broken Board

When in the Fireimmunity state, one can’t be broken, so one can break other things. One of these "other" things are boards, roofing tiles and rocks.

Michael had some boards, and so he decided that that would be just a nifty thing to do that afternoon.

I’m just like everyone else, until I actually experience a thing, I conjecture about it. And when I actually experience it, it is quite different from what I imagined.

I didn’t like the idea of breaking boards. I imagined that the boards would break if you just gave then a harsh look. Boy was I wrong.

If you think that breaking a board is so simple, go outside right now and try to do it. but your hand is more likely to break, or your wrist before the board does.

Our Kumu got up to demonstrate it for us first. The sound of the collision on his hand against the board echoed off the walls of the large classroom we were in.

But the board remained whole. Time after time he did the same thing, only to have the same result. He thought that he was "failing" in front of us. But that wasn’t the case. Not even close. It took a lot to convince me that boards didn’t just fall apart!

Another lady tried her hand at it, and she too failed several times. This was also very instructive to me.

Then it was my turn. Getting my mental duckies in a row. Setting my body. Then giving up into the Fireimmunity. There was a "pop" and the board was lying in pieces on the floor.

Everyone broke their boards, but for some, it took them more than one try. They weren’t in state deep enough.

Why did Michael fail to break his board until about his seventh time? It remains a mystery. All I know for sure is that it was only because of that that I became convinced of the verity of the experiences.

The Firewalk on Broken Glass

 

I had been worried about this test since I had first heard about it about six months before the actual event took place.

There are two reasons why it held so much emotion, other than the fact that it is just rational not to walk on broken glass shards if at all possible.

There was a series of films that I saw after my graduation from high School. They were all called the "Mondo Kani" films, or something like that.

In one of them, there was a vignette about a small medieval city in Italy. Here on Easter morning, the local Catholic older boys wake up early and leave their homes. They have prepared wooden disks with pieces of broken glass. The movie showed close-ups of these brave boys tapping the glass pads onto the soles of their feet. Their flesh shreds. Their blood flows. They run through the village up to each home’s door, then from there to the town’s Cathedral. When the folks leave for Church that morning, they see footsteps in blood going from their door to the Church. Symbolizing Jesus’ walk to the crucifixion.

While I appreciate them. It still makes me shiver to see them tapping the glass shards into their feet.

Another time I was still living at home. My beloved sister Sharon had married and moved out. My brother-in-law was a glazer and came over one night to replace some cracked window glass we had. He did his job and left. I went outside, barefoot, to see what he had done. It was night. He couldn’t have known about the pistol shaped and sized piece of glass in the grass.

I stepped on it and it completely penetrated my foot except for the upper layer of skin. It was stuck in there, and I had to grab it by its handle and tug it out.

But everything seemed to be OK. Mom went to bed, and a little later I went into the kitchen to graze on whatever I could find.

As I stood with the refrigerator door open, I felt some stickiness on the floor. This annoyed me. I looked down and I was standing in a deep puddle of my own blood.

Boy did I freak out. My shout woke up mom, and she came in a panic to see what was wrong. Standing on the wound had simply opened it up.

I still shudder at that one too.

So my poor little Unihipili has been traumatized by images of bloody feet.

In some of my dreams of the last six months, I see myself and others leaving bloody footprints after the Fire walk on Broken Glass.

 

 Glass Shard I walked on

 Now it was time to go from those metaphors into the reality of it. The pit of broken glass was before me, and the other haumana there.

Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, Michael McDermott, DD (which Keonaona says stands fro Dare Devil!), has made a pit from a sheet of plywood about 4 feet x 8 feet by about 4 inches deep. This has all been lined with sheet metal. He pours broken glass shards from a 50 gallon drum he has to save the glass in.

He starts to talk to us. He always seems to be our combination loving older brother and Prison Guard. The more he talks the more I want him to talk. So long as he talks, I don’t have to walk on it! I still see flashes of bloody footprints. There is a part of me that wants him to stop talking. This is the part of me which wants it all over with. No matter what the outcome, just get it over with!

There seems no part of me that is enjoying this or is really, Then he slowly really happy about it all. No part which is excited.

Then he slowly walks across it. He had the Fireimmunity and is unharmed. Then a lady haumana goes for it. I am ashamed that I was a little relieved that she took the initiative.

She did a perfect job. Even started to dance in the glass at the end. She was unharmed. I don’t remember now if Keonaona went in front of me, or behind me.

I "saw" Wahinenuiho`alani throw a beige blanket over the glass to protect me. This was a thing that happened. For some infantile part of me, it seemed to be of no comfort.

I let it be like standing before the sentient fire. I just stood there before the glass shards. In time I felt a spirit wind blow my soul across the broken glass. My fear arose to suppress by body from following, I suppressed my fear. But I didn’t try to walk or not walk. My body was on the other side of the broken glass, but I don’t really remember doing it.

I just remember starting to take a step where a tiny tower of glass found the ball of my foot. I became aware, but surrendered. All my weight came down on that knife, and my skin remained intact.

 

The Firewalk of Body Piercing

 

I don’t know why the Fire walk of Body Piercing should have the effect it does on me. Perhaps that, unlike the others, it is devoid of all possibility of deceit or mistake. And, of course, it is ugly.

Anyway it is very simple: your kumu hands you a 5 inch needle. You talk to your body to let it know that this isn’t a punishment of any find. You enter into the fireimmunity relationship. You push the needle through your hand. There is no pain nor blood.

 needle_pierce_bent_after

 My Firewalk needle, a little bent from use

 

 Actual size, more or less

Simple. I sort of failed it though. The fireimmunity was only partial, and there was pain, VERY much pain when I was coming out from the inside of the palm of my left hand.

Our kumu then had the pin remain where it was for about ¾ of an hour. My hand fills up all golden like, all warm and tingling with joy and deep pleasure. I would love to have my whole body feel that wonderful, but it would require so many needles piercing me at once…er, forget it!

Then he had us pull it all the way through. I don’t know why he wanted it to come out in that direction, instead of being pulled out. But anyway, there no pain in it.

When he read this, he sent me this:

"Thanks for reminding me. I meant to tell you the following story in class, but I forgot to. I learned the body pierce from Steve Bisyak.

 "The only place I ever saw Steven pierce his hand was the one place we pierced in the class.

"I started pushing beyond my own limits by piercing my face, ears, lips, nose, tongue, arm, etc. and Steven found that pretty freaky & bizarre – i think it scared him.

"Steven explained his viewpoint to me and his logic was as follows: because the end of the needle is so much wider than the point, it's not possible (that's what i remember him saying!) to pull it all the way through.

"I wanted to experience a complete "passing of the metal" all the way through flesh, not just put it in and then pull it out. Also, if it was not "possible" i wanted to know for sure by my own experience

"When I was able to run the needle completely through my hand instead of just put it in and pull it back out, this experience created an additional feeling of legitimacy in the experience for me personally. It just felt more valid to me as a "mind over matter" exercise."

It was grim to look around the room and see all these flashes of long steel hanging out of everyone’s hands.

But there was a few moments of pain for me in it. So I took the needle home with me. I'll have to do it until I am competent in establishing the sacred Fireimmunity.

And for practice, it is a LOT easier than a Firewalk on fire, or even a broken arrow.

Oh yeah, there was no blood. And except for that one moment, no pain. But there is a sensation to it.

The Firewalk with the Rebar

I wasn’t scared of this test, maybe that’s why it almost did me in.

You’re seen rebar, it is those iron/steel large rods sticking up out of concrete constructions. Indeed that what its name, "rebar" stands for: "reinforcement bar".

The length is cut into thirds, each length is about 6 feet long.

It’s easy. You stand at one end of it, your bud stands at the other end. You both place the ends into your "v" at your neck. You both lean forward a little to trap it in pressure than let go and put your hands down. There’s a little patch of clean cut sweat sock between the end of it and your soft neck. It just helps protect your neck from the sharpness of any metal pieces.

When you see your bud go into Fireimmunity and you feel yourself do likewise, you both walk forward towards each other. One of two things happens. If there is supernatural protection, you both keep walking until the ends of the rebar are bent into a hoop and you hug each other—or the rebar collapses your windpipe (Trachea) and you die of asphyxiation, or you might be fast enough to back off to relieve the pressure before you are clearly damaged.

It starts. Suddenly my fear pops up and stops my walking. Fireimmunity fails. The rebar is choking me. I quickly pull back. Choking and coughing. Keonaona is watching me. Worried.

I recover. My breath returns and I’m game again. I didn’t invest all this fear to get nothing in return. This time everything works as advertised, and I get to hug and get hugged by my kumu Michael.

You can imagine just how happy I was to "demonstrate" to Keonaona there, just how good I was to do it first!

Now it is Keonaona’s turn. She and her bud do it correctly on the first try! I’m so proud of her.

Opening night—Our First Firewalk

 

I’m writing this backwards in time for some reason.

In the main, I have been recounting the terrors for your amusement. There was a lot that wasn’t terrifying. Although I think that this is because Michael just couldn’t think up BOTH how to make it fearful and still actually do it.

This is one such thing which we did that wasn’t life-threatening:

How to Unshrivel a Raisin

God has killed every animal that has ever lived. I ran into a militant vegetarian in my Firewalk initiation last week. He asked Keonaona if her compassion went down to the animals. She said yes. He then asked her how she could eat meat. She asked him if his compassion extended to Carrots? He went ballistic and blew up.

During the initiation we had a meditation of transformation involving our relationship with a raison. We each had to put a single raison in our mouth for half an hour and pay attention to it. We could do anything with it that we wanted to but swallow it.

First it was all wrinkly and tough. Then it began to expand into an almost grape sized mass. Then when I bit on it, it filled my mouth with grape juice!

During the quiet of the half hour, my mind saw an image of a dinosaur chomping on a bunch of vegetation of some sort. The voluntary sacrifice of the vegetation's life to sustain a higher life struck me. And how it goes all the way up to us, layer after layer of clean and honorable souls sacrificing their temporary bodies so that others might live. Libido (The Good) all the way down.

And our Doctrine of EVO-CON, and how this chain of sacrifice leads up to us. And McDonald's fast food restaurants. The many twists and perturbations of our lives. And how one reaches out to the souls of the bodies—both animal and vegetable—which were sacrificed to sustain us.

A Hunian "Grace":

"I humbly bless and recognize and appreciate every being who has given it's life to sustain me and everything else throughout all time."

 

Opening Night—Our First Firewalk cont’d

 

Well, now that I’m almost at the end of this series, I’ll start from the beginning of our trip. We had flown up for this to the State of Washington, next to Microsoft, in Redmond. It was late at night. We really had no idea of where we were going. And we were hungry. We started to pass a Denny’s restaurant, and stopped for dinner.

I asked Keonaona if she had brought her cell phone. I wanted to call our kumu and let him know we were late but still coming. She had brought it, but it was WAY out of its useful territory, she said. A different phone company entirely. She can make and receive calls only from California and Nevada unless she makes a special arrangement.

I felt more antsy, so I asked her to call him on it anyway. Our kumu Michael McDermott answered immediately. She was nonplused, it shouldn’t have worked. Michael drove down to lead us back to the hideaway camp where we would be for the week’s initiation.

The next morning is a blank to me. That night our kumu put on our first Firewalk. I had walked on fire before under the auspices of Tony Robbins. She had never walked on fire before.

He prepped us as well as he could.

I stood at the edge of the firepit. I was barely in control of myself. Odd. I thought I would be more in control of my mind.

There was a full moon, it was directly behind the end of the firepit. It looked as if the moon was pulling me forward. Wahinenuiho`alani was pulling me into the fire. I could feel the spiritual wind, and I didn’t stop myself. I walked across the fire. The sentient fire lovingly accepted me. The coals were glowing red hot, and the hot heat on my face, but the embers felt cold. Everyone else walked too. I walked a second time. This time the embers were warm. I walked a third time, and the heat nipped at me. Lightly hurting me. I decided that the fire had decided that I had walked enough for that night.

Another haumana, a lady, also walked three times that night. Her experience was the exact opposite of mine. Her first walk had been hot, the second warm, and the third, which almost burned me, was cold.

On another night, which one I no longer remember, our kumu wanted to have a very deep layer of embers. So he made it about 6-8 inches deep.

It was the first time when the hot coals rolled over the tops of my feet, they felt very hot. At the end of the Firewalk, I accidentally walked into a Bramble Patch and the tops of my feet were badly scratched.

Later on that night when we were all in a hot tub, The soles of my feet began to hurt. I reached down and felt a thorn in my sole. Keonaona got it out. In doing so, she discovered the blisters on my feet. I had been unaware of them, there was no pain.

There were two young men who showed up for that Firewalk that night with some others. One was David and the other, Mark. David was tall and lanky and Mark was a little shorter and more muscular. Both were handsome with good clean spirits.

During the night, I felt the need to smoke my pipe, and wandered off a little to do that in contemplation. David saw me, and came after me, asked if he could stand with me. I said sure. He was some kind of computer system administrator, but he wanted to go into massage. He was asking me about the Hawaiian "Lomilomi" Massage. Wanted to know its history. I told him a lot about it. I told him about the style of Lomilomi I practice. He couldn’t imagine how you massage someone without denting their skin. So I took his arm and put some Lomilomi into it. He was impressed, and we returned to the fire.

This happened towards the end of that evening’s Firewalk. Everyone had walked by him. He had walked on fire about six weeks before, but now his fear had arisen for him, and he had returned to the sentient fire to face it one again. For a long time, he just stood at the edge of the firebed, and couldn’t walk it.

Then turning away, he asked our kumu, Michael, if he could break a board like he did last time. He needed to experience to focus his intention to overcome his fear.

Michael obliged and got the 1 inch plank and held it in front of him. David went into Fireimmunity and the board shattered like it was window glass. A chunk of the flying board struck Michael in the face, even setting his glasses askew.

I watched as an instant later Mark was at his side, appearing to adjust Michael’s glasses, but I saw Mark surreptitiously checking his fingers for blood. Michael was a little stunned at the force used to dissolve the board, and probably didn’t even notice Mark’s checking him for wounds. But he had already shown us, inadvertently, his Service commitment earlier that evening, when Keonaona faced the sentient fire for the first time.

She had been afraid, this was her first Firewalk, and she didn’t know what to expect, but knew that fire burned. And that the slightest touch of the fire would bring her pain and damage.

She had kept asking Michael where he was going to stand, etc.

Finally he understood that she was asking him to save her when she burned, and Michael, brought her into Malamaka`opuahiki or Enlightenment by saying to her, "This isn’t about your relationship to me, but about your relationship to the fire." Keonaona became enlightened for a moment and could face the sentient fire, really for the first time. Now the Way was open for her to walk, but she still had a lot of residual fear that she didn’t need. I saw Mark come up to her and reassure her, and tell her that if anything happened, he’d jump into the fire to save her.

With that, she strode harmless across the fire.

Mark had been serious, and even before I could get to her, Mark was there hugging her. Mark hadn’t walked yet. not that night, not on any other. He knew it was a dangerous thing to do to, but he didn’t know if he would make it. But he knew through instinct, as I knew through tradition, that he was taking the station of a sacred Firetender. This meant that if he jumped into the fire, there would be no Fireimmunity for him. If he jumped into the fire to save someone, he would sustain bad burns on the soles of his feet. We both understood that.

That’s what I meant that he had a clean spirit. He had never met us before. Never been to a Firewalk before. Would take pain for Keonaona if he had to, to assist her to attempt to walk the firebed.

But that was earlier. Now we had come to the end. And all, including Mark, had walked on the fire, all but David. He stood transfixed at the edge of the firebed for twenty minutes to a half hour. That was a long time for us just to stand and watch him stand there. Finally people started to really want to leave, but didn’t want to abandon David either. When I sensed this, I spoke to David and told him that if he continued to want to brave the fire, that I’d stay with him all night or until the fire went out. But that if he had decided not to walk, then we should go now. I told him that in no case should he walk if his soul was telling him not to. That there would be other Firewalks for him if he didn’t walk that night.

David just stood there silently staring with, it seemed to me, horror reflected in his eyes. I was afraid that my presence was a possible distraction to him, so I turned my back to the fire, so he couldn’t see me watching.

Then he walked. Perfectly and straight! I hugged him, we all did.

He did was all a great service that night. We might have also been in his shoes any night like that. He took that burden upon himself so that we didn’t have to be the one who was stuck in his fear. Many times during the initiation I was to take that onus, as well as everyone else too.

David performed that service for us that night.

In her first Firewalk, Kahuna Keonaona had received a small symptom, so had our kumu.

At 3:00 am she suddenly awoke from her sleep because the pain had suddenly ceased. Reaching down, and then later by light, there was no trace of the blister.

She had not received it in the Firewalk itself. The moment you finish, the fireimmunity fades. If there is a "Clingon" or spark clinging onto your foot, it will burn you at that point. She had had a small clingon. She had still had a little fading fireimmunity, so it didn’t hurt her as badly as a burn normally would.

Now I had my first symptoms. I could now feel the water-filled domes. In the morning there was no trace of them; neither visually, nor by sensation.

Umu and The Sweat Lodge

We arrived on a Friday night. Saturday the initiation started and that night was the first of many Firewalks, implements during the day, and on fire at night.

Sunday was very different. Michael had decided that we should be as pure of spirit as possible for the remaining time we would be there. He decided to have a "Sweat".

This was done in his home, because it had the Sweat Lodge, and it wasn’t portable. This was my first Sweat.

Because of the frailty, we had decided that I would just participate in the first two "rounds". There are four rounds to a regular Sweat, and each one gets hotter as more red hot rocks are brought in.

Some of the rocks were small, about the size of a double fist. But most were a little larger than a football and a little smaller than a basketball.

Once inside the Lodge, the door is closed and you are in complete darkness.

The second round was way more intense. Now we could see all the rocks glowing red with their heat.

I knew that in Honolulu in 1949 the rocks, about the same size had been white hot, and the earlier Firewalk by Kahuna Nui Brigham was on a self-luminous lava overflow. I couldn’t believe that anyone could walk on such rocks. I’m not sure, but they looked even more menacing to me than the firebed I had walked through three times the night before.

Michael told me I could walk on those rocks right then and there. I decided not to.

I asked him if he had ever walked Umu style (over glowing rocks), like the ones I saw in front of me.

He told me that he had. That he had arranged it himself. I asked him if he had had any symptoms? But he had not, nor anyone else who had walked that night. "But", he said, it was very challenging.

I looked at the glowing stones, and wondered at the career choice I had made

The First Huna Firewalk since 1949

There is a fine Huna Practitioner, Steven Varro who has held Firewalks at some Huna (HRI) conferences. He even tried to get Otha’s wife to walk on fire, she refused.

When I talked to him about it, it was clear that it wasn’t a Huna or Polynesian style, but a sort of Tony Robbins style of a Psychological presentation. Not anything to do with Huna, apparently. But he is really a fine gentleman.

One of our members of the Huna Heiau, Lamaku Schmall drove all the way up from the San Francisco area to offer service to us in the Firewalk I was scheduled to lead, scheduled by our kumu.

Kahuna Keonaona and I spent the morning of the initiation by giving a seminar on Huna. She led in the afternoon a process of "Conscious Dreaming", a technology she is proficient at.

We built the fire, and set it. We all went back inside, and the three of us put on a formal `Awa Ceremony. I did the chief part, Keonaona made the `Awa. Our kumu was gifted with an `Apu`awa (a cocoanut shell cup especially made for `awa), and Lamaku served it.

The type of `Awa was the "Mokihana" which was picked out for us by the farmers who supply the `Awa used in our Huna Heiau Church, John and Rebecca Fowler at Nuka Hiwa Farms in Hawaii. It served us well.

After everyone had had the `Awa, we all went out to the Firewalk — the fire now sentient.

Two of the haumana did the actual raking out of the glowing embers. As my health is irregular, they chose to help me. They helped me so much that they ended up doing it all!

Keonaona and Lamaku and I chanted into the fire.

Several other people had showed up for the Firewalk. I handled this is the same as all the Firewalks I put on. I will make no effort to get the public there, but if someone comes, they will be welcome and I won’t charge them or turn them away. (Or maybe some also showed up for the first Firewalk, I’m not sure now.)

I tried to set their minds into lokahi with Wahinenuiho`alani, and their Aumakuas.

This was the first time I was to lead it and be the first to cross it. If all went well, I’d tell the others how the fire had responded to me.

It went well. It welcomed me with great love and kindness.

It the first of the truly sweet fires.

It was wonderful.

No one had any symptoms from it. It wasn’t rambunctious at all.

When you walk to the other side of the sentient fire, you will have found something which no one else who has not traveled that path can ever know.

The plans of Io are advanced both in peace and in war. When it is time to party-down and have fun, and when it is time to be the courageous one. In the Light and in the Darkness,

Io abides.

-Kahuna Lani

 

 How To Do Your Own Firewalk:

 

 How To Do the Trick

"There must be a rational explanation!" I know, I’ve heard it all my life. What this really means is: "There isn’t any real magic or God left in the world. This meaning must be a mistake!"

But it isn’t. There is a Priest of the Sentient Fire, a Kahuna I Ke Umu KI. What or who is that? A person, usually trained for it, who can elicit the awareness of God in the fire. Turn it from a Scientific fire into a Religious Fire. And while usually trained and ordained and called to that purpose, anyone who can do it is a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, even if they have never heard of anything like that before.

By some means or other, actually respect and intent whilst making the firebed. Respect and aloha for it when it is made, invokes a goddess which Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long calls an "externalizing lesser manifestation" of Io. The goddess named in the Huna religion as Wahinenuiho`alani (or to simplify it: Wahine [woman] nui [great] ho`a [sets fire to] lani [the sky] wahine-nui-ho`a-lani).

It can happen that a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, or by any other name hasn’t had the grueling and very dangerous initiation we’ve had, and still do it.

Once the Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki has created the sentient fire, he or she then helps the haumana who will walk, to get their physical and mental duckies in a row.

When all this is done, there is one final instruction, and the haumana is left alone with his fear. That final instruction? "Give up to your God your protection. Nothing else suffices."

Then the sentient fire will look into your heart and judge you of your purity. And if the Kingdom inside you is secure, you will feel what I call a "spirit wind" pushing you into the fire. You will walk on wings if you walk then. But also in that moment, your fear will arise and try to stop you from the Firewalk.

It is then that Io is testing your courage.

The whole of Malamaka`opuahiki is founded on koa or courage.

But it is not the fearless one who has courage, he is simply insane or underchallenged. No, to have courage means to experience fear and do what you intend to do anyway.

I used to resent the Psychological presentation of the Firewalk in the New Age movements. Now that I have actually experienced it, I can see what they are talking about. They reduce the religious implications to make more bucks and haumana, which is silly; but it isn’t silly at all to focus on the overcoming of fear. In many ways, fear is the fulcrum of the experience.

And at the grossest level, that you are saved from the burns with the overcoming of your fear is the teaching. That there is "something" (Io) out there, which, if approached with intention and faith, will save you, supports you in the strangest of ways.

Some of my Christian friends I’ve talked to about the Firewalk, use the idea in their Bible to say that they must not test God. But this is pure sophistry on their part. It isn’t God who is being tested, it is them.

But if the judgments of your God, Aumakua or Io or the goddess Wahinenuiho`alani, or anything else, are so strict that only a very few can make the cut, then the fear and backing away would be more understandable.

But the aloha of Io is bountiful. When approached correctly, everyone gets across the sentient fire unharmed. Those who do the Firewalk many times, will be reminded that the fire burns if it is not respected, but unless a person is way out of integrity, or startled out of Malamaka`opuahiki, they will walk in safety, hand in hand with their god?

And what do they really learn? What do they really know then which everyone else can only speculate and have "faith" in?

They know what any others can only guess at, that if they reach out in the fire, they will find a hand to hold. They will literally walk with their god. It isn’t a trick. It is a reality.

When they get to the other side of the sentient fire, they will find that their god walked them, and like me, they will wonder how the fire got behind them.

Firewalking Articles

Umu Ki

The First Huna Firewalk (1890s) by Williams Tufts Brigham (as transcribed by Max Freedom Long)

Firewalking From the Inside (1949)  by Charles W. Kenn

Book Review by Max Freedom Long (1949)

What Price Firewalking? by Max Freedom Long (1951)

Initiation Into the Body of Firewalk Priests (2001) by Ho`anoiWahinenuiho`aLani

The Hunian Firewalk: How the Umu Ki Ceremony was returned to Huna (2006) by Ho`anoiWahinenuiho`aLani

 

Pre Firewalking Movement

Te Umu Ti, A Raiatean Ceremony (1893) by Miss Teuira Henry

Mystic Isles of the South Seas (1921) by Frederick O'Brien

Firewalkers of the South Seas (May 1953) by Wilmon Menard (Rosicrucian Digest)

The Function of Ritualism (January 1953) by The Imperator (Rosicrucian Digest)

 

Firewalking Movement

The Roots of Consciousness: Firewalking (1975) by Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD

Firewalking: The Psychology of Physical Immunity – Take a Stand in the Fire (1991??) by Jonathan Sternfield

Dancing with the Fire: The Skeptical Mind (1989) by Michael Sky

Firewalking: The Psychology of Physical Immunity

By Jonathan Sternfield


Firewalking Picture Gallery

Dan_McHale_Firewalking_handstand

 

Seattle fire walker Dan McHale tests his immunity to burning in a variety of ways, among them, firewalking across red-hot firebeds on his hands. Repeatedly, he has been able to make such passages without any injury whatsoever, and, in the process, has challenged the skeptics’ theory that the fire walking can be safely performed only because the feet are tough and callused.

Manawanui: I met Dan McHale before I ever knew about firewalking. I was looking for a backpack for long distance hiking. He owned company 3 blocks from where I went to college making the sturdiest and most comfortable packs I had ever tried. A little heavier than I wanted. I didn’t find out about some of the things he did to push the envelop in the firewalking movement until later.

Firewalking: The Psychology of Physical Immunity

By Jonathan Sternfield


Taking a Stand In the Fire

I had the feeling that I had pushed to the brink of the world; what was of burning interest to me was null and void for others, and even a cause for dread. . . . After all, there was nothing preposterous or world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality.
Carl Jung

To assess further the phenomenon of firewalking, we should carefully examine any evidence that brings into question conventional physical explanations. Without resorting to a whole battery of new experiments, we might scrutinize the claims of scientists that short contact with the coals is the reason why most of us can safely walk across a glowing firebed. Besides the low thermal capacity and conductivity of wood coals — a fact which is not open to question but whose effects seem in some dispute — the short contact theory is the most popular scientific explanation of how the firewalk is possible. Yet repeatedly, both my own experience and that of others strongly suggests there is something else going on.

If there were any reliable reports of long contact, they might at once dispel both the short contact and the low thermal capacity and conductivity theories. For few would deny that if a firewalker simply stood on glowing, red-hot coals, he or she should normally suffer serious burns within a matter of seconds at most.

Zusne and Warren emphasize this in their exploration of anomalistic psychophysiology: “One of the factors not stressed in reports on fire walking is that fire walking is walking, not standing still on embers or stones. There is no recorded instance of anyone’s ever having attempted to just stand on red hot stones or glowing embers for any length of time.”1

JOE NUZUM AND THE CHI

Herewith, let us record several such instances. We already have my own account of standing on a bed of glowing hot coals for several seconds, though I did receive a small blister. We also have Michael Sky’s report about his standing in the fire — and his witnessing others not only standing in fire but lying down on the coals without singeing skin, hair or clothes. Equally impressive is the experience of Joe Nuzum, a former foundry worker from western Pennsylvania who spent years working around incredibly hot fires and molten metals. Now he spends his time giving demonstrations of what he calls “Ninja Magick” and teaching martial arts. Among the rituals he teaches his students is the firewalk.

Nuzum says he first firewalked in 1975, when he was 16. Before he firewalked, though, he experimented extensively. Having heard about firewalking Tibetan monks, he began by holding his hand over a candle flame. “Once I realized the different states of mind I could enter into,,, he told me, “I found a way where I wouldn’t get burned. I went from getting burned almost instantly to being able to hold my hand in the flame for close to 45 seconds.”2

Nuzum says he also practiced holding his hands in the flames of burning papers, then eventually progressed to firewalking and from there to standing on red hot coals. “And that I’ve done for maybe 45 seconds,” he said.3

I have not witnessed this, but I have seen videotapes of Nuzum holding flaming coals in his hands for a period of 40 seconds. I have also read reports about him and discussed him with a psychiatrist who has both examined him and written about him. 4  In conventional physical terms, Nuzum’s performances are amazing and inexplicable. Nuzum attributes his fire immunity to “the protective qualities of the chi,” the field of bioenergy around the body that Eastern mystics tell us can be controlled by the mind. “There’s been a lot of fascinating things done with the chi,” says Nuzum. “It’s mind blowing.”5

THE WORLD’S LONGEST AND HOTTEST FIREWALKS

Perhaps it is also time science confronted the activities of another amazing firewalker, a Washington state resident named Steve Bisyak. Bisyak is a Tolly Burkan-trained firewalking instructor who runs his own human potential seminars, Challenges Unlimited. And he is undoubtedly one of the most experienced firewalkers in the world. “I’ve firewalked over a thousand times now,” he said when I spoke with him in early 1991. “I’ve walked on a red-hot metal plate, red-hot coals and red-hot briquettes.

In Kansas City, in front of 300 people, I pretty much gave my whole lecture from the center of the fire. I was on a red-hot fire for minutes“6

Bisyak first saw firewalking on the “You Asked For It” TV show when he was nine. Fifteen years later, in 1984, he learned firewalking from Tolly Burkan. Even since then, he says, he has continued to “push the limits.” Today he holds the record for the world’s longest firewalk (120 feet) and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the hottest firebed ever walked on.

For the longest walk, he used 10 cords of wood with the highest BTU factors he could find (cherry, madrono and oak) stacked in a pile 126 feet long. For the hottest fire, he and 10 other walkers braved a coalbed 15 feet long, 12 inches deep, with three inches of flame on top. Its average temperature was measured at 1,546 degrees F. After his walk, not even the hairs on Bisyak’s toes were singed.

Bisyak has also done some tests with the firewalk — tests that lead him to conclude that the ability to walk safely over hot coals is all a state of mind. For example, in August 1990, he and three other volunteers were fitted with EEGs, blindfolded and, one by one, paraded around a grassy area. Then, unannounced, each was led onto a bed of red-hot coals. All four were badly burned.

“If you take the mind away from the situation, it’s guaranteed burn,” Bisyak said. “If you step on fire by accident, you get cooked. Other people who were there and in the right state of mind walked across that fire with no problem.”7

Moreover, the EEG, said Bisyak, indicated a common brain wave pattern for those who burned and another pattern for those who did not burn. “Alpha and beta [brain waves] are extremely wide; theta is fairly narrow; the very bottom of delta is pegged out wide. And without delta being pegged out wide, it was hot — meaning that if you were very peaceful and calm and relaxed, you got burned!8

After all his semi-scientific investigation, Bisyak has come up with a folksy formula for figuring a person’s burn possibilities prior to any firewalk. “One hundred, minus the percentage of attention,” he says, “equals the number of blisters — meaning if you’re 98 percent, you probably got two blisters; if you’re 75 percent, you got 25 blisters; if you’re 50 percent, you got cooked!”

Bisyak has also done what he calls the “nylon stocking test,” walking on hot coals wearing nylon stockings. “They don’t bum,” he says. “You can put the nylon on the coal bed, and it doesn’t last; it disintegrates — you can’t put it out! That’s what brings me to the conclusion that it’s a bioelectric field that protects us, something like the human aura.”9

Bisyak says he’s convinced that this field is activated by a combination of fear and faith. He’s also convinced that if it could be isolated, the same energy or chemical that prevents burns could also be used to treat serious burn victims. “Two out the three serious burns that I’ve had — and I mean where the whole bottom of the foot comes off — healed almost spontaneously. I was able to go out and play tennis the next day after walking on hot coals. There was no sign of damage at all.” 10

Bisyak’s testimony is also revealing in regard to the skeptics’ argument that a firewalker’s immunity can be attributed to the way in which the feet are placed on the coals. If we examine Bisyak’s experience and that of many other firewalkers, we must admit that hot coals are not only underfoot but also to the sides of the foot and on top of it as well. Bisyak at one point described his feet as “submerged” in glowing hot coals. Similarly, when I stood in the fire myself, my feet were buried in orange coals, and the surface coals covering the tops of my feet were in no way less radiant than when I entered the fire.

It seems equally clear that short contact with the fire cannot explain many firewalking in which the participants stand, dance or linger on the coals. “You have to be committed,” says Bisyak. “That’s the difference between what the physicists are saying and what the firewalkers are saying. If you’re not committed, you get burned.”11

JACK SCHWARZ: TOTAL BODY CONTROL

Another committed man who is equally adept with fire is Dutch-born American Jack Schwarz. In his early teens in Holland, Schwarz began increasingly to realize voluntary controls over many of his normally automatic physiological functions. He concentrated on the control of pain. frequently pushing an unsterilized knitting needle through his arm to test himself, but soon he could also control bleeding and burning. By the time he arrived for testing at the laboratory of Drs. Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Institute in Topeka, Kansas in 1971, Schwarz was regularly sleeping only two or three hours a night, eating only several small meals a week and had demonstrated fire immunity to himself and to his friends. 12

In the late 1970s, Schwarz got an opportunity to demonstrate his controlled fire immunity to a convocation of 55 doctors. At a meeting of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, psychiatrist Kurt Fantl introduced Schwarz, announcing that he would demonstrate a variety of astonishing, self-regulatory controls. The most startling among these was immunity to fire. First, Schwarz allowed the physicians to examine his hands, which they found to be normal and untreated in any way. Next, two medical students wearing asbestos gloves carried a burning brazier into the conference, and from the container Schwarz scooped out a double handful of red-hot coals. Walking calmly among the doctors, Schwarz showed them the fire in his hands, allowing them to feel the heat and observe his immunity to burning. Finally, he laid the coals to rest on a newspaper, which immediately burst into flames. When his hands were examined once more, they again appeared to be perfectly normal, with no signs of their lengthy contact with red-hot coals.13

When tested in the Green’s laboratory at Menninger in 1971, Schwarz again demonstrated his immunity to fire, as well as his control of bleeding and pain. Fire immunity, Schwarz found, was not automatic; in certain states, he could still be burned, in other states, his immunity seemed complete and absolute. To him, the critical factors appeared to be intention and need. And when intention and need are strong enough, he says, they activate “the power of the radiance of our body,” which he says can protect us not only from fire but also from other noxious stimuli. Schwarz also maintains that this body radiance creates “a living Faraday cage — a high voltage, low amperage energy field” that can even prevent one’s hair and clothes from burning.14

Jack Schwarz believes that his remarkable abilities are not so remarkable, and he repeats over and over again that his performances are potentials we all have. “At a laboratory once,” he said, “they told me, ‘Now we are going to test some normal people.’ I said: ‘I beg your pardon; I am the only one whom you have ever tested who was normal. I follow the principles which are normal principles for firewalking; the other ones have not bothered to, so they are still operating in a subnormal way.” Schwarz seemed especially adamant about this last point. “I make that statement not just to you,” he said, “but in every lecture I give: ‘Now, look, people, don’t sit there in admiration, and don’t tell me, “Yeah, but you were born that way.” You forgot: you were born that way, too.”15

FOOTNOTES- Chapter 7

1. Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones, Anomalistic Psychology. A Study of Extraordinary Phenomena of Behavior and Experience (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Eribaum, 1982), 64.

2. Joe Nuzum, personal communication.

3. Ibid.

4. Joe Nuzum, “Joe Nuzum – Ninja Magick,” a videotape; Dr. Berthold Schwarz, “K: A Presumed Case of Telekinesis,” International journal of Psychosomatics, 32:1, 1985, 3-21; Dr. Berthold Schwarz, personal communication.

5. Joe Nuzum, personal communication.

6. Steve Bisyak, personal communication.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Elmer and Alyce Green, Beyond Biofeedback, (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), 235-6; Jack Schwarz, personal communication.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Jack Schwarz, personal communication.