I had no frame of reference, when Warrick handed me the cards that evening on the slopes of Table Mountain, after we had crawled out of that rough blanket lodge into the cool mountain air. I did not know what a sweat lodge was. I did not know what a card reading was. I did not know what the Red Road was.
I had no idea I was about to walk into a ceremony. My only preparation, if you could call it that, was a cooler bag. Beers. Some meat, because in South Africa, fire means braai, and a braai means you bring something to cook and something cold to drink. That is simply how it is. I was not being disrespectful. I was being exactly what I was, a South African man with no frame of reference whatsoever, arriving at the wrong event with the wrong luggage.
The cooler bag sat outside the lodge the entire time. Unopened. I never touched it. Not because someone told me not to, but because, when I crawled back out into the mountain air afterwards, something had quietly shifted, and I couldn’t quite locate the version of myself that had thought the beer was a good idea.
Niyan exiting the Sweat hut
Warrick laid the cards out quietly. He was a gentle, soft-toned man. He read them the way someone reads a landscape, without performance, without urgency, as though the information had always been there and he was simply pointing to what was already visible.
He drew four cards.
The first was Niyan. Card thirteen. The Spirit of Man. The Higher Self. The part of you that knows it is of the Creator, that knows it is eternal, that navigates through experience without ever being lost, even when you are certain you are lost. Warrick looked at me and gave me that name. Niyan. I carried it for nearly fifteen years without fully understanding what had been placed on me.
The second card was Pita. Fire. Eternal Life. The Lakota tradition teaches that fire is the great power of Wakan Tanka, the Creator, and that as one of the four elemental spirits, it can never be extinguished. The card asked a question I was not ready to answer: What will you leave behind? What light will you carry into the world, and what will remain when you are gone? Your words and actions, it said, are pieces of yourself that will be passed down to your children.
I had no children. I was a man whose studio had just burned down. I filed the question away without knowing I had done so.
The third card was Skan. Motion. Manifestation. The eternal Now of Creation, that which existed before time itself. Through Skan, you are given the gifts of experience, reflection, and hope. All that is created is in motion. The seas, the clouds, the trees, everything that lives upon the earth moves in a dance to the radiance of the One who created all things. You have the ability, Skan says, to use your inner power to attract what you want. Not by forcing, but by allowing.
The fourth card was Tob Tob. The Eight Directions of the Wind. Self-protection. The wisdom of change. Your life is like no other life, it said. Your needs are like no other needs. Know what to change, how to change, into what to change.
Four cards. I had no idea I had just been handed a map.
The Red Road — the path we walk in the physical, stretching back through all who came before.
The Red Road is the road we walk in the physical world. This life. This body. This collection of days, choices, losses, and discoveries that we call a lifetime. It is not a metaphor. It is the actual ground beneath your feet, the breath in your lungs, the fire you tend, the children you bring into the world.
The Blue Road is the road we walk when this body is finished. The path we follow in death, in order to find our way back. Back to the Red Road. Back to the body, back to the ground, back to the fire. The two roads form a circle, not a line. There is no ending, only return.
The threshold between the Blue Road and the Red Road — where the Sangoma stands.
I did not know any of this on that mountain in 1993. I know it now because I walked it. Because the sweat lodge I stumbled into that evening with my cooler bag became the first of fifty, perhaps a hundred, built across South Africa and Brazil and Costa Rica over the following thirty years. Tim Sekeya came from the Lakota nation to Rustlers Valley in 1997 and I became his firekeeper and learned what the fire actually is. Because the Red Road has a way of keeping you on it whether or not you know its name.
Ahpo Wi Chapi · Card 33 · The Morning Star · Hope
Thirty years passed. Then recently, I sat down and looked at those four cards again properly, for the first time. And I saw something I had never seen before.
The fifth card. The one that was not drawn that evening, but that belongs in the reading as surely as the others. Ahpo Wi Chapi. Card thirty-three. The Morning Star. Hope. A light that shines at the boundary between darkness and light, the last star visible before the dawn, the first sign that the Blue Road is giving way to the Red Road once again.
On the first of February 2003, my son was born on the grass outside a sweat lodge at Rustlers Valley. It was four in the morning. As he arrived, Venus rose in the sky above the mountain. The Morning Star.
The local Sesotho people named him Mphatlalatsane on the day of his birth. Their word for the Morning Star, Venus, rising as new life comes into the world. They did not know about a card reading on Table Mountain a decade earlier. They did not know about Ahpo Wi Chapi, or the Lakota tradition, or a man named Warrick who had laid four cards out in the mountain air and handed a stranger a name he was not yet ready to wear.
They named him what the sky said he was.
Pita had asked me, back in 1993, what I would leave behind for my children. I did not have the answer then. I have been living it ever since. The fire that cannot be extinguished. The road that does not end. The star that rises at the boundary between one world and the next, wearing a name given to it by people who had never met each other, across thirty years of walking a path.