A Spiritual Telegram from Mr. Charles Pratt

One of the primary functions of the shaman is to serve as a negotiator between the spirit world and what we perceive as the “real” world. Types of entities encountered in the otherworld vary: spirits of the unrested dead, land wights known by various names based on culture (the ones I primarily work with are usually referred to as alfar/elves and duergar/dwarves, which Celtic practitioners often refer to as the Sidhe), animal spirit helpers (aka “totems” in the Native American parlance), deities and other energy based beings. As a valkyrie and a priestess aligned closely with the earth-friendly Vanir, I work with the spirits of the dead and other types of landvaettir (land wights) very easily.

I have an affinity for finding antique glass. The stuff all but jumps out into my hands. It may have been there for over 150 years. Doesn’t matter, given the chance I will find it.

Glass is one of those substances once revered by the people who follow my spiritual path, now taken for granted like so many other things in our world. Glass still contains many a scientific mystery – it is neither a liquid nor a solid, and those who have sought to understand and study it have brought us to many a scientific breakthrough.

My affinity for finding glass frightens even me. I was helping family friends clean out the mansion that had originally belonged to the inventor of Corningware and found some absolutely priceless original prototypes in the basement that the entire family had missed. While we were in Corning, my husband and I visited the Museum of Glass. The energy of the place had me as high as a kite, I had to practically be dragged out of there kicking and screaming by my husband.

My connection with glass has existed since childhood, but only recently as I wandered my local lands this summer did I realize that something was going on with this that pertained to my shamanic practice and which required my attention. A gigantic hoard of antique bottles came to light from two turn-of-the-century sources as I began my work this summer to bring the festering problem of the contaminated Photocircuits corporate campus to the attention of local government.

I realized that this was, in it’s way, a form of thanks expressed to me by the landvaettir for speaking on their behalf. I even ended up obtaining a perfectly sized display cabinet for the antique bottles off Craig’s List, so here they are on display in my kitchen.

As global warming and environmental conservation have become issues our society had best no longer ignore, I have become prone to ending my letters and email messages on those subjects to local government with the following sentence: “Take care of the land and the land will take care of you.”

This is no mere platitude I preach to others, it is one that I live by. In my wanderings I began cleaning up the land. To be sure, some of this was rooted in the fact that I’ve been unemployed for over two years now and I wanted to be able to feed my kitties. So I was gathering up recycleable bottles and cans and redeeming them. However, if I had the energy and the wherewithal, I would gather up the non-redeemables I found in equal measure and recycle them along with my regular household stuff. I considered this part of my shamanic service to the land; a means whereby I would assure the local vaettir that I cared about their well being. I find that there is little shame in such action if one is doing it for wider reasons than one’s own benefit.

As I found more and more antique bottles I got involved in the collector/”digger” world of people who share my interests in antique glass. One of the things I learned is that the bottles can be cleaned using tumblers, similar to gem polishers, that slowly rotate the bottle while it floats in a cleaning solution of bleach and small pieces of copper. I wondered where I was going to get small pieces of copper. The vaettir responded with a will, and I began finding all sorts of wiring buried near the glass I’d also find. The area I live in has been settled for over 350 years, and it’s the heart of the Gold Coast of Long Island – some of the world’s richest magnates decided to settle here.

As my dad was an electrical engineer, I am somewhat more familiar with and interested in such technology than the average suburban housewife. I began digging up some of the earliest versions of electrical wiring ever made. People who lived here could afford it, and when it became obsolete it was thrown away with everything else. I have found and stripped versions of wiring going back to the early 1900s.

A few days ago in my merry “volkswanderung” I found a glass insulator half buried in yet another clandestine dump in the woods. Insulators are very popular among antique glass collectors because they are small and very colorful, and while this one was a fairly common example worth only about $10-20 it was in absolutely perfect condition. It was still attached to a rotting, half-buried 1920s vintage telephone pole. I unwrapped the 90-year-old high tension pure aluminum cable that held it in place, and unscrewed it from a rusting bracket. I joked to myself that perhaps with this strange new affinity for finding old electrical wiring, I was “getting a lesson in the history of electrical engineering from my spirit guide, Charles Pratt”.

Oil magnate Charles Pratt lived here in Glen Cove. He built several mansions here for himself and his family which are still in use today as municipal buildings of one form or another. He also founded the Pratt Institute. Pratt rubbed elbows with the likes of the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and most especially John D. Rockefeller, with whom he founded the infamous industrial era behemoth Standard Oil. The private family plot is not far from my sister’s home in Lattingtown. We liberal types would probably number Mr. Pratt among those evil, out-of-control capitalists from the Industrial Era whom we love to hate; however as a woman with a technical background I can and must have the utmost respect for the guy who founded Pratt Institute; as well as the Pratt family name which includes no small number of some of the most pre-eminent engineers of our time.

I became most especially bemused when, on a whim, I investigated further and discovered that the Pratt Institute he founded has this as it’s motto:

Be true to your work, and your work will be true to you.

Well, what I seem to have picked up from my own spiritual work is an affinity for finding antique glass, antique wiring, and the urgent and eerily similar message,

I am quite certain that by his lights and in the eyes of those who knew him, Charles Pratt was a great man – hard working, brilliant, fair and honorable, and understanding of the need to provide opportunity and share it with others. However it cannot be denied that there was one thing in his life he not only took for granted, but in his ignorance and misguidedness thought was something to be plundered and controlled. Charles Pratt was an Industrial Era big oil man, and one of the things he did – the way by which he made his fortune – was rape the land, and teach others to do the same.

Oh rich man, rich oil man, hard working and honorable, brilliant and driven, but in some ways so misguided and ignorant; now that you are in the very Mother Earth that you taught others to rape, how is it there for you?

I find myself wondering what the spirit of Mr. Pratt, captain of industry, would think of a place like Photocircuits leaching toxicity into the land not all that far from where he and his lie at rest. No, as a valkyrie, as a Vanic woman, and as a shamanic practitioner who can perceive the otherworld, I do not wonder. I am pretty sure I know.

“Take care of the land”, indeed. Jacob Marley never rattled his chains any louder.

I wonder if his message will be loud enough for those who are meant to hear it today?