About
My name is Asra Lokakona. I was born into a very Catholic family, but my mother sometimes saw things and it terrified her. Apparently her mother was gifted, but she never taught mom anything because of mom's fear. My grandmother died 5 years before I was born, almost to the hour, but mother fought labor until midnight so that I wouldn't have the same birthday as grandmother's death day. In my family that's a very common thing.
We moved into a house around 1979 that was haunted. There was a big graveyard in the front yard, and there was a slave shack down the road that was coming down. I understand these have since been restored, but at the time I lived there everything was pretty ramshackle. The haunting never really bothered me, except that at 7:00 PM a ghost would walk through the downstairs hallway. She would come in from one wall and out the other. I never thought to check if she went through the other rooms on the other side of those walls.
I was 7 years old, and I just had my first communion. My first communion gift from my parents was a watch, and I was very proud of this watch and being able to read it. One day mom asked me to go downstairs and ask Dad something, but I checked my watch and realized that I would be going through the hallway to Dad’s office right at the time the ghost would go through. I decided to sit on the stairs until the minute passed, and then go through the hall.
My watch was fast.
The ghost walked through me as I went through the hall. At first I was terrified, the cold was indescribable. But I felt a voice respond in surprise, before it passed. That night, I had a visitor. Her name was Elyse, and she decided to teach me. So for the next year I learned how to do Trance Journey. Elyse helped me connect with the spirit that I later found out from Mom had been described in the family by her mother and her mother's father, a mountain lion. What developed was a practice I would later discover was very similar to what was being marketed as core shamanism. I had animal helpers, because that's what you do with children. I learned to shapeshift, and would regularly play with the friends I made there in animal form.
Unfortunately when I was 8 I had several traumatic events happen at once that caused me to shut down until I was 12. We spent the summers at the local beach resort because of my mother's allergies, and Dad would drive back and forth each weekend from home to the resort so he could both work and see us. One night that summer I woke up with a very bad feeling. I was trying to sort it out in my head when the phone rang. My sister and I could hear mom sobbing through the door, but she never came and told us what was going on, so my sister, who was 15 at the time, went to find out what happened. She didn't come back for longer than my patience lasted, so I went out to find out what was going on. My father, who I was very close to and looked up to tremendously (I was Daddy's Little Girl) had had a heart attack. We drove back from the resort to home and saw him in the hospital. I should not have been allowed to see him at that age, on a breather with tubes all over him. The image is seared into my mind to this day, which is impressive since I have aphantasia.
For the second event, my sister and I had been shuffled back to the resort to get us out of the way, and were in the care of my great aunt and uncle, who did not stop us from going anywhere or doing anything. My sister was out particularly late one night, so I did as Elyse had taught me and astral projected to look for her. I found her, being gang raped. My sister is gifted too, which is probably why I got pulled into her and experienced what she went through.
Several nights later, my sister decided to take me to a movie. She had wanted to see Poltergeist, so that's what we saw. To an extent, the movie could have been made about our house. We had the graveyard in the front yard. The big spooky tree was right outside my window. And of course there were the ghosts. It was months before I was able to sleep alone again in my room.
All of this happened within the space of about 3 weeks. Spiritually, I shut down.
When I was 12 I finally decided to try to recover what I had lost. I read books on psychic phenomena, I developed a lifetime dedication to fantasy literature, and I struggled to remember Elyse’s lessons. She was still around, as she had followed me when we moved away from that house, but I couldn't reach her yet. That took a couple more years. I finally figured out how to trance again when I was 14, and that was when Elyse came back into my life, and my practice progressed once again.
I had been attending an all girls catholic school. In the first grade I befriended an old nun who, come second grade, was dying. Special arrangements were made to allow me to visit her, and before long I had the run of the convent. It became assumed that I would one day join them. I was trained as an altar assistant, and was very devout. Later I served as an altar assistant at our parish. When we moved to Florida, the priest at our parish nearly refused to allow me to take part in their confirmation process because of having been on the altar; there was some controversy about girls serving there. As a result, we swapped churches to another one farther away, where I eventually sang in the choir and was part of the Marian society.
When I was 15 I went to a used bookstore and bought a book that had a malignant spirit attached to it. After listening to it speak to me, trying to convince me to release it, I became convinced that the book needed to be destroyed. A friend said he would burn it for me, so I gave it to him to do so. He instead released the spirit, who then proceeded to possess him.
At my church, the Monsignor regularly went home to Ireland and exchanged with another priest who would come and take over the parish for the summer. That priest was a mage; I had observed him manipulating energies in church. If the exchange had happened that year, I might have been in a convent even now. It did not however, and when my friend succumbed to the spirit, I immediately went to the Monsignor. He was useless. So I went in trance and freed my friend, and the Monsignor never looked at me the same way again. I was no longer welcome.
At 16 (1990) I decided to find a faith that would allow me to be who I was, and I found Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. And from that point forward I was part of paganism.
I went through a period of weirdness that I am now convinced was mostly thought forms running rampant due to a complete lack of discernment. Elyse led me into some things that were not good for me, convinced me of some things that were not true, and basically proved herself to be less of an ally and more of an opportunistic parasite. In 1997 a practitioner took me aside and told me what was going on, and after a lot of kicking and screaming, convinced me to let him banish Elyse. I will never know how much of those 7 years was real, but I destroyed my reputation with my friends and the circle I had been practicing with in college. I graduated and moved away, hoping to start fresh somewhere new.
In my new town I eventually found a journey circle that I joined, run by Reverend Mary Phyllis Horn. She helped ground my practice, and rebuild without the mess. I joined alt.religion.shaminism, where I met Joseph Bearwalker Wilson and his partner Starrhawk (not the writer). They collectively knocked some of the stupid out of me, and helped me build a practice grounded in reality. I joined their project, Metista.
When they split up I followed Joe into his next and final project, the Toteg Tribe. This was an extension of his earlier project from California in the '80s, the Temple of the Elder Gods, or TOTEG. In it, we attempted to basically start over. Joseph had written a story, called The Ancient One, which you can still find floating around the internet, in which the Ancient One basically tells the seeker that the other peoples of the world have ways that are right for them, but they do not belong to the European colonists, that we have lost our ways, and must regain them. So that's what we did: we started over.
Joseph was terminally ill, and when he passed away in 2004 we did our best to keep things going. We lasted about two more years.
Meanwhile on a mundane level, I graduated with a BS in Chemistry, which got me my first job. However, we were processing so many samples that the system we had was clearly not going to scale for our newer projects, and I knew what the words “relational” and “database” meant when strung together in that order, which apparently qualified me to write one in my boss's eyes. I did a whole lot of research, developed a few small databases, changed careers, and never looked back. Oddly, my spiritual practice helped me here as well, as my father had been an old mainframe programmer, and I was able to connect with his spirit every time I got lost in my studies. Somehow it made things clearer.
In 2006 my health, which had never been good, took a turn for the terrible. My internet presence disappeared, my website shadowdance.org went down, and I basically disappeared from group practice entirely. Over the course of the next year, it became clear that my health would not allow me to work anymore, and I became disabled. I effectively collapsed in on myself, especially when I had to sell my horse and give up that dream, although looking back now I realistically know it was necessary.
In 2016 I finally got fed up with being alone, so I did what Joseph had told me to do if his organization fell apart: I looked up Ásatrú. Again, I haven't looked back. Loki exploded onto my radar, and at the time I bought into the negative propaganda around him, but his presence felt hauntingly familiar. Several years later I was researching his names and discovered one of them had belonged to a being I met when I was 14, who had accompanied me well into my twenties before disappearing (before Elyse’s banishment) because I was becoming too dependent on him. The other deity that I was working with at the time, Freyja, had also felt familiar, and I realized that her presence was the one that I had sensed under another name when I was starting out, before much of the tomfoolery had set in. They had been with me all along, and they soon became my fulltrúar.
My health proceeded to get worse and worse as time went on. In 2017 I got a case of shingles on my face, and my immune system got confused and ate my nervous system, giving me small fiber neuropathy over roughly 3/4 of my body. Today I have recovered probably 80% of that back, but complications have left me effectively disabled, again. This comes with gifts however, in that since I can't have a career anymore, I can study Heathenry to my heart's content, so I have immersed myself. At any given time I am reading at least one book relevant to the topic, I have written several papers on academia.edu, and I now have a manuscript awaiting publication. I've been studying three languages, with different reasons for each. I started studying Spanish in first grade, and continued all through high School. Spanish was my foreign language for the international baccalaureate diploma, but I wound up being able to read and write the language yet unable to speak it. I'm working on that now. In college, I had to take a year of German for my degree, and as I got into heathenry I realized that it would be a very good language to learn in order to continue my studies. My ultimate goal is to read Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology in the original, but I don't know that it's going to happen. I also am studying Icelandic, as I wish to be able to read Old Norse for my studies as well, and it seemed to make sense to take the Icelandic angle on learning as that would allow me to also read modern papers.
I miss writing about spiritual topics though, and so I started this blog. Oftentimes my writings are an exploration of their topic, and I learn more by writing than I would have simply thinking. I invite you to join me as I investigate what's rattling around inside my head. What will we find in Asra's Attic?
5.24.26