Episode 32 - The Thinning of the Veil

Let's start with history, because the Dream Speakers have a complicated one, both their own and how they ended up in a room with the other eight traditions.

The spiritual practices that feed into the Dream Speaker tradition are among the oldest forms of human magic on the planet.

We are talking about shamanism, animism, ancestor veneration, practices that predate written language, practices that were developed on every inhabited continent more or less independently and then developed further over thousands of years.

Korean Mudong spirit mediums, Kuri spirit workers out of Australia tied to the dreaming, and even Evenki shamans out of Siberia, where the word shaman originates from.

The list goes on, and the point is that none of these practices are the same thing.

They share certain recognizable shapes, such as belief in a living spirit world, the importance of altered states of consciousness, the role of an intermediary who moves between human communities and the unseen, But they are not interchangeable.

They grew from different soils.

The tradition traces itself to two figures, Nioba and Star of Eagles, whose own bond bridged very different peoples and very different lands, and whose union is part of what held such scattered peoples together in the first place.

though Niobo was assassinated in 1464 before the Grand Convocation even concluded.

And the Cavati were there at the Grand Convocation, the founding moment of the Council of Nine back in the 1450s and 60s.

But there doesn't mean respected.

The European mages running the room, mostly white male hermetics fresh off a big win against the Order of Reason, wanted nine traditions to match the nine spheres— so they force-fit the attendees into nine boxes.

They called any Will Worker who listened to the songs of Earth and Spirit a Dream Speaker, regardless of the differences in their beliefs or practices.

And the discomfort with the Dream Speaker name doesn't only come from outside.

Within the tradition itself, there's a faction, the Akin Kanju, or Unbroken, actively pushing to drop the council's slave name and replace it with something the Cavati chose for themselves.

What these diverse cultures share is that they were doing exactly what mages do, negotiating with reality, communing with forces beyond the mundane, tending the relationship between their communities and the spirit world long before the Council of Nine ever existed.

The proto-dreamspeakers, whatever their particular heritage, understood that the world is more than what you can see and touch.

There is a living, active dimension underneath and around and through everything, populated by beings with their own agendas.

And the role of the spirit practitioner is to keep that relationship balanced.

Give something back for what you take.

The dream speakers came through the colonial era and rise of the technocracy with real severe losses.

Their worldview is precisely what the rational materialist consensus was designed to stamp out.

Even the label shamanism itself was part of that.

It flattened every one of those practices into the same primitive stereotype, no matter which culture they came from.

But the worst betrayal didn't come from the technocracy at all.