"Spiritwalker" by Hank Wesselman. A brief review.

I recently had the pleasure of finishing a rather odd book titled “Spiritwalker”, written by Hank Wesselman. It’s odd not only because it’s a unique twist on a common genre, but because it is ambiguous as to whether it is Fiction pretending to be Fact, or Fact pretending to be Fiction.

“Spiritwalker” is essentially a member of that classic genre of book loved by the “Spiritual, New ager” type, the story of a scientist exploring and then affirming the spiritual realms after having experiences they can’t explain away with contrived materialist theories. In particular this book is the story of how Hank Wesselman, an anthropologist, was led to follow the path of Hawaiian “Kahuna” mysticism after years of sporadic visionary experiences in which he both encounters various spiritual beings, and more interestingly witnesses and “Lives” the life of a Hawaiian Clerk and soon to be budding Shaman…who lives 5000 years in a post-industrial future.

To be more precise, a future in which sea levels are much higher, society is largely neolithic in technology with the sole exception of possessing books and some metallurgy mostly limited to “soft’’ metals like copper, and a civilisation based in Hawaii has colonised much of America’s West coast.

It is this odd detail that makes this book stand out from the others in its genre. The fact that Hank receives spiritual visions about the life of a future man separates it from the standard script of shamanic visions, which usually involve meeting spiritual beings or people from the present, or the past, or some dimension beyond time itself. This oddity makes you wonder how genuine the book is, at least from the perspective of someone used to the standard scripts of spiritual encounters.

It is perhaps suspicious that the only books I am aware of that come close to the central theme of “Spiritwalker”, that of a man receiving visions and thoughts from a person who lives far into the future, are two works of fiction by the 20th century sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon.

These novels, “Last and first men” and in particular its sequel “Last men in London”, both feature a man in the present that has been given information about the history, society and philosophy of humanity many millions of years in the future via the telepathic communication across time by one of these future-men. Because of this it’s admittedly possible that Hank may have read or been vaguely familiar with these novels, thus inspiring him to write this Kahuna-themed parody. However, there is a subtle difference between the novels of Olaf and this book of Hank’s.

In the book of the former, it is the man from the future, with superior spiritual and mental attributes, who via a time-travelling telepathy makes contact with the author/narrator and deliberately tells him about his world. But in the latter the contact between Hank and Nainoa, who are equally spiritually and mentally endowed, is entirely mediated by some otherworldly/spiritual being(s) and consists of “living through” the other person, experiencing the world through their mind and body and can happen both ways, while it begins with Hank “Living through” Nainoa eventually Nainoa gets too “Live through” Hank, learning valuable lessons about what is for him a great and mysterious ancient civilisation.

Anyhow, I should probably go into a bit more detail about the plot of this book, a general synopsis of what happens in it. It begins with a brief explanation of Hank’s life, such as how he is an Anthropologist who lives in Hawaii with his pregnant wife in the early 1980’s, who then sporadically gets a vision of a “shadow being” after falling asleep one night. every now and again these visions occur until they change in character, becoming an OBE of the previously mentioned Nainoa.

Nainoa has been asked by the chief of the future-Hawaiian society he lives in to travel beyond the west coast of America, on a mission to find the legendary creature known as a “horse”, and if possible, discover if any descendants of the ancient American civilisation have survived. Nainoa leaves just as his town is sacked by some people from the southern parts of his land who are fighting a civil war. He eventually gets to the West coast, then travels east despite much hardship right up until he gets mauled by a bull. Luckily, he is saved by the future descendants of the Inuit called the “Ennu”, who left the arctic generations ago after it got flooded by climate change. He then becomes part of the tribe, not only marrying one of the women but training as a shaman under the tutelage of an old Ennu shaman named (I kid you not) William.

At the same time Hank also describes how his life changes both from the consequences of his visions and his new family life in Hawaii. Throughout the book the anthropologist side of him shines as he not only talks about his experience of trying to understand the future cultures he sees, but also his studies of shamanism and Kahuna mysticism that he feels compelled to undertake in order to understand his spiritual experiences. He actually goes into some depth explaining some of the metaphysical theories and terminology of Kahuna thought, revealing it to be just as intricate as anything in Kabbalah or Taoism.

Aside from the novelty of shamanic visions of the future and explanations of the much-neglected spiritual philosophy of Hawaii, another interesting aspect of this book, or rather its author, is that you feel the same difficulty of judging Hank as you would judging someone who claims to have seen UFOs or been abducted by aliens, “Did they really see something or are they lying?”

I should be clear that I am not talking about whether Hank “Really” received a genuine vision of the future, but more whether he truly experienced something that for whatever reason convinced him that this was the case, or whether he copied what Carlos Castenada did and used his knowledge of anthropology to craft a fiction convincing enough to fool, or at least entertain, the vast majority of people who enjoy books from the “New age/Spirituality” section of a bookstore. I personally like to think he is being honest, as I am not a cynic, but I find it doubtful that one can truly see into the far-future since the world is too non-deterministic for such a thing to be feasible except in very broad, physics-based statements such as “The earth will eventually be burned up by the expanding sun.”

To finish off my first book review, I have found “Spiritwalker” to be a decent read for anyone with a taste for new-age spirituality of an intellectual bent, and also for somewhat new-age “Soft” science fiction. It would also be an interesting book for fans of De-industrial science fiction, since it’s not only set in a de-industrial future but describes Hank’s grappling with the “fact” that the future he is shown is entirely bereft of Hi-tech, becoming aware of how fragile the Industrial world truly is. I have only one serious quibble with his De-industrial world-building though.

He says that the reason for the rarity of steel and iron in the future is because it gradually rusted away, leaving mostly metals such as copper and aluminum for people to work with. This makes little sense as rust is in fact a brilliant “ore” for smelting iron. That being said, it requires more heat, and therefore more fuel, to smelt iron compared to metals such as copper or aluminum. So perhaps fuel economy could be the “real” explanation, but even then, history belies this idea since iron has been such a common material way before our “Hi-tech” age. Aside from this blunder the rest of the World-building is quite plausible to me.

I should probably now mention to anyone intrigued enough to buy a copy that there is no E-book edition of this work, and furthermore most of Hank’s books are only available as paperbacks.