Speaking with Victor Anderson
by Inni Baruch
On a recent trip to San Francisco I had the great fortune of
spending several days with Victor and Cora Anderson in their
home on the Barbary Coast. I had been introduced to Cora's book,
Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition, five or six years ago, through
my work fundraising for the Reclaiming Tradition Witchcamp in
the Mid-Atlantic. This wonderful week of working Between the
Worlds is now called the Spiralheart Witchcamp and it happens
in August of each year near Baltimore and Washington DC.
A linguist, as much as a Witch, Scientist, and Shaman, Victor
can talk for hours about the things of this world, and other
worlds that I do not see, where he travels frequently in the
It is on the nature of the human being that I am most interested,
and so the notes I have taken on his talks with me, relate mostly
to these questions.
This text is directly approved by Victor for publishing and
this is very important. While not yet an Initiate of Feri. I
deeply respect the work of my teachers Victor and Cora Anderson
and am grateful to bring this small capsule of their vast knowledge
to PNN readers.
After we spoke back and forth, and I scribed his words, Victor
asked me to give you this footnote for pronouncing the words
of his Hawaiian language.
The Hawaiian vowels are the same as those in many other languages.
They are "a" as in father; "e" as in they;
"i" as in police; "o" as in so; and "u"
as in zulu or the double "o" in moon. In the diphthongs
the first vowel is the one accented usually unless there's a
small dash over the last vowel. This mark is usually called
macron and indicates a stressed vowel.
FROM VICTOR: One of the things that I want understood about
the Spanish part of my heritage is that there are four racial
strains: Arabic, Jewish, Gypsy and Basque. Now, I use Basque
in a lot of my rituals. Like the prayer that starts Eko, Eko
Azarak..... which you can find in a lot of the books on Witchcraft.
There are two translations of that incantation. One of them
is cleverly woven together so that it tells the names of our
Gods, the other one tells about the festivals and their times
of the month and so forth. All of those words in there, tell
the names of the Gods but, at the same time they tell other
things too, that's the way the Basque language can be done.
For example Eko means "here is." And martillo is a
Basque word taken from the Spanish which means "press down
and go into" and it can also mean the first day of March;
in Spanish alone it means "hammer."
The Arabic part of my heritage that has come through Arabia
into Southern Spain, (one branch went to Sicilia) is of royal
origin, and it must be understood, with all of my national origins
I am directly related to the Feri People. I am not old fashioned,
I am very much of the new millennium. I spent my childhood in
close contact with the medicine people of Mexico, and the people
who ran away from the Nazis. These people took me to their heart.
They were the real old German Jewish Scientists, and I know
what I'm talking about.
There is a disgusting Streisfragen thing that happens when
you try to talk to people about some things. Streisfragen is
German and it means a controversial question or statement that
is used to end a discussion like the question "how do you
know?" This is like when they say, "everybody's got
to believe what they want to believe, you can't change people's
opinions, everybody's got a right to their own opinion."
This is B.S. Why bother to teach anything if everybody's got
their own opinion? An example would be I once told another person
that I had made the estimate at 186,300 miles per second for
the speed of light, the usual figure is simply 186,000. We know
by radar for example that light travels faster than 186,000
miles per second. When I finished my argument I was told that
"you have just as much right to your opinion as they have
to theirs, why don't you just write that as the speed of light."
That's ridiculous. We are all working on the velocity of "C"
which is the velocity of light. Trying to get it as exact as
possible, it's not just a matter of personal opinion.
I am a little P.O.'d at all the Pagan People. For example they
are taking these things like the Guardians of the Four Quarters,
and they're twisting up the meaning. The Guardians that come
to your circle are simply the Holy Ones that come to your circle,
the Gods, and the Spirits who are everywhere. They come and
join your circle and They invoke the great cosmic powers and
the great Gods.
It doesn't lessen the meaning or the importance of the great
Gods, but what they (the Guardians) are there for is invoking
the things that we cannot. They invoke the great Gods themselves,
just as we humans do, yet they are much older than us, and they
have more knowledge of these things.
We are free to invoke as they do because we are all of the
Great Spirit/Cosmic Conscious. It's just as if someone were
singing and you were joining along with the choir. These Gods
and Spirits are living parts of nature, they are beings like
We are supposed to advance because evolution is the natural
law. However, many people are making a mistake when speaking
about God. All that this word meant in the beginning is "that
which is to be reverenced and worshiped." It never meant
just one single dictator being.
Mana. This is the life force. It comes from us as living creatures.
Just to call it energy is not enough. It's got to be understood
as a definite thing, a definite substance.
Now this word is not only confined in the South Seas, it occurs
all over the world, even in the bible. It's supposed to have
another meaning in the bible, but it comes from the same word.
The mana that falls from the heavens actually comes down from
the personal God. We send the mana up to the God, and it sends
it back down to us. Sure, when we pray to our personal God,
we are not leaving out any of the great Gods. Each one of us
is a triune being. It's like tuning a guitar, and if we can
talk to each other, we can talk to the Gods; it is the same
For example if you're going to take a treatment with a sun
lamp, you don't get out of the sun to do it, that is you don't
deny the sun's existence. It isn't for nothing that it says
we're made in the image of God. We Kahuna know how to work with
all three parts of the soul separately and also together.
At this point I asked Victor: "Why would you work with
VICTOR: Because the soul can be afflicted, especially in cases
like extreme paranoia or split personality, and then they can
become separated, and that is the real origin of the doctrine
of losing your soul. These units who are separated are real
individual entities just like the atoms of a molecule that have
been broken up. The Unihipili can act much like a poltergeist.
It is always heavily charged with what we call emotion, and
has the memories of the person that it was attached to. I was
once called upon to find the two parts of a man killed in an
accident and put them back together. Now his Unihipili haunted
his wife and made sounds like dripping water, and caused her
to smell blood. It spoke like her husband, but without the reasoning
power that is usually associated with a fully conscious being.
When I prayed to his personal God, she found the two lower parts
and put them together. One night he appeared to his wife and
said "Francis I am all right now." The word "soul"
can mean all of the spirit, or it can mean the highest part
of it. This is even shown by some of the poetry of early Christianity.
The South Sea Islands were populated much later than the rest
of the world. This is because they were the last of the land
masses to be created. So those who came to inhabit them came
from many parts of the world, and brought the old wisdom with
them. It is now well known among Hawaiians and those like me
who are part Hawaiian, the three names for the three parts of
the soul, as we use the word "soul" in English. The
two lower parts are called, Kinowailua which means "body
of two waters." These two lower parts are: the Unihipili
which means "the sticky one." It is called that because
it imparts mana to everything you touch. For example when you
shake hands with a person the mana from the Unihipili forms
fine etheric threads connecting you with that person.
Kinomalamala, which means "body of light," is the
aura, especially the inner aura. The matter that forms it is
less dense than the matter of Unihipili, and more luminous.
The area around the body that is the Kinomalamala is egg shaped
and vaguely follows the outlines of the body as it surrounds
it, and the body that is Unihipili is about two centimeters
to one inch out from the physical body on all sides. Then above
the physical body and a part of the whole person, is the personal
God which is called Aumakua which means "I am" or
One of the Hawaiian words for the complete soul is Uhane. This
word means a conscious entity that can speak or make itself
known. Some of the early missionaries who were more willing
to understand Kahuna used the word Uhane for the Kinomalamala.
As did Max Freedom long many years later. One of the words for
a spirit that is speaking strongly as in a haunted place is
Uhanehane. "U" means a conscious entity, and "hane"
means to speak or make yourself known. So the word can be used
for the entire soul or one of its parts. In English the Kinomalamala
is usually called the middle self. We Kahuna object to the word
"self" as it is used here, because it implies that
these things are just aspects of your psychology, but really
they are much more.
The real Jesus as he existed before the corruption of Christianity,
said we should baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Holy
ghost. Since we are made in the divine image, the Aumakua is
your personal Holy ghost. The name "Father" does not
have to mean masculine. It means the action of the more logical
part of the soul on what we think of as the more emotional part,
and can therefore be man or woman. The High Spirit is feminine
in appearance and aspect over men and women both. But this spirit
can give masculine or male energy as needed, and is therefore
spoken of as Heavenly Father, as well as Heavenly Mother. The
word for the God Self is Neshama in Jewish. The other two are
called Nefesh and Ruakh. The last part is pronounced as the
German word "och." Although this outline is brief,
it is necessary to contemplate and realize as the true structure
of the human being. This is not just a theory invented by Hawaiians.
It's part of the knowledge of the ancient human race itself.
World Wide knowledge, no matter what other names are used.
People often ask me why I say I am Kahuna and then give other
names for what I do, such as Witch, Shaman, Medicine Man, and
so on. This is because the word "Kahuna" means the
same thing, but it also means, literally translated from Hawaiian;
"the Science, or the thing that you specialize in doing."
In Europe the Witch word for Unihipili is "Fetch."
Use your resources and look it up from there; these things should
be contemplated and researched. All real Witches are Scientists
as we were the first Doctors and Scientists to exist on the
planet, and we must always remember this.
Copyright © 2001 Inni Baruch. Reproduced here with
permission. This interview with Inni Baruch first appeared in
PagaNet News (PNN), in the Imbolg 2001 issue (Volume
VIII, Issue I). It was later reprinted in the Winter 2001 issue
of Connections Journal, a magazine published by CUUPS.