Táltos

My Táltos drum was made by Attila Heffner in Hungary.

I was born when the sun was in Sagittarius (half horse/human). I would have nightmares that were just the sound of hooves running fast. My nagymama Matild Czigany (A horse gypsy of Lake Balaton who had prophetic dreams, wove carpets and tapestries, played violin and kept a goat herd), told my mother to strap me to a board as I had an extra vertebrae like my father. The doctor’s thought I had mild scoliosis due to my long curved tailbone. When I was in primary school I thought I could fly and would jump up and sit on tall fences to prove to my friends I could. I had regular flying dreams where I would lie face down and vibrate then float.

At age 7 I fell from the top bunk bashing my ribs on the corner of the dresser and crawled to my parent’s room bleeding from the wound in my side. This side pain has returned. When I was little, an African girl would smother me and give me tiny fetishes. I would bite a black one for bad luck. My Magyar father’s strange taxidermy and drumming practices enthralled me. He called me his shadow as I followed him everywhere watching him pin butterflies and skin animals. I would crawl in the bird pens and commune with them for hours until my mother called me. To fall asleep, I would bang my head rhythmically on my pillow until I began drumming at age 13.

As a young adult, extreme mood swings led to fits where I was consumed by the suffering of nature at the hands of humanity. At this time a man came to my door and told me I had seven angels attached to my body, he said most people have one or two. Continued flying dreams began to feature a snake-like staff that vibrated above my body to make me rise. I would always fly straight up and then fall. Before I travelled to Arnhem Land I had a prophetic dream where I flew over the stone country escarpment. I am plagued by a sense of failure (hiba). Am I a fallen one (half táltos)? Now my ankle is torn from drumming, dancing and running. I cannot walk, I am falling into hiba.

“In Hun­garian tra­di­tional folk be­lief, táltos is a me­di­ator between the world of the liv­ing and that of the dead, but he may have had nu­mer­ous other roles in the folk be­lief gradu­ally chan­ging over the cen­tur­ies. The fig­ure of the táltos is in­her­ited from the sham­an­istic world­view, however, today he only has a pos­it­ive role. The táltos is char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally born with an ad­di­tional bone, for ex­ample an ex­tra tooth or six fin­gers [like my young niece – also a gifted artist]. However, this fact must be kept secret. In sev­eral places it was held that not long after his birth the táltos can speak, but the par­ents are not at liberty to re­veal it.”

“If all his un­con­ven­tional char­ac­ter­ist­ics are suc­cess­fully kept secret, at the age of seven the ghosts come for him and tor­ture him. At this time he falls ill, or goes hid­ing for three days, and gets rap­tured and goes into a trance. When he re­turns, he is able to give ac­count of what he saw in the oth­er­world, where he saw the dead and was taught. The táltos has a sky-high tree and pre­dicts the fu­ture hav­ing climbed on it. The es­sence of the táltos’s activ­ity is con­tact­ing the oth­er­world in or­der to ful­fil as­sign­ments to the be­ne­fit of his com­munity. Ac­cord­ing to the le­gends, some­times he hides and in the form of a bull, he fights an­other táltos. The fight is usu­ally over weather, ac­com­pan­ied by thun­der­storm, wind or hail. Thus the aim of the táltos’s struggle is to in­flu­ence weather for the be­ne­fit of his own com­munity.” (Ipolyi, 1990, pp. 14-17; Pócs, 1990, pp. 583-585; Diószegi, 1967)

According to Mircea Eliade “The Hungarian shaman (táltos) ‘could jump up in a willow tree and sit on a branch that would have been too weak for a bird’…Miraculous speed is one of the characteristics of the táltos… ‘put a reed between his legs and galloped away and was there before a man on horseback.’ All these beliefs, images, and symbols in relation to the ‘flight’, the ‘riding’, or the ‘speed’ of shamans are figurative expressions for ecstasy, that is, for mystical journeys undertaken by superhuman means and in regions inaccessible to mankind… A Hungarian táltos ‘had a stick or post before his hut and perched on the stick was a bird. He sent the bird wherever he would have to go… aggressive mania… is peculiar to… the Hungarian táltos. What is fundamental and universal is the shaman’s struggle against what we could call ‘the powers of evil’… the shaman has been able to contribute decisively to the knowledge of death. Many features of ‘funerary geography’ as well as some themes of the mythology of death, are the result of the ecstatic experiences of shamans.”