The Anagnorisaurus
He's got your back...and your front, and your sides...
The phenomena are not to be tamed by mere logic and rationality, and attempts to do so are doomed to failure.”
—George P. Hansen, in “The Trickster and the Paranormal”
I’ve always been a magical thinker—had odd experiences and kept odd little cherished beliefs that don’t make rational sense—and it’s worked for me fairly well, as long as I remember that the most important thing is to maintain functional contact with consensus reality. It doesn’t actually matter much what you believe, as long as you can obtain food and shelter for yourself, and you’ve got friends you love and who love you back.
Several years ago when I went through a particularly tight spot with my health, part of my recovery involved doing quite a bit of shamanic work. My practitioner was a dude of German ancestry originally from Wisconsin, who started work under Alberto Villoldo and then drifted away from the Four Winds lineage to do things his own way. He helped me a great deal with the psychospiritual aspect of the Great Healing I had to undertake.
As part of this, I finally received a framework for the “vision” stuff I’d been doing instinctually my whole life anyway. I learned to take my imagination a little more seriously, and to make sure that I kept my own agenda and safety in mind. Yeah, safety—ideas are powerful. Just because they don’t have physical form doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you. Anything that makes you afraid can literally hurt your body, overclocking your cortisol, denying you rest…it’s a whole thing.
So any of the apparent entities that would drift up to me in dreams, or in waking life vision work—I learned to, basically, interview them as if they were candidates for a job. You never want to just trust that everything’s going to work out. What is this dude actually like? What are his motivations? Is he a good fit for, for lack of a better term, my psychospiritual corporate structure?
Enter the Anagnorisaurus. That wasn’t his original name, and this wasn’t his original form. I recognized him as an intermittent but consistent presence in my mind at least since adolescence*. Finally I decided to ask him who he was, what he wanted, and what I could do for him. A lot of the time these noncorporeal guys just want some kind of help. My job is to figure out what kind, and to do it if I have the time and if they’ve got a baseline level of ethics I can vibe with. The decision is mine. If they’re not at least somewhat ruly, they can go bug someone else.
The A-saurus needed to see better, so we collaborated on creating this form for him, and coming up with this name. In return he took over the duty of hypervigilance I’d been saddled with ever since I was a kid. Some part of me could relax, because the A-saurus was always paying attention, and I could trust he’d let me know if there was something I had to attend to.
Getting the tattoo was part of the contract…taking a photo of a tattoo on your own back, not so easy…
His name is a nod to the Greek concept of anagnorisis, which is that point in a narrative where the main character finally sees what’s been going on and the mystery is solved:
The A-saurus can see around corners, and into other dimensions, and into the past and the future at the same time. He’s got your six, and your three, and your nine, and all the other numbers on the clock face. Plus he looks fucking badass on a tee shirt or hoodie!
*Was he part of my psyche just trying to keep me safe, or was he an actual entity in his own right? It doesn’t actually matter. What’s functional is, he turned up consistently, and I could develop a useful and mutually beneficial relationship with him. Don’t overthink this shit. What works, works.