I would like to start by giving a big shout out to the organizer of this contest who is @jerrybanfield for giving us an opportunity to share our stories.
Mine is a very personal one that I would like to call "Traditions and Myths". It is an experience that led to my supernatural awakening and brought me closer to nature.
My Supernatural Awakening (Traditions and Myths).
I grew up the in the bustling City of Lagos which is nicknamed the city that never sleeps. My childhood was that of a typical urban child and I never had the opportunity of going to the either of my parents village. My dad was a lawyer, an affirmed traditionalist, who taught us not to believe in any modern religion.
My mother was a lecturer who also shared similar beliefs so I would say that my family had no affinity to contemporary religions like Christianity or Islam.
We spent our Sundays in the family library reading leisure books.
Dad would gather us in the parlour on some of those evenings and tell us stories.
Sometimes he told us of how the British came and destroyed our shrines and took away our idols which they kept in their museums, where they made money from the tourists who travelled from all across the world to see it. He would also add how our Chiefs and Igwes were brainwashed into allowing them exploit the sacred objects against the advice of the native doctors; and how developed our people had been before colonization. He spoke about our very sophisticated and functional markets and how our gods meted justice immediately and made people to be careful of what they did.
The stories my father told us were fascinating, but it contradicted with what I was taught in school during the Christian religious studies classes. I was taught there that there was only one true God, who ruled over all earth and that all other gods were mere lifeless creations of man.
I never told my father these, but they left me confused and wondering if there was any truth in all his stories about the gods and deities of our forefathers.
Sometime after I had completed highschool, I was opportune to travel to my Dad's hometown and that was where I was able to witness firsthand the "power of our gods" that dad has always talked about.
I was coming back from the stream with my mother, as she had insisted she would take on a tour around the village when we ran into a group of people gathered around the market square. We went closer to see the reason for the commotion and on getting there, we saw a man lying on the ground. He obviously struggling to breathe and his abdomen was bloated.
Everyone present was trying to guess what the cause of the strange illness was, but none of the them seemed to be confident enough to speak. After a while an old woman spoke.
He must have killed one of our Sacred python she said.
Everyone nodded with sadness and pity in their eyes.
Later that night My father told us why it was a taboo to kill any of the pythons in the village.
He said that myth had it that, the pythons helped to defeat our enemies during a war that happened a long time ago. The story said they would lay in the bush at night to attack and strangle our enemies who were planning to strike at the break of dawn.
To me everything sounded like one big fairytale but the man I saw at the market made a strong point for his story.
Out of curiosity I asked my mother were I could find that man that we saw at the market square and she told me that he must have been taking to the Kings palace.
I went there in the morning to confirm for myself what had actually happened to the man but on reaching the palace I did not see any sign of him.
I made an enquiry and I was instructed to wait for the King.
The palace clerk told me that ordinarily I would have not been able to see the king with out an appointment, but because I came to learn about something that related to our custom and beliefs that he wouldn't mind seeing me that day.
The king came out after a long wait and I was invited into his palace to see him.
He talked to me like a father and he was nothing I had imagined him to be. He was kind and nice, and he explained everything I asked him.
He told me that the man that was inflicted with that disease was a husband to one of the daughters of the land. He had come back to the village and had killed and cooked a Python against advice from his wife and friends.
He came down with the illness the next day and had since been struggling not to give up the ghost.
I asked if there was anything that could be done to save him and the King said that he had to give the python a proper burial before seven days or else he would die
The king called the chief priest who took me to go and see the man and I had a chance to talk with him. He confirmed the king's story and said that he had learned his lesson.
This meeting with him was a turning point for me. It made me come to see that there were really powers that we didn't know about and that not believing in them did not make them any less potent. I became spiritually aware that some of these myths I had heard were truly founded on strong evidence.
I didn't stay long enough in the village to witness the burial of the python but I heard from my mother that it went well. And as funny as it sounds, people actually came out to bury the python the way they would have buried a human.
All these were fascinating and educative at the same time and it has taught me to respect the traditions of any community I find myself in.
I am now aware that we are part of a bigger puzzle and that everything that happens has a way of fitting us in to the right place if only we are willing enough to listen.
We all have that other people might not agree with but it does not mean that it is not valid and it should not in any way deter us from obeying the traditions of the land we find ourselves in.
I am really glad for being able to share my experience with you.
To that wonderful steemian in the name of @michelbkk doing the curation of these posts, I say a big Thank you.
Thank you once again @jerrybanfield for hosting this wonderful contest. You are doing a great job of connecting steemians on this platform.