Everyone who knows me knows that I love October – I’m a Halloween fan. Samhain’s my favorite Wheel of the Year holiday, and overall I feel in a better mood during the autumn, because the world celebrates the different, the misunderstood, and the unusual. As I look forward to next month’s arrival, when I can enjoy shorter and shorter days and longer and longer nights, my mind wanders to far corners, like the dark streets where Michelena’s Chained Man strolls.
Looking over a vista of clouds, valleys, and mountains in Tachira, Venezuela [LuisG67, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
An Eye for an Eye
The story of this specter is known in the Michelena municipality, part of the Táchira state, recognized for its many legends. This tells us about a man named José who lived in 1925; he was good-looking and in love. Although he had a girlfriend named María Eugenia, everyone knew that José was unfaithful to her with various women.
The girl’s father, tired of gossip, and probably also feeling shame, decided to settle their accounts. He chased him at night with a club, beat him to death, and asked that the body be left somewhere without ensuring that it would be given a proper burial. This is when everything gets twisted, because José found no rest.
After several days, while the girl’s father returned late to his house, he had to go through the front of a cemetery. He remembered his crime and felt a chill run through his body, but kept walking without caring about anything. Later, the spirit of the man appeared to him, telling him that he should pay for his actions.
As soon as he arrived at his home, the man collapsed in terror without anyone understanding anything about what had happened. It is said that he eventually went mad before he died, and although there is no explanation, it is said that it was the same spirit that took his life in revenge. However, as the years passed, there were many testimonies from citizens of the city about a ghostly figure dressed in a black robe, glowing eyes, and long chains that hung from his arms, crawling through the streets of Michelena.
It is said that this figure continues to appear today on the main streets of the town, supposedly from the cemetery to the Santa Rosa neighborhood, during the anniversary of José’s death.
A pile of rusty chains [shuraki, Pixabay]
Bitter Lessons
I couldn’t help but think of the famous, and sometimes hated, “Rule of Three” in Wicca, almost always taken as a universal law that says “everything you do comes back to you threefold.” Many Pagans and witches have very established opinions regarding this concept, but it strikes me that in Venezuela there is also a very similar popular saying: “He who works well, he does well.”
For me, it is illogical to expect good things to happen if we are always looking for problems, facing others without a basis, provoking discord, arguments, distributing hatred, and sowing fury. The same applies if we work honestly, with humility, helping others, and trying to carry everything in peace – that is, to be loving and respectable people.
This doesn’t mean that there will be no exceptions to the rule at all, because nobody has a perfect life, but I don’t agree that the ends justify the means. I’m a healer first and foremost, and I accept the fact that there are horrible events in the world. Fanaticism, racism, misogyny, perversion, murder, and whatever form of hatred there may be, that all exists today, but there are also those of us who work to end all this.
Michelena’s Chained Man is a story that tells us about the consequences of resentment, hatred, of becoming a judge and executioner carried away by anger. This is a powerful feeling: being angry can be the fuel necessary to perform certain works, to train and drain everything that has happened during the day, but it is also a double-edged sword.
I have lost count of the times when I got carried away, lost my temper, and just acted without thinking, but there’s a memory that I keep reliving that makes me feel bad every time it comes back to my head. It was a reaction typical of a spoiled child, but done by a teenage boy about to finish high school.
It is not a secret to anyone that my grandmother is sacred to me, that she’s a very important person, and that she has taught me too much in this life. However, she is a person who, because of her upbringing, has a way of thinking very different from mine and who often doesn’t understand me or doesn’t support some decisions.
Once, I was reading in the bedroom while she was in the living room, and she has never been a lover of reading. She does support that a person should study, train, be better and better and acquire more knowledge, but that one of her grandchildren prefers to stay at home reading instead of going out to talk and play since he was a child is something she had a hard time accepting.
I don’t remember what I was reading on that occasion, but I do remember that she said to me, as many times before, “Is the Bible good?” It’s a joke that always annoyed me a bit, but that I know she does in good faith and because she wants the best for me. However, that time I just looked at her and said nothing, and kept reading. I only managed to see that her smile faded.
It may seem insignificant to many, but that I would do that to a woman who has given everything for love without ever expecting anything in return seems unthinkable to me. It’s a chain that I still can’t break free from, but it’s also a reminder to be polite and kind no matter what. It’s my lesson that unbridled anger creates bitter memories.
I can only think about all the atrocities that could have been avoided if people thought a bit more about consequences, about what will happen to others, to family, friends, those we don’t know yet, those we may never get to know. Like the father, we often forget we are only humans.
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