But late last night I recalled the story and made the connection: that whole creepy incident at The Wife Waiting Place at The New Yuangming Palace in Zhuhai more than a little resembled that hideous Christian Missionary-Man's story about Papuan New Guinea totem poles!
What happened was that, one night, well over a decade back, a bunch of us were out at an Italian Restaurant and our friend Fran brought along her new boyfriend, a smug self-righteous jerky-creep called John. My hackles rose on sight and I felt a deep, instant and visceral dislike.
Then, over dinner, as he talked, pontificating and prosing on and on, telling the most dreadful stories about his 'Christian Missionary' adventures, he made me so angry it took all my will-power to resist the urge to see how far I could plunge my fork into his large and hideously bobbing adam's apple.
Do you blame me? He was a Fundamentalist Christian who called his brand of the religion "Robust and Manly Christianity" with "none of this ridiculous love-one-another stuff!" which "patently doesn't work" and he traveled around the globe with a coven of other like-minded creeps to disrupt and destroy other 'pagan' religions. In the Himalayas, they broke up Buddhist funerals with abuse and violence, and chanted "Devil Worship! Devil Worship!" at Hindu ceremonies across India, and he had a story about personally ripping off a Native American shaman's medicine bag and throwing it into a fire, and lots of other stories about breaking into Hindu and Buddhist Temples around the world to 'liberate these pagans' from their religious icons.
"You destroy ancient religious artifacts!" I said, aghast, sickened and clutching my fork!
"No, of course not. I always sell them to antique dealers. This is how I fund my travels. It's God's work I'm doing, you know, and God provides!"
I was speechless, sitting there gasping, trying to get my breath. "You're a temple robber!" I hissed at him.
"Someone has to. You have no idea how evil these things are. Why, only last week I got a frightened phone call from the antique dealer in Sydney I sold my Papuan New Guinea totem poles to!" and then, with no idea that I was thinking my fork wasn't enough and I wanted a very large carving knife, he turns to the others. "Can you image it? He rang me in a panic asking if I could send these totem poles back to their owners because he said there was a nest of extra-terrestials living in them - those types of ETs he called 'Large Greys' - and they kept coming out of the totem poles and into his shop, all very angry and dangerous and he felt they wanted to be returned to their homes."
E.T. go home? Or else!
I loved that story mainly because ... well, totem poles in Papua New Guinea are called Tauvakas - in English, "spirit vessels" - which refers to how they are meant to house a particular type of spirit they call "A Tau"; a messenger spirit who looks exactly like ... that type of E.T. known as "Large Greys".
And here are people - fools and antique dealers - who don't know that and yet they are talking about what are so clearly Taus coming out of tauvakas.
Naturally, because Jerky-Creep was an ignorant and dangerous fool, I didn't tell him Taus aren't evil in the slightest; that they are simply spirits from The Unknowable and Indescribable Realm who are called out of the tauvakas by the village Bete or shaman for reasons of protection or to help and advise the village in times of trouble.
I know this because they have these spirit fellows all over the Pacific. Maybe even further afield. Sir Arthur Grimble, in his gorgeous book "A Pattern of Islands", talks about meeting one in the Gilbert and Ellis Islands, although he doesn't know what it is and simply describes it. And I once walked into an office in Australia and saw a painting of Taus sitting in a ring, and, very taken aback, asked about it, and it turned out the painting was by an Aboriginal woman who claimed to have seen this very scene as a child in Outback Australia and it had been bought by a Swedish woman who grew up in Indonesia and had seen that exact scene in a field near their house on Java when she was five. Strange, huh!
Do I believe Taus exist? Who knows! But I do know I wouldn't mess with even one of them, so good luck to the antique dealer who has a shopful of angry ones!
But to finish the John story, I ended up with terrible indigestion and decided that eating and hating weren't ever meant to go together, so told Fran I disliked him so much I'd be grateful if she arranged it so I never met him again, especially if it involved restaurants. And, luckily, Fran agreed with me and said she was fooled by the "Christian Missionary" moniker and had no idea what he was doing was anything like this and so she dumped him. Yayyy!
Oh, and shortly after this night over a decade back, that Australian Christian Missionary and his children were set alight in a village in India - remember that? - and I wondered back then if they were members of John's Coven and so richly deserved - no, maybe not, nobody does - being burned to death - or if John's Coven had so angered these righteous Hindus that they killed the next - maybe very decent 'love-one-another' types - Christian Missionaries who crossed their path. (Just found the story and, yes, he seems a very decent sort.)
And John himself was last seen, several months after this night, on the news, pontificating about some religious 'sect' developing in the countryside of New South Wales in Australia, prosing on and on about how they'd all made a suicide pact and were within days of "Going Jonestown" and the poor woman who ran the sect saying "But it isn't true. We're not.". However, John's drawing attention to this 'cult' brought in the media who then did big investigations and the 'sect' turned out to be some real estate scam and the woman running it turned out to be a well-known con artist, according to the papers, and John became somewhat of a hero ... and don't you just HATE it when things turn out well for really detestable people.
But this post is meant to be about connecting the dots, and can you see the connection between ... let's call it "The Strange Incident in Zhuhai" ... and John's story about tauvakas?
So what we may - MAY - have here is a statue of a goddess - only a reproduction, mind you ...
The Goddess Farty!
No, sorry, Lady Buddha.
... who could be a sort of Tauvaka, only not for Taus. That was definitely - 100% definitely - not a Tau I saw - sorry, may have seen - coming out of it.
Of course, the whole thing could just as well have been a strange trick of the light so, now I've remembered what was niggling away at me, why don't we all just leave this whole saga alone forever.
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