"The Wanderer," Part 3

Initiation rituals are concerned with the crossing of boundaries such as those between boyhood and manhood or the unmarried and the married state. From an anthropological point of view, they can be seen to lie in the broader category of rites of passage, which includes the rituals associated with birth and death and also with the crossing of boundaries in space and time, for example from one territory to another or from one year to another.

Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past

"Turning and Turning ... the Widening Gyre ..."

How to find a real falcon? In the middle of London? A daunting task. So I was quite astonished to discover an advert for live falcons, in a trashy magazine called Exchange and Mart. Some guy in Dalston in the East End of London was selling some falcons newly arrived from India. I remember it clearly to this day, going into this decrepit, dilapidated old house and being taken down into the basement. Another basement. ... There, on high wooden perches in dark, dingy rooms, were the falcons. It was a moment of ecstasy. I had never imagined that the birds could be so utterly beautiful. When I asked if they could be trained for falconry, he promptly invited me to watch him flying a falcon on some nearby playing fields. I will never forget the moment the bird opened its wings and took off from his wrist. It seemed to me at that moment, to be the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my life.

From that moment onwards, until 1991, falcons were the essence of my life, the sacred central meaning of my existence. I lived as a falcon, breathed as a falcon, copulated as a falcon, bred falcons in all kinds of difficult conditions, travelled to remote and dangerous mountain and desert regions, brought their eggs back thousands of miles on my stomach, sometimes even hatching them there. Without fully being conscious of it, I was gradually being drawn more and more into the realm of the Mysteries of Isis.

The very first falcon I bought that day was a small red-headed Merlin from India. This was in 1969, soon after I had finished The Fall. I named the bird Aten, which was the name Akhenaten gave to the sun's disc. This was only the beginning. I had yet to learn the complexities of the art and craft of falconry. There was nothing spiritual about that. It was about learning how to communicate with a once wild living creature and to develop a harmony between us. It was a delicate process which might well be considered "of a spiritual quality." The development of this kind of relationship with a living falcon is a fragile, fascinating experience, and no one documented it so accurately as T. H. White in The Goshawk (1951), a painfully authentic description of the gruelling process by which you create the necessary, working relationship between man and a trained bird of prey. Taken from the wild.

My life with the falcons spanned the next twenty years. I breathed falcons every minute of every day. I lived with them, I slept with them in my bedroom, I risked my life for them in the wild, in extreme conditions, time and time again. I went to some of the most remote and dangerous places in the world, politically and physically. I walked across glaciers, lived and slept in cars in temperatures of minus fifty Fahrenheit. One year I captured falcons in Alaska as late as December. No sun, just two hours of dusk. I taught myself to climb rocks in Morocco because I needed to scale cliffs to retrieve live eggs from nests. But these were huge desert cliffs which my climbing teacher—a friend I'd taken along who had climbed Everest—refused to climb with me, calling it "vertical mud. Suicide!" The cliffs were indeed really dangerous as there was literally nothing solid to cling to. The Arctic is also a dangerous place, at all times, but I had to go there at the absolutely worst time of year, when the birds laid...