As October ends in the Philippines, 'most everything grinds to a halt as folks honor their forebears by visiting cemeteries all around the country. All Soul's Day is a huge occasion, probably the second most intense holiday celebration after the endless yuletide season.

My family is no exception, and the last few years I have dutifully trooped off with the clan to Manila Memorial Park to encamp on, in, and around the family resting place. "Encamp" is a fairly accurate term, although it fails to capture the aura of simultaneous celebration, reminiscence, reunion, and closing the circle that pervades the air. The crowds are heavy and it takes an hour to work your way through the traffic from the gate off a busy thoroughfare to the family plot. Picture families carrying poles and tarps, coolers, barbeques, boom boxes, blankets, candles, cakes, and fruits. Once ensconced, plan on staying a spell, as leaving is impractical given the rock festival-like density of the crowd. And keep your fingers crossed that God will hold off on the next big earthquake for a while.

Last night, in preparation for the occasion, I spent some quality time under the 'phones with old friend Robert Johnson, an itinerant African American bluesman who died at age 26 in 1938 after being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend whose woman he had trifled with, not long after recording 30 some songs in a San Antonio hotel room. Those songs, which had a major impact on the blues (Muddy Waters in particular) and rock and roll (Clapton and the Stones being at the forefront of the cultural crossover), featured brilliant guitar work (the turnaround chord ending on the dominant seventh instead of the tonic, the boogie woogie walking bass line adapted and expanded from Charlie Patton) and an emotionally intense delivery, songs like:

Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door,
Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door,
I said, "Hello Satan, I believe it's time to go."

You can bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side,
You can bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side,
So my ole evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.

Johnson's music provides perfect preparation for graveyard meditation and sets the mood for revisiting the darkest corners of the primeval mud in the form of hellhounds on the trail and a pitch dark vision of a black man sitting alone at the junction of two lonely country roads roundabout midnight somewhere in the desolate Mississippi Delta 70 years ago.

To understand the deep blues, a good place to start is with the metaphor of the crossroads. Back in the Great Depression, the Mississippi Delta crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 8 could be a real scary place, especially if you happened to be a penniless African American fellow trying to thumb a ride as dusk settled in. The traveler on foot, horseback, or buggy was vulnerable indeed, looking anxiously over his shoulder as images of strange fruit hanging limply in the evening air permeated his mind.

Going back further, one finds references to the mystical power of the crossroads in the folklore of India, Greece, Japan, and the Native American traditions. The crossroads at midnight was a place for demons, spirits, ghosts, fairies, and evil witches to act out their rituals, make their sacrifices, and commune with the netherworld. Bringing the thread to the present, one might even draw a parallel to the baby boomer at the midlife crossroads, a point at which crucial decisions have to be made and where taking the wrong road can lead to damnation. Crossroads symbolize the boundary between known and unknown, light and dark, past and future, and for that matter heaven and hell.

Robert Johnson's journey to the crossroads started when he was a poor kid who didn't want to work in the cotton fields like the other sharecroppers' kids. His daddy didn't much care for the way he shunned manual labor, but Robert was stubborn and single-minded in his pursuit of more amenable options. He soon took to sneaking off to the local juke joints around Robinsonville, sitting at the feet of Son House, Charlie Patton, and Willie Brown, learning the blues as best he could.

When local musicians weren't playing, they swapped tales. One of those stories was about Tommy Johnson, a bluesman from the '20s who had gone to great lengths to nurture his magical image. When asked how he had learned to play the blues so well, he would brag about having met the devil at a lonely crossroads at midnight. Legend had it that, if you sat down in the middle of one of those crossroads a bit before midnight, the devil himself would soon come striding out to greet you. Tommy Johnson had encountered just such a figure, a tall ebony chap who suddenly appeared out of the murky night to tune Tommy's guitar and play a piece or two. After he handed the instrument back, Tommy could play and sing the damndest blues you'd ever want to hear.

Although Robert was thrilled by the music he heard and was suitably impressed with the lore, if truth be told he wasn't much of a musician, just a fair to middlin' mouth harp player and a mediocre guitar player. He yearned desperately to play like his heroes, and made a nuisance of himself by always insisting on playing the guitar despite his poor chops, always a bit out of tune and rhythm, by no means up to the standards of the proficient bluesmen in that part of the delta. Son House constantly scolded him, telling him to stick to the harmonica and quit wasting his time on something for which he clearly was not cut out.

At some point Robert left the northern Delta, headed south, and no one saw hide nor tail of him for a year or so. When he finally showed up again he was a masterful bluesman, weaving tales of existential dread and worldly woe, songs like:

I got to keep moving
I've got to keep movin
Blues fallin' down like hail
Blues fallin' down like hail

Some said he had sought the help of a Root Doctor, a hoodoo medicine man from deep in the bayous of Louisiana. Indeed, given the various and sundry references to mojo bags and such in his songs, it is quite possible Johnson had used such services. But most of the folks in the delta who heard Robert play like the dickens after he returned figured his virtuosity had been acquired at some lonely crossroads smack dab in the middle of the night.

Who exactly was the tall black man that Tommy Johnson had given so much credit to? His origins lie in the West African traditions of his (and Robert's) ancestors, a cosmology centering around the orisha, deities much more colorful and magical than their counterparts in Roman or Greek mythology. The character in question was known as Eshu-Elegbara(Eshu for short) among the Yoruba and Legba among the Fon. Legba, simultaneously a Trickster and the god of communication and spiritual language, played an integral part in the belief system shared by West Africans exiled to slave life in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and the Southern states. In transplanted cultural context, Legba was usually portrayed as wearing tatters as he made his rounds looking for fools to take advantage of. Those who messed with him often ended up being possessed, and Legba soon came to be equated with Satan. When Robert Johnson said he had met the devil, he was almost certainly referring to Legba.

Throughout human history, the trickster has been associated with animal spirits or Promethean figures - the Coyote among the Lakota, Br'er Rabbit on the Plantation, Bugs Bunny or Wily Coyote in cartoons. The trickster symbolizes deceit, humor, lawlessness, and both overt and subtle sexuality. Legba's emphasis on trickery made him the ideal orisha for slaves, symbolizing revenge against their white owners. Over time, his more malevolent aspects came to be emphasized - and appreciated - at least when those powers were turned against the white man.

In Jungian psychology, the trickster archetype is related to the process of enantiodromia through which, sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite. Shadow becomes the hero, hero becomes the shadow (a theme elaborated throughout his career by Joseph Campbell), the Hindu Shiva simultaneously cosmic creator and destroyer, trickster become redeemer, yin become yang. In West African tradition, people directly access their archetypal energies, essentially constellations of powerful images and psychic forces, the master drummer playing highly complex polyrhythms, entering a trance and triggering a state of spirit possession among the rapt audience.

The improvisational nature of Johnson's music and the sheer audacity of his lifestyle represent fundamental expressions of personal freedom in the face of severe social and economic oppression. Some are called to the gospel, others are called to the blues; some are filled with the Holy Ghost in church and live contentedly in expectation of a better life ahead, others meet Legba at desolate crossroads in the middle of the night. Robert Johnson and his compatriots gave voice to the absurdities of black life in an intimidating and oppressive world, helping create a liberating catharsis for the poor folks in the clapboard juke joints on Saturday night. In a world dominated by smoke hanging thick in the air, moonshine filling the tub, and syncopated liberation, their artistry and inspiration were powerful means of psychological survival and affirmation for a lost and alienated people facing an absurd and unforgiving future.

I can tell the wind is risin',
'Leaves trembling on the tree.
Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm

I can tell the wind is risin',
'Leaves trembling on the tree.
Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm

The Philippines also has its trickster images. This country has always been big on supernatural phenomena, and stories of magic, surreal entities, and strange happenings abound in Filipino culture. Every area of the country has its own healers and sorcerers (I've been to a few myself, but that's another story).

Filipino folklore shares many traditions with Indonesia and Cambodia, a reality that belies the stereotype that the Philippines is completely different than its Southeast Asian neighbors. These supernatural belief systems are mostly pre-Christian, and feature bargaining and exchange relationships with supernatural beings. Filipino cosmology features ready explanations for crises that occur because of nature (floods, volcanoes, earthquakes) or society (sorcery, war). However, when events occur that are irrational or don't fit neatly into the accepted cosmology, traditional (and for that matter modern) Filipinos often explain things in terms of one of their own Trickster figures - the dreaded aswang.

An aswang can take the form of a dog, pig, horse, or carabao, although most commonly he/she/it is a beautiful girl by day. But at night, the aswang transforms into one of several types of creatures, with corpse-eaters and bloodsuckers being the worst. At night, the beautiful (and perhaps betrayed) wife/bloodsucker transforms herself, using her hollow, needle-pointed tongue to stab her unsuspecting husband in the neck while hugging him, then sucking out his blood until he dies. (Sounds a bit like my wife in one of her every-five-year jealous rages, although I refuse to believe she is a true aswang). Self-segmenters, another type of aswang, feast on unborn babies, which they can smell from a mile away. The self-segmenter (also a beautiful lass by day) discards her arms and legs, leaves her lower body in a closet (or perhaps in bed), and takes flight through the dark night. She lands on the roof of the unsuspecting victim, an expectant mother, then lowers her tongue down through the shingles. She finds her way into the victim's body through the eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, navel, anus or genitals. (Practical tips: (a) If you're ever walking at night and see a strand of a cobweb hanging down from a tree, get the heck away from there, it might be an aswang's tongue; and (b) Don't sleep with your belly exposed lest an aswang steal your intestines while you're dreaming).

To find a link back to the West African traditions and the experiences of Robert Johnson's people, note that the terms Santero/Santeria, often used to describe some of the the voodoo practices in the American South (particularly in New Orleans), were coined right here in the Philippines during the Spanish era. The reference point was Philippine woodcarvers who produced wooden carvings of Catholic saints; they carved them for devout Filipinos who couldn't afford the more expensive plaster statues imported from Spain. That tradition later found its way to Cuba and Puerto Rico, where those same arts were applied to create statues of African orisa priests and priestesses - including our friend Legba.

And the days keeps on worryin' me
There's a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trial

In a humble effort to bring this Spooky Pearl full circle, let me return to a lonely hilltop cemetery in Southern Indiana, a site of scenic beauty overlooking a placid lake, a lake that was originally a holler in which my dad was born in the first year of the Great Depression, a setting reminiscent at midnight, perhaps, of the eerie things that sometimes happen in the misty fog in the middle of a Delta crossroads.

That hilltop resting ground happens to be where my late, beloved brother Paul is spending eternity. He was buried there in a handmade wooden coffin wearing his 20-year old Marine Corps fatigues almost a decade ago, his floppy leather hunting cap on his chest and an ironic half-smile bidding final farewell to a world that had always treated him cruelly.

A long time ago in a universe far far away, when both of us were in the US military, Paul regularly visited me at my desert bungalow in the middle of the Nevada high desert. He would hitchhike up from Oceanside (near San Diego), or perhaps catch a Greyhound through the lonely night. One evening when he popped up unannounced, I was heavily involved with Robert Johnson, my battered LP of "King of the Delta Blues" revolving on the turntable for the zillionth time. It was a bit scratchy, but at high volume and in the correct state of mind, it did the job.

Paul got into the blues with me for a while, and I told him the crossroads story (although back then I suppose I lacked quite the armamentarium of academic claptrap that I am now burdened with). We spent an hour or so listening to Robert Johnson and Cream, comparing Clapton's Crossroads to the original Delta blues, and even listening sequentially to Johnson's original Love in Vain and the Stones' version from Let It Bleed a couple of times.

Before long, however, Paul got itchy for something more familiar, and the vinyl soundtrack soon switched to another type of blues, the white country blues of Hank Williams. Inevitably we returned to one of Paul's old favorites, a mournful item indeed:

Everything's agin me and it's got me down
If I jumped in the river I would probably drown
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive

I ain't gonna worry wrinkles in my brow
Cause nothing's ever gonna be alright nohow
No matter how I struggle and strive
I'll never get out of this world alive

I bet Robert Johnson would've understood.