Elhoim Leafar - Part 1

Join us as we interview a wonderful person from Venezuela who brings some insight into South American Spiritualism. I learned A LOT!

Elhoim Leafar (NY) Author of 'Dream Witchery' (Llewellyn Books) is an astrologer, dowser, tarot reader, and urban spiritual worker from Amazonas, Venezuela. Elhoim was initiated into Traditional Venezuelan Spiritism.
www. Elhoimleafar.com
https://www.instagram.com/elhoimleafar/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Elhoim
• 4:30 Multi-Linguistic Book
• 8:26 Language & Culture
• 12:54 Dreams, Water, Ancestors
• 21:13 Remembering DNA, Culture, & History

Transcript

0:05

Anyway, hi, everybody. Granddaughter Crow here. And today we have a wonderful guest here on Belief, Being and Beyond. We have Elohim Leafer. Elohim. Elohim. Leafer. Elohim. Elohim Leafer. Perfect. Yes. Yes. Yeah, very, very close. It's more than enough. I work. With many people in many different languages, everybody gives me a different interpretation of my name. I'm just used to from very child because my grandpa was a Turkish, he was Jewish and from there it comes from there it comes my name. He tried to write. He made some changes in the name. He changed one letter of place because he wanted when I born in Venezuela. Where we talk Spanish and a bit of Portuguese. He wanted people who were able to pronounce the name, how old Jewish culture pronounce the name. So he just changed the letter. But all my life everybody's like giving me a different accentuation of the word. So everybody just put me hello, hello, everybody just give me a different name and that's pretty OK by me. I love it. I love it. Well, you can call me Granddaughter Crow or I'll just call you Elo and you call me GD C Yeah, you're my sister. You know that. I love it. So let me give let me give everybody a little bit quick intro. So author not only of Dream Witchery that is out. Which we're going to get into, but also an astrologer, dowser, tarot reader, reader, an urban spiritual worker from Venezuela. AndAnd this and and very much initiated into traditional Venezuelan spiritualism, which is amazing. Super Young. Yeah, so. You guys, dream witchery. This book is folk magic, recipes and spells from South America for witches and brujas. The beauty around this book is not just this, but that there are a lot of different books out there that talk about dreams. And then maybe they'll reflect on on South America and add little things in there. But Ello is actually this is the first book that I am aware of that comes of that comes straight to us with that South American spiritual spiritualism to talk about not just dreams, but the world of dreams that I want to dip into. Each of those. And so thank you. I mean, from what I understand, you've been in the States, what, eight years now? Eight years, almost nine. And you came in not fluent in speaking English. No, I started learning English in 2019. Because I was living in the Bronx, so I didn't have like the need to talk in English. Everybody was talking to me in Spanish. Everybody was Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, from Nicaragua, from Guatemala, from El Salvador, from all of these countries. So everybody talks Spanish with a different accent. I didn't have the need to learn English. Then in 2019 I take it seriously like you, you know, I should, I should learn the language because I'm publishing books in English. Which are translate with a professional and with my husband helping me. So maybe I should get on this. They start taking classes then the lockdown happens and they have a whole year to practice at home. Oh so but this book is most I mean it's you do have some Spanish in here but. If I were to learn a new language five years ago, I wouldn't have the ability to write a whole entire book in that new language. In my first book wrote in English. That's something that every book has always a different story because every time that you plan in a book is what that will make that book different to everything else that is in the market, right?Because we have a very competitive market and. Every book have something special in it. Even sometimes you find books that they are all talking the same thing, but every book gives you something new, something different, a different taste. And when I was writing on this one, I in the moment that I sit down to write, my goal was trying to make it all in English. So I heard of these like different documents with information in Spanish and Portuguese. I just translate a bit and then I try to give the whole history of the book in English. That was the process was trying to make it in English, but try to keep it organic, try to keep it Hispanic, try to keep it native, try to keep it indigenous. So I try to keep the words even a lot. A lot of the words in there that are still in Spanish or Portuguese are because are words that sometimes they lost the significance. With the translation. So for me it was important like if the person who was reading these don't understand the word, I'd rather that the person looks for a dictionary and understand the context of the word than just giving them a wrong translation because that happens a lot. Yes. So a lot of part of the book continue having words in indigenous language because I have the blessing to born and grew up in the Amazonas. Which people here know as the answer. You know, when you interact with so many indigenous communities and with so many tribes and you learn so many things of them, translating their language is very complicated, very like rough in some way. So I just like to keep the essence in there for respect to them because how many words that you can just simply like translate is like. I always joke about it with my co-workers and with other people when we're trying to translate something from English to Spanish or to Portuguese. OK, I I don't have the translation for this word and sometimes happens that I just find words in English that you can't translate to another language. Like going forward if you translate it to Spanish, it's something entirely different that you need to give people a whole context. So every time that I'm talking with somebody and it's so an English speaking and a Spanish speaking. The table and they say going forward, people who talk Spanish, they're like what that means. So I need to oh, youknow, continue doing what are you doing in that direction, don't lose your note yada yada because it's something very characteristic of the English language because every language is bonded to entire different culture. Something that we have in the indigenous communities that we don't have a lot of writing language because most. They go to a school, they learn Spanish or they learn Portuguese if they are. If you are close, if you are in the Amazon, if you are close or Venezuela or Colombia, they teach you in Spanish. If you are close to Brazil, they teach in Portuguese and you just talk indigenous language in your home. So when you try to write down some words, everybody write the same words in a different way. I love it, you know. Not to get too off track, but when under the shutdown I play a little game on my phone and I was invited to be a part of this group and they were all living in Brazil and so I had to try to pick up. On understanding how to speak Portuguese for a little bit. I'm not saying I know how, but it would be so much fun because they would then try to say, Oh well, let's talk English for her. And I'm like, no, no, no Let me speak Portuguese. You know, all of those little things. So I I I it's so beautiful of a language. So I think it's just really funny that when you started learning English, I started trying to learn Portuguese. I can't, I can't speak Portuguese as well as you can speak English because it's a very complex language when we talk about the Spanish Portuguese. Or languages have so many words. We have many more words than English. English is a more practical language. We have this kind of Hispanic joke that English is teached worldwide because it's easier to learn, which is not totally true. It's not so easier because the form how you move the tongue, which is a whole muscle in your body, how you move it is entirely different. So the accentuation of the words hits different in your mouth when you have months. Talking in English, after some time you start feeling like all of this area of your face is like spfelling heavy because you are exercising muscles in ways that you were using before. In Spanish and Portuguese we have many more words to describe situations. That's why when you find a text in Spanish or Portuguese and you use any translator on the Internet to translate it to English, you see that the text is smaller. Because English is very practical in the language. It's not so descriptive, you don't have so much content. You just give a word or two words to people and they just know what are you saying in Spanish or even in Portuguese, which is even more complex. You give a whole explanation of the situation. This reminds me this it's a moment very funny in The Lord of the Rings, this film, and my husband is obsessed with that. We rewatch. The whole trilogy every year for the past 14 years and it's this very comic moment when the trees are having a conversation between them to see if they can go and make some kind of coup against the bad magician and when they are talking. They spend hours and they talking and when they go back to The Hobbit, The Hobbit says OK and you say this, Oh no, I just was explaining the intro of the situation because our language is very old and take us a lot to explain because you know they don't have so many words so they need to over explain the situation so everybody can get in the same position. And in Spanish and Portuguese is something that we need to over explain everything because our language different from English. When we talk about the Spanish, first we have two different Spanish. We have the Spanish on on Spain, which is which have a European accentuation and a very strong influence from the Portuguese from Portugal, which is not the same Portuguese from Brazil. And when we talk about Latin America Spanish, the Spanish that you talk in Mexico, in Cuba, in Ecuador, in Guatemala, in Venezuela, in any country, all of these have different accents, different words that you can translate to another language. Or food is different or culture is different. And while closer you are from to Brazil, more words in Portuguese you have. Also if you are in South America, historically we were colonized from or Portugal, Italy and Spain. So we have a lot of that culture blended and mixing our language. And when you are trying to talk with a Mexican person, you continue talking in Spanish. But there are many words that we are like, what did you just say? And we're talking in the same language, but I don't understand you 100%. I understand you like 80 90%. Gotcha. I love it. I love it. So with your book Dream Witchery, you guys have to get this book. Not only is it about dreams, but it is about dreams from a pure original South American Bruha. And so I would like for you to give us, cause I love what you do in the book. I got through a lot of it, but not all of it. I'm looking forward to finishing it though. But you describe dreams. It's a big book. It's 400 pages. Yeah, I know. This is like two of my books. It's a big book. So describing dreams. You kind of refer to dreams in a different way than what an English speaker in America would see. Oh, it's just a dream. You talk about dreams sometimes as a train station or sometimes as a Internet, you know, Internet for connections. Could you give us a little deeper explanation of dreams? Yeah, so this is, this is what happens with this book. I want first of all, thanks to Llewellyn Worldwide for accepting the book because this this manuscript was rejected for practically everybody because no publishing house wanted everybody was like, this is too complicated. We need something like, you know, more new age and less complex because people want to just go directly to experiience. This is too much. And Llewellyn Worldwide was like, give me the book. It's complex. We want it. And the thing about this book is I have, I grew up in a place where I was fortunate to have contact and constant interactions with so many different people, with so many different religions, different tribes, and all of them have this complexity of thoughts and traditions related with dreams. The Aragua, the Guajos, the Wahiro, the Yanomami, all of these different tribes, they share this ideology. And indigenous ideology, even when they have different cults and different deities and different religions and different pantheons, they all share the perspective that dreams is something that gets you to your ancestors. They have certain things in common. For all of the tribes in Amazon, the dreams are related with water. It's a lot of water. When you go inside of a dream, it's like going inside of a river. Just everything looks different, feels different, sounds are different. First of all, it's a lot of relation between the water, the river with the Dreams. The second relation that it has is a lot of ancestry. It's important to remember when the slaves from Africa get into America, they start to sharing contact, not willingly, but because they were forced. With the indigenous slaves from South America. So you have two different cultures. All of them are slaves from the same people, the Spaniards, but the African slaves and the South American slaves, they share certain things in common. We are slaves, we are piran, we have different languages, we believe in many gods, we believe in the rivers, we believe in the sky, we believe in all of these things. And they have a lot of interactions in folklore in the rivers. The rivers for us are so important in our culture because. Different to the Western perspective, in the Western culture, rivers, water, ocean, sea is something that separate one continent or one country from one to another. In the indigenous and American culture, rivers, water or city is a bridge that actually join the continents. It's something that don't separate us. All the country give us the chance to connect with each other because you just make your ship and you can travel to that other continent which. Without the water will be just another mountain in the world. But for the indigenous tribes, it was like the water connect us and connect our ancestors. And every time that you go close to the river or close to the sea, you are literally watching the direction of your ancestors in another continent, which is something very magical in our culture. And for them, every time that the slaves were crying a river, washing the clothes or preparing the food or doing something in the river. The tears continue being in the river, all of the sadness, the religion, the spirituality, everything is blended in the river. So they find the river like a connection with the other world. And for them, having this like chance to just go to a river means that you don't need to go to a temple or a sanctuary or a church to pray. Every time that you go to a river, you are washing your clothes in the same river where your grandpa and your grandma and your mom were also. Washing their clothes. So they have all of these certain connections in their different spiritualities and medieval stripes, and all of them have something in common, and it's the dreams. For them, the dreams is a place where you can connect with your ancestors. Every time that you dream, you go into the rivers of the other world. That is something that also the Greeks have in their culture. If you go to the Greek mythology, the Greeks have the Greeks. People, they have all of this culture about when you die is so many rivers in the turtles is every river have a different function. These rivers you drink from from this water, you will forget if you drink this from this other water, you will remember if you drink from this other water, your soul die and stop existing. All of these rivers have different function and the idea of having some kind of rivers in the other world is something that is shaded worldwide in the in different. Pagan cultures. So everything that you are dreaming, the experience is like, oh, I'm underwater. Also, they have something very particular, especially in the Yanomami culture, indigenous people from Venezuela and Colombia. When everything that a woman or a person with reproductive capacities have a baby, when the baby comes, it's very magical, yes, but also a lot of organic processing. There is a lot of anatomy things happening to. It's a lot of water, p......, blood, a lot of fluids coming from the womb of the woman. And for the indigenous culture, this was some something very mystical. This was like, oh, every time that the womb is open and the baby is coming out, it's the river giving us back one of our ancestors through the body of the woman and all of this fluid. Blood and the water coming from the womb or the woman is something that belongs to the river. So we take one of that and we take it back to the river and we keep the baby, which is one of four ancestors coming back. So every time that they dream with an ancestor and someone was pregnant in the tribe, they think, oh, is this ancestor who is coming back through this person who is the grandchild or the niece of that ancestor. And if you see all of these, everything's connected with two things, the rivers. And the dreams. So when I was writing down the book, I was like, I'm doing a book on dreams magic or I'm doing a book on ancestry or I'm doing a book on water magic. I don't know what I am doing, but I'm doing one of this in a book and I try to separate it like 3 books. But every time that I just go deeper in each other, I continue relating to the other one in the other book and I try to keep them separate and was literally impossible. It was like this. Like you have three babies and they just want to stay together in the play place in the playroom. So I just blended again after months of effort trying to keep them separate. I just blended again and they blend perfectly. It was like every piece was together in this game. I just feel like, oh, this chapter goes with this one, this chapter goes with this one. OK, this is connected. And when I mix it, it was just taking me like 3 weeks. And everything fits so perfectly. So I just like, let me continue to dive a little more into this. Let me refresh what things I could have forgotten about different cultures because I had a chance to travel a lot and that was many years ago, so. I call my priest, I call my mom, I call the family of my grandma, I call my cousins who are still living in there. When you use this word, which is the context, when you pray to this deity, which is the context, when you go to this river, how is different this river from this other one?Because I remember when I was child, I go to this and this was this was very long. Conversations with all of them reminding me of stuff like you don't remember when we go to that river, you take that stone and grandma told you take that stone, put it in the temple, and then we take that stone and throw it to the moon. Oh yeah, I remember all that story. OK, all of that symbolized that all of us did in a certain point. Oh, I was doing a ritual and I didn't know it. OK. And making the book was that was something like. Not trying to do something, just trying to remember something that you have been learning for so many years. And what was more important for me was try to keep it how it is. Don't try. Don't try to make it easier. Don't try to make it mercy. Don't try to make it easier to read. If people find it complicated, force them to read it again. But the idea is not oh, let me say. 300 years of culture and language in a silverware for you. No, no, noThis is how we do it. And for us it's complex to learn. So I'm serving you in a better way, more comfortable to read because you have it in pages. We didn't have that. We don't have books on that, not in English and believe me, not in Spanish. So having all of these was so complex because also I had the chance to reread. All of these old books that I put in the resources by by bibliography of the book. That's why in when you read the bio, you will find books in Spanish, in French, in Portuguese, in Nuage, in Aragua, in Wahira, in in in all of these languages. I had a chance to OK, let me read this again. Let me translate it. I sent money to my mom. She sent me a lot of books back from when I was in high school, even books from my nephews. With all of this draw is deep because like when you're growing in United States, I don't know what people learning in the schools, but I know that you learn about the North American indigenous tribes and you know, which are the indigenous people of East Coast, West Coast, you know all of these things. And when you grow in places like Venezuela or Colombia, it's the same they teach you. These are the Timoto quick guys. These are the Yanomamis. These are the Wahiros. These are the other ones and the other ones and all of these cultures. And having that was like, OK, I I need something in like teachable for people. I don't need college books, writer for British people who just go to Amazon at one time a year. No, I need the school books that my nephews are taking and my mom sent me all the books and I just sit down. To reread it. Oh, I remember this. Oh, I was in this place. Oh, I remember this story. I'm just trying to add it to the book because I wanted that when people read it, they have a deep understanding of what I'm giving to you. Where? Where is this place? What is the context? Who is the deity? How is the ritual? Why is male? All of these different aspects in every chapter. I love that, you know, you know, so Dream Witchery, you can get it wherever you get books on Amazon or on, you know, wherever you get books. This, just because of what you just said, this isn't just a dream, a book on dreams. This is a cultural something we need to carry in our libraries. This is something that we need to give to schools. It's something, I mean, I was listening to, well, I was, I was reading a part of it where you actually translated a certain spell or maybe you do it even more and I haven't gotten to it, but certain indigenous South American indigenous spells that have never been written down, let alone in the English language. So this, I mean, this is a treasure. This really, really is a treasure. I am so proud of this book. And you know, I I have made, I don't like to use the word followers. I have a line up of readers who follows my work on social media and a lot of my readers are Latin American descendants who lives in United States. From the moment I started my account on Instagram, living in the United States for many people was like, oh, I have a person from South America who knows these things and talks my own language. Because many of these Latin American descendants, they born here, they grow up here, they speak a bit of Spanish, but they are not so connected with their ritualistic stuff. And I have all of these DMs every day from people from Peru, from Ecuador, from Colombia. I remember when my grandma did that. Oh, I I I remember when my uncle visit me five years ago and he did this with a glass of water and I didn't knew that other people do it. And it was like, yeah, we all do it. It's like literally yesterday I was talking with this friend. I was explaining to him about the how we do the cleansing with eggs. He was like, oh, I know this person from Peru who do that. And I'm like, yeah, in some Americans, Central America, we clean people with eggs because it's something that is fresh. From the chicken continuing certain way a life and you use it to absorb the negativity from another person and then you broke the in the glass of water and you read the glass of water and you see what's happening in there. And he was like, you are telling me exactly what she says to me 8 years ago. And I was like, yeah, because it's something that we grow up with our grandmas doing that when you have, when you come from high school and you have a headache, your grandma is. Maybe you have a ___, let me take my egg and they make a whole cleaning on you. Or the thing about cleaning with tobaccos, which is very different here in the United States, people here cleaning people who learn to do cleansing with tobaccos. Here they think that you just go to the market, you go any tobacco and you bring it around the person. And for us it's like first the tobacco can't have nicotine. You need to find very complicated here. Tobacco just made of tobacco leaves without any additives. You pray it three times in a way, then you turn it over. You pray it three times again. You light the tobacco and you clean the person and you use 3 tobaccos just for cleansing the space before do the reading because you can't treat a person who is when there's some kind of cause for conjuring. And after that you do two or three more tobaccos and you ain't super exhausted. Your mouth is on fire, but that's our culture is how we grow up doing this. And that's why our magic is in certain way like so strange, but at the same time so powerful because it's not easier to do. We don't care how tight we we are at the end of the day. The client is doing well. That's the goal. If they are doing well, everything is OK. You will sleep a lot after that. And having the chance to put all of this about my culture in the book was. Very positive for me, very affirming like a Latin American person because also it's so much about our Latin American culture that we have mixed that it's beautiful to find that you have people from Nicaragua, from El Salvador, from Puerto Rico who relate with this and they say, oh, my grandma did that, my mom did that, my dad did that. You find all of these connections with other people and everybody's like, oh, this is what we do in our country. And yeah, I know what you know. It's it's fascinating how giving people something that they can use, like finally have a book related to this. Because when you come to the Witch community, everybody's like, you need to read this book, you need to read Scott Cunningham, you need to read Raymond Buckland. I have never read the Blue Book of Raymond Buckland because I just feel like the 1st 3 pages and I was like, I really don't understand anything of this. Feels like so old for me because it's a very different culture. It's like to British, it's to structure. The way how is writing is everything like I don't like the way I respected like for a magician, that's perfect for you. But for me it feels different. Don't feel organic. And in this book in a certain way that now it's my personal consulting book. I literally when I am with a client, I take the book from the shelter. Let me check on this. Referring to myself and that has been something very magical because finally I feel that even if he is writing for myself, I feel like finally have a guidance like I didn't have before because sometimes I I think I wrote about this sometime. Let me check. Oh yeah, this means this when you are dreaming with this or this stuff. I love