Kam Baqça

Herodotus, the father of modern history and an all-around know-it-all, said that the Scythian priests sacrificed their manhood to achieve shamanistic power, and lived as women. I found that a pretty compelling picture, especially as it had parallels in the Native American world, and when I saw some archeological evidence for such a person, I was all the more interested. So, for the record, as I’ve been asked — no, those aren’t mis-prints. Kam Baqça is a man — at least born — and has trans-gendered to live as a woman. As the reader will discover, she has a daughter, Nihmu, from when he was a married man and a warrior. The complete life change required by the way of the shaman is well attested in ancient and modern sources, and I wanted to have a character with the same power — and sense of doom — that I saw in Herodotus. In addition, Mircea Eliade’s seminal work Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy had a major impact on the character of Kam Baqça and on the shamanism practiced in Tyrant and Tyrant: Storm of Arrows as well as on the dream cycles experienced by Kineas.

A note on the fine line between fantasy and reality, or between Fantasy and Historical Fiction. As a writer who loves history, I try to portray the people in my books as they would have seen the world. They, quite clearly, believed in the power of dreams and the shamanistic world, the law of correspondence, oracles, and other naturalistic philosophies now deemed either superstitious or relegated to the fringes of our rationalist/Judeo-Christian society. I had the pleasure (well, sometimes it was a pleasure) of growing up with a Native Seneca man who believed deeply in the power of dreams and in the “magical” power of the natural world around him, while remaining utterly pragmatic in his approach to earning a living or fighting a war. The strength of his belief was a revelation to me, and I’d like to suggest to my readers that every event in my books will have a rational explanation — and yet, it is also possible to suspect that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I don’t ask that you believe in oracles — merely that you accept that they believed.