2016
Jeffrey Cerneson has been wandering the crooked paths of sorcery for nearly 30 years. His journey began after a series of personal and spiritual crises following his involvement in the first Gulf War. His wanderings led him from humble beginnings in Anglo-Saxon traditions to the mountains, temples, and hidden doors of the ancient wisdom of the Wu Shaman of China; those Taoist Sorcerers and Sages who have preserved the old sorcery in their secret martial, healing and spiritual arts. He has been trained as a Daoshi; priest, healer and alchemist, by such teachers as Huo Zhi Lian, Tzu Kuo Shih, and Feng Song, and is accounted a disciple of the Tao. From his wanderings in the Far East, he returned to explore the roots of his own blood and ties to the land of his birth. Being of Abenaki heritage, he undertook an apprenticeship in Native American Medicine ways and healing in exchange for the knowledge he brought from China. There he learned singing medicine, the Medicine of the sweat house and the sacred pipe, and the calling of spirits for healing, power, and balance. As he became a primary singer for an Absaroke Wicasa Wakan, his own medicine grew. Along with this growth came an awarenss of the need to return to his European heritage as well. While training in the medicine ways was essential to deeper understanding, it has always been to his own cultural heritage that his heart belonged. Returning to his roots, he began to re-examine the cunning arts of the Northern peoples on his own. With his newly awakened senses, and comparing what he experienced afar with what has been written and passed down, his wisdom potency and insight grew beyond what was possible for him before those wanderings. Perhaps most important to the integration of all that he has learned, he has studied the Old World Witchery of Southern Europe, and the Etruscans through training and initiation with Raven Grimassi, and Stephanie Taylor-Grimassi. He is an initiated member of the Ash, Birch and Willow tradition and as such is a Pharmakeute; a spiritual botanist and also a cunning person of the Greenwood who lives in partnership with the green world as the heart of his life.