Read Dark Curse Online

Authors: Christine Feehan

Tags: #Fiction, #Paranormal, #Horror, #Vampires, #Love Stories, #Occult & Supernatural, #Occult fiction, #Fantasy, #Romance

Dark Curse (54 page)

BOOK: Dark Curse
13.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Second verse

Ai Emä Ma?e,

Oh, Mother Nature,

Me sívadbin lanaak.

We are your beloved daughters.

Me andak arwadet emänked és me ka?ank o

We pay homage to our mother and call upon the

Põhi és Lõuna, Ida és Lääs.

North and South, East and West.

Pide és aldyn és myös belso.

Above and below and within as well.

Gondank o ma?enak pusm hän ku olen jama.

Our love of the land heals that which is in need.

Juttanak teval it,

We join with you now,

Ma?e ma?eval.

Earth to earth.

O pirä elidak wenca.

The circle of life is complete.

6. CARPATHIAN CHANTING TECHNIQUE

 

As with their healing techniques, the actual "chanting technique" of the Carpathians has much in common with the other shamanistic traditions of the Central Asian steppes. The primary mode of chanting was throat chanting using overtones. Modern examples of this manner of singing can still be found in the Mongolian, Tuvan and Tibetan traditions. You can find an audio example of the Gyuto Tibetan Buddhist monks engaged in throat chanting at:

http://www.christinefeehan.com/carpathian_chanting/
.

As with Tuva, note on the map the geographical proximity of Tibet to Kazakhstan and the Southern Urals.

The beginning part of the Tibetan chant emphasizes synchronizing all the voices around a single tone, aimed at healing a particular "chakra" of the body. This is fairly typical of the Gyuto throat-chanting tradition, but it is not a significant part of the Carpathian tradition. Nonetheless, it serves as an interesting contrast.

The part of the Gyuto chanting example that is most similar to the Carpathian style of chanting is the midsection, where the men are chanting the words together with great force. The purpose here is not to generate a "healing tone" that will affect a particular "chakra," but rather to generate as much power as possible for initiating the "out of body" travel, and for fighting the demonic forces that the healer/traveler must face and overcome.

The songs of the Carpathian women (illustrated by their "Lullaby" and their "Song to Heal the Earth") are part of the same ancient musical and healing tradition as the Lesser and Great Healing Chants of the warrior males. You can hear some of the same instruments in both the male warriors' healing chants and the women's "Song to Heal the Earth." Also, they share the common purpose of generating and directing power. However, the women's songs are distinctively feminine in character. One immediately noticeable difference is that, while the men speak their words in the manner of a chant, the women sing songs with melodies and harmonies, softening the overall performance. A feminine, nurturing quality is especially evident in the "Lullaby."

 

Appendix 2

The Carpathian Language

 

Like all human languages, the language of the Carpathians contains the richness and nuance that can only come from a long history of use. At best we can only touch on some of the main features of the language in this brief appendix:

· The history of the Carpathian language

· Carpathian grammar and other characteristics of the language

· Examples of the Carpathian language

· A much abridged Carpathian dictionary

1. The history of the Carpathian language

The Carpathian language of today is essentially identical to the Carpathian language of thousands of years ago. A "dead" language like the Latin of two thousand years ago has evolved into a significantly different modern language (Italian) because of countless generations of speakers and great historical fluctuations. In contrast, many of the speakers of Carpathian from thousands of years ago are still alive. Their presence—coupled with the deliberate isolation of the Carpathians from the other major forces of change in the world—has acted (and continues to act) as a stabilizing force that has preserved the integrity of the language over the centuries. Carpathian culture has also acted as a stabilizing force. For instance, the Ritual Words, the various healing chants (see Appendix 1), and other cultural artifacts have been passed down the centuries with great fidelity.

One small exception should be noted: the splintering of the Carpathians into separate geographic regions has led to some minor dialectization. However the telepathic links among all Carpathians (as well as each Carpathian's regular return to his or her homeland) has ensured that the differences among dialects are relatively superficial (e.g., small numbers of new words, minor differences in pronunciation, etc.), since the deeper, internal language of mind-forms has remained the same because of continuous use across space and time.

The Carpathian language was (and still is) the proto-language for the Uralic (or Finno-Ugrian) family of languages. Today, the Uralic languages are spoken in northern, eastern and central Europe and in Siberia. More than twenty-three million people in the world speak languages that can trace their ancestry to Carpathian. Magyar or Hungarian (about fourteen million speakers), Finnish (about five million speakers), and Estonian (about one million speakers), arc the three major contemporary descendents of this proto-language. The only factor that unites the more than twenty languages in the Uralic family is that their ancestry can be traced back to a common proto-language—Carpathian—which split (starting some six thousand years ago) into the various languages in the Uralic family. In the same way, European languages such as English and French, belong to the better-known Indo-European family and also evolve from a common proto-language ancestor (a different one from Carpathian).

The following table provides a sense for some of the similarities in the language family.

Note:
The Finnic/Carpathian "k" shows up often as Hungarian "h". Similarly, the Finnic/Carpathian "p" often corresponds to the Hungarian "f."

 

Carpathian

(proto-Uralic)

Finnish

(Suomi)

Hungarian

(Magyar)

elä
—live

elä
—live

él--live

elid—
life

elinikä—
life

élet—life

pesä—nest

pesä
—nest

fészek—
nest

kola—
die

kuole—
die

hal
—die

pälä—half, side

pleltä
—tilt, tip to the side

fél, fele—fellow human, friend (half; one side of two)
feleség—
wife

and—
give

anta, antaa—
give

ad—
give

koje
—husband, man

koira—
dog, the male (of animals)

here—drone, testicle

wäke—
power

väki
—folks, people, men; force
väkevä—
powerful, strong

vall-vel—
with (instrumental suffix) vele—with him/her/it

wete—
water

vesi—
water

víz—water

2. Carpathian grammar and other characteristics of the language

Idioms.
As both an ancient language, and a language of an earth people, Carpathian is more inclined toward use of idioms constructed from concrete, "earthy" terms, rather than abstractions. For instance, our modern abstraction, "to cherish," is expressed more concretely in Carpathian as "to hold in one's heart"; the "nether world" is, in Carpathian, "the land of night, fog, and ghosts"; etc.

Word order.
The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles (like subject, verb, and object) but rather by pragmatic, discourse-driven factors. Examples: "
Tied vagyok
." ("Yours am I."); "
Sívamet andam
." ("My heart I give you.")

Agglutination.
The Carpathian language is agglutinative; that is, longer words are constructed from smaller components. An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meaning is generally unique, and which are concatenated one after another without overlap. In Carpathian, words typically consist of a stem that is followed by one or more suffixes. For example, "
sívambam"
derives from the stem "
sív
" ("heart") followed by "
am
" ("my," making it "my heart"), followed by "
bam"
("in," making it "in my heart"). As you might imagine, agglutination in Carpathian can sometimes produce very long words, or words that are very difficult to pronounce. Vowels often get inserted between suffixes, to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which can make the word unpronouncable).

Noun cases.
Like all languages, Carpathian has many noun cases; the same noun will be "spelled" differently depending on its role in the sentence. Some of the noun cases include: nominative (when the noun is the subject of the sentence), accusative (when the noun is a direct object of the verb), dative (indirect object), genitive (or possessive), instrumental, final, supressive, inessive, elative, terminative, and delative.

We will use the possessive (or genitive) case as an example, to illustrate how all noun cases in Carpathian involve adding standard suffixes to the noun stems. Thus expressing possession in Carpathian—"my lifemate," "your lifemate," "his lifemate," "her lifemate," etc.—involves adding a particular suffix (such as "=
am
") to the noun stem ("
päläfertiil
"), to produce the possessive
("päläfertiilam"
—"my lifemate"). Which suffix to use depends upon which person ("my," "your," "his," etc.) and whether the noun ends in a consonant or vowel. The following table shows the suffixes for singular nouns only (not plural), and also shows the similarity to the suffixes used in contemporary Hungarian. (Hungarian is actually a little more complex, in that it also requires "vowel rhyming": which suffix to use also depends on the last vowel in the noun; hence the multiple choices in the cells below, where Carpathian only has a single choice.)

 

Carpathian (proto-Uralic)

contemporary Hungarian

noun ends

noun ends

noun ends

noun ends

person

in vowel

in consonant

in vowel

in consonant

1st singular (my)

-m

-am

-m

-om, -em, -öm

2nd singular (your)

-d

-ad

-d

-od, -ed, -öd

3rd singular (his,her,its)

-ja

-a

-ja/-je

-a,-e

1st plural (our)

-nk

-ank

-nk

-unk, -ünk

2nd plural (your)

-tak

-atak

-tok, -tek, -tök

-otok, -etek, -ötök

3rd plural (their)

-jak

-ak

-juk, -jük

-uk, -ük

Note:
As mentioned earlier, vowels often get inserted between the word and its suffix so as to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which would produce unpronouncable words). For example, in the table above, all nouns that end in a consonant are followed by suffixes beginning with "a."

Verb conjugation.
Like its modern descendents (such as Finnish and Hungarian), Carpathian has many verb tenses, far too many to describe here. We will just focus on the conjugation of the present tense. Again, we will place contemporary Hungarian side by side with the Carpathian, because of the marked similarity of the two. As with the possessive case for nouns, the conjugation of verbs is done by adding a suffix onto the verb stem:

BOOK: Dark Curse
13.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Twins of Noremway Parish by Johnston, Eric R.
Snowball's Chance by John Reed
Love Bade Me Welcome by Joan Smith
The Mystery of the Purple Pool by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Katie Beers by Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story
Until There Was You by Stacey Harrison
Horse Tradin' by Ben K. Green
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin