BEING THERE:THIS WRITER is open to most things, which is why she's standing in a New Age shop in Cork city centre getting her energy cleared by a man who bears a certain wispy haired resemblance to 1980s children's TV character Catweazle, writes ROISIN INGLE
Amon-Ra Antares is communing with his spirit guides whom, he says, have approved this meeting with The Irish Times. He is asking for permission from a higher self to manifest a "honeycomb scrambler" and a "protective grid", all the better to clear the body's energy field. "You really need a clearing, I can feel that," he says.
Amon-Ra Antares changed his name by deed poll from Eamon McClafferty 13 years ago when he lived in England. Amon-Ra stands for "hidden god" while Antares, also the name of his New Age shop, is part of the constellation of Scorpio and means "against war". Surrounded by crystals and angel cards, he goes to work muttering indecipherable phrases and making small, jerky hand signals in the incense-filled air.
"How does that feel?" he asks, a pair of reading glasses perched halfway down his nose, requesting that I focus on any feelings of stress and worry and then visualise a gateway through which they may be released. You tell him truthfully that you can't be sure but that maybe there's a lightness in your being that wasn't there before.
Amon-Ra has a steady trickle of customers, some who browse, some who know exactly what they are looking for. A young French woman comes in on a mission to buy a bundle of white sage. This product is also known as a smudge stick and, when lit, the grey smoke smells uncannily like stuffing for a turkey. It's said to chase away evil spirits.
Another woman comes in looking for a crystal to help a particularly forgetful friend. "I can't remember where it is," jokes Amon-Ra in his English/Irish accent, not quite one thing or another. "Ah, I'm only blackguarding you," he tells the woman, which is what his Irish mother and father used to say in the house where he grew up in Birmingham.
HE BECAME INTERESTED in spiritual healing, crystals, angels, native American wisdom and auras after a life punctuated by violent episodes, chronic drug and alcohol abuse and spells in prison. For years he walked around with a knife in his inside jacket pocket, earning the nickname Hatchet in honour of one of his favourite methods of attack. He has lived on the streets and been in more rucks than Mike Tyson, but his rock-bottom moment came in a council flat in England where he had smashed up all the furniture in a fit of rage. That was the same day he drank high-octane fuel from a camping stove because a friend told him it contained alcohol.
"I was a cheat, a liar and a thief, an arrogant arsehole, a real psycho," he says cheerily. Although his family upbringing was violent, he takes responsibility for his own life-choices. He sees his chequered past as a blessing that led him to his true path, which began when he gave up drink and drugs 17 years ago, discovering "real love" through Alcoholics Anonymous.
"The unconditional kind," he explains. "Where a group of people open up to each other in a real and compassionate way. It was also where I began to discover that God is in everything." He interrupts the story to help a customer who is looking for an elephant. "No elephants, but we have dolphins," he says after a bit of a search. The customer leaves and then Amon-Ra finds a small statue of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god. He runs out to give it to the man but comes back still holding the statue. "He just wanted a regular elephant," he says.
With the Mind Body Spirit festival starting this Friday in Dublin's RDS, it's an appropriate time to talk to a man who is up to his head chakra in this New Age business. Amon-Ra is a Pleiadan Light Work Clairvoyant and his brochure talks about clients who have had "pain, limiting beliefs and trauma cleared from their aura and chakras". He is also an expert on something called "dolphin brain re-patterning and dolphin starlinking", which he says clears the nervous and chemical systems in the body. He is a reiki teacher, spiritual counsellor, facilitator of Mayan astrology sacred calendar workshops and a neuro linguistic practitioner. At the same time, he will admit he actually "knows very little".
He wants to "serve humanity's purpose and evolution" but some similarly minded friends in the New Age community chastise him for eating the occasional bit of chicken and shopping for cheap jumpers in multinationals.
"I know all of this saved my life and I feel passing what I've learnt on to others is what I am meant to do," he says.
The Mind Body Spirit festival has been running for 16 years now, welcoming exhibitors who want to sell everything from Indian head massages to tarot cards to flower remedies to psychic readings to spiritual gurus. Amon-Ra says he'd encourage people to be circumspect when visiting the festival.
"The thing is that the New Age world has become a business," he says. And if this seems a bit rich from somebody who makes his living training people in the healing arts and selling New Age products, he is ready with an explanation. "Yes, I sell things but I am not in this for the money. That's why I don't come down hard on shoplifters. Well, that's also because I used to shop-lift myself quite a bit and I know what it's like to be in that position, but mostly it's because this stuff doesn't belong to me. It belongs to God," he says.
He advises caution in all matters of mind, body and spirit. "Use discernment and judgement. Be guided by your inner voice, only move towards the things that seem right for you," all of which sounds sensible enough.
"Remember there are demonic forces and energies trying to work their black magic arts on you," which sounds more Harry Potterish than some people will be able to stomach. But this is what it's like hanging around with Amon-Ra. Sometimes he sounds like the wisest man on earth and sometimes, well, sometimes not.
Thankfully, Amon-Ra doesn't mind being challenged or even teased about his beliefs. He is laden down with silver, turquoise and blue opal jewellery, the kind worn by Navajo native Americans. He likes to put a protective grid around his food to ascertain the quality of what he is eating. And he's not bothered about the fact that some people don't understand or agree with his philosophies.
THERE ARE PLENTY who do, though. A woman called Anahata, curly haired and smiley, and her Croatian partner Igor, a dark-bearded bear of a man, come in to the shop. Visits to Antares form a large part of their social life and today they buy a small statue of a warrior because Igor has been getting in touch with his inner combatant lately - a throwback, he says, from past lives. Anahata's business card reads "High Energy Healing, Working with the Arch Angels, Ascended Masters & Benevolent Beings of Divine Light, Physical, Emotional & Spiritual Healing". She met Igor in Dublin and knew in that moment he was her "twin soul". Ever since Igor was a small boy in Croatia he has had a yearning to go to Ireland. "I've always had a deep connection to this country and when I eventually came here it made sense," he says.
They are a sweet couple. Amon-Ra reckons he knows Igor from a past life.
The other day Igor was looking to meet some druids, and Amon-Ra was only too happy to give him a few names. They have a casual chat about the reason for human existence, the way most folk talk about the weather, they all agree this planet is an abject lesson "in how not to run the world".
Tim Arnold is another regular customer. "He was actually my first," says Amon-Ra, as the man in tweeds who travels 18 miles from his home to shop here peers into the glass cabinets crammed with crystals. Tim is nearly 70, and listens attentively to Amon-Ra's patter on the unique healing energy of crystals. However, Tim says he is "a deeply unspiritual person, anti-spiritual you might say. I am a great disbeliever. I've been through the mill with religion, with people who lay down the law without any genuine feeling or understanding of the world."
ALL THE SAME, crystals fascinate him. "It's a world of magic," he says, and he tells you about the accoutrements he has at home, the ultraviolet lamps and microscopic instruments, which allow him to appreciate the "beauty and wonder" of the stones. He picks up a piece of fluorite and shows you how under different light it changes from lavender to green. (According to one of Amon-Ra's books, fluorite is useful as a psychic vacuum cleaner.) "It's magic," says Tim quietly, sounding quite spiritual despite himself. "If you spent your whole life studying crystals, you'd still never get to the end of them." Apart from the crystals, does he think some of the other items in the shop are weird? Tim just smiles as Amon-Ra purifies him with a smudge stick.
"You can't be weird enough to keep up with all the weirdness in this world," he says.
A healing session with Amon-Ra means going to his home near Glanmire, lying on a soft blanket with a silk pillow on a massage table surrounded by strange symbols drawn in black marker. He says a few words and then next thing you know it's an hour later. Whatever about healing, it's the most restorative snooze you've had in ages.
He is running a happiness workshop in the RDS this weekend. He believes happiness is being yourself, "not the limited self that you pretend to be most of the time but the unlimited self that you are and always have been. This is the self that is always there effortlessly present before, during and after everything else that appears in your experience. You are the radiant, yet changeless, background that allows for everything else to exist." Depending on your position on angels and auras, this will either resonate with you or sound like complete gobbledegook. In his world of honeycomb scramblers and higher selves, it's all the same to Amon-Ra.
"There are demonic forces and energies trying to work their black magic on you
