Undines are the spiritual beings of the water realm, also often referred to as selkies, mermaids or sirens, and they have fascinated mankind for centuries. Author William Mistele has devoted much of his life to communicating with these creatures, and he relates his experiences in his new book, Undines. Through dialogues between Mistele and various undines, the book explores and answers life’s perennial questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? The spirits in Undines have much to teach mankind about compassion, peace and love.
Below, we feature an excerpt from Undines, revealing a passionate and exciting exchange between Mistele and the queen of the undines, the beautiful, wise and sensual Istiphul.
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February 5, 1995, at 5:30 PM
At Lumahai Beach near the Na Pali coast on Kauai, again I call, and Istiphul appears. She says to me, “I would steal the sorrow from your heart with a kiss.” Then Istiphul kisses me, and I enter a dream. I hear my heart beating and another heartbeat as well, that of the whole ocean beating in rhythm to my own. And though our lips touch but for a moment, in truth she kisses my body all over a thousand times, with a thousand kisses from a thousand goddesses.
You may well laugh and ask me, “How can you exaggerate like that?” I am not exaggerating when I say that touch contains magic and that an immortal, a queen of the undines such as Istiphul, has magic in great supply.
Her kiss?
It is green waves yielding as they fall on white Aegean shores.
It is the glittering blue-white icebergs drifting on salty seas,
Sunlight trapped in ice, blazing with beauty.
Her lips, slightly open, invite you to join
With the mouths of rivers,
The Nile, the Ganges, and the Amazon,
Flowing from the source.
It is fierce tides going out, undertows and riptides,
And racing currents beneath small, rippling waves.
It is a continent of waves dancing and at play
Among a thousand winds.
It is both the drawing in of the ocean’s great depths
And a yielding of all of her being—all her secrets unveiled,
All unleashed and released in her kiss.
Once you have felt this kiss, it is a dream you cannot imagine
And a love you cannot fathom,
Though you may try to put it out of your mind.
It is an explosion of new emotion
Your body bursting, your blood rushing,
Rising, exalting, and then collapsing
On distant and unknown shores.
For whatever your need may be,
She joins with that need, liberating you from loneliness.
And whether it be desire, craving, or longing,
Hunger, or wanting, secret or known,
She is there within it.
She dissolves it by the touch of her lips.
She embodies both the thirst
And the cup that quenches it
All in the same breath, and in the same kiss.
Yet she does not weaken the desire
By accepting who you are.
Rather, she intensifies desire, her beauty amplifying it
So it burns for the first time, in all its power
With a flame that brings healing, renewal, and new life.
And so it is that in her kiss, wet and dry, steam and ice,
The driving force in electricity—
These she unites in one circle of life.
But consider, for a moment, the price:
Some will panic if they sail this ocean
Like the sailors with Columbus
Fearing the edge of the world in sight.
They cry out, “Turn back!
We have lost our taste for the unknown.
Our desires are not for treasures this bold.”
For this very reason Istiphul has remained hidden:
That human courage not be tested by beauty so terrifying
It rends the soul and haunts the mind with unattainable visions.
But now mankind is ready:
The wind is offshore. The tide is in.
The constellations, flaming cold and furious in the distance,
Have waited for aeons to guide our course.
But who will voyage with me
Beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and the familiar?
You hesitate? I do not blame you.
I have traveled without companions to places reason cannot fathom
And where words must be minted anew
To dissolve the darkness and emptiness within you.
The elixir of love, the essence of all divine mysteries,
Has always been exceedingly dangerous.
Its wisdom is greater than magic,
Its knowledge greater than power.
Those who would follow this path must search their hearts
Till every barrier separating one from another is cast aside forever—
For this is love’s art.
Lightning
Istiphul is not satisfied with the healing process. Perceiving my needs even more clearly as we kiss, Istiphul takes my hands. As some women I have met can also do, Istiphul passes into my body—her soul is now within me.
I have visions of electrical storms. That is to say, my feelings and physical sensations spontaneously transmute into visual images of a thunderstorm at sea: explosive volts leap into the indigo darkness of a moist sky. Electricity accumulates around my body and then flows back around hers. Between us, we are condenser, amplifier, and generator as the spark arcs between our hearts.
Within my body, lightning reaches down from violent clouds to strike the ocean and explode in a touch or a kiss. Ball lightning forms and flows from my shoulders down my arms, reaching for her and caressing her body. Saint Elmo’s fire encompasses us, and its sound is here— the hiss and jzzzzz that hum with prayers of eerie solemnity. In the distant sky I see the northern lights, both marvelous and ominous—the earth’s veils being lifted by solar radiance—a banshee’s hopeless songs of loss turning into a frenzied dance of bliss.
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Fantasy or reality? You decide. Are you the undine, captivating the spirits of men, or are you looking to brandish the power and wisdom of their kind? Click here for more about this book and its author.
