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At the crossroads we meet others who no matter race, creed or philosophy are made brothers and sisters by necessity for they too are fellow travellers.  It is this essential truism that bonds us together in a way that transcends what came before.  Regardless of whether our paths diverge or not we travel together, we share the adoptive parent that is the road.

I am not sure how Peter, Alkistis and Jake captured the metaphysical truth of the crossroads but they did.  It is not truly a forking of the way, a diverging of paths, it is the singular point from which all our paths radiate.  It is the singular point which reveals that truly all our paths are just the one path.  That we travellers of that road, no matter the direction we chose are moving together, are becoming more alike.  The road itself recreates us and the longer we spend travelling it the more our stories sound alike.  Anyone who has wandered knows that this is true.

Circumstance and shared trials brought together those old disparate practitioners who gave form and spirit to the spiritual creoles of the west, new languages born of immediate necessity and new Gods born of fresh circumstance.  Time and circumstance change, the road goes ever on.  These days getting an old world Necromancer, a Kimbandist, an Espiritista, a handful of disparate ceremonialists, a Vodoun, a pair of Palo and a cranky barely literate hoodoo (*cough* .. that would be me) to agree on anything is harder than teaching a collection of stray cats to perform as a synchronized swimming team.  Lord knows I have argued with half the authors who contributed to the text already. 

In this sense the editors mentioned above have outshone us all, sitting as they are at this new crossroad of technology and media exposure, they laid a trick on the lot of us.  We didn’t have to agree on anything to agree on everything, they gave us no subject upon which to reach a consensus, no philosophy upon which to jointly pontificate.  Clever bastards.  They had us meet around their digital fire and tell our stories from the road knowing that those stories would each intertwine with the other effortlessly because the road had made us all alike.  Like it does to all who travel it long enough.  To my own surprise I found myself nodding in agreement as a student of Bertiaux talked of how the creoles were the faith of the future and cracking open Allen Kardec to see what I had missed in my easy dismissal of the spiritualists.  Though they fall from our hand, it is the spirit of the world that rolls the bones.

Clever bastards.