Furthermore, his skill at making the water rise helps us see that the omphalos , the bellybutton of the world, the world tree, grows always in our own backyard. This is the secret knowledge that is the basis of every shapeshifter's power. Colonization ends, the colonized mind is liberated, when it rejects the imposed mythologies of dominant mainstreams and finds its origin, its cradle of civilization, in its own culture. Yet it is one of those truths that each individual and every generation must rediscover for themselves and apply to their own experience. Each quest usually entails a journey towards an edge, where earth meets sea or sky.
Every diviner passes the rod to the new apprentice.
These threads I have pulled out are themes and motifs that heighten the reader's enjoyment. The Lagahoo's Apprentice is about time, change, death, grief, reality, order, chaos, politics, sexuality, mythology, identity and spirituality. All of the allusions are deliberate. This is a story about consilience, conjunction, the fusion of everything. Maharaj shows us that every man is an island, volcanic, attached to the molten core of the Earth, from which mud bubbles up, eternally birthing, ever growing.