Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Golden Times between Sleep and Awake

 


Iamblichus (c.250-325 CE), the famous philosopher and theurgist descended from the priest-kings of Emesa (in modern Syria) was very clear that the liminal space between sleep and awake is prime time for contact with spiritual guides, such as gods: 

"Either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down, so that there is no visual perception of it, but some other awareness and self-consciousness. When entering, it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions without any contact, and it does wondrous works by way of freeing both soul and body from their sufferings. 

"At other times, however, when a light shines brightly and peacefully, not only is the sight of the eye possessed, but closed up after previously being quite open. And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say and know what they do."[1]

Iamblichus wrote his book under the pseudonym of an Egyptian priest, Abrammon, maintaining that “the gods are pleased when invoked according to the custom of the Egyptians”. [2] Though he wrote and taught in Greek, he is distinctly less Hellenic that other Neoplatonists. He kept his Semitic name, which is derived from the Syriac or Aramaic ya-mliku, meaning “El is King”. He was descended from the priest-kings of Emesa, some of whom bore his name. Iamblichus I sent troops to support Octavian in the Roman civil war. [3] Iamblichus the theurgist professes great reverence for Egyptian and Chaldean tradition, as opposed to the faddism of the "flight" Hellenes. 

Theurgy means "divine working" and for Iamblichus it was a matter of ritual activity and practice in shifting consciousness, not abstract speculation. The aim was to “rediscover life-giving water hidden in our desert”, to return the soul to knowledge of its greater identity and purpose and lift the individual to the level of a greater self.  This extended to “taking the shapes of the gods” while human, in the body."

 Iamblichus taught that theurgy did not act through the intellect but through one’s entire character “to allow the soul to exchange one life for another, to exchange the mortal life for the life of a god”. [4] In Theurgy and the Soul, Gregory Shaw observes that Iamblichus was  “the first leader of a Platonic school to function simultaneously as hierophant of a sacred cult”.[5] We do not have texts describing the specific ritual practices of that cult, though we know it involved sound and light and telestiké, statue magic, which involved calling the energy of a god or daimon into an image to ensoul it. 

Good to know that this celebrated ancient magician-philosopher also recognized that nightly or morning magic awaits us in that liminal space of “god-sent dreams” between sleep and awake.

References 

1. Iamblichus, De mysteriis trans. Emma C. Clarke John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003) III.2

2. Marsilio Ficino came up with the title On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians [De mysteriis for short in most references]. Since it was framed as an epistle from an Egyptian priest in response to criticisms from Porphyry, another leading Neoplatonist, its real title would be: “The Reply of the Master Abammon to the Letter of Porphyry”. 

3. John Dillon, “Iamblichus of Chalcis” In Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik, (New York: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 863-5

4. Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Kettering OH: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014) p.6

5. ibid., pp. 76-7


Photo: The Emesa Helmet. A Roman cavalry helmet with iron face guard covered by a sheet of silver, from the 1st century; found at Homs (ancient Edesa) in 1936.

 

Gods in disguise


When it comes to gods, human kind cannot bear very much reality. Jung, the son of a disaffected Protestant minister, observed that organized religion exists to protect humans against a direct experience of the sacred. The Hebrews appeal to Moses to speak to Yahweh on their behalf and play middleman, because he terrifies them. God counsels Joshua “I am near you, but you must hide your head or you will be destroyed." The closest Joshua can come to seeing the deity is to get a glimpse of his back as he withdraws. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna begs to see Krishna’s cosmic form, but can't bear it when it is revealed.

In C.S.Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy (published in  the United States as the Space Trilogy), the Oyarsa, planetary deities, are dizzying when they first appear to humans, seeming to rush in all directions, more directions than Earth physics allows. They must slow and gentle their manifesting forms to interact with humans.

We read in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “I saw Him in the manner that I was able to perceive him.” So gods come in disguises and they use camouflage that is meant to be seen through by those who are ready. For a costume shop of disguises, check out Athena’s apparitions in the Odyssey.

As for camouflage, it’s been said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. We might add: while tempting us to try to identify the author. When we realize that in special moments of synchronicity greater powers are in play, and seek their identity we start to construct the greater stories of our lives. Then we can riff on the old saying like this

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, while tempting us to try to identify the author.

Photo: XIX dynasty mask of Anubis in the Louvre

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The lion who fell from the moon

Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him: a potter’s vermilion glaze; the sky-vault filled with stars that were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen….

My chills of recognition make me pause, just three lines into a story by Jorge Luis Borges, one of the essential writers, opening worlds of wonder and doorways into the Universal Library in a few pages. Borges named this one after himself: “The Maker”, El Hacedor.
     Previous translators squirmed at the title “The Maker”. They thought people might confuse it with Our Maker; they feared leaving sulphurous traces of a heresiarch. So they considered and sometimes used “The Poet”, “The Artificer”, “Il Fabbro”. But Borges chose the English himself. And yes, he meant maker of worlds.
     The maker wrote this as he was nearing blindness in the vast library in Buenos Aires with whose flying books he had made love and married and danced the tango and fought with knives inside his mind. I can think of no one, not even Jung, who has housed so many books in his head and incited so much action between them. Borges was now engaged in constructing a total library in the imaginal realm, his version of paradise. Never a tame library, but one where wild things are.


the moon, from which a lion had fallen….

    I am seized again with wild familiarity, the hot breath at my neck, claws at my kidneys.
    Borges’ line has a rhyming cousin, short, stocky and flat-faced, wearing a robe of skins hung with bronze mirrors. I know where find it.  I keep it locked behind glass doors, along with the Red Book, the Golden Bough and other books that are restive and like to flap about and  prowl in the night.
     Sometimes the doors rattle and the key turns itself but today, things are quiet and I must fetch the book myself. It was published in Oxford five years after Borges died, so he could not have known it but might have known some of its sources. Its words are spun from conversations with shamans and elders of the Daur Mongols, lovers of horses, fermented mare’s milk, and drums that they ride to other worlds.
     Like Borges, these shamans are forever talking about tigers and lions. While Borges tried to make dreamtigers and was never quite satisfied, around Hailar or the Nomin River it’s not hard. Lie by the water watching butterflies and a tiger twice as long as you may come for you, as it would come for a tethered goat.
     Out here the lion may demand a deeper seeing, since you won’t see lions in Daur country with your ordinary eyes.
     The Oxford anthropologist asks a Daur shaman, Urgunge Onon, about this. He speaks from the tellings, which is how his people describe their traditional knowledge. Anthropologists may know about shamanism but the people who practice it in the old ways don’t have any “isms” in their vocabulary.
      Urgunge says, “Wild animals of the forest have two kings [khan], the tiger [tasaga] and the lion [arsalang].
      “Lion?” The anthropologist is amazed. “But you don’t have lions in Manchuria.”
      “They will be thinking of …er..what is it in English? Leopard. Leopard is just like lion, is that right?”
      “But you don’t have leopards either.”
      “No, that is true. So the conclusion is: in reality the khan of animals is the tiger; in imagination the khan is also the lion, even if we do not have lions in Mongolia. Everybody knows the story of the lion who jumped to catch the moon, then it died, you see. This is definitely the lion. The tiger never did that.”

I don't trust the end of this story. I am pretty sure the lion who fell from the moon did not really die. Some nights, coming in or out of sleep, I feel him lying with me on the bed, back to back.


The night after I wrote th
is, I dreamed of lions in a place of soul recovery. In a huge cavern, divided by an underground river, a wise elder is preparing people to make the crossing and meet the lions who are waiting for them, one for each. From this side the lions look no bigger than kittens. They may look different close up. I know that those who find the courage to meet their lions will be transformed. The courage of the lion and its power to make itself heard will live in them.


Books referenced 

"The Maker" in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).292
Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols  by Caroline Humphrey with Urgunge Onon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Art: Douanier Rousseau, "Sleeping Gypsy".

Friday, March 8, 2024

Mutual dreaming and remote healing in The Temple of Asklepios

 


Of all the testimonies that survive from the temples of dream healing consecrated to the god Asklepios and his divine family, the most fascinating, for me, is the case of the mother of a young Spartan woman named Arata. The mother made the  long and often dangerous journey to the great Asklepian temple of Epidaurus to seek healing for her daughter.

Arata, we are told, was υδρωπ, "dropsical". Today, we might say that she had an edema, a serious swelling due to the build-up of fluids in the cavities of the body. When ordinary medicine could do nothing for her, the mother embarked on her journey. She must have undergone the customary cleansing and ritual purification, and made simple offerings to the sacred powers of the sanctuary, including honey cakes for the serpents of Asklepios.

She would have been assisted by the therapeuts - the helpers of the healing god - to incubate a dream of invitation and to clarify her request to the god, for the benefit of her beloved daughter. She would have been shown testimonies of those who had been healed before, and images of the gods, building a mental climate of positive expectation. Eventually she was ushered into the abaton, the inner precinct of the temple, where she would have been encouraged to lie down on an animal skin and await the coming of the healing god in the sacred night.

In the night, "She slept in the temple and saw the following dream: it seemed to her that the god cut off her daughter’s head and hung up her body in such a way that her neck hung down." We can picture how a butcher might hang an animal carcass on a meat hook.  Out of the neck came a huge quantity of fluid matter. Then the mother took down her daughter’s body and fitted the head back on the neck. 

After she had seen this dream, she went home and found her daughter fully recovered, in good health and excellent spirits. Her daughter reported she had the same dream.

In this wild and primal experience, glimpsed through a few lines of an inscription chiseled on stone, we see the lineaments of a healing practice that reaches beyond ordinary medicine and beyond time and place. A sacred power appears to the dreamer, in response to a heart-felt prayer. Let us notice that the experience unfolding is possibly best understood as a lucid dream playing in the liminal space between sleep and awake.

The god of this dream is a ruthless surgeon, but his cutting is true and precise. Something that was wrong in the body of a person at a distance is drained and healed during this operation., Not only is the effect transferred to Arata, hundreds of miles away, but Arata sees the whole thing, as if she were with her mother and the god in the sacred space.

We have here remarkable evidence of the reality and efficacy of remote healing and shared dreaming. We have confirmation that direct engagement with the sacred is the ultimate healing resource. We have a reminder that even the most terrifying image - if it is authentic and truly belongs to us - can open a way to healing and transformation, if we are willing to stay with it and work with it.

Source: the testimony of Arata's mother is printed in Emma J. Edelstein and Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (second edition, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998) as #423.21.

 Photo: Marble votive relief depicting Asklepios healing a patient in the sacred night, with Hygieia standing behind. From the Asklepeion at Piraeus, c.400 bce. Now in the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus:.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

The Angel of the Rushing Waters

 



 I have seen you as a purple bruise in a yellow sky,

as a Scottish soldier with drawn sword

at the edge of the tame land and the wild wood,

as a snowy owl with fierce talons and fiercer eyes

as an Indian death-lord traveling abroad

in a Johnny Cash outfit, swinging a lasso.

 

I have felt you enter as a gentle breeze

stirring the curtains of a window in a hospital room,

and in the raw, thrusting horse-power

of the dark lord bursting into the sunlit maiden meadow.

 

You are a sexy devil.

I love you better than your brother Sleep.

Through aching nights of absence

I have longed for your embrace.

 

I have run your errands,

speaking in your voice to the old golfer on the plane,

negotiating with your razor-sharp precision

the terms for a possible life extension.

I have taken ailing humans by the hand

to your deep pools, to find you – if they dare –

in the troubling of the waters.

 

Few can look into your black sun

but those who do are different.

To know you, to walk with you,

to feel you always at the left shoulder

brings courage and October light.

 

You love to dress for occasions.

I have encountered you as a dandy in evening dress,

as a red Irish big-bellied god, and an Indian flame,

and a white lady whose footsteps are frost.

Your image is rarely in public places

though the medieval mind, like the mind of Mexico,

puts skeletal reminders of you at every turning,

mocking the vanities of the world.

 

On our wedding day

I want you to reach down in your robe of stars

and catch me in your voluptuous embrace

as we leave my old garment in the blanket of earth.

But if you choose not to come in your goddess form

I want you to be wearing my face.



This poem is published in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss (Excelsior Editions). 


Art: "Swan on a Black Sea" by Robert Moss

 

Friday, February 16, 2024

Location, location, location - and other keys to dream reentry

 




The realtor's familiar slogan applies to the technique of dream re-entry as well as the property game. The easiest way for you to back inside a dream is to hold your focus on the dream location. Your initial memories may be fuzzy, but a single landmark - even a single shape or color - may be sufficient to enable you to shift your consciousness into a vivid and complex scene.


Be open to possibility! The geography of the dream world is not that of the Times atlas or the Mobil guides. In dreams you may find yourself in familiar locales, including places from your past – Grandpa’s place, or your childhood home – that may or may not have changed. You may also visit unfamiliar but realistic locations, often clues that your dream contains precognitive or other “psychic” material. You may find yourself in scenes from a different historical epoch (past or future), in a different galaxy, in otherworldly locales, or in free-flowing situations where nothing conforms to the supposed laws of the physical world. One of the purposes of dream reentry is to establish where in the worlds you are. The typical dreamer, after waking, has no more idea where he spent the night than an amnesiac drunk.

The best time to try to reenter a dream is often immediately after you have come out of it. By snuggling down in bed and rehearsing the postures of sleep, you may be able to slide back into the dream in a gentle and natural way. But your work schedule may not allow you leisure to do this. And if your dream contains deeply disturbing material, you may need to wait until you are ready to deal with it. You may also feel you need the support of a partner or a drumming session.

But here is a simple technique for dream reentry you can use in the privacy of your bedroom or easy chair:

1. Find your question. What is your main question about the dream you wish to explore? Try to formulate that question as clearly and successfully as possible. Write it down. This will help to establish your focus. During your exploration, you will use this question like a flashlight or a miner’s lamp. It might be quite specific, or as general as, “What is this dream telling me?”

2. Focus on your target. Summon back as many details of your dream location as you can. This is the scene you are going to reenter. Maybe you have multisensory impressions of it. How does the air feel? What can you hear? Are there any distinctive smells?

3. Ask yourself who or what inside the dream can best answer your question. When you reenter the dream, you may be able to communicate directly with one of your dream figures.

4. Relax. Get into a comfortable position, sitting or lying down. Take some deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. As you exhale, try to release any pain or tension you are holding in your body and wish it outside your space. You may find it helps to count yourself down – from twenty to one – as you let your consciousness slide toward your selected locale. Or you may wish to put on meditation music or a drumming tape.

5. Move into your dream locale. Look around carefully to identify exactly where you are. You may notice many details you forgot or overlooked before. Do you know this place? Do you feel you are inside a scene from another time, or another order of reality?

6. Let the action unfold. Don’t interfere with the spontaneous flow of images. You have full power to choose how you will interact with your dream characters and respond to any challenges that are presented to you. Your dream reentry may take you beyond the point at which the original dream ended; if the first dream was unresolved or aborted, this is part of your design. Your new dream may also introduce characters and events that were not in the original dream. This is fine; your underlying purpose is not to reproduce the earlier version, but to move closer to the source from which dream images flow.

7. Dialogue with dream characters. You may find a dream character who can answer all your questions. Your selection is not confined to humans. Dreams are full of “persons other than human” (to borrow an Ojibwa phrase). There is no such thing as an inanimate object in dreams.

8. Expect the unexpected. Because the dream source is wiser than the ego, it may be telling you something more important than the question you decided to ask.

9. Map your journey. Pay attention to how you return from the dreamscape, as well as the paths you took through it.



Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

The Cinema of Lost Dreams


What happens to the dreams we don't remember?
    I've asked myself that question on several mornings, when I've awoken with little or no dream recall, while feeling that the night had been active.
    On one such morning, I decided to linger in bed and see whether I could find a place where I could recover lost dreams. I found myself approaching an old-time cinema, that reminded me of a movie theater where I used to go, as a boy, to watch Saturday matinees. I was amazed and delighted to find that, this time, the movie titles on the marquee and the images on the posters in the lobby all throbbed with significance in my present life.
     Waking the Sleeping King was blazoned in lights.
     One of the posters showed a boy riding a monster of the deep through a stormy ocean. Another depicted a steamy romance.
      The girl at the ticket kiosk smiled and gestured for me to go through. Soon I was settled in a comfy padded velvet seat in a private screening room. As dream images filled the screen, I realized I had a choice. I could remain a comfortable observer, or I could enter the fray.

On another morning, after coffee, I decided to try the same method again. This time, instead of going back to the movie house, I found myself drawn to the kind of video store that is almost defunct, thanks to our new instant delivery systems. This video store was vast, with its products arranged on many levels, On the first floor, dreams were arranged like DVDs on shelves, according to familiar categories - Drama, Comedy, Family, and so on, There was a large Adult section most of whose content was quite unfamiliar to me. I realized that a block had been placed on some of this material, so that it did not reach my conscious mind, or - in cases where the film had been rated I (for Intrusion) was not allowed through during the night.
     I discovered sections devoted to my dreams of individual people. I had only to focus on a name or title, and the movie began to play all around me, so I could enter it at will. 
     On a lower level of the dream video store, I discovered that I could explore dream adventures I may have shared with other people, but had not remembered. I found an immense archive of shared dreams involving each of these people. One was as large as a Gothic cathedral, with shelves rising to the high roof many stories above. I watched several dream movies in each location. They took me deeply and vividly into scenes of other lives and other times - of leopard people in Africa, of Celtic voyagers in a coracle on a cold northern sea, of a turning castle in a high desert landscape where everything is the color of sand except for the pretty star-shaped flowers, blue and purple, on a terrace. The dream movies revealed a hidden order of connection in all these relationships, transcending our present lives.

On yet another day, when I felt impelled to go searching for lost dreams, I was drawn to a building like an old-fashioned post office. It resembled the post office in the rust-belt city of Troy, New York, where I once lived. When I arrived in front of it, in my conscious dream, the sky turned dark. I mounted the high steps, and walked past the mail boxes towards the counters. Most of the steel shutters were down and locked for the night, but one was still half-open. Behind it, I saw letters spilling from pigeon holes and heaps of giant mail bags and packages. A little black women in  a blue uniform hurried to the desk and handed me a letter. I was moved to tears when I opened it and found a message from a beloved family member, long deceased.
    When I turned to thank the postal clerk, I realized that I knew her. I had glimpsed her, in half-forgotten dreams, slipping mail through a letter drop in the door of my house, a letter drop that is not in the physical door. She strongly resembles a figure from history I was called to study by dreams I did remember - Harriet Tubman, a world-class dreamer who used her visions as maps to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War.
     I suspect there are back rooms in my dream post office where there is more to discover. Maybe one of them is like the Cabinet Noir in the old French post offices, where mail judged suspect by the authorities was held for inspection, and often never delivered to the addressee.

All of which leads to this suggestion: if you are missing your dreams (and your dreams are missing you) try taking a little quiet time, when you won't be disturbed, and announce this as your intention:

I would like to go to a place where I can find my lost dreams

Maybe this will take you to a movie theater, a video store, or a post office, or another place entirely, constructed from your own life memories and suited to your imagination. In whatever form it appears, you will be entering the Office of Lost and Found Dreams.



For more on recovering lost dreams, please see my book Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Place of Wild Freedom. Published by New World Library.

Graphic: 1933 photo of the Victoria Station News Theatre, London.