Birth of Apollo

I cannot be born
on solid ground,
only where everything flows.
To enter my dawn
you must be unbound
from how the fixed world goes.

Leave behind

your maps and losses,

let  dreams be all your law.

Trust the wind

when the ocean tosses,

burn your boats on the farther shore.

Make new songs

and your floating island

will be rooted beneath the waves.

Drink my sun

and you dance on the high land

your heart, remembering, craves.

This poem is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

Island of Delos by Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann (1847). According to legend, Delos was a floating island until Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were born there.

Raven Eye

 

In myth and legend, the raven is many things: trickster and creator, messenger and seer, personification of ravening greed, harbinger of death, companion or form of the Goddess. Here I want to speak about raven as an oracle bird, one that can lend us his or her sight. 

Odin sees far with the help of twin ravens, named Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. They fly all over this Middle World, returning with information. In the Prose Edda, Odin is called "raven god" because of his close association with these birds. 

The raven has an equal role in the legends of Celtic seership. The raven is also the seeing-bird of Apollo, the owner of the most famous oracle of the ancient world, at Delphi. In the Greek story the raven was white until it brought the god the news of the infidelity of his mate Coronis (the Crow-Woman); his fury blasted it until it was black. 

In dreams and journeys over many years, I have found the raven an impeccable ally when there is a need to see into dark places or see into the future. It has served as an ally in shamanic healing, plucking out the cells of disease. When I look into the raven's eye, I see a screen like a television monitor on which images of things I need to know appear; sometimes I can also travel through the screen, to explore a scene beyond it. 

In seership trainings in my Active Dreaming workshops, I suggest to participants - after they have done some foundation work - that they can borrow the keen sight of twin ravens named Thought and Memory to go scouting the possible future. They don't have to rely on their own intuition or intelligence; they are to let the birds do the work. The quality of the information gathered by raven trackers in these exercises is often remarkable, even when the scouts have had no prior experience of doing anything remotely like this. 

Despite their literary reputation, ravens aren't solitary birds, unless forced to be; they mate for life.  

Here's a poem I wrote to honor some of Raven's gifts:

 

Sun Stealer  

They say you stole the sun. 
This is inexact. 
You hid the light in darkness 
where the light-killers could not find it 
so the sun could shine brighter than before. 

They say you are black
because you are evil and unkind.
They do not say you swallowed
your own shadow and mastered it
at the price of wearing its colors.

Shivering, they call you death-knell,
Death-eater, bad omen, flying banshee
because you feed on death that feeds on men.
You strip what rots from what remains. 
You give us the purity of the bones. 

Trickster, they call you. 
Oh yes, you'll do your wickedest
to ensure our way is never routine 
and we are forced to improvise and transform. 
You won't let us swap our souls for a plan. 

At least they don't accuse you of minor crimes.
I praise and claim your gifts 
of putting on darkness to come and go safely 
in the darkest places, jesting with Death.

Illustration: "Two Ravens" by Robert Moss

Swinging with Hermes on the Hinge of Fate

He is always in motion; he belongs to the journey (hodios); his home is the road itself. He is the angel of the Odyssey, the angelos, the messenger of the gods. He is “the quick one”, especially as angel of death. He is dios eriounios huios, the “swift as death son of Zeus.” He was born in a cave, through the mating of Zeus and a primordial goddess, Maia, who was shrunk in the later phallocentric theology to a mere nymph.
    He is ruler of dreams (hegetor oneiron) and guide of souls (psychopompos). The dream people of Phaeacia – who rescue Odysseus and send him safe to the harbor of the soul – make offerings to Hermes before going to sleep. (Odyssey Book VII, 138).
    He is the embodiment of synchronicity, and his oracles speak through natural events that convey supernatural meaning. The oracle of Hermes at Pharai, in the Peloponnese, was located at the center of a walled market, where there was a simple rough-hewn statue of the god. Consulting this oracle was as simple as this: 

You enter the market through the gate in the wall towards the close of business, as the vendors are packing up their stalls. You bring your question for the oracle with you. You walk to the statue of the god and whisper that question in his ear. Then you plug your ears, or press your hands over them, shutting out external sounds as you walk back to the gate. At the exact moment you reach the gate, you unplug your ears. The first sounds you hear – a snatch of conversation, the cry of a bird, the creak of an overloaded wagon – will be the response of the oracle. The god will speak to you directly through the everyday noise of the world, once you have set a clear intention and put yourself in a frame of mind to receive the message.

Hermes is “the friendliest of gods to men” but his actions are unpredictable, and he begins his career as a thief. He bestows on humans the gift of fruitfulness. The stroke of good luck, the windfall, is named after him in Greek; it is a hermaion. He can be roguish, and shameless in singing bawdy, teasing songs over his lyre, strung on a tortoise shell. He sings of love and riches. He tells the tale of his own begetting, the lusty embrace of his parents in their secret union in the cave. He carries memory. He has great appetites – for meat, for sex, for song, for improv. He is of the night. 
    According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Zeus fathered Hermes by making love to Maia, then oldest of the Pleaides, under cover of dark in a cave. When she delivered Hermes, Maia bundled him up in warm fleeces and fell asleep. Hermes is quick. Within hours, the newborn baby had crawled to Thessaly. Before nightfall the next day,now fully grown, he had stolen some of his half-brother Apollo's cattle and invented the lyre by stringing a tortoise shell. Hermes' theft of the cattle caused a dispute among the gods that was resolved only when Apollo agreed to receive the lyre as payment for his cattle.   
    In the older strata of the myths, preserved by Cicero in De Natura Deorum ("On the Nature of the Gods"), Hermes is the son of Heaven (Ouranos) and Bright Day (Hemera); Aphrodite is their daughter. He is the escort of the goddesses – on the reliefs he is always leading three of them. He is the lover and ally of the feminine world of springs and caves, trees and streams. He is the primal lover, seminal in every sense. He has associations with water; at Pharai he has a sacred fishpond. He is one of the consorts of Hecate, who also presides at crossroads and is a keeper of gates.

      He manifests a world, a world of spontaneous creation and fluctuation. The great mythographer Karl Kerenyi, colleague of Jung, struggled to explain this in his elegant little monograph Hermes, Guide of Souls:

The sum total of pathways as Hermes’ playground; the accidental “falling into your lap” as the Hermetic material; its transformation through finding – thieving – the Hermetic event – into an Hermetic work of art, which is always something of a tricky optical illusion, into wealth, poetry and every sort of evasion from the restriction and confinement imposed by laws, circumstances, destinies – how could these be merely psychic realities? They are the world and they are one world, namely, that world which Hermes opens to us. 

Hermes, Kerenyi declares, is “the source of his own world”.    

     He is the masculine aspect of the life force, represented as the herm, the phallus.

     His phallus is a pivot between the worlds. We begin to grasp this sexy mystery when we find a carved phallus used as grave marker. There is a stone phallus three feet high inscribed with the name and portrait of an ancient Greek woman named Lysandra of Alexandros. Priapus, the god of the permanent hard-on, according to some a son of Hermes, is a guardian of graves and gardens. Seed is also soul. On an Attic black-figured vase, an ithyphallic man blows on a double flute as he ejects four drops of semen towards a large fluttering butterfly – which appears to be emerging from the first of the drops. 

    Hermes embodies the phallic and active principle, reigning over the rebirthing of souls. Hermes steps through the door with a hard-on, as men often transit from the dream world to the waking world, and hanged men, universally, enter the afterlife. Hermes is penetrating, and this is the effect of synchronicity. It pushes through, it opens up, and it inseminates.
    He is depicted wearing winged sandals, and a winged traveler's hat, and bearing a caduceus.
    Hermes is one of the great mythic Gatekeepers. Through him, every house opens into the Otherworld. One of his names, sotheos, means The Socket, as in the socket of a hinge that enables the pin to turn and the door to open and close. So we can think of him as a Hinge guy – as in “hinge of fate” – or a Pivot. As he swings, so do our fortunes.

Image: Hermes watches Hypnos and Thanatos prepare to carry the fallen hero Sarpedon back to his homeland in Lycia. Painting from the Euphronios krater (c.515 bce), now in the Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri. 

How to know when the god is present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess.
    We are inside the scene. We feel the coming of the god right now. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind.
    The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod among the fumes rising from the deep chasm.

Inside the dream, I feel educated pleasure. Some awe, but no fear. When I leave the dream, I have a deep sense of satisfaction. Also the strong feeling I have been in an entirely real situation, in another time and/or a separate reality.

Dreams set us assignments. It is agreeable for the ancient history professor in me to reopen books about the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. I am reminded that in preparing to become the oracle, the Pythia bathes in the sacred spring. She inhales pungent incense. She invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her.
   She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton (sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod that serves as her throne. In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl.
   She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as if it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages. 
    The philosopher-historian Plutarch, also a priest of Apollo, wrote that at Delphi the god makes his thoughts known “through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet, or, as it yields itself to the One that moves it, to remain of itself unmoved and tranquil, but, as though tossed amid billows and enmeshed in the stirrings and emotions within itself, it makes itself more and more restless.” [Plutarch, de pythiae oraculis in Moralia V]
    So the saying that truth comes with goosebumps comes with a mythic pedigree. I may have forgotten that, but my dream self clearly did not. Once again, I find myself racing to catch up with him.

Art: John William Waterhouse

Truth comes with goosebumps, now and then

It's a rule of skin, for me, that truth comes with goosebumps (or chicken skin, if you like). There is a science of shivers, which involves learning to recognize and respect what is going on when something exceptional is in the air and your body responds even before your mind can make sense of it.
    For the ancients, and in shamanic traditions, trembling for reasons other than cold or external danger has always been regarded as a sign of the advent of the numinous, the coming of gods or spirits. I recorded a recent dream that seemed to take me deep into this realm:

How to Know When the God is Present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind. The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod. The laurel leaves on the branch in her other hand are shaking and murmuring.

Inside the dream, I felt educated pleasure in being able to explain these things clearly. I woke with a mild shiver of recognition, and a deep sense of satisfaction.

Dreams set us research assignments, and this one sent me back to the books, to refresh my memory on the practice of divination in the ancient world, especially at the famous Greek oracle of Delphi, where the priestess known as the Pythia, or Pythoness, was consulted by the rulers of cities and nations.
    Through the surviving sources, starting with Aeschylus' play The Eumenides, I confirmed my dream self's version of the operations of the Pythia. In preparing to become the oracle, she bathes in the sacred spring and invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her in the presence of a client. She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton (sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod chair.
    In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl. She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages.

The bit about the goats fascinated me. In Diodorus of Sicily's World History, I reviewed again the legend of the foundation of the oracle of Delphi. Long before the great temple was built, when the area was wilderness, a goat herder noticed that some of his animals were behaving strangely. They were shaking and throwing their heads back, croaking and bleating.
    The herder approached them and saw they were at a crack in the rock from which vapors were rising. When he peered down, a strange exaltation seized him. He started shaking too. Knowledge of many things streamed through him. His family, alarmed by his long absence, searched for him and found him under a tree. He began to tell people their secrets without being asked. He had become clairvoyant. News of the chasm and the power of the vapors spread far and wide, until those in authority determined that things should be put on a orderly business footing. A priestess of blameless life would be chosen as speaker for the oracle, and access to the adyton would be banned to everyone except her attendants.
    It would probably be mistaken to attribute the Pythia's powers of truth-seeing to suphurous vapors from the earth, or chewing laurel leaves, or any other chemical assistance. For one thing, recent archaeology suggests the historical oracle of Delphi operated at a different site from the place - called Likoreia - where the goats were set trembling by whatever was rising from a fissure in the earth.*

But there was something else to be learned and remembered about quivering goats. Ah yes, it has to do with divination by animal sacrifice, indirectly referred to my dream-lecturer self. Goats and sheep were the preferred animals used in extispicy, divination by the entrails, a practice common throughout the ancient world and held to be of high importance in establishing the divine will in relation to human decisions. The Mesopotamian baru, a specialist in these matters, held high rank. So did the Etruscan haruspex counselor to Greeks and Romans, under both the Republic and the Empire. The liver was the preferred organ for divination, because it was thought to be a vital seat of an aspect of soul, and a kind of anchor between the spiritual world and the world of the body.
     For the haruspex, the best liver for divination was one that had been just carved from the animal victim, still warm and quivering in the diviner's hand. The Hittites liked to observe the spasms of the dying animal as its organs were removed.

These tales of savage times say it again: truth comes with goosebumps. Personally, I can do without looking at animal livers. It's enough to notice those little - or large - shivers that come when something is going on beyond the range of ordinary perception. They are a part of what the bleep we know that we (often) don't know that we know.

* On the archaeology of Likoreia and Delphi, see the vivid account in Robert Temple, Oracles of the Dead (Destiny Books).

Image: The Pythia on her tripod at Delphi, with a phiale (shallow bowl) in one hand and a laurel branch (sacred to Apollo) in the other.

Dream archaeology at Didyma

Temple of Apollo, Didyma, Anatolia

Columns of Apollo's fallen temple still stand tall against the sky. At the gate of the precinct are three Medusa heads; be careful how you go here. We walk past stone lions and carved bull’s heads and mount the steps of the outer temple.
     The walls of the inner temple are only a third their original size, but still rise high above us as we go down towards the sacred spring, where the oracle once sang through the vocal chords of an inspired prophetess.
     Blessedly, there are few tourists at the Temple of Apollo today. Shall I call to him? I decide to take the risk.
     In the inner temple, facing the sun, I join hands with the friends who have joined me on this expedition and we sing the words in classical Greek that call on Apollo Paian, Apollo the All-Healer, to awaken. I will not transcribe those words here.    

    Some curious German visitors snap pictures. The words reverberate across the enclosure. Sound must have been an essential part of the rituals conducted here. The acoustics are still extraordinary.
     I am drinking the sun, filling with light and music.
     A sweet, long-haired redhead – one of the stray dogs you see everywhere in these parts – comes to nuzzle me and lick me, and this feels like a blessing. Pilgrims at the temples of dream healing in ancient times were always hoping for friendly encounters with dogs.

    My Dutch friend asks, “What do you think went on here in ancient times?”
    I hear great waves of sound, choral voices, musicians. Sound was all-important in the rites celebrated here.
    I see a giant statue of Apollo at the center of the precinct. On his shoulders appear twin birds, black and white. They are both ravens. Of course: ravens were the birds of Apollo, and his seers use their sight very much as Odin does.
     Bird-watching was a vital part of divination here. I look through ancient eyes that quartered the sky and attributed different contexts and different outcomes to the behavior of birds in each of these quarter segments.

- from my casebook of dream archaeology (September 27, 2012).

Awakening Apollo at Didyma

Frankfurt journal: Every angel is terrifying

Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany

I can't think of any financial district in the world that announces its dedication to money more flagrantly than in Frankfurt, where a huge neon Euro sign glows in front of the bank towers. One of the dreamers in my Frankfurt workshop shared a dream in which she watched from the roof of her seven-story apartment building, several kilometers a way, as the Deutsche Bank tower imploded and crumbled to dust, followed by all the high-rise towers of high finance around it. "I was safe and my building was untouched," she reported. "I felt my role was to be like a guardian angel and watch over people as they tried to cope with the collapse of their values and their normal structures." Speaking of those values, Frankfurt's downtown business district is cheek-to-cheek with its red light district. Maybe that's because they share the same moral codes.

Side by side on huge plasma screens in the lobby of the hotel where I am leading my workshop (the hotel that promises "Starry Dreams Every Time"): amazing images of (1) a dramatization of an inspection of Adolf Hitler's brain and (2) a documentary about the possible migration of extra-terrestrial life forms on ancient asteroids. Whoa. A nonordinary multidimensional history tutorial, running during the break in our group shamanic adventures in the multiverse.

No, that's not a smartphone. It's a shamanic headphone, one of the pair of ravens I helped members of my workshop for the Frankfurter Ring to invoke to help them track for each other, bringing back life guidance, glimpses of the future, and keys to healing. Odin, who was a shaman before he became a god, relied on a pair of ravens named Thought and Memory to bring him information, sending them out to travel wherever was required. Sometimes they flew so far that he became worried about their safe return. It is said that he was always more anxious to recover Memory than Thought. Another god who relied on ravens was Apollo; interesting that a god of light had black birds at home in dark places as his winged familiars. An ancient Hellenic shaman names Aristeas of Proconessus used to take flight from his mouth in the shape of a raven and was capable of showing up in two places, and two different times, in the same moment. I have dreamed of him too.

Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. That's what I wrote on a card I contributed to our Coincidence Deck in the game we played in the closing session. It's from Rilke, and I  translated this as "Every angel is terrifying." A more literal translation would be "terrible" in the sense in which C.S.Lewis wrote of Aslan: "he is terrible, but he is good". I took a little poetic license - and perhaps Rilke would approve - to make the point that on first contact non-Hallmark angels terrify, by driving us to wake up and step outside our comfort zone and the picket fences of daily ordinary mind.     The workshop member who drew my message from Rilke was originally from Turkey. She found it highly relevant to her intention, which was to find joy in her work and her current life. The deeper powers that are hunting us, seeking to help us recognize and life our life calling, require us to brave up. You'll find the rules of my Coincidence Card Game, and other games for getting life guidance through synchronicity, in my book The Three "Only" Things, published in German as Fingerzeige des Schicksals.

I took a German course as an undergraduate in order to read Rilke and Goethe in the original, but I was lazy about grammar, and regret that my spoken German is so limited. It may grow now that Active Dreaming is growing in Germany, and I have been invited back, and back. I did have the pleasure of learning how to offer my dreamer's wish in German, and of writing it on the flyleaf or title page of many copies of Traum-Heiler, the German edition of Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

 Mögen deine besten Träume Wirklichkeit werden!

"May your best dreams come true" (and may you remember them!)