Lady of Crossroads

As I drifted in the liminal state between sleep and awake, I imagned myself entering the great temple at Eleusis. I was received by a priestess wearing a gold bee with outspread wings at her throat.

I asked to meet the deity who would appear to me at the climax of the Mysteries. She was scary to begin with. There was something like an immense cobweb that parted, and snakes, and a dark bird rushed from her eyes. She seemed to have owl eyes in the lined and craggy face of a crone.

Then the old woman’s face rippled like muslin curtain, and I saw her three-formed, all three bodies and faces beautiful. The central one facing me was that of a mature woman, the ones on either side looked younger. They were conjoined, not stuck together, vibrating in constant movement, capable of taking other forms but content to present themselves in the most lovely shapes for now. A reward for the initiate who finds the courage to part the veil, to come and go from the Underworld at will. No doubt about it: This is Hekate time. 

I reflected on offerings made to Hekate in ancient times. Food for sure: raw eggs, olive oil, honey, bread and cakes, beer. Since juniper is one of her special trees (small figures of Hekate were often carved from juniper) gin would be a modern addition.Neo pagans offer food from the meal they prepare each month at the dark of the moon, before or after the mortals eat.     

Hekate is Lady of Crossroads. She is also called Apotropaia (The One Who Turns Away Evil) and Enodia (In the Road) and the Key Holder.She is not only the Lady of Crossroads to be invoked when you are traveling this world or between the worlds. She is threshold guardian. The Greeks put little statues or emblems of Hekate at their doors. In Miletus these were small stone cubes,or wreaths. Larger temples might have little shrines to Hekate just inside their gates. 

Pausanias in his Description of Greece (5th century bce) wrote that "Of the gods, the Aeginetans worship most Hecate, in whose honor every year they celebrate mystic rites which, they say, Orpheus the Thracian established among them. Within the enclosure is a temple; its wooden image is the work of Myron, and it has one face and one body. It was Alcamenes, in my opinion, who first made three images of Hecate attached to one another, a figure called by the Athenians Epipurgidia (on the Tower); it stands beside the temple of the Wingless Victory." [2.30.2] 

Her reputation was darkened and demonized especially after the Church took on the old gods. But the darkening is also the work of dark sorcerers who called on her for low goetic workings. Look in the Greek Magical Papyri for how she was invoked in spellcasting, especially spells of attraction and love charms. In one of the most powerful, she is coupled with Ereshkigal, the Sumerian underworld goddess (PGM LXX. 4-25)'

I think of the horrid bestial sculptures of Hekate I saw during a visit to the dusty old archaeology museum in Constanța on the Black Sea coast of Romania. Then known as Tomis, this was the place of exile of the Roman poet Ovid, the great scholar of shapeshifting.

Among Hekate's animals and avatars: 

Screech Owl (she sees better at night)

Raven and dark birds

Wolf

Goat 

Fox (I am sure though I do not see it in the references)

Black dog. One of her Greek titles is Black Bitch, something we would be prudent not to say in English. Cautious translators sometimes call her the autiously render this as Black She Dog. Since I have lived with black dogs most of my life, Hekate is no stranger.

Her role in the Persephone story: she is the one who hears Kore’s cry and helps Demeter in her search. In some of the ancient art, Hekate is with Hermes when he guides Persephone up from the Underworld, holding torches. 

Let us note that Hekate enters literature, around 700 bce in Hesiod's Theogony, as a Great Goddess who is not yet deparmentalized. Hesiod speaks of "Hecate whom Zeus the son of Cronos honored above all. He gave her splendid gifts, to have a share of the earth and the unfruitful sea. She received honor also in starry heaven, and is honored exceedingly by the deathless gods. For to this day, whenever any one of men on earth offers rich sacrifices and prays for favor according to custom, he calls upon Hecate. Great honor comes full easily to him whose prayers the goddess receives favorably, and she bestows wealth upon him; for the power surely is with her.

She was worshipped in this way into much later times in Caria in what is now southwest Turkey.Around 125 bce the people of Lagina built a monumental temple for her where she was honored with lavish animal sacrifices. She was revered not only as a cthonic deity but as city protector, rather like Athena in Athens. The Carians put her image on their coins, just as Athenians put their goddess and her owl on their silver tetradrachmas. Rites of Hekate in Caria included the Procession of the Key. The daughter of the priest of Hekate carried the key from Lagina to the larger city of Stratonikeia,10 km away, where the goddess was honored with animal sacrifice. Then the key-bearer and her retinue traveled back to the temple. [*] 

* Amanda Herring, “Reconstructing the Sacred Experience at the Sanctuary of Hekate at Lagina”in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2020) 79 (3): 247–263.

Dream horses

Horses run through our dreams. We wake, hearts pounding, still feeling the thunder of the hoofbeats.

Our dream horses are not the same, of course. Some are oppressed by dreams of a black horse that seems like a figure of death, or a red horse foreboding war and bloodshed, or a ghostly pale horse that brings the sense of sorrow and bereavement. Such dreams - and Fuseli's famous painting of nightmare - have encouraged the belief that the "nightmare" has to do with a mare, whereas in fact (the etymologists tell me) the "mare" part here is most likely derived from the Old Germanic mer, meaning something that crushes and oppresses.

In dreams, the state of a horse is often a rather exact analog for the state of our bodies and our vital energy. When you dream of a starving horse, you want to ask: what part of myself needs to be nourished and fed? You dream of horses flayed and hung up under the roof beams (as did a dreamer in one of my workshops) and you need to ask: which parts of me have been flayed and violated in the course of my life, and how do I heal and bring those parts back to life? 

Such a dream also evokes the ancient rituals of horse sacrifice - common to many cultures - and might also require a search back across time into primal material from the realm of the ancestors, lost to ordinary consciousness, but alive in the deeps of the collective memory.

In Greek mythology, horses are the gift of Poseidon, and come surging from the sea, their streaming manes visible in the whitecaps. Or they irrupt from the dark Underworld, from whence Hades charges on his black stallions to ravish Persephone with his unstoppable sexual energy and hurl her into a realm of savage initiation beneath the one she knows. Yet in Arcadia, Persephone's mother Demeter, the great goddess of Earth and grain and beer, was depicted with a horse's head.

Go to the British Isles, and you find the white mare revered as the mount and form of the Goddess. She is Epona, and her prints still mark the land whichever way you ride, even if only by train or car or Shanks' pony. In ancient Ireland, a true king was required to mate with the white mare, as the living symbol of the sacred Earth. (It would take a manful king indeed to couple with a mare; I suspect a priestess was substituted.)

We know the horse in certain living myths as healer and teacher, as vehicle for travel to higher realms, and as the source of creative inspiration. It is the hooves of Pegasus, rending the rock, that open the Hippocrene spring, beside the grove of the Muses, from which poets have drunk ever since. It is Chiron the centaur, the man-horse, who is the mentor of Asklepios, the man-god synonymous with healing, especially through dreams. In fairy tales (the Grimms' and others) it is often the horse that can find the way when humans are lost.

I dreamed of rounding up a great herd of wild horses, and understood, waking in excitement and delight, that this was about bringing vital energy back where it belongs and helping to shape a model of understanding and practice of soul recovery for communities as well as individuals, The wild horse racing through our dreams may be the windhorse of spirit, or vital essence, that needs both to run free and to be harnessed to a life path and a human purpose. 

Of all the shaman terms I have heard, "windhorse" is my favorite. It is native to at least three traditions of Central Asia, where the word "shaman" and the shaman's frame drum (often made with horse hide and commonly called the shaman's "horse") originate. In Buryat (Mongolian) the word for "windhorse" is khiitori; in Old Turkic it is Rüzgar Tayi; in Tibetan it is rlung ta (pronounced lung ta).

When you think about it, the horse is unlike any other animal. Stronger than man, it yet allows itself to be gentled and bridled and provided the main form of locomotion for all those centuries before the invention of the internal combustion engine. As in Plato's image of the charioteer of the soul, challenged to manage the rival energies of a horse that wants to go down on a rampage, wild and sexy and possibly violent, and the steady horse whose instinct is always to go up, to rise higher, we are challenged by our dream horses to recognize, release and temper the horse power within us.

Photo: Pegasus in Powerscourt gardens, County Wicklow, Ireland

Dreams of initiation

In dreams and twilight states, we are called to a deeper life. Training and initiation, as well as direct experience of the sacred, lie beyond the dreamgates.

    The hunger for transcendence, through a primal, direct encounter with the sacred, leads people down strange and dangerous byways: into experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, into dubious cults and ersatz Nativism. Yet the authentic call to initiation continues to resonate in our dreams. And through the dreamgates, it can be followed to a genuine consummation. Arguably, it can hardly be pursued in any other way since — whatever the externals of ceremony and culture — true spiritual initiation and apprenticeship always take place on the inner planes, in a deeper order of reality.

    Even in societies where Mystery initiation was regarded as central to human fulfillment, and its gates and secrets closely guarded, the validity of an individual dream calling and initiation was honored.
    There is a fascinating story about this from the Hellenistic world, preserved by Sopatros, a teacher of rhetoric. A man dreamed he had attended the epopteia, the crowning revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He recounted the secret rituals of the Telesterion in vivid and accurate detail to an initiate of the Greater Mysteries. But in ordinary reality, the dreamer was not a “made man.”
    The initiate to whom he told his dream was shocked that he was speaking openly about things he had no right to know and denounced him for sacrilege. He was dragged into court, where his accusers demanded the death penalty. However, the defense argued successfully that the gods themselves had played the part of the hierophant in his dream. His dream of initiation was recognized as true initiation; the dreamer would now be respected as an epoptes — one who had “seen” and gone through the sacred fire.

     Contemporary dreamers who have never heard of Eleusis or other ancient Mystery rites have dreams of similar quality.        
     A woman with no classical education dreamed she was at a banquet that reminded her of the Last Supper, except that the feasters at the table were wearing curious masks. One of them had the face of a raven, another wore a veil, yet another a Roman helmet. Her own head was covered by a lion mask fashioned from a canvas-like material, possibly oiled paper. When she shared this dream in one of my workshops, I realized she was describing, as if from the inside, a communion rite of the Mithraic mysteries, whose initiates donned masks and headgear of this type according to their grades.

Adapted from chapter 7 of Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: The Ninnion Tablet depicts Iacchus leading Mystery initiates to an encounter with Demeter and Persephone. Found in the sanctuary of Eleusis, and dating from the mid-fourth century BCE, this red clay tablet is the only known original depiction of the Eleusinian rites of initiation. Now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

The Goddess, Her Bridegroom and a Romanian Word-Magician

We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."

- Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess.

Marija Gimbutas was so many things: an extraordinary and indefatigable archeologist, linguist and mythologist, a lover and restorer of the Goddess traditions, a survivor of one of the worst nightmares of history, "an embodiment" (as her friend and editor Joan Marler puts it) "of an essence of the Lithuanian soul". Marija created the multidisciplinary approach she called "archaeomythology". It has taught us essential things about the Old Europe of the Neolithic that revive the hope that in our times we, too, can cherish the Divine Feminine and nourish a "partnership society" in which the sexes are balanced in a dynamic harmony that tends the earth, and the soul.

Marija's work is being continued and furthered by the passionate and scholarly work of Joan Marler and her colleagues at the Institute of Archaeomythology. From their base in the gentle wine-country town of Sebastopol, California, they reach across the world to support the work and publications of remarkable scholars like the Romanian linguist and archaeomythologist, Adrian Poruciuc. I have just read his recent book, Prehistoric Roots of Romanian and Southeast European Traditions, with great pleasure and profit.

Poruciuc is an etymological detective, and if you are a lover of words, and are willing to jump from Homeric Greek to Old Church Slavonic at the drop of a diphthong, you could find his work as exciting as an episode of NCIS on television. Take his investigation of the root meaning of two famous names from Greek mythology, Demeter and Dionysos. After tracking the components and variants of "Demeter" through many languages, he confirms what many of us knew in our gut and our atavistic memories, but many cavilers (nothing to do with "cavaliers") in the academic fraternity long doubted: Demeter means "Earth Mother." Then he takes us into fresh and thrilling territory by demonstrating that Dionysos, all but certainly, means "Bridegroom of the Mother." Drink that one in deep (as is Dionysos' way). Reflect on what the meaning of that name reflects from the civilization of the Goddess in Old Europe. The roistering, hard-drinking god of ecstasy is, first and last, the consort of the Goddess and her partners in the Mysteries that renew and fertilize the earth.

Poruciuc probes mysteries that are more arcane, to non-Romanians. Why are the folk songs or "carols" (colinde) sung around Romanian holidays full of references to a great flood that is clearly very different from the Biblical one, since it has nothing to do with rain but only with a wildly rising sea? Romania, after all, has only a small coast, on the all-but-tideless Black Sea. Do these songs of flood carry on the memory of an ancient event, older (perhaps) than the flood of the Book of Genesis? On those stormy waters, in some of the songs, comes a great bull or antlered deer with the goddess rocking between his horns, on a swing. Here we are, again, in realms of the Once and Future Goddess.

Lovers of mythic beasts will be intrigued by Poruciuc's mythic bestiary of creatures that populate those old Romanian folk songs and folk memories: of the sea-monster known as the dolf (which sounds like dolphin but probably isn't) that comes on land to steal apples; of a fish-goddess, and a snake-goddess; of a lion that is spoken to like a dog. I was hoping to find the wolf-headed dragon of the ancient Dacians here - terror of the Romans, and source of one of the most ferocious battle standards I have ever seen - but I gather we'll need to wait for another volume of Poruciuc's studies for that. I look forward to it.

The book discussed: Adrian Poruciuc, Prehistoric Roots of Romanian and Southeast European Traditions. Sebastopol, CA: Institute of Archaeomythology, 2010.