Ankh at the heart

I am asked to find a symbol for the heart.

    It comes immediately. It is a standing ankh, silver-bright. Waters stream over and around it. I know that its gift is neverending life.
     I remember drinking healing waters from a vessel shaped like an ankh, and holding such a vessel to the lips of those in need of strength or healing.
     I remember an ancient baptism: an ibis-headed god of the Moon and of writing pours the waters of life over the chosen initiate.

     How often have I seen the ankh in the hands of deities, grasping it by the loop, giving meaning to the name the Romans gave it: crux ansata, the handled cross, the cross you can handle.
     The essence of male and female are wound together in its form. Here are the knot of Isis and the djed pillar of Osiris, the womb and the phallus or backbone of the bull.
     I remember other uses for this eternal symbol of life. Of looking through the loop, as through a viewfinder, into the world-behind-the-world.
     Gratefully, I say the old, old words.

I am life
I am love
I am truth

     From life to life, from world to world, there are forms that return.

Note: Egyptologists contiue to speculate whether the form of the ankh was chosen because of its resemblance to a certain phsyucal object. There was popular theory that ut might be modeled on a sandal strap. ings'. The ankh symbol has also been identified wth a girdle knot, a mirror, a double-axe, a penis sheath, and the thoracic vertebra of a bull. The rival comparisons are discussed in Andrew Gordon and Calvin. Schwabe, The Quick and the Dead: Biomedical Theory in Ancient Egypt (Leiden:Brill, 2004) pp.102-4. 

Four Days in the Grip of the Bear Goddess

 

I have known since early in my long sojourn in North America that the Bear is a great medicine animal. A powerful dream that brought me personal healing reminded me that this was not unknown to early peoples in Europe, especially when the ancient way of the Great Goddess was most alive. Here is my unedited journal report from almost quarter of a century ago.

 

April 26 1999

Four Days in the Grip of the She-Bear

A she-bear is among us. I volunteer to deal with her. She is enormous, maybe six hundred pounds. Light in color, lighter than honey-brown. She grips my head in the crook of her arm, and holds it against her, close to her face. We spend four days in this intimate embrace. It is not uncomfortable, but I am aware that at any moment she could break my neck.

At the end of four days, the people who were with me at the outset gather around us again. One is a woman scientist or zoologist. They now have the means to release me. But the she-bear lets me go without a struggle, confident of our relationship. She shambles away into a space that had been prepared for her, in a room off the corridor of an institutional building, a hospital or teaching facility.

When I start talking about her, she returns to look at me. 

“You are Artemis,” I tell her. “I am Osiris.”

On waking, I noticed that troublesome symptoms that had been bothering me for days - headaches and wooziness - had left me. I felt charged with vitality, sure I had received personal healing, and grateful to the she-bear that delivered it.-

I was intrigued by the words my dream self had spoken to her. I could grasp why I might have identified myself with "Osiris", as candidates for initiation and travelers preparing for the next world were schooled to do in ancient Egypt. Osiris is one who dies and comes back, one who is dismembered and re-membered. I could find something of my finite story within his neverending one.-

But why did my dream self hail the she-bear with the name of the Greek goddess Artemis? I hit the books, especially the brilliant early studies of Jane Ellen Harrison, who had an intuitive grasp of the shamanic sources of Hellenic ritual practices. I rediscovered hat throughout ancient Greece, bears were sacred to Artemis. Well-born little Athenian girls danced as bears to Artemis of Brauronia, the Bear-Goddess. Jane Ellen Harrison observed they “could not but think reverently of the great might of the Bear.”-

More generally, Harrison wrote in  Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, "The mystery gods…are never free of totemistic hauntings, never quite shed their plant and animal shapes. That lies in the very nature of their sacramental worship. They are still alive with the life-blood of all living things from which they sprang."-

I looked anew, with the eyes of a dream archeologist, at ancient images of the Bear goddess, including the 2nd century bronze statue of the Celtic bear goddess, found near Bern in Switzerland, who appears in the photo that accompanies this essay. The Romans called her Dea Artio. As far away as Britain, the Arthur, as consort of the Bear goddess, led his men into battle under her standard. In her human guise, in the Bern statue, the goddess offers fruit to her animal self.-

The link between Artemis and the Bear can be tracked through the myths, though we need dream sight to get to the heart of these stories. In the Greek version of the creation of the Bear constellations in the sky - Ursa Major and Ursa Minor - Zeus pursues Callisto, one of the nymphs of Artemis. Callisto keeps shapeshifting; the lusty god shifts just as fast, seeking to cover her in every form. The nymph of Artemis becomes a bear, and now Zeus, as a male bear, wraps her in his embrace and has his way with her. When Artemis later notices that her nymph is pregnant, she flies into a rage and kills her, but quickly repents and places Callisto and her daughter among the stars, as the Great Bear many call the Big Dipper, and the Lesser Bear.

Freud among his "old and grubby gods"

When the young Freud visited the Louvre for the first time, he felt he had walked into a dream. He could not get enough of the "Assyrian kings, tall as trees, holding lions like puppies" and their tremendous winged guardians. He was captivated by the Egyptian rooms. Here, among the ancient statues, he discovered a passion that became one of his ruling drives for the rest of his life. He longed to possess these mysterious and potent images. While no apartment within his means could ever hold a lamassu or a full-size Sekhmet, there were smaller versions available, of the kind the ancients kept as talismans, life-protectors, and vehicles for daily communion with powers of the invisible world made visible through the makers' arts.
    Freud became a dedicated collector of antiquities, haunting the shop of Robert Lustig, the foremost dealer in Vienna, using every holiday or conference abroad to ransack other stores. This was the great age of the tomb robbers, and Freud had no qualms about purchasing what had been taken out of Egypt or Greece or Etruscan lands by questionable means. Tutankhamon's tomb was opened in 1925, and Freud was able to buy a piece from that. In his seventies, he declared that if he only had enough money, he would like take on the complete excavation of a new archaeological site. He considered himself an archaeologist of the mind, but he would have liked to be an archaeologist of the earth as well,
    The rooms reserved for his consulting and study in the apartment at Berggasse 19 where he lived with Martha and their many children for decades struck visitors as a museum, indeed an over-stuffed museum. On her first visit in 1933, the feminist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was stunned by the immense number of items, above all statuettes. Freud had a battalion of gods and goddesses arrayed on his desk. As he talked, he would handle them and sometimes choose one to hand to a patient. He passed H.D. a statue she did not immediately understand. Its general shape made her think of a lotus, with the stamen rising within the petals. It was an ivory carving of Vishnu standing below the five cobra heads of a serpent, a piece commissioned by the Psychoanalytic Society of India to honor Freud - and the only Hindu statue in his collection.
    His favorite, among all his treasures, was a little bronze statue of Athena. "She is perfect," he told H.D., "but she is missing the spear." No doubt he saw a sexual metaphor, in the context of his theories. But Athena was more to him than that. All his "old and grubby gods" - as he once called them - were more than anything explained in his theories. There, on his desk, was a head of Osiris. It had been severed from the body of a bronze statue and was missing the jeweled eyes as well as the high crown. Nonetheless, Freud explained to visitors, this was his "Answerer", the one who answered his deepest questions. Here, was Isis, rather formally posed as she suckled her child, a queenly and hieratic mother. Here were falconed-headed gods like the ones that Freud saw in a childhood dream that stayed with him, carrying his mother to the gates of the Netherworld. Here was the Chinese figure of a scholar before an exquisitely carved jade screen, an alter ego from a culture that Freud understood incompletely.
    I had heard about Freud's art collection, but nothing I had read prepared me for the amazing sight of his army of gods and sacred beings on display in his last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead when I visited in 2011. Whatever you think you know about Freud, prepare to be taken in deeper and unexpected directions. I felt an eager desire to understand the relations of the great psychoanalyst - who gleefully called himself a "godless Jew" - to all these idols and magical artifacts. Nothing in his collection (except the fakes that escaped detection by his keen eye and those of his friends at the Kulturhistorisches Museum in Vienna) was made simply for the sake of art and ornament. These statues were regarded as "breathing images" (as the Greeks put it); some part of the deity or daimon represented was believed to have taken up residence.
    Freud's greatest compulsion, second only to the addiction to chain-smoking cigars that killed him, was his collection. Later in life, he insisted on having the entire collection carefully boxed and sent by train to join him and his family on their long summer vacations. He would bring favorite statues, and new acquisitions, to the dinner table. He was forever talking to his little gods, stroking them, handling them. He knew that they were alive, though this sentiment did not fit very readily into his secular humanism. He denied or ignored the one God, but he lived among many gods. In his feelings, he was quite at home in the pagan world. After visiting the overgrown site of the Forum in Rome for the first time, he wrote that he was perfectly prepared to worship at the ruined temple of Minerva.
    When H.D. called on him in London, in the year before his death, she was amazed that he still had most of his gods, over 2,000. How did he manage to keep them out of the clutches of the Nazis who now ruled in Vienna? “I did not bring them," he told her. "The Princess had them waiting for me in Paris, so that I should feel at home there.” The Princess was Marie Bonaparte, his patient and patron. With the help of a friend at the museum, who gave an appraisal of Freud's collection that grossly undervalued its worth, she had helped to pull the strings that got the Reich bureaucracy to let Freud leave with his gods as well as his family. H.D. found gardenias, Freud's favorite flowers, and had them delivered with a card that read, “To greet the return of the Gods.”
     Freud's collection included many objects from Egyptian tombs, not only statues of gods but shabti representing bound spirits expected to work for the dead, mummy cases and painted mummy bandages. He surrounded himself with evidence of cultural beliefs in the soul's survival of death, while strongly suggesting that he did not personally believe in an afterlife. I suspect that he knew better in his dreams, especially when the "breathing images" came alive, as the ancients expected and prayed for them to do.
     Freud's ashes were placed in a superb red-figured Greek urn from the 4th century b.c.e., one of many gifts from the Princess. His wife Martha's ashes joined him there after her death. On the vase is the image of Dionysus, a god who dies and comes back, with a maenad, one of his ecstatic female worshippers. An interesting choice of a resting place. On New Year's day,2011, robbers tried to steal the vase from Golders Green Crematorium, where it was on public display. They did not succeed, but caused major damage to the urn. It is not clear what exactly happened to Freud's ashes. 

~

There is an excellent book on Freud and his collection by Australian art historian Janine Burke. The first (Australian) edition is titled The Gods of Freud (Sydney: Knopf, 2006). It was republished in the U.S. as The Sphinx on the Table. It amounts to a top-notch biography of Freud seen through the art that spoke to him. The most vivid account of his relations with his "old and grubby gods" is H.D.'s Tribute to Freud, essentially a narrative of and reflection on her five-times-a-week sessions with Freud in Vienna in 1933-4. H.D.'s classical education and knowledge of the myths and the sites made her a fascinating conversation partner for Freud, the collector. For other intriguing and lesser-known aspects of Freud's life please see my book The Secret History of Dreaming.

At top: Sigmund Freud at his desk. 1914 etching by Max Pollack.
Below: RM at Freud's last home in Hampstead

For a journey inside Freud's relationship with his gods,please see my story "A God of Freud" in Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm.

Egyptian Gates to the Afterlife: Flying to the Sky Goddess

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is full of spells for becoming a bird - a swallow, a falcon, a heron, or the benu bird the Greeks identified as the phoenix, the bird that is reborn from the ashes of its own funeral pyre. Sprouting wings was clearly one of the preferred Egyptian ways of entering the Otherworld and embarking on a happy afterlife. The ba soul is already winged; it is depicted in many inscriptions as a human-headed bird coming or going from the body of the soul traveler.

I come to you, O Nut.
I come to you, O Nut.
My wings have grown into those of a falcon.
My two plumes are those of a sacred falcon.
My ba-soul has brought me
and its magic words have equipped me.

- PYRAMID TEXT OF UNAS, Utterance 245

    In the Pyramid Text of Unas, the star traveler calls to the sky goddess that he is ascending to her on falcon wings, leaving the realm of Osiris below and behind. Nut, the great goddess , mother of Isis and Osiris, Set and Nephthys, is depicted as a naked woman or a heavenly cow whose body is filled with the starry sky. When the soul voyager calls to her, she gives him the following welcome:

May you split open a place for yourself
among the stars of the sky
for you are a star...
Look down upon Osiris
When he gives orders to the spirits,
you stand far above him
You are not among them
and you shall not be among them

    A true pharaoh ascended to the realm of the gods in such ways not only to rehearse for death, but to marry the worlds and return to the body with superabundant energy and insight. Initiates made the journey of ascent to enter the realm of the Akhet - the shining ones - and to be made "shining" (akh) in transformed energy bodies.
    The transformations recorded in the pyramid texts reflect a passage through several levels of reality, requiring movement beyond successive energy bodies and the putting-on of a celestial body. Like the shamanic journeyers who find that they are required to give up human or animal form to transcend the astral plane, the royal traveler becomes lightning in the Unas text, "a blinding light...a flame moving before the wind to the end of the sky and the end of the earth."

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Dreaming like an Egyptian

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, is etymologically connected to the root meaning “to be awake”. It was written with a determinative symbol representing an open eye.

     The Egyptians believed that the gods speak to us in dreams. As the Bible story of Joseph and Pharaoh reminds us, they paid close attention to dream messages about the possible future. They practiced dream incubation for guidance and healing at temples and sacred sites. They understood that by recalling and working with dreams, we develop the art of memory, tapping into knowledge that belonged to us before we entered this life journey, and awakening to our connection with other life experiences.

     The Egyptians also developed an advanced practice of conscious dream travel. Trained dreamers operated as seers, remote viewers and telepaths, advising on affairs of state and military strategy and providing a mental communications network between far-flung temples and administrative centers. They practiced shapeshifting, crossing time and space in the dreambodies of birds and animals.

     Through conscious dream travel, ancient Egypt’s “frequent flyers” explored the roads of the afterlife and the multidimensional universe. It was understood that true initiation and transformation takes place in a deeper reality accessible through the dream journey beyond the body. A rightful king must be able to travel between the worlds.

     It seems that in early times, in the heb sed festival, conducted in pharaoh’s thirtieth year, the king was required to journey beyond the body, and beyond death, to prove his worthiness to continue on the throne. Led by Anubis, pharaoh descended to the Underworld. He was directed to enter death, “touch the four sides of the land”, become Osiris, and return in new garments – the robe and the spiritual body of transformation.

     Jeremy Naydler’s Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts makes a convincing case that the palace tombs and pyramid texts of Egypt are about much, much more than funerary arrangements; that the Egyptians traveled beyond the gates of death while very much alive, not only to bring back first-hand knowledge of the afterlife, but to enter into sacred union with the gods and enthrone their power in the body, and so acquire the spiritual and sexual potency to marry the worlds.

      The dream guides of ancient Egypt knew that the dream journey may take the traveler to the stars – specifically to Sothis or Sirius, the “moist land” believed by Egyptian initiates to be the source of higher consciousness, the destination of advanced souls after death, and the home of higher beings who take a close interest in Earth matters.

      When we look for ancient sources on all of this, we are challenged to decode fragmentary texts, some collated over many centuries by pious scribes who jumbled together material from different traditions and rival pantheons.  Wallis Budge complained (in Osiris) that “the Egyptian appears never to have relinquished any belief which he once had”. We won’t find what we need on the practice of ancient Egyptian dreaming in the fragmentary “dream books” that survive, any more than we’ll grasp what dreaming can be from the kind of dream dictionary you can buy in drugstores today.

      We gaze in wonder at the Egyptian picture-books displaying the soul’s journeys and ordeals after death – and the many different aspects of soul energy that survive death – and quickly realize that to understand the source of such visions, and the accuracy of such maps, we must go into a deeper space. We must go to the Magic Library.

      In Hellenistic times – the age of Cleopatra – dream schools flourished in the temples of Serapis, a god who melds the qualities of Osiris and Apis, the divine bull. From the 2nd century BCE we have papyri recording the dream diaries of Ptolemaios, who lived for many years in katoche, or sacred retreat, in the temple of Serapis at Memphis. A short biography of the dreamer has been published by the French scholar Michel Chauveau in his book Egypt in the Age of Cleopatra. Ptolemaios was the son of Macedonian colonists, but like ancient Egyptians he was called to the temple by a dream in which the god appeared to him. He seems to have lived for years as a full-time dreamer, whose dreams guided him not only in his spiritual practice but in handling family and business matters beyond the temple walls.

     In this later period, the Egyptian priests who specialized in dreaming were called the Learned Ones of the Magic Library. What marvelous promise is in that phrase! What profound recognition of the magic and wisdom that is available to us through dreaming!

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Healed in the grip of She Bear

A she-bear is among us. I volunteer to deal with her. She is enormous, maybe six hundred pounds. Light in color, lighter than honey-brown. She grips my head in the crook of her arm, and holds it against her, close to her face. We spend four days in this intimate embrace. It is not uncomfortable, but I am aware that at any moment she could break my neck.

   At the end of four days, the people who were with me at the outset gather around us again. One is a woman scientist or zoologist. They now have the means to release me.
    But the she-bear lets me go without a struggle, confident of our relationship. She shambles away into a space that had been prepared for her, in a room off the corridor of an institutional building, a university or teaching hospital facility.

   When I start talking about her, she returns to look at me.
    I stare into her beautiful eyes. 

    “You are Artemis,” I tell her. “I am Osiris.”

Feelings: I had been suffering persistent wooziness and blurred vision before the dream. These symptoms were now gone. I felt physically restored, confident about things, open to adventure.

Reality: I have come to know the Bear as the great medicine animal of North America, where I live. I knew that warriors in the Europe of my ancestors called on the power of the Bear as a fierce protector. I know that Osiris is the model of one who rises from death, under the wings of a goddess.
   For the connection between Artemis and the Bear, I turned to my personal library, and immediately found this, in the Jane Ellen Harrison's classic work Themis: A Study of the Origins of Greek Religion: "The well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls who danced as Bears to Artemis of Brauronia, the Bear-Goddess, could not but think reverently of the great might of the Bear.”

   Harrison added the important general insight that "the mystery gods…are never free of totemistic hauntings, never quite shed their plant and animal shapes. That lies in the very nature of their sacramental worship. They are still alive with the life-blood of all living things from which they sprang."

Comment: In my current state of hibernation (the literal meaning is simply "passing the winter") I am deep in old journals. The report above comes from my journal for April 1999. As I read the journal entry again, the memory of healing streams through me, sweet and bright as mountain honey.
Bear has come to me again and again, over many years, to offer healing for me and for others. Great Mother Bear has come to offer soul recovery healing for many who come to my workshops. I have seen it again and again: Within the supportive energy of a circle of active dreamers, you journey with the drum to find a missing part of yourself, perhaps that magical child who took leave of this world because it seemed too cold and too cruel, and has been living all these years in a Land of Lost Girls or Lost Boys. You find that child, but she won't come to live fully in your body and your present life unless you can convince her you are safe and you are fun. That's not so easy. But when you take her in your arms, and hold her, Great Mother Bear comes and wraps her great arms around both of you, holding you gently but firmly together until you are one.

Drawings by Robert Moss

Egyptian Gates to the Otherworld

What can we learn from ancient Egypt about soul travel and viable gates to the Otherworld? Among the dense menagerie of Egyptian deities and practices evolved over 3,000 years, so far as we can fathom them through scholarship and far memory, five distinctive themes emerge:

1.          1.  Shapeshifting is a preferred model for soul travel

The gods assume the forms of birds or animals. Humans, in assuming the god forms, take the shames of the same birds and animals. Shapeshifting is one of the shortest passages through the terrors of the Underworld to the heavens of the blessed. In facing down his adversaries, the journeying soul may assume successive forms including those of his most terrifying challengers, such as the crocodile god Sobek.
    This type of shapeshifting is not reserved for the deceased. It is a model for the living of how to journey most effectively in the subtle body. There is a clear continuum here with shamanic practice. Just as in Egypt the gods show themselves as birds or animals, the animal powers – in shamanic cultures – are not confined to animal forms but may display themselves as humans or gods.

2. Feeding and Preserving the Energy Double

The Egyptian cult of the Ka was an incredibly elaborate magical industry devoted to escaping the “second death” and ensuring the survival of the dream body or astral double close to the realms of the living. It is clearly based on the recognition that different aspects of soul and spirit go to different places after physical death. The Ka has its own priests, responsible for its care and feeding. In the event of their death or dereliction, the Ka may be sustained by objects or images placed in the tomb that supply magical food and support. The Ka interacts with the living. It can travel from its house – the sarcophagus or a separate house or statue inside the tomb – through special doors, just as it sees through special eyes. It may influence the living for good or bad. It may be the source of prophetic dreams. It may stand guard over tomb and their treasures, as in the magical tale of Khaemewas and the Book of Thoth.

3. Testing Alternate Routes to the Neterworlds

The Egyptians studied and tested various itineraries for traveling to heavens, star worlds and neterworlds. In several thousands of years of evolution, magic and experiment, they developed a rich geography of the afterlife, peopled by a host of gods and demons who set trials and obstacles in the path of the journeyer.
    The Book of Gates depicts the departed soul having to confront a series of terrifying gatekeepers who may all be personifications of the Great Goddess. In other funerary texts, the pilgrim soul has to evade the nets of an implacable Soultaker, brave up to the attacks of a series of monstrous beasts in a passage through utter darkness, or survive a dramatic life review in the hall of judgment where the heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the divine embodiment of natural law. Go out with a heavy heart, and you are consigned to the ravening monster Ammit.
    The Egyptians believed that it helped to cast off from this earth with a good route map, and to know the names of those you will meet. A well-equipped traveler took a map and recognition codes with him into his grave.

4. Knowing the Names

Knowing the names of the entities you’ll meet along the way was one of the best ways to prepare for these journeys. Egypt was a land of magicians, and the hekau (magic words) were thought to bring things into manifestation; Heka, the god who personified Magic, rides with Ra in the solar barque along with Sia (Intelligence). Knowing the secret names of the neteru and how to vibrate the hidden vowels was one of the highest magical arts. There is a thriller about hhow Isis gleaned the secret name of Ra by catching his spittle to make a scorpion that stung him. Because it was made from his own spit, it had the power to kill; Isis promised a cure at the price of learning his secret name. Now she can wield his power. On the roads of the neterworlds, the journeyer assumes the powers of his challengers – and sometimes their forms – by speaking their names.

5. Way of the Heart

It is easy to get lost in the thickets of exotic names and directions, in which many pantheons and rescensions over millennia meet and merge and morph, in cohabitation with earth spirits and perhaps star travelers. Let’s notice that the Egyptian craft of death is also a plan for larger life, at home in multiple worlds from the Duat to the Akhet. Of special interest are the Way of Ra and the Way of Osiris (they merge in mystery texts and vignettes of Osiris transforming into Ra, or birthing him from within his mummified corpse). The Way of Ra is the story of the 12 Hours in the funerary texts, in which we see the Boat of Ra go through many levels of the Underworld and survive many challenges before it is reborn. It may also open into the Way of the Sun Behind the Sun, the opening of a stargate that may lead to the intelligences of the Sirius star system>
    The Way of Osiris requires the experience of death and rebirth within a Mystery or shamanic initiation. It becomes enfolded into the ethical teachings implicit in the scenes of the Weighing of the Heart and the 42 assessors.
    Let’s observe that throughout it is the heart that provides the operating center and purpose for the journeys. While the brain is discarded, the heart remains in the chest, sometimes protected by a heart scarab of carnelian.
    Approaching the place of inquisition and judgment, the traveler is reminded to call on his heart – the Ka of his heart – to speak and act for him.

My heart, my mother
My heart, my mother
My heart of my becoming

Photo: Hathor in the Louvre by RM

Raising Osiris, Birthing the Golden Child

We faced the sun, arms raised, palms out, and chanted the syllables that evoke the unmanifest power of the creative source, and the power of creation in this world:

Atum-Ra
Atum-Ra
Atum-Ra

We drew the power into our bodies, and shared it through the raised hands with each other. Then we stood in our own places in the circle and used the power again to project energy doubles, hands raised like the symbol of the Ka. We walked our energy doubles a few paces into the room, experimented with shifting forms, before we turned them around and absorbed them back into our bodies.
    We made the sign of the Enterer at the Anubis gate, greeted our gatekeepers and made our way to the chambers where we lay down on beds with lion legs and headrests shaped like thin crescent moons. Here we called for the dreams of invitation that would establish our right to go further.

    We were then admitted to the Hall of the Gods, to find - among all the breathing images set on high pedestals - who among the neteru support our life journeys, who defends us before the greater powers.
     Next we were challenged to brave up to our fears and master our rage in the Chamber of Sekhmet. Some were torn limb from limb and devoured, to spend an aching, desolate time in utter darkness before they were reborn. One, with the hunter in her soul, met the lion spear in hand and killed it -  to find that she was now transformed into a lion and required to devour her human double.

     At last we went down to the Halls of Osiris. Each of us, male or female, was required to share his passion. We relived the experience of allowing ourselves to be trapped in a box, because it looked pleasant or because we thought we had no choice. We felt the crushing burden of being used to prop up a whole structure, be it a marriage, a job, a community or a world.          
     We knew the joy of being released by one who loves us and never ceases from seeking us. We knew the pain of being torn apart, our pieces scattered to the four quarters, and losing something that could never be found again in an ordinary way. We felt the gentle hands of those who sought our broken pieces and brought them together and made us whole.
    We stirred alive under the great wings of the beloved of our soul. And we claimed those wings, becoming the shamans of our souls, prime players in our own restoration. We knew the fierce joy of giving birth, through soul magic, to the golden child, the new creative life project. We saw it rise up like the sun falcon.
     When we came back, we each wrote a statement identifying ourselves, with fresh words, with the three central characters in the neverending story of Raising Osiris and Birthing the Golden Child. This is my version:

I am Osiris, the one who was trapped in a box, dismembered and re-membered, and returned from the dead. I am the one who came back.

I am Isis, above Osiris, the soul shaman who brings vital spirit back into the body through my beating wings.

I am Horus, sun falcon, golden child. I am the magical boy who writes and makes worlds and lives under the love and protection of the Sisters.

- Notes from group shamanic journeys I led in my workshop on "Dreaming Like an Egyptian" in Ann Arbor, Michigan in June 2014.

photos of Horus and Sekhmets in the Louvre (c) Robert Moss
drawing "Temple of Anubis" (c) Robert Moss
photo of Lake Michigan sunset by Julie Tumbarello