The Night When the Veil Thins

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. It is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. Some of my friends in Ireland still do. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Photo by RM: Birch woman in the Samhain circle of Brigid's Gardens near Rosscahill, County Galway.

Under Bare Ben Bulben's Head

 

From my travel journals

I met a windy spirit in the night of a grey soggy day spent sloshing along the shores of Sligo and checking out the burial place of my favorite dead Irish poet in Drumcliffe churchyard.  

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid. 

In fact there is no reason to believe that Yeats' mortal remains are under his headstone there. He died in France at the start of the Second World War and in the confusion his corpse was thrown into a communal grave. After the war, with nothing like DNA testing, a committee selected some likely bones to return to Ireland.  Whether or not any part of Yeats the man of flesh and bone is in that ground I do not doubt that some part of his spirit may fly here, like the swan of hammered pewter on the church door. The dark, sere wall of Ben Bulben rises against the horizon. Some say they have seen a door in the wall open around Samhain to let the Wild Hunt ride out. Yeats encountered these trooping fairies and urged great caution around them. His unease was reflected in the epigraph he wrote for his headstone. 

Cast a cold eye on life, on death
Huntsman, pass by 

He changed the key word in the last line and it is the blander version - Horseman, pass by - that tourists and pilgrims read today. The softer word does not dull the edge of what lies beneath. 

I felt that edge, lying back on a creaky bed in a shambling hotel of creaking floors, under bare Ben Bulben's head, as the poet expected to lie in his casket. 

It was wet and blowy outside, and the windows rattled. A harder gusto of wind threw one of them open and it banged so hard against the wall I feared that some of its little planes of glass had broken. 

"Wisp" drawing by Robert Moss

The wind took a form, with knife-sharp features and streaming hair. There was cruelty in the mouth, lordly disdain in the upward tilt of the raptor nose and the sweep of the high forehead. The body was still a force field, a seething bunch of energies whose form would be determined by the will of the airy spirit, and perhaps by the fears and desires of the perceiver. 

This was not a fairy of the sort you find in fairy tales that adults think suitable for children. But children may know this kind of fairy in the stories they live and may never share with their parents. 

"What is your name? " I find that this is the best opening for any dialogue with spirits. The creature appeared to yawn. Really? 

"If you must call me something you may call me Wisp."

Art: "Mountain View" by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet. Lean through the paint and you are at the multipane window of a cozy cottage with lush window boxes. Lean through the glass and you are at the sere, dark wall of Ben Bulben, from which the Wild Hunt is said to ride out in due season. Lean through the stone, if you dare, and you may find yourself among the Sidhe. I came upon this window to the Otherworld during a visit to the wonderful Model Museum of Modern Art in Sligo

Le Hêtre: Beech Gate

 

The roots of the beech are living serpents
There is a green woman in the tree gate
her eyes are the green fire of growing things
The winged deer stamps its hooves
impatient for me to go in or go up.
High in the branches, close to the crown,
the raven couple wait for me
but for now my way is down
into the painted cave, past the see stone
where a ruined king came to call me.

For time I do not count I am among the long
luminous elegant people who raised me
when I was away from my body as a boy.
But I will not spend another life with them,
not yet. I feel my way down, ever down
to the shallows of blind fish
where grains of sand sparkle like jewels.

I choose the grain that glows like cinnabar
and it becomes a universe. I see now
how the infinitely large is contained
in the infinitely small, how the high branches
of the world tree in one universe
are the roots of the tree of life in another.

Drawing: "Beech Gate" (c) Robert Moss

 

 

 

Scottish Crossings to Fairyland

 

Robert Kirk, a seventeenth-century Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland, wrote a remarkably detailed account of the Otherworld, its inhabitants, and their intercourse with living human beings. He wrote it by hand, as magical texts need to be written, with the greatest of  care, in 1691. Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth is not another collection of folklore and popular beliefs but a rigorous study, scientific by the standards of its day, that is clearly grounded in experience. Its main interest today is that it describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will.

Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.” By “subterranean,” he does not mean creatures living in dark, gloomy places in the bowels of the earth. Their realm is full of light, though it is not lit by any sun. They live in “cavities” and may pass wherever air may go. The earth is “full of cavities and cells,” and everywhere is inhabited; there is “no such thing as pure wilderness in the whole Universe.”

Though invisible to most humans, the inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud.” They are best seen at twilight. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. They are mortal, in the sense that they pass from their existing state, but they live far longer than a human life span. They are strongly connected to the earth and special places within the earth. They tend to show themselves in the costume of the country and speak its language. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different phenomena. Just beyond the borders of everyday perception is a vast and varied population.

Encounters with the fairies can be dangerous. They are known to abduct humans into their realm Those who enter the Otherworld willingly may have a hard time getting back. Some inhabitants of the invisible realm are hostile to humans, and some seek to feed on the energy of the living. However, the peoples of the Secret Commonwealth take a close interest in human affairs, and our lives are closely related to theirs. 

One of Kirk’s most intriguing observations is that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

Your double may be seen by others. Kirk gives several examples: of someone’s double entering a house shortly before the person himself arrived; of sightings of the double of a person who had just died or was soon to die; of the perception of the subtle form of a lover or spouse standing close to the loved one; of a woman who observed her second self walking ahead of her as she left her home. Kirk also offers clues to the possible influence of the co-walker — even unrecognized and unperceived — in a person’s life. He cites the Scots belief that someone who eats great quantities of food without putting on weight is being joined in the gourmandise by a “joint eater” or geirt coimitheth. Maybe there is a tip here for a new weight-loss program!

Rereading The Secret Commonwealth, I asked for dream guidance to clarify exactly what Robert Kirk means by “co-walker.” In my dream, I acquired a suede coat identical to the coat I most often wear when flying around the world or traveling to my Active Dreaming workshops. In my dream, I carried both these garments, swapping them according to circumstances. The dream confirmed my suspicion that Kirk is writing about the dream double; unfortunately, he tells us little about dreaming, where the double is most easily perceived.

Kirk speculates that everything may have its double — a tantalizing hint of the existence of what I have called counterpart reality.

How can we know the truth about these things? Through the art and science of seeing. Robert Kirk describes the practice of the Scottish seer as he was able to understand and enter it. The seer is able to make spirits visible to himself and others. He is able to cross into the Otherworld and return at his choosing. Kirk includes a curious report of a seer who was seen to vanish, body and soul, from a certain spot and reappear an hour later some distance from the point of his crossing. 

The gift of seeing runs in certain families, but many of the most powerful seers receive their calling directly from the spirits. Their initiatory visions are often wild and shamanic; they gall into “fits and Raptures.” The gift of seeing brings the ability to look into subtler orders of reality and perceive things “that for their smallness or subtlety and secrecy are invisible to others” even though they are intermeshed with them. The seer is accompanied by an inner light that can be focused and directed, “a beam continually about him as that of the sun.” Kirk’s description of the taibhsear’s “beam” closely parallels Inuit accounts of the “shaman-light” of the angaqok.

Kirk provides an interesting account of a seer’s initiation. He winds a cord of human hair around his middle in the shape of a helix. He bends down and looks backward between his legs. The object of his gaze may be a funeral procession, moving over a border crossing. Or it may be a hole in a tree — like the hole left in a fir tree when a knot has gone.

Kirk describes how a seer can provide a layman with temporary access to the Sight. The apprentice places one foot on the seer’s foot, while the seer lays a hand on the apprentice’s head, so that the would-be seer is enclosed within the taibhsear’s body space as well as his energy field. as he looks over the seer’s right shoulder, the apprentice is suppose to see “a multitude” of beings rushing toward him through the air.

The gifts of seeing include the ability to fold time and space. Kirk cautions — as any good practitioner would — about the difficulty of interpreting and working with some of these sightings. He recounts the case of a woman with the Sight who foresaw a seaborne attack on her island in the Hebrides but was confused about whether the soldiers in the boat were hostile or friendly and even whether they were coming or going — with good reason, since they had stolen a barge from her island and were rowing toward it with their backs to the shore.

As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. He reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.”

According to local tradition, Robert Kirk paid for his knowledge. He was reputedly taken by the fairies in 1692 into a fairy knoll across a little valley from his church; villagers were still pointing out the site centuries later. Were the fairies annoyed with him for revealing their secrets? Or had they fallen in love with him? Maybe the tale was concocted by people who wanted to “spook” their neighbors into keeping away from personal exploration of the unseen. Some say the fairies took Kirk’s body and soul; some say only the soul. A related tradition says that he had a means of coming back from the Otherworld that depended on the actions of a cousin to whom he announced it in a dream. But the cousin lost his nerve when he saw the clergyman’s double appear in the church at a baptism. So Robert Kirk remained on the other side.

 

 

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

Art: A Fairy Ring’ by Walter Jenks Morgan (1847-1924)

 

Sunset Road

 

I

 

A piece of sky has fallen into the sea,

So this must be the time.

The Sound is banded pink and heron blue

By the gentle palette of the lowering sun.

 

I strip at the shore of the shelly beach

And fold my clothes neat as Christmas packages.

I was never tidy in life, except in leaving it,

So they’ll know that I left with intention.

 

The water receives me in a lover’s embrace.

Discreetly, the watcher on the reef takes off

And becomes a black arrow, flying west,

Beyond the lighthouse island, pointing my way.

 

There has been a sea-change. The chop and current

That resisted me fiercely, day after day,

Pushing me always toward the Old World,

Now streams with my strokes.

 

I am riding blue water, crested with burning bronze.

How my body loves the sea, its element and its nature!

I swim through all the colors of memory

And I remember the water-world that is my home.

 

Something slips from me like a swimsuit

Whose elastic has snapped, and I am free of human form.

I am a cormorant, fishing and skimming the waves.

I play with the shapes I remember:

 

I am a dolphin, leaping and plunging in its joy

I am a sea-king in his chariot, plowing the waves

I am the Blue Man, tireless lover from the deep

I am the one who fell from the sky like a shooting star. 

 

 

II

 

I remember the sunset road. Perhaps I looked too long

Into the black light at the heart of the sun

Because I have skipped a continent, and return to myself

On the white sand of Manly Beach.

 

For a moment, I am in the body and memory

Of an awkward Australian boy of eighteen

Learning how to make love. Quickly I am drawn

Through green shadows and groves of familiar dead

 

To the World Tree. It has an everyday name:

A Moreton Bay fig. The flocks of ibis birds around it –

Travelers from the precinct of Thoth the Star Voyager,

Measurer and Rememberer – herald its greater name.

 

Its corkscrew roots drill a passage to the Underworld.

Its manifold trunks and branches open many ways.

Its upper limbs are ladders to the World Up Top

Where a couple with black opal eyes help me up.

 

In the lubra’s opulent body I read a pattern of stars.

Her eyes shift. She is flying fox, and echidna,

And black Venus. Her eyes turn as spiral galaxies

And I find she is a way through the Milky Way.

- This poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

 

Photo by RM

Assignment: Idun

 

Dreams set us research assignments. A note on an assignment I was given in the hypagogic zone, on the cusp of sleep, when I lay down in the early hours:

January 2, 2021

HG assignment

IDUN

The name comes through clearly the moment I close my eyes.. I know I am being given an assignment: to explore and report from the realm of the Norse goddess who keeps the apples of regeneration that keep the gods young. For a moment I am wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smell the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.

I let myself drift into sleep. In the final scene of my sleep dreams, I am driving far north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seems to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushes past us as the beating of great wings. We are excited because we have found the key to a mystery. We now need to use it and confirm the story we may bring to the world.

Feelings: excited

Clearly this sequence demanded immediate research in ordinary reality. I looked at the name, written as Iðunn in Old Norse and translated as "ever young" and "rejuvenator”. I went back to the books: to the Prose Edda for the story of Idun’s abduction and rescue (both the work of Loki), to Hilda Ellis Davidson’s treatment of Idun in Gods and Myths of the Viking Age, I looked again at the role of apples in many traditions (notably Celtic) as seeds of life and as passports to the Otherworld. I reflected on the nature of Idun’s  husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised.

Of course I drew Idun by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I see her. This assignment has just begun. Who knows how far the road may lead?

RM jounal drawing January 2, 2021

Paleopsych 101

 At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president once asked, “What exactly is it that you do?”

I told her, “I’m a paleolithic psychologist.”

She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt.

I had stolen the phrase from Frederic Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher. Myers coined the term Paleolithic psychology as an erudite joke, to describe “the habits of thought of the savage who believes that can travel in dreams.” [1] He apologized to his respectable readers for “the apparent levity of a return to conceptions so enormously out of date” — while sowing the seed of doubt that “modern science” had actually surpassed the “primitive” understanding of the soul. 

Myers chose the path of true science, which is always ready to revise the reigning hypotheses in the light of fresh evidence. “My own ignorance…I recognize to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well-attested.” He arrived at a “root-conception” of “the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other’s actions,” and that “segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism.” [2] Myers observed such phenomena in “true apparitions” of the departed, but also in “traveling clairvoyance” by living persons, which sometimes produce “phantasms of the living” that are visible in other places.

Myers’s contemporary Edward Tylor, who held the first chair of anthropology at Oxford, beautifully summarized the challenge to modern science that is posed by shamans and frequent fliers who are at home with the spirits and often journey in their realms: 

"The issue raised by the comparison of savage, and civilized spiritualism is this: do the red Indian medicine man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer and the Boston medium share the possession of a belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import, which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are habitually boating of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of degeneration and the savages on whom some ethnographers look as degenerate from a higher civilization may turn on their accusers and charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge."[3]

The basic insights of paleopsychology are as follows:

 

1.    Spirits are real.

2.    We are not alone: we live in a multidimensional universe peopled with beings — spirits of nature, gods and daimons, angels and ancestors — who take a close interest in our affairs and influence our lives for good or ill.

3.    We are more than our bodies and brains, which are only vehicles for soul.

4.    The soul survives the death of the body.

5.    Soul journeying is the key to the spiritual worlds and the knowledge of ultimate reality. The soul makes excursions outside the body in dreams and visions. The heart of spiritual practice is to learn to shift consciousness at will and travel beyond time and space. Through soul-flight, we return to worlds beyond the physical plane in which our lives have their source and are able to explore many dimensions of the Otherworld.

6.    Souls are corporeal, though composed of much finer substance than the physical body.

7.    People have more than one soul. In addition to the vital soul that sustains physical life — closely associated with the breath — there is a “free soul,” associated with the dreambody, which can travel outside the body and separates from it at physical death, as well as an enduring spirit whose home is on the higher planes.

8.    Souls — or pieces of soul — can be lost or stolen. This is the principle cause of disease and misfortune.

9.    Some people have more souls than others and have the ability to make excursions to different places at the same time.

10. At death, different vehicles of soul go to different lots. Through conscious dreaming, it is possible to explore the conditions of the afterlife to prepare for one’s death and to assist souls of the dying and departed.

11. We are born with counterparts in nature. For example, we are born with a totem animal and a relationship with natural forces (wind or water or lightning) that are part of our basic identity and help to pattern the natural flow of our energy.

12. We are born with counterparts in other places and times, and in other dimensions of reality. When we encounter them through interdimensional travel, they become allies and sometimes teachers.

 References

1. Frederic W.H. Myers. The Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green,1903). 1:247.
2. ibid., 1:249
3. Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray,1871)

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

Image: Sketch of a Siberian udagan (female shaman) reconstructed from remains found in a burial site by the Lena river near Ust'-Uda by a Soviet era archaeological team led by A.P. Okladnikov.

Note the fringes on her costume. They suggest her ability to take flight like a bird and travel to the Upper World. In rock art from this era, shamans with wild fringes are shown flying with birds. "This ornithomorphic essence appears to have been the most ancient characteristic of the shamanic coat, and by extension its fringe was the most crucial symbolic element in its decoration." [Ekaterina Devlet, "Rock art and the Material Culture of Siberian and Central Asian Shamanism" in Neil Price (ed) The Archaeology of Shamanism (London: Routledge, 2001) 44]

The Invitation to the Island of Apples

For the Celts, the road to the Land of the Living, the Islands of the Blessed, runs ever westward, across the sea. The immrama, or voyage tales, contain vital clues to the ancient European craft of dying. Despite flawed and faulty transcription, gaping lacunae, and editing and censoring by pious monks, the voyage tales still hold the memory of shamanic explorations of the Other Side, and of a deep practice for rehearsing the dying and guiding the departed along the roads of the Otherworld.
    The earliest of the immrama is the Voyage of Bran mac Febal, recorded in the seventh century. His journey begins when he is alone. Unearthly music sends him into deep sleep, and he wakes to find a silver branch, blossoming with crystal flowers, beside him.
    A beautiful woman of the Otherworld appears to him in the locked house and sings to him of the glories of the land from which she has come. In one of the loveliest invitations to a journey in all of world literature, she urges Bran to cross the sea and seek the original Avalon, the Island of Apples:

I bring a branch of the apple tree from Emain, from the far island ringed by the shining sea horses of Manannan mac Lir. A joy to the eyes is the White Silver Plain where the hosts play their games, racing chariots against curraghs...
    There is an ancient tree there in fruit and flower, and birds calling from it; every color is shining there, delight is common and the music sweet.
    There is no mourning or betrayal there...
     To be without grief, without sorrow, without death, without any sickness or weakness - this is the sign of Emain, and no common wonder it is.
     Its mists are magical, the sea caresses the shore, brightness falls from the air.
     There are treasures of every hue in the Gentle Land, the Bountiful Land, the sweetest music and the best of wine. Marigold horses on the strand, crimson horses, sky-blue horses...
      There are three times fifty far islands in the ocean to the west, and every one of them twice or three times more than the land you know.
      It is not to all I am speaking, though I have made these wonders known to all who hear me. Let you who are ready listen from the crowd of the world to the wisdom falling from my song.
      Do not fall upon a bed of sloth. Do not be overcome by drunkenness. Set out on your voyage over the clear sea, and you may chance to come to the Land of the Living, the Land of Women, the Island of Apples.

Who could refuse such an invitation? Bran sets sail with three companies of nine men. They meet Manannan mac Lir - lord of the sea and the Underworld. They reach the Land of Women but after a year they leave because one of the men is homesick.
    When they return to Ireland they find that centuries have passe and they are remembered only as figures of legend. When the homesick man stumbles ashore, he crumbles into dust. Bran and his men cross the waters again and do not return - and yet, in another telling, the head of Bran, the man who went to the Otherworld and returned, becomes a true oracle from generation to generation.

In another immram, the Voyage of Maelduin, the hero's journey begins as a quest for vengeance - for Aillil, Maelduin's the murdered father. But in the course of the voyage, deeper purposes emerge and we travel through a marvelous geography of shifting states of reality and consciousness.
    The transition from an ordinary boat trip is marked by a shift in relative scale and proportions as the voyagers come to an island with "ants the size of foals". Many terrors and temptations and reality shifts follow until they pass through a mysterious Silver Net to realms of abundance and love and deeper wisdom. When a falcon from Ireland appears to pilot them home, their petty agendas are forgotten. Maelduin can forgive his enemies and go home. However, he remains joined to a deeper world.

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. The excerpt from the Voyage of Bran is from Kuno Meyer (trans.) The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal to the Land of the Living (London: David Nutt, 1895). In The Dreamer's Book of the Dead I describe a nocturnal journey in which Kuno Meyer or something like his holographic projection gave me a tour of some of his transitions on the Other Side.

Art: "The Voyage of Bran to the Isle of Women" by Monica Lu.

Neither folk nor fairy

We did not have the term “near-death experience” (NDE) when I kept dying and coming back as a young boy. The first edition of Raymond Moody’s book Life after Life did not appear until 1975, twenty years after I left my body in St Andrew’s hospital in Melbourne and flew through the Moon Gate to live a life in another world while my body lay under the surgeon's knife.
     If the phenomenon now called NDE had been recognized earlier, it might have been easier for me to have been heard and understood by those around me. It would have been helpful to me to know that many others in Western society have reported profound experiences of leaving their bodies and that this is widely recognized as evidence that the soul can travel outside the body and that there is life after physical death.
    There is a statement in Life after Life that spoke to me deeply when I eventually got to read it: “Once the dying person reaches a certain depth in his experience, he does not want to come back, and he may even resist the return to the body.” This was certainly part of my story.
    Moody argues in Life after Life that “the similarity of so many of the accounts” is a reason for believing reports of NDEs.  But when I read the cases he assembled, and then hundreds of other reports from Near Deathers, I did not find many close “similarities” to what I experienced when I was nine, and seemed to live a whole life in another world. The stories that spoke to me were from ancient and indigenous cultures, from folklore, and from Eastern traditions.
    In Yeats’ song, I heard a voice that knew something of where I had been:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

      When I discovered George MacDonald’s tales of Highland seers and ghosts, I found a phrase that spoke very directly to my experience of trying to live in the ordinary world. In MacDonald’s wonderful little book The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders Commonly Called the Second Sight, the woman who nursed the narrator reveals details of his strange birth and his possible connection with a tragic drama played out in an earlier time. The nurse has the gift of second sight; she sees things happening at a distance, and moving between dimensions. She cautions Duncan that he will never be “either folk or fairy”. I did not remember quoting this phrase as a young boy. I doubt that it would have helped me communicate with those around me. But the notion that one may be “neither folk nor fairy” – but something of both” – helped me to explain things to myself.
     In MacDonald’s “faery romance,” Phantastes, the book C.S.Lewis said “baptized” his imagination, the room where the protagonist is sleeping turns into an enchanted forest overnight. Water spilling from a green basin becomes a little river. The floral patterns of the carpet become wildflowers and grasses along its bank. When he follows it into the woods, he is in Fairy Land. He is welcomed and fed by a friendly woman in a cottage of living trees, and knows she must be at least part human because she is awake during the day, when the fairies sleep. But she is something else as well. She must live close to fairies, and eat a little of their food, or else she will always be hungry.
      This became a pattern for me, since I went away. I found that the gates of the Otherworld opened from wherever I happened to be, and that I went hungry unless I stayed near its people and shared some of their food. I never had trouble staying awake in the night, or sleeping in the day.

- Excerpted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Fairies by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) 

Immrama: Celtic voyages to the West

For the Celts, the road to the Land of the Living, the Islands of the Blessed, runs ever westward, across the sea. The immrama, or “voyage tales”, contain vital keys to the ancient European craft of dying. Despite flawed and faulty transcription, and gaping lacunae, and editing and censoring by pious monks, the Celtic voyage tales still hold the memory of shamanic explorations of the Other Side, and of a deep practice for rehearsing the dying and guiding the departed along the roads of the otherworld. As Caitlin Matthews says wisely in The Celtic Book of the Dead, “The function of the immram is to teach the craft of dying, to pilot the departing soul over a sea of perils and wonders.”
    The earliest of the immrama is the Voyage of Bran mac Febal, transcribed in seventh century. His journey begins when he is alone – unearthly music sends him into deep sleep. He wakes to find a silver branch beside him, blossoming with crystal flowers. A beautiful woman of the Otherworld appears to him in the locked house and sings of the glories of the land from which she has come. In one of the loveliest invitations to a journey in all of world literature, she urges Bran to cross the sea and seek the original Avalon, the Island of Apples:

The Invitation to Avalon

I bring a branch of the apple tree from Emain, from the far island ringed by the shining sea-horses of Manannan mac Lir. A joy to the eyes is the White Silver Plain where the hosts play their games, racing chariot against curragh….
    There is an ancient tree there in fruit and flower, and birds calling from it; every color is shining there, delight is common and the music sweet.
    There is no mourning or betrayal there...
    To be without grief, without sorrow, without death, without any sickness or weakness – this is the sign of Emain, and no common wonder this is.
    Its mists are magical, the sea caresses the shore, brightness falls from the air.
    There are treasures of every hue in the Gentle Land, the Bountiful Land, the sweetest music and the best of wine…
    Marigold horses on the strand, crimson horses, sky-blue horses.
    It is a land of constant weather. Silver is dropping on the land, a pure white cliff on the edge of the sea, warmed by the sand…
    There are three times fifty far islands in the ocean to the west, and every one of them twice or three times more than the land you know.
    It is not to all that I am speaking, though I have made these wonders known to all who hear me. Let you who are ready listen from the crowd of the world to the wisdom falling from my song.
    Do not fall upon a bed of sloth. Do not be overcome by drunkenness. Set out on your voyage over the clear sea, and you may chance to come to the Land of the Living, the Land of Women, the Island of Apples.[1]

Who could refuse such an invitation? Bran sets sail with three companies of nine men. They meet Manannan mac Lir – lord of the sea and the underworld. They reach the Land of Women but after a year they leave because one of the men is homesick. When they return to Ireland they find that centuries have passed and they are remembered only as figures of legend. When the homesick man stumbles ashore he crumbles into dust. Bran and his men cross the waters again and do not return – and yet, in another telling, the head of Bran, the man who went to the Otherworld and returned, becomes a true oracle from generation to generation.

1. Adapted from The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal translated by Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt (London: David Nutt, 1895).

Photo: Landing at Staffa (c) Robert Moss

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

Notes for the Road

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.

Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

Photo: Path in Transylvania (c) Robert Moss