Synesius on the Dream Oracle

 

You have direct access to sacred knowledge, in your dreams. Your dreams are a personal oracle that reveals the future and helps you prepare for it. Don’t let anyone tell you what your dreams mean; get rid of dream dictionaries. Pay attention to signs from the world around you; know that everything in the universe is interconnected and constantly interweaving. Use your imagination. What you grow there will be stamped on your world and on your soul – on the energy body in which you will travel to another life after death. [1] 

Amazingly, these insights come from a fifth-century bishop of the church. His name was Synesius of Cyrene, and his treatise On Dreams, composed around 405, is one of the wisest books ever written on dreams, coincidence and imagination. Synesius was a most unusual bishop. In his life and work we find – alas, only briefly – a confluence between the best of the ancient practice of philosophy and the new religion of the Roman empire.

Synesius was a Greco-Roman aristocrat who could trace his pedigree back to the founders of Sparta, seventeen hundred years before him. He lived on a great estate in Cyrene, part of modern Libya, enjoyed the pleasures of both the hunt and the study, and chuckled over the fact that rural folk in his area still thought “the king of the world” was Agamemnon. [2]

 He had the best education possible in his time, in Alexandria, in the school of Hypatia, the extraordinary woman scientist, mathematician, and Neoplatonist who strode the streets of the world-city in her philosopher’s cloak, surrounded by eager students. 

It was in Alexandria that Synesius experienced his first and deepest conversion, when he found “the eye of the soul” within him opening to reveal the sacred depth of the universe. His consciousness expanded to give him the clear vision of the One beyond the many. He saw the reality behind the forms of religion. In his quiet hours, he dedicated himself to “mysteries without rites” devoted to awakening the divinity within the human that corresponds and coincides with the divinity within and beyond the cosmos. [3] He was a convert to philosophy as it was understood in the Greco-Roman world: the love and practice of wisdom. 

It was in Alexandria, around 405 and recently married, with the Barbarians at the gates of Rome, that he wrote his treatise on dreams. 

He makes it clear that his discussion of dreams is grounded in personal experience. Dreams have guided him in the hunt, showing him how and where to find the game. Dreams have led him to “swarms of wild beasts that have fallen to our spears”.[4]

He was guided by dreams when his city sent him to Constantinople to plead for favors from the emperor. In a hothouse of political intrigue, his dreams helped him to tell friend from foe, and alerted him to hostile intrigues in which his enemies hired “ghost-raising sorcerers” to attack him by black magic.

The dream oracle “helped me in the management of public office in the best interest of the cities, and finally placed me on terms of intimacy with the Emperor.”

His dreams contributed to his success as a writer and orator. The dream source “frequently helped me to write books”, correcting his style, and helping him to prune archaic Attic expressions – products of his love of old books - from his essays and poems. 

Synesius explains that dreams are “personal oracles”. We want to claim authority over our own dreams and reject anything and anyone who tries to come between us and the dream source. “We ought to seek this branch of knowledge before all else; for it comes from us, is within us, and is the special possession of the soul of each one of us.

The dream oracle speaks to us wherever we go. “We can’t abandon this oracle even if we try. It is with us at home and abroad, on the field of battle, in the city and in the marketplace.”

Dreams are our common birthright. They belong to rich and poor, to kings and to slaves. The dream oracle turns no one down because of race or age, status or calling.

Even the worst tyrant is powerless to separate us from our dreams – which may hold the key to his overthrow – “unless he could banish sleep from his kingdom”.

“Dream divination is available to all, the good genius to everyone.”

It is no wonder that dreams show us the future, because dreams are experiences of soul and “the soul holds the forms of things that come into being”

 Synesius dismisses dream dictionaries – popular in his time, as in ours – with admirable vigor. “I laugh at all those books and think them of little use”. General definitions don’t work because each dreamer is a different mirror for dream images – some are funhouse mirrors, some are made of varied materials. Big dreams do not require interpretation; their meaning is in the experience of the dream itself. Dreams that are “more divine” are “quite clear and obvious, or nearly so”, but come only to those who live “according to virtue”.

Steeped in Homer, he can’t avoid mentioning the scene in the Odyssey where the Gates of Horn and Ivory are described. In his view, both Homer’s Penelope and legions of commentators and borrowers failed to understand that dreams, in themselves, are never false. Penelope assumes that there are true dreams and deceptive dreams “because she was not instructed in the matter.” Deception arises through false interpretations, not false dreams. If Penelope had understood the nature of dreaming better, “she would have made all dreams pass out through the Gate of Horn…We should not confuse the weakness of the interpreter with the nature of the visions themselves.”

 Synesius recommends setting an intention for the night. “We shall pray for a dream, even as Homer prayed. And if you are worthy, the god far away is present with you…He comes to your side when you sleep, and this is the whole system of the initiation.”

 Synesius also stresses the value of keeping a dream journal, and of writing and creating from dreams. “It is no mean achievement to pass on to another something of a strange nature that has stirred in one’s own soul”.

 Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of signs and synchronicities as well as a “night book” for dreams.  “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”.

 Five years after writing his essay On Dreams, Synesius was persuaded by Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, to accept the bishopric of Ptolemais. It seems that he was baptized at the same time, rather late in the day according to our common understanding of what is involved in becoming a bishop of the church.

Synesius’ entry into the episcopate was a political, rather than a spiritual, event. The influence of his wife – who he loved deeply – may have been important; she was presumably Christian, since Theophilus was at their wedding in 403. Winning an aristocratic philosopher to the church was a coup for the Patriarch; though Christianity had become the religion of the empire, the old houses were still keeping their distance. For Synesius, assuming the rank and responsibilities of a bishop was both a case of noblesse oblige and an accommodation to the movement of history. In 399, the Serapeum – the great temple complex of Serapis at Alexandria – had been destroyed, and the might of the Roman Empire was now being used to stamp out pagan practices. The new God was fast supplanting the old ones.

In theological language, Synesius joined the Christians through adhesion rather than through the transformative experience of a full conversion. [5] But we can trace some possible lines of convergence between his philosophy and the Christian message. He believed in One divinity, behind the many forms of the divine. He wrote of the “fall” of the soul from a state of knowledge and truth. He believed that in times of darkness, a saving power may be sent to rescue humanity from itself and its deceivers. His essay On Providence depicts a world dominated by dark forces whose purpose is to drag humans down and destroy them if they reach for the light. Behind the surface events of history is the struggle between the higher instincts of humanity and the darkness within and around it. The power of light in humanity runs down, and must be restored periodically, at the end of the great cycles of history. But sometimes, when humans are in extremis, divine intervention may take place before the end of a cycle, to keep the game in play. [6] 

If Synesius lived long enough to learn the end of his mentor, Hypatia, he would have been left in no doubt that the darkness was rising. Though Hypatia’s students included Christians, the fanatical Cyril, who became bishop of Alexandria in 412, saw her as magnet for pagans. His violent diatribes against her helped to inflame a mob, led by a church lector, that pulled Hypatia from her carriage at night. In their collective dementia, these frenzied fundamentalists dragged her into a church called the Caesarium, tore off her clothes, and flayed her alive with sharp-edged shells. Then they butchered her body and burned the pieces to ashes. [7] 

In such a world, Synesius offered the means of communicating with a higher realm, and bringing gifts from it into everyday life. He taught that the realm of imagination is “the hollow gulf of the universe” where the soul is at home. Imagination is “the halfway house between spirit and matter, which makes communication between the two possible”. [Bregman 148] The soul travels in this realm in dreams.

For Bishop Synesius, dreaming is everyday church. It is also a way of entry into the real world. According to Synesius, dreamer do not return to reality when they awaken; dreaming, they are already there. 

 

 References

1. Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-Bishop. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 148.

2.ibid 76

3. ibid 26, 32-3,citing Letter 137.

4. All quotes from De insomniis (On Dreams) unless otherwise noted are from  Augustine FitzGerald (ed) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)

 5. See A.A. Nock, Conversion. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).

6. Synesius, De providentia quoted in Bregman,op.cit., 66-72

7. Socrates Scholasticus, “The Murder of Hypatia” in Anne Fremantle (ed) A Treasury of Early Christianity. (New York: Viking, 1953) 380

 

Graphics: 

Lion at the Templeof Apollo in Cyrene

"Eye in the Sky" Journal Drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

Shamanic dreaming in ancient Britain: an interview with Manda Scott

Manda Scott’s Boudica novels – from Dreaming the Bull through Dreaming the Serpent Spear – are a magnificent act of historical imagination. We are plunged into the battles of Britain in the time of the Roman occupation, into a maelstrom of deception and divided loyalties, in which the heroism and sacrifice of a warrior queen shines with a clean bright flame. The characters are indelible – the Boudica, horsewoman, visionary, resistance leader - her tormented half-brother, her lover who dreams with the wren, and their fierce but honorable Roman adversary, whose soul is branded and bound by the cult of Mithras.  

   Manda takes us deep into ancestral realms. The Boudica novels are a gift to dreamers everywhere because they show us a way of dreaming – and healing and seeing – that may have been shared by all our ancestors, a way we urgently need to revive to restore our connection to soul and to re-vision our world. Manda helps awaken us to the possibility that dreaming has been a secret engine of history, far beyond what the history books have taught us. The dreamers in the Boudica novels are druids and shamans. They are scouts and trackers for the warriors. They mediate between the living and the ancestors. They fly with the birds, and run with the hound or the deer. They enter each other’s psychic space, and travel at will into other times and other dimensions. They speak to us, across time.

      I talked to Manda Scott in December 2006 about her vision of the ancient British dreaming.

Your Boudica novels beautifully evoke an early society in Britain in which dreamers were of central importance - as military scouts and mediators with the ancestors, and as the conscience of the leaders. What are your sources?

Our ancestors wrote in Greek but  chose not to keep written records of their work, thus we have nothing  from their point of view.  In literary terms, then, I started with the Roman writers and lawmakers. 

   We have to be careful in that they are writing through the lens of their own experience and for an audience which they wish to manipulate, but it is possible to begin to read between the lines and in some cases, I assumed they were speaking without undue spin when, for instance, in de Bello Gallico  Caesar described the 'druids' as the lawgivers and lawmakers and said that the druids of Gaul sent their apprentices to Britain for up to  twenty years' training. 

   Caesar furthermore said that the druids were above and beyond tribal boundaries and that their word was law. He described a society in which the 'men live forever in the eyes of  their gods' and that the principal point of their doctrine was that  the soul does not die, but after death passes from one body to  another.   He states that the druids were not a hereditary order (possibly in contrast to the “nobles” who were the other “rank” in  society, although this may be purely a Roman perspective)

   Later, Tiberius passed a law in which it was a capital offence for any to practice 'soothsaying' which was clearly intended to wipe out  the druids. 

   We can infer further the power of the druids from Rome's actions:  In almost all cases, Roman practice was to enfold the religions of a conquered people into their own relatively peacefully.  This was often a two-way street - the Egyptian cult of Isis became huge in Rome in the early centuries AD.  Mithras was a Persian god before he was ever Roman, the entire Greek pantheon was renamed and subsumed. Only when the priestly class were involved in insurrection did they try to wipe out a religions/spiritual force and this only happened twice: with the Jews of Jerusalem and the Druids of the (later) Celtic lands  of western Europe.  From this and other writing, we can infer that  the druids were instrumental in overcoming tribal friction to unite  the tribes not only within the different nations, but between them in the war against Rome.

    Apart from writing, we have archaeological evidence. this is always prone to subjective interpretation, but it is nonetheless interesting:  An examination of the midden remains of the Eceni in east Anglia showed that they used hides and feathers extensively for  decoration, that black feathers and white were particularly popular but nowhere in all the middens were found the feathers of a magpie - a carrion bird (black, of death, perhaps of Briga) with white on it - the colors of swans and geese, the birds who fly high to the sky gods and can then live underwater.  Neither were there ever otter skins although beaver abounded in those times - so these two, magpies and otters, were so taboo or so sacred they were never used.

   So I can begin to build a picture of a shamanic society in which the people live forever in the eyes of their gods. They live communally in round-houses and have a possibly hereditary nobility but a non- hereditary (presumably skill-based) priestly class.

   I abandoned the  name “druid” because it is too laden with projection - and created the  dreamers and the singers.

    It's important to remember that the tribes were not the militaristic society they have been painted: they were  agrarian, with massive amounts of man/.woman power needed for their cereal based diet and they were tremendous craftworkers in iron and precious metals - they had a love of beauty and a level of skill that was unmatched in the ancient world for at least another millennium.   These two are not going to happen if all the able-bodied men and women are busy fighting their neighbours. A warrior-based society is not necessarily always at war.

    I read a great deal of the Irish “Celtic” laws of the 4th and 5th  centuries.  Rome never conquered Ireland and although there is some Christian spin, the Irish laws are astonishingly egalitarian and quite at odds with the rest of emerging “Roman” Christianity.  In particular, women were able to hold property and to request a divorce, something that we have only recently won back.  I also read the old Irish and Welsh sagas, particularly for evidence of women as  warriors.  When CuChullain wanted to learn truly to fight, he went to a warrior school taught by women. This does not seem to have been thought of as unusual.

   Finally,in the context of the wider culture, for years I indulged in battle re-enactments where I fought as a Dark Age spear/sword-bearer.  I discovered that a) one does not need to be a man to fight and b) what one does need is supreme self- belief - and the skill to back it up.

Did your own dreams and visions contribute to your understanding of 

Boudica's people?

Yes, massively, continually and through every sentence of the writing.

Will you identify and explain some of the specific shamanic dreaming practices you describe in the novels?

 There are “night” dreams, in which a sleeping dreamer is sent specific information, regarding (For instance) a flood which will wipe out the steading if they don't move). There are waking dreams in which the gods visit specifically to give information - Valerius has those regularly, even when he is fighting for Rome. There are visions sent to non-dreamers, particularly to the Boudica in order to bring her closer to her destiny.  These often happen in or around grave mounds or passage tombs left over from neolithic and megalithic times. 

Do you personally practice any of these techniques?

All of them.  My intent with the first book was that every part of the dreaming, from Breaca's “vision quest” through to the end where  Macha and the dreamers call down the mist to confound the legions,  was something I had either done personally, or had seen done - mostly the former.  By the second book where Breaca helps Airmid cause the 

death of a Roman governor and where the bear-cult begins to arise, we are stepping beyond things I have done or seen done, into the realms  of what I believe may be possible, but wouldn't choose to do.  I also  highlight, where I can, those practices I believe to be dangerous. In addition, because I am a teacher, I have made an effort to be sure  that the books can be used as a learning by those who follow, if they so choose.

How did you learn them?

I learned mostly from men and women in this country who learned them from Native American teachers and later branched out to learn from others who have tried to explore Britain's past.  The problem we have  is that there is no direct lineage - the druids really were wiped out  and we have no true lineage.  Thus, to reach again the gods of this  land, we have to listen and learn from those who have never stepped  away from their own true connections.  I learned basic journeying to a drum and progressed from there.  The writing of the books themselves grew out of a vision quest and my dreaming moved in unimaginable ways during the six years of writing.

    The books arose when I was at the end of my crime thriller, No Good  Deed.  I was contracted to write a sequel and was out with my (then)  two lurchers walking, thinking about the new book.  They put up a  lactating hare and, eventually, caught and killed her. I was devastated.  Hares are sacred and she had young, which meant if I couldn't find them, they would die.  I couldn't find them, though I did spend a long time looking.   I sat down and decided that if something had to die to show me that I was walking along with my brain in neutral going in the wrong direction (which I was - I could have  stopped the dogs if I'd noticed what they were doing) then I had better pay attention.

   I went out into the woods alone with the specific question, “What do you want of me?”  The answer very clearly was to write Boudica - I  had made a commitment to write about her in a ceremony some years  before, but had added the coda, “when I'm a good enough writer” -  which of course was always going to be at least a decade away.

     But no, they wanted it NOW.  I argued that I wasn't a historian, an archaeologist, an anthropologist and I knew nothing about the subject. I also had no money and had been paid to write a different  book. It wasn't negotiable. I agreed that I would spend a month doing the research and if I still didn't think I could do it, I'd be back.
     By the end of the month, I had a 23 page synopsis and the beginnings 

of the first book. I also had a new editor, and a new publisher, and enough money to continue with something that required quite astonishing amounts of research.

Your love of animals, and your deep affinity for them, shines through all of your writing. Do animals dream? Do your dream with  the animals who share you life, and those you have helped?

Animals definitely dream - my lurcher (a hunting dog which is a cross 

between a greyhound and a collie) always dreams more of hunting when she has recently put up a hare -  her feet paddle, she yelps exactly as she does when running and she  breathes in a running rhythm.  My cats used to display REM and I'm as sure as I can be there were dreaming.  Inca (my lurcher) dreams with me regularly and if I'm in trouble in a dream and am unable to wake up, she will stand over me and put her nose on my brow until I  wake.   

     In general, I think that if we live with animals as genuine members of the family, accepting them as equals, not repositories of our projections or our insecurities, they will dream with us.  One of my most profound spiritual experiences was when I was out with my two lurchers and a pair of working cocker spaniel bitches, both of whom had given birth five weeks previously.  We were casting through bracken, not thinking very much and suddenly I was aware that I was one part of a five-parted being in which I knew where each other part was  (though I could see none of them) they knew where I was and we all worked as a unit.  It was quite astonishingly profound. I realized then that my dogs live in this state all the time and that I could do so too if I stepped away from my 'head-mind' into my 'heart-mind'

Your ancient dreamers are closely identified with animal guardians. Tell us about the animal guardians, and their role in shamanic dreaming. Will you share something of your personal experiences in this area?

The animal guardians mirror my own experience in that animals have always

formed a more significant part of my emotional life than  (most) people and this extends tothe dreamworld where they can and do represent and lead to aspects of reality that I

might otherwise be unable to access.  In the books, I have extended it and embraced slightly the concept of animal “totems” where a man or a woman, on coming to puberty may (but not necessarily) find an animal or a  bird to which they form a unique bond during their “long nights'” -  their dreaming time at which they cross from childhood into  adulthood. This animal is either a specific one - as in Hail the Hound with whom Valerius dreams, or they are generic, as in Airmid and her frog-dreaming. 

   My own experience is that I bond with specific animals, but also that many of us, including me, bond more solidly with other things - elements (fire, water, storm, earth) or  ancestors.  The animal dreaming grew out of the story, but I think it's important that people realize they may not make an animal  connection and if they do, it may take many years to work through  their projections before they make one that is genuine.

Tell us about the relationship between the living and the dead, as it is lived by your characters.

The boundary between the living and the dead is as thick - or as thin  - as we choose to make it.  Because my characters live in a society where the elderly and the ancestors are held in high regard, and where the soul does not die at death, then they live in the constant awareness of their ancestors, particularly those with whom they have  been close in life.  These act as guardians and guides.  They also, for a short time, see the dead as they leave the lands of the living  and walk towards the lands of the dead.   

    In the start of the third  book, Dreaming the Hound, Breaca speaks for a while with the spirit of a Roman standard bearer whose throat she has just cut.  The Romans choose not to listen to their dead (as we often do) and so are the weaker for it. Moreover, they are the invaders in a land where their gods do not tread, so their spirits have a longer journey when they die than do ours, who cross the river immediately to the lands of the dead.  Thus also, when it comes to personal sacrifice, Dubornos can offer himself as a living/dying mediator between the tribes and the  gods in the time of greatest need and his offer is perceived as entirely noble - and worthwhile  - not a waste of a life, or a loss  to him.  

Manda Scott is a veterinary surgeon, writer and climber, not necessarily in that order.  She was a horse vet in Newmarket, home of English thoroughbred racing, when she first began to write the Boudica: Dreaming series.  She now lives in Caradoc's land in the west, in the threshold place between England and Wales, a few miles south of Caer Caradoc.  She has been actively working with dreaming since she was a student in Glasgow. Visit her website here.

© Robert Moss and Manda Scott. All Rights Reserved.

A book-lover in dreams as well

One of the games I play with dreams is to compare the character and behavior of the dream self with that of the waking self. In at least one respect, I find that my dream and waking personalities are identical; they are both passionate book-lovers.
     I am forever handling, appreciating and reading books in my dreams. Sometimes these are books I have not yet written, and when I am fortunate I am able to bring back a few paragraphs I can turn into a draft. More often, I am inspecting and reading books from a universal library, of authors I know well and those I have not yet discovered in regular life. To those dream researchers who claim (as several have done) that it is not possible to read in dreams and hold a clear impression of text, I say: look again. Some of us do it nightly.
    In one of my dreams last night, I pulled a selection of books from my shelves that included Tolkien's The Silmarillion and several of Michael Grant's histories of Rome. I became tremendously excited by what I re-discovered in these books, especially by Grant's limpid overview of the rise and fall of the Roman empire, and its myths and customs. I resolved, in the dream, to seek out more. I learned that there is a sequel or successor to The Silmarillion I had not yet read, and of course there is always more of Michael Grant to read; this British classicist was immensely prolific, to the chagrin of the plodding pedants in his field.
    I don't know what triggered my dream self's book selections overnight, though I am wondering now whether he was influenced in part by my late-night reading, an excellent historical mystery by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage) set in Turkey right after World War II. Michael Grant was fluent in Turkish, and was in Turkey for part of World War II, and was no doubt involved in secret operations.
    I want simply to note the sheer enjoyment of my dream self as he perused his books. As I stirred into waking consciousness in the golden light of early morning, filtered by the drapes, I stayed with him, in his dream library, relishing this gentle literary recreation.
    Oh yes. I'll see if there is more of Tolkien, published after The Silmarillion (a posthumous collection of his mythopoeic works edited by his son Christopher) that I need to explore; and I have already placed some of Michael Grant's books about Rome at my left hand on my desk. Dreams set assignments.