The Cave of the Dreaming God

 

A stranger gave us directions

at the mouth of the subway.

My friend and I heard him

but we had trouble with his accent

and disagreed about what he said.

The guitar man busking quarters heard

but claimed he had been there already.

Everyone else was on cellphones

or lost in headphone land.

 

"Get down, go down, find the Gatekeeper

who will ask you for the correct time.

There's only one right answer,

here or anywhere. Don't screw this up.

Then go west of certainty, north of comfort.

Take passage over the Jell-O sea.

Study, talk politely to demons.

and you may know the dreams of Time."

 

So we went down the tunnel and told the ticket man

who bared his teeth, "The only time is now."

He growled, but let us into ferry-land

where we took the Western Line

and sailed off the maps to the slow motion sea

that moves like tree sap dreaming of amber.

 

We came at last to the island where Chronos

lies bound in sleep. It took us only thirty years

of constant study and conversation with spirits

- but noone is counting here - to win entry

to the Cave of the Dreaming God.

 

In the slipstream of Time that is no time

possible histories flicker off and on;

ifs and might-have beens and might-bes,

memories of the future, roads not taken

in one world but followed somewhere else.

 

We learned not to look too long

at what we prefer not to see -

goosestepping Nazis in London,

plump Protestant ayatollahs ruling Hollywood,

Earth infested by bog-men and hungry ghosts

or ruled by insectoid dynasties from a hungry star.

To look here is to pluck from the quantum soup

a strand that becomes a species thought

and may become an event track in the serial world.

 

"Jus' like pickin a guitar" said the busker

when we came up from the underground.

So we'll keep the Cave of the Dreaming God

well-hidden, like a fleck of pyrite in a drop of amber

on the fob of a dead poet’s pocket watch.

- Robert Moss

 

Gates of Ivory

Thanks to last night’s dreams, I have no doubt why Virgil had his hero return to the ordinary world through the Gate of Ivory. The famous passage in Book VI of the Aeneid has sparked endless discussion among scholars and thoughtful readers.

There are two gates of sleep: one is called the Gate of Horn and it is an easy exit for true shades; the other is made all in gleaming white ivory, but through it the powers of the underworld send false dreams up to the heavens. Here on the night did Anchises walk with his son and with the Sibyl and spoke such words to them as he sent them on their journey through the Gate of Ivory.(Aeneid 6.893-898)

     In both Homer and Virgil, there are twin gates of dreams: false dreams come to humans through the Gate of Ivory, true dreams come through the Gate of Horn. The symbolism is clear: ivory is opaque, while polished horn, as the ancients knew it, is translucent and sometimes almost transparent. False dreams were thought to be brought to humans by low spirits; true dreams by higher guides. False dreams were held to be prevalent before midnight, true dreams after midnight.
    So one theory about Virgil is that Aeneas and his seeress companion, the Cumaean Sybil, returned from the Underworld after meeting the hero’s dead father Anchises because they traveled back before midnight, Then there’s the political theory, that Virgil was making a camouflaged dig at the emperor Augustus. The hero is returning to a world made false by Roman imperialism.
     A dream of last night confirms me in the view Virgil has Aeneas return through the Gate of Ivory because he is coming back to a world that is no more real, and may be more illusory, than the Otherworld territory where he has been.
     In the dream, I led a series of group journeys through various portals to places in the Imaginal Realm and in the afterlife. We shared very rich experiences. Each time I sounded the recall with my drum and brought our shamanic travelers back to their bodies, I enjoyed startling them by saying, “You are now in a dream.” Or: “You are now in the afterlife.” The last statement produced notable shock effects.
     I riffed on it with successive groups, saying at one point (as a voice in a much older dream had once declared to me), “This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife.”
     Thoughts come flocking, like the wild geese over the lake in my line of sight as I write. From the viewpoint of the beings we were before we came into this world, our physical existence is literally the afterlife. In dreams and visions, we often travel to realities where the dead are alive. We frequently fail to realize that we are with the “dead”. We also miss the fact that we are traveling in environments we may inhabit when we have left our present bodies behind. We may have known some of these places for eons, in the spaces between lives..
     So then: as you return from your night adventures, are you coming back through the Gate of Ivory or the Gate of Horn?

     

P.S. I have no doubt that my father came through the Gate of Horn when he recently brought me a vital medical advisory that I acted upon.

Images (1) Wooded path photo by RM (2) Aeneas and the Sybil c 1800, artist unknown.

Istanbul diary

Istanbul

An episodic travel diary of my current adventures in and around Istanbul, the peerless city that spans two continents and more than two worlds.

Friday, September 27.

Time to cross from Europe into Asia, which you can do by ferry in the time it takes to drink a glass of the tea they offer on board. Three lira buys me a jeton, or turnstile token, for the boat to Kadıköy, the Chalcedon of the Greeks. I have dreamed of Chalcedon, though not - as I recall - of modern  Kadıköy. 

    I admire the old train station, called the Gar, at the water's edge, evoking an age of elegant travel on the rails. A walk up the hill through the market. 

    I must pause to inhale the gleaming, slippery sights and smells of fresh-caught fish

displayed in boxes of ice at a fishmonger’s that is also a restaurant. Choose your fish, and they'll fry it up right away and serve it with salad and bread. I choose the sardines and the istavrit, or horse mackerel, when told we are inside the two-week window when they are at their best. The fish are delicious but fingers are required to keep the tiny bones out of the throat.. A calico cat, one of the countless strays prowling or napping everywhere in the vast world city, gets one of the istavrit.

I dined tonight at a table right on the Bosphorus, at the House Hotel in Ortaköy, looking from Europe at the lights of Asia. The passing ferries were an amazing light show. From time to time orange lights whizzed across the sky. These were paper lanterns sent aloft to carry wishes, a custom probably borrowed by the Turks from China. My favorite boat was a tiny fishing vessel with one man at the wheel and another at the prow, fishing with a little hand-held net that he swept back and forth as the boat bobbed and turned circles. This seemed like a good metaphor for human consciousness struggling to catch some of what goes on in the multidimensional universe.

Saturday, September 28

I am trying on new clothes. The long camel-colored coat has a double row of buttons. The fit is not right at all. There seems to be far too much fabric, and this garment seems to shaped for a body that is fuller in certain places, and narrower in others, than my man's body. I do not like the floral decoration on the collar - or was that on the headscarf that overhung it, and when did I put that on? No, this is not for me. I hand the coat to an assistant to put back on the rack.
    Waking, I smiled as I realized I had been trying on a pardesü, the distinctive long coat worn by many Muslim women in Turkey. Some of the styles are quite elegant. 

The names of the first Turks to introduce themselves in the adventure I led today mean (in English): Magic, Universe, Reality, Joy, Nile. How could we go wrong? No one is wearing a pardesü

     They were not only willing to share lively dream reports in front of the whole circle but to turn them into theater, the pinnacle of improv and wonderful fun. We acted out a dream in which the dreamer freed people who had been held captive in a dark sterile cave by guards resembling the Imperial Startroopers in "Star Wars", with the aid of a great rainbow bird.
    Then we used the dream as the portal for a group shamanic journey to see what we needed to release from a place of confinement in our own lives, and to claim the power of the heaven bird. This became a deeply healing and empowering experience for all, with many mutually confirming travel reports of the kind that produce confirmation of the objective reality of experiences in nonordinary reality. It gave our group the model for many shared journeys through the portals of personal images over the rest of the weekend.

Sunday, September 29

We can put our questions to the world, and we can let the world put question to us. During a break from my workshop, when I took a seat on the terrace of a coffee house near Taksim Square, the universe asked permission to ask me a question. Evren (whose name means "Universe" in Turkish) a lively and spirited member of our circle, was seeking guidance on how to use a dream to use as a portal for a healing journey. It is a grand thing when the universe puts a question to us - and then insists on paying for the coffee.

Monday, September 30

I made a long descent to the Underworld, going down through many levels and a steep tunnel. I paid a coin to the boatman. I came to a Moon Gate whose name was the same as the one I entered when I died once before, on the sea of an ancient poet shaman who was famous for being able to die and come back. I had a heavenly time on the other side of the Moon Gate on the Sea of Marmara. On my way back, at a neighboring island, I saw the sign for a restaurant with a most improbable name: Terk-i Dunya, Leaving the World. The question, of course, became: which world am I in now? The fuller story is here.

Tuesday, October 1

Go down five levels, then take the tunnel to the lowest level of this underground. Don't go the Door of Compassion. Go to the Rude Stone, by the ferry port, but don't cross by water today. Take the tram to the House of Roses. You will pass the House of Cannon Balls, the Black Village and the Vinegar Makers. The tram will be crowded. You will have to fight your way to the doors but don't miss the moment or you will come to the Stone of Iron Rings.
    If you are looking to create a geography of afterlife transits, names from the Istanbul mass transit system are an optional feature. All those I use here are translations of names that featured in my travels by subway and street car today, on my way from Pera to the Archaeological Museum.
 

  The museum has fierce gatekeepers, Medusa heads on the modern gates, Hittite lions flanking the steps to the Near Eastern collections, and an immense number of sarcophagi and tombstones. I wondered about what kind of afterlife was being projected by those who had pitched battles and savage hunts depicted on the marble and limestone vaults that would hold their bones. 
     I did like the rather fetching sphinxes on a Lykian sarcophagus. The Lykians liked a good checkout. I recalled the story in the Odyssey of how Sarpedon, a Lykian prince who fought on the Trojan side, was instantly transported to his homeland by Zeus when the god was not permitted - under divine treaty - to save this favorite.

In the evening, I was deeply moved and impressed by the whirling dervishes in the Mevlevi sema ceremony I attended at a restored Ottoman bath house. The audience was touristy; the Sufis were not. Turning always counter-clockwise on one leg, opening space for divine power to come down, right hand up to receive, left down to diffuse into the world. "The secret turning in us makes the universe turn." (Rumi) Tonight, this was no secret.

all photos (c) Robert Moss