Meeting a Merlin of the Baltic

I saw him again last night, in the twilight between awake and sleep. He first appeared as a giant dark eagle atop a conical hill, able to see across vast distances. He showed himself again as hybrid, eagle-man, and then as able to project the form of an iron wolf. Lyzdeika. I have not forgotten you. 
     Shall we recall our meeting at your birthplace in May, 2013? Here is my report of my quest for a Baltic shaman-priest:

The Shaman from the Eagle’s Nest

 On my second visit to Lithuania, I was taken to the old city of Kernave and shown a conical hill that was the reputed birthplace of a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, he was found, as a baby, in an eagle’s nest on that hill.  Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form. He plays a central role in the unfolding of the most famous dream in Baltic history.
    Camped with an army near the present site of Vilnius, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that howled. He consulted Lizdeika - by now the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion — on the meaning of the dream. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. The city of Vilnius was founded because of this dream, and in front of the cathedral is a statue of Gediminas’ iron wolf.

 On my fifth visit to Lithiuania, several years later, I stood in the rain on Lizdeika’s green hill and asked for the blessing of the ancestors, in the midst of a circle of Baltic dreamers who were eager to reclaim the old ways. Kernave means Wet Place, setting a perennial weather forecast in a country whose name means Rain Country. We had managed to perform a traditional Baltic fire ceremony that morning, despite the unremitting rain, and I had been impressed by how greedily the fire spirits swallowed offerings of Lithuanian beer, the heavy, dark beer that is like liquid bread. Now I was drumming for our circle, to open direct communication with the spirits of this land. My personal hope was to make contact with Lizdeika. I believed I had dreamed of him, before this trip, as a Baltic Merlin whose story needed to be told.
     As soon as I tapped the drum, the landscape opened, to my inner eye, as if a zipper has been pulled from the zenith to the muddy path at my feet. I saw a windswept figure above me, at the top of the hill. He was a man wearing a feathered robe, or a bird the size of a man. I sensed his fierce determination. I understood that I was required to earn the right of entry into his realm. I must start, now, by disclosing my shamanic connections, by showing him that I was his peer. This was not so hard.
     I found I had at my left shoulder a kinsman in his own feathered cloak. It was raven black. I recognized the druid from fourteen centuries ago who had often been my companion, in my time and in his own. On my right side was a wolf pack. It seemed to have traveled here with me. I had been privileged, in this country of the wolf, to have enlisted the protection and guidance of the wolf family before, because of my connection with the ancient Mohawk Mother of the Wolf Clan. This soon proved to be extremely important.
     We were given a private tour of the archaeological museum of Kernave later that day. Kernave is an active site, with ongoing excavations. The museum director, who participated in my workshop, responded cordially to my request that she should tell us about unsolved mysteries that we might be able to investigate as dream archaeologists. 
     We heard a singularly creepy ghost story involving a mutilated corpse. On the night local archaeologists excavated a grave at the edge of the ancient burial ground, strange things happened. They had dug up the remains of a woman who had been decapitated. Her head had been buried face down in the earth. Her hands and feet had also been cut off and transposed. The archaeologists speculated that she was a witch who had been dug up and mutilated in this way to prevent her from going around bothering the living. There was a second theory; that her body had been hacked up this way to turn her into a cemetery guardian, a protector of bodies and souls and grave goods. That night one of the archaeologists heard rushing winds outside her tent on site. She went out to see the energy form of a giant stallion reared up on its hind legs. All the animals around went wild, dogs howling, birds screaming. All the archaeologists rushed out. What was going on that night? What had they released? They covered up the body in its original site.
     After lunch, I suggested to our group that we might use objects we had seen in the museum, as well as any impressions we had picked up around Lizdeika’s hill, as portals for a journey to encounter the spirits of the land and recover essential history. One of our explorers chose as her portal the skull of a princess that had impressed all of us. The princess had been buried wearing a diadem with symbols of a mother giving birth and the Tree of Life. In her journey, our dream archaeologist traveled through one of the eye holes of the skull and then looked out, through the priestess’ eyes, into scenes of her life and her world. Another brave explorer used the skeleton of a horse that had been buried alive at the center of a circle of human graves; it was buried standing, its neck and legs were broken. Another of our trackers chose to investigate the mystery of the missing swords; only one sword (and this just the hilt and pommel) was in the museum. I gently discouraged tracking the phantom of the mutilated corpse.
    My own intention for this expedition was to go back to the scene at Lizdeika’s hill when I saw the landscape opening as if it had been unzipped. After I began the drumming, however, I was distracted by the tale of the mutilated body and our discussion of the missing swords. I traveled rapidly through many scenes of violence from the past. I saw a duke hurrying down wooden stairs and ladders to fight or flee under sudden attack. I saw raganas, wood witches, as ancient masters of psychic warfare, creating Baltic versions of the golem to menace and terrify enemies. It seemed that they had used bodies like the one in the cemetery, rather than clay, in this cause. Some may even have worked with Kabbalists in times when the survival of the Lithuanian Jews was imperiled.
     I saw warriors and/or their weapons — swords and spears — and/or figures of wood or amber representing them planted vertically in the earth with the idea that in need they would spring from the ground, fully armed, to fight invaders.
      Now I was back at the place of Lizdeika. He stared at me from pale blue eyes. The human features around the eyes kept changing, and I became aware that he has occupied many bodies. Then the shape around the constant pale blue eyes became the head of a wolf. He really is a wolf as well as a man.
    He began running like a wolf, pelting across the landscape. I ran after him, adopting a similar wolf form. Then he rose from the ground and became a dark eagle. I became a bird and flew after him. There were several more animal transformations. Then he became a grass snake and slipped through a crevice among the rocks. I became a snake and slid through after him.
     We were now in a different space, a kind of sanctuary between the worlds. I felt the presence of one greater than him, a female presence. It came to me that as a wolf, he is subject to the Alpha in his pack, who is the She Wolf, the Mother of the Clan. They have relations in other forms, on other planes. He is linked to Menulas, the Moon God; she to Saule, the Sun Goddess. They seemed to enjoy my own encounter with Moon Man and Sun Woman in Paris.      It came to me that Lizdeika’s main obligations were not as counselor to dukes or high priest of the recognized pagan line, but to these hidden powers. What happened to the Lizdeika of history, who advised Gediminas? He had wanted his body to be left for the bird, up on a tree on the hill where he was found as a baby. But it was necessary to dispose of his body faster, because enemies — and maybe witches — were coming who would desecrate it or (worse) use it for sorcery. So he was burned and the ashes were dropped in the river. However, his vital soul was preserved inside a soul catcher, an amber whose natural shape resembled that as a man. It is from this container that he was able to enter and use successive human (and animal) bodies.
     I met a Merlin of the Baltic, neither good nor bad, just so, and — like the Merlin of my Celtic ancestors — never confined to one time, ever shape-shifting, through the stories he weaves and the stories that are woven around him.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Photo: At the hill of Lizdeika, Kernave, May 2013. 

 

The Drowning Boy and His Sister

When I was nine years old, before I left my body in an operating theater and went to another world, I nearly drowned. I had been out fishing with my father and his friends on a boat on a river near Melbourne, Australia. When we docked, I slipped on the gangplank and fell into the water. Nobody could understand that I was in any danger. The water was shallow and I was a good swimmer. Yet all my short life was swirling through my mind, with glimpses of places and people I had not met in ordinary reality. Finally someone reached down and hauled me out. Then I was on my belly, coughing up the brackish water I had swallowed.

Half a world away, in Memphis, Tennessee, a girl my age dreamed that a boy with a round, freckled face, was drowning, though no one understood he was in danger. In her dream, she reached down into the water and helped to pull him out.

In many nights during my lonely boyhood, this girl was the sister I longed for. We went riding through the sky together, leaping from cloudbank to cloudbank to get to fresh worlds of adventure. Usually my horse was gleaming black, with a star on his forehead, while hers was white. Sometimes, we would meet in a garden of fruit trees and rambling roses, where a bear guarded the gate to color worlds, as vivid and fascinating and scary as the Color Books of Fairies. We could count on Bear to keep us safe. He tied a red cord round our middles so we could not get lost, and would tug when it was time to come back.

It took more than three decades after my near-death in the river before I met the girl from Memphis. Because of my dreams of ancestors of the land, I was now on my quest for Sir William Johnson and the world he made in the Mohawk Valley. I drove from the farm where I was living to Johnson Hall, his last home in the Valley, and met Wanda Burch, who had been curator of this historic site for many years. I did not know her right away as my dream sister, but I felt completely at home with her. She was generous in opening her vast trove of personal knowledge of the records of Johnson, and in escorting me to other places connected with him and the Mohawk Indians he came to know so well. 

We soon discovered we were both dreamers. We traveled into the same dreamscapes, as we came to believe we had done as children. Wanda revealed an ability to dream into other aspects of my life that would have been disturbing had we not almost immediately developed a relationship of deep trust and agreed to adopt each other as brother and sister. 

One morning, Wanda shared a dream report in which she saw me exploring a strange triangular castle on the borders of England and Scotland. While she was dreaming, I was studying photos and descriptions of Caerlaverock castle, the ancestral home of the Maxwell clan (of which the Scots Mosses are a sub-clan). This stronghold on the Western Borders, near Dumfriesshire, was built in the shape of a triangle for both ease of defense (it takes fewer soldiers to guard three walls than four) and for magical purposes (the triangle is a favorite ritual portal for evocation, or bringing things through from a hidden dimension).

Sometimes Wanda seemed to be dreaming my material. She would call and say, “I have another of your dreams.” Sure enough, her report would look and feel exactly like one of my own dreams, stamped with personal markers like picking up a phrase from another language, discovering a secret room or a rare book, or cloak-and-dagger adventures in far-flung places.

The great and daily gift in this ever-deepening friendship was our ability to give each other mutual support and validation and to grow our practice of dreaming together. We realized early on that dreams require action..
     

Over lunch soon after the pull of dreams and the play of synchronicity had led me to sell the farm and move to a house on a hill in the city of Troy, I told Wanda that I had dreamed that a famous author of dream books had moved to my town and was leading dream classes and everyone was very excited. Wanda and I had not yet learned to offer comments by saying “if it were my dream”. She fired her interpretation of my dream right at me. “Robert, you are the famous author who has moved to Troy. Why not give some dream workshops?”

This had me poised for action, but I did nothing until the next day when, in the way of synchronicity, I got a call from a local arts center. Would I be willing to give some classes? Sure. They were expecting me to offer writing classes, but readily readjusted their expectations when I said I wanted to lead dream workshops. Prior to the first of my evening dream classes, I dreamed we had 41 people signed up, and that there was a problem with a man seated near a piano who was trying to record the class without asking permission. I was perplexed by the number 41, since we had agreed to limit the class to 35 – until I got to the center and learned that we had 35 registered and 6 on a waiting list. I was now alert for possible appearance of a man with a tape recorder near the baby grand piano in the gallery we were using. I spotted him as soon as he started fiddling with the machine he was trying to conceal under his raincoat, and laid down the law.
    

Wanda and I practiced dream archaeology together, culling the holographic memories of the land at sites in the Mohawk Valley and further afield where the events of Johnson’s life, and those of the settlers and natives he knew, had unfolded. We also found ourselves developing “far memory” of other lives where we felt we had been connected.

We learned how to companion people who are moving through the gates of death. We learned how to grow dreams for people who are in need of a dream, and wrap the energy of vision around them so that it can bring body and mind towards healing.

I don’t recall exactly when Wanda told me her dream, from when she was nine, of rescuing the drowning boy. I remember her talking of it to me again, when we visited a Mohawk community in Ontario because a Mohawk grandmother had asked me to help her people remember how to dream in the old way. At the lunch table, I found myself sitting opposite young women whose surnames were Johnson and Brant, and may well have been lineal descendants of the 18^th century people who called me into their world and brought Wanda and me together.

“Your own will come to you,” asserted the Irish visionary writer George Russell, beset known by his pen name Æ. My soul friendship with Wanda, in its inception and its ever-renewing gifts, has taught me that this is simple truth. In his beautiful little book The Candle of Vision, Æ gave a personal example. When he first attempted to write verse, he immediately met a new friend, a dreaming boy “whose voice was soon to be the most beautiful voice in Irish literature” This was William Butler Yeats. “The concurrence of our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of spiritual gravitation.”

In his later life, Æ found a soul companion in the Australian writer P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins and also a deep student of the Western Mysteries and a world-class mythographer. Æ wrote to her, “I feel I belong to a spiritual clan whose members are scattered all over the world and these are my kinsmen.” Yes. And our spiritual kin can reach to us across oceans, and across centuries, even into the drowning pool.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo by RM

For Wanda's odyssey of healing through dreamwork, please see her beautiful book She Who Dreams 

Great Turtle Rises

The ancestors are calling, calling. Not only the ancestors of our bloodlines but of the land where we live or travel, and of traditions to which we are connected, across time and space, in our multidimensional families. This morning a dream of power carried me deep into the cosmogony of the First Peoples of the land where I live. May its energy and potential for healing reach you with these words and images.

December 2, 2020
Dream

Great Turtle Rises

I am with a group in a rural location. We agree to enter the healing night together and bed down in a room full of mattresses. An elderly man moves among some of the dormant bodies with sprigs of wildflowers with lilac blossoms. I see that whatever he is doing brings immediate healing.

A woman elder is lying near me next to the wall and I notice there is a strong energy connection between us. I can feel juice streaming back and forth, balanced and powerful. I look at the wall. It is now natural stone, maybe limestone, with the clearly defined shape of a turtle. The stone turtle starts to revolve. It comes alive. Turtle raises its head and stares at me.

"Aksotha," I greet it in Mohawk, with reverence. "Grandmother."

Feelings: blessed

Reality: I know Great Turtle, as Teacher of the Deep as well as Great Mother, in the traditions of the Onkwehonwe, the Iroquoian peoples of the  land where I live. Years ago, I was invited by a Turtle Clan healer to teach a circle of Mohawk women to dream in the ancient ways on a reservation in Ontario. I was presented with a turtle pendant (see photo) by a Huron/Wendat dreamer from the birth people of Island Woman, the ancient woman of power who called me in dreams half a lifetime ago. Here is a poem I wrote in honor of Great Turtle, whose form (be it noted) is that of the snapping turtle which (like the sea turtle) cannot hide in its shell. 

Anonwara (Turtle Dreaming)

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Winged soul in the sky

I have been a speaker at a conference attended by a group of dealers in art and antique jewelry. I was impressed by the beauty of jeweled belts that two of them have in their stock; they tell me the best of these come from Jordan.

    Now I am outside. The world around me is shimmering. I marvel as the landscape becomes a field of crimson, streaming like silk. High above, to the left, I see a golden winged figure. Is it a golden bee, or a hummingbird?
    Ba.
    Clear as a bell, the one syllable is spoken in a beautiful feminine voice.
    I remember Egypt, and how the ba soul, seen as a human-headed bird, takes flight from the heart. The gods of Egypt, the neteru, have ba souls too. The sun-god Ra, as I recall, has seven and they take many forms. The benu bird the Greeks called the phoenix is a ba of Ra.
    I rise before the sun, thinking of the sun god, because of that vibrant field of red, and that glorious golden winged soul.

I found this dream report dated March 31, 2012, when I opened an old journal at random today. It is one of hundreds of dreams of ancient Egypt and its mindset - l'imaginaire égyptien  - that I have recorded from as far back as I can remember. In dreams, the ancestors are calling, calling. Ancestors of our bloodlines, and of the lands where we live or travel, and of traditions to which we are connected across space and times. Our dreams will show us where we need to clear ancestral karma, and where we can claim an empowering connection with the wise ones. Go deep enough in dreaming and you will understand that outside liner time - to which dreamers are not confined - all these connections are playing right now.

Image: Gold and enamel ba figurine from Ptolemaic Egypt, sold at auction at Christie's on April 26, 2012. 

The Practice of Dream Archaeology

Marija Gimbutas declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."
    The emerging discipline of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed. Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.
    The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.
    We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.
    We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.
    We travel to ancient sites and dream with the land, opening communication with the ancestors. In The Boy Who Died and Came Back I describe what happened when we made group shamanic journeys at Kernave, an ancient capital of Lithuania, and I found myself in contact with a legendary shaman-priest, a veritable Merlin of the Baltic.
    We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”.

Image: This mysterious figure, dubbed the  "Idol of Pomos" was found in a Cypriot village and dates from the Chalcolithic period. It is an inviting subject for dream archaeology.

The Ka of Mau has restored the crown

Ann Arbor, Michigan

The tall cabinet is the kind that is sometimes called a secretary. There is a pull-out writing surface between the drawers below and the glass-fronted bookcase above. There are intriguing objects visible behind the glass - statues, vases, family heirlooms. However, the object that I want to access is on top of the cabinet. To get to it, I will need to climb onto the opened desk part of the secretary. The whole thing is rickety and I doubt that the desk can bear my weight. A friend volunteers to hold everything steady but I don't trust her ability to do this. I don't want to risk breaking the contents of the secretary. They belong - or once belonged - to an extraordinary older woman I regard with great respect and affection.
   So I turn to other things.
   I am startled by the arrival of a whole pack of cats. There are at least six or seven of them. They are long-eared, short-haired, lean and wiry and very supple. They stretch and sport and show themselves off in different postures. All vary Egyptian, I think. Wait a minute. They are Egyptian. I am sure of it.
   A gray cat separated herself from the others. She springs up on my lap and gazes intently at my face. Her eyes are strange. I expect the slit eyes of a regular cat, but these eyes at first seem blank. Their substance - light gray in color, and flecked found the edges - makes me think of a statue. I also think about ancient bronze mirrors.
   I read the cat's fierce intention. She wants me to know that she is my helper, and that she will bring what belongs to me if she has my approval. Absolutely.
   She springs to the top of the secretary with one bound and jumps down with something in her paws that looks like an enormous flower. She brings it to me and places it in my hands. It is so light and beautiful. I recognize the white conical center piece and the high flanking ostrich plumes. This is the atef crown of ancient Egypt.
   A voice in the dream says, "The Ka of Mau has restored the crown."

Feelings on waking: Gratitude, delight, surprise
Reality: I am preparing to open a workshop in Ann Arbor titled "Dreaming Like an Egyptian". Cats were sacred in Egypt, were sometimes mummified, appear in many statues, and were known to have Ka souls that were fed - like those of humans - after death. The atef crown combines the conical white hedjet crown of Upper Egypt with twin ostrich plumes. Osiris wears it. So do Sobek, the crocodile god, and others,

"Mau brings me the atef crown" drawing (c) Robert Moss June 13, 2014

Harriet Tubman and the leopard dreaming

She moves through the night woods on leopard feet, vanishing and reappearing. Her night vision guides her unerringly to the frightened people hiding among the sweet gums, or scrunched down inside a mudhole, aquiver for the sound of dogs or horses, coming after them. The leopard, osebo in the language of the Ashanti, is an impeccable hunter. It also knows how to hide.

In West Africa, the leopard is a powerful dreamtime ally. Up to the present day, there are tales of the abakwa, the sorcerer who can shapeshift into the body of a leopard, and is greatly feared because of the leopard’s stealth and delight in the kill.

     In my dreams of her, Harriet Tubman was not confined to the human sensorium. She could not only fly like a bird; in the swamps and forests of the New World, she could sense and move with the grace and precision of an African night hunter.

    Is this idle fancy?

    Franklin Sanborn, writing in 1863, described her as “the grand-daughter of a slave imported from Africa” with “not a drop of white blood in her veins.”

    Many years later, a reporter for the New York Herald called up these memories in an interview: “The old mammies to whom she told dreams were wont to nod knowingly and say, ‘I reckon youse one o’ dem Shantees, chile.’ For they knew the tradition of the unconquerable Ashantee blood, which in a slave made him a thorn in the side of the planter or cane grower whose property he became, so that few of that race were in bondage.”

Memories of gossip heard in childhood are not evidence that Harriet had Ashanti blood, but the story suggests that the Ashanti were known where she grew up, and she was associated with them in people’s minds. The Ashanti, a warrior people of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) built a powerful kingdom after 1680 with a standing army of 80,000 men, half equipped with firearms. Their chiefs, called “masters of firepower” or simply “big men”, took slaves from enemy tribes and sold them to the Europeans in the trading ports via Hausa middlemen; they boasted that no Ashanti could ever be made a slave. Nonetheless, it is likely that some Ashanti were captured and sold by their enemies.

The shipping records of the Chesapeake slave trade suggest that Harriet’s ancestors were brought to America from this part of West Africa. Nearly all of the slaves brought to Maryland ports came direct from Africa, and the vast majority came on big London vessels that picked up their cargoes along the Gold Coast or from Upper Guinea. Maryland planters were constantly asking for slaves from the Gold Coast; they had a reputation for strength and stamina and craftsmanship.

West African slaves brought to Maryland’s Eastern Shore did not lose their identity and traditional practices overnight. Recent archeology shows the survival of key elements of West African culture under slavery in North America: in the miniature boats and other items placed in graves, in the bones and carved objects used in divination kits. When Minty Ross was growing up, the Christianization of African slaves had barely begun.

Harriet said she inherited special gifts – including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future – from her father, who “could always predict the future” and “foretold the Mexican war”. [Sanborn, also Bradford, Scenes 79-80]. She spent a lot of time with Ben Ross in the timber gangs, splitting and hauling wood for the Chesapeake schooners. In their quiet times in the woods, maybe they revived something of the atmosphere of the Sacred Forest of the Ashanti, and the practice of West African dream trackers accustomed to operating outside the body, sometimes in the forms of animals.

We have an interesting source on Ashanti dreaming in Robert S. Rattray, a British “government anthropologist”. A few months before the New York Herald announced Harriet’s “Shantee” roots, Rattray was rowed ashore to the sweaty, dusty coastal city of Accra, on his way to the Ashanti homeland.. Rattray became a passionate student of the Ashanti, who called him “Red Pepper” because of his blazing red hair. He was a Scot who went native in a big way, dancing as wildly as a woman possessed (according to one of his critics) and also “chasing after” African women (according to another). Though sometimes baffled by the mobility of consciousness among the West Africans he interviewed, he did his best to record Ashanti dream practices in a weighty 1927 study titled Religion and Art in Ashanti.

“To the Ashanti mind,” Rattray explains, “dreams are caused either by the visitations of denizens of the spirit world, or by spirits, i.e. volatile souls of persons still alive, or by the journeyings of one’s own soul during the hours of sleep.” In the Ashanti language, “to dream” is so dae, which literally means “to arrive at a place during sleep” – implying travel.

For the Ashanti, what happens during these dream travels are real events. If you sleep with another man’s wife, for example, you are held to be guilty of adultery and may be punished for it.

Flying is a common experience in Ashanti dreams. “If you dream that you have been carried up to the sky…and that you have returned to the ground…that means long life.” This certainly held true for Harriet Tubman, who lived to be ninety-one.

Rattray describes an Ashanti practice for disposing of a “bad” dream by confiding it in a whisper to the village rubbish dump, which may also be the communal latrine.

His account of the practices of Ashanti dream hunters may have direct bearing on our understanding of how Harriet Tubman dreamed. One of his informants described how his dead brother guided him on the hunt. “I often dream of my brother who was a hunter, and he shows me where to go. Any antelope I kill, I give him a piece with some water.”

The same man’s dead uncle gave him dream prescriptions. When a child was ill in the house, his deceased uncle showed him some leaves to administer as part of the medicine; “I did so and the child recovered.”

Like other indigenous peoples, the Ashanti believe that if you are not in touch with your dreams, you are not in touch with your soul. “If one does not dream for eighty days, it means that one will become mad.”

Drawing: "Harriet Tubman with Guides" by Robert Moss (2003)

For more on Harriet Tubman and how she used dreaming to guide escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, please read The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss, published by New World Library.