The Lamplighter and the Ancient Deer: Expanding Jung's Reach

My first dream of 2015. Intention: Show me the best things I can help to bring through in the year ahead.

EXPANDING JUNG'S REACH

I am engaged in a busy, enjoyable round of publishing, conferences and workshops. I have made creative connections with scholars and psychologists who are dedicated to Jung's work. One is a woman who has written a fascinating new study of the history and legends of the Ancient Deer in Europe. I read many pages of this text with great care.    All this work, and especially the paper on the Ancient Deer, is making Jung's central ideas more accessible to ordinary people.
    You can see this going on in the street. I watch an attractive younger woman who is part of our circle standing in front of row houses with a long pole, tall enough to reach the second floor. She is swaying a little, but I see that she knows what she is doing. With the pole, she looks like a lamplighter from the gaslamp era.  I understand, as I watch her, that what we are doing is turning people's lights on.

Feelings: happy and very intrigued.
Reality: I greatly admire Jung, have studied his life and his writings rather deeply, and part of my current book is a kind of circumambulation (one of his favorite words) of his theory and practice of synchronicity.
    I have dreamed of Ancient Deer and have led shamanic workshops for twenty years on a mountain where the Deer energy is strong. The woman lamplighter reminds me of a younger, more attractive Marie-Louise von Franz. I hope our paths converge.

Snapper: We Are Turning People's Lights On.

Return of the ancient deer

I know I am dreaming. I decide to rest my dream body in a high place overlooking a vast rolling landscape of rivers and wooded hills. People may look in on me, but only if they are able to ascend to this level.
    I close my dream eyes for sleep, and at once the landscape comes alive in a new way. Ancient deer are everywhere. Their spreading antlers are immense. They are like a walking forest.
    From my vantage point, I can see that the ancient deer are returning, all over the world. They are even in the cities, though few people are remotely aware that they have come again. This gives me tremendous hope. I am awed by the return of ancient and primal powers of the Earth. They are needed.

I am thinking now about the resemblance between antlers and the branches of trees. In French, the word for antlers is bois; they speak of the "wood" of the deer. As I follow the troubling news from Turkey, I notice that the protests began as a campaign to save the trees of Gezi Park, and I recall that the symbol of Ankara features a deer with tremendous antlers, dominating two bulls.
    May the wisdom of the ancient antlered ones, connected to the trees and to the power of regeneration, prevail over the bull-headed ones today.

P.S. In sketches for my personal tarot deck, I have drawn the Empress as Ancient Mother, seated under a tree whose branches rise like antlers, and the Emperor as a Deer King whose antlered crown resembles the tree and confirms his dedication to the Great Mother.

Tarot card drawings (c) Robert Moss. All rights reserved.