At the Stag Tree

 

At the Stag Tree

I am the antlered one.
I raise living bones
as taproots into the sky
to draw down the strength of heaven.

I am sure-footed, potent,
a warrior in love,
with power to read the land,
to see behind me and around me.

I grow my own crown, royal,
magnificent, and have the wisdom
to give up its burden
when the year grows old.

I come here, to the hickory,
to rub out my royalty,
to drop the burden of my crown
and grow again, stronger than before.

September 15, 2018

- lines composed in an exercise to become Animal Speakers in my "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" retreat in the green fairyland of northern Bohemia

Calling the Deer

Deepheart, mountain guardian
who harries the hunter
and knows what belongs to us
and what does not,
give us your speed,
your ability to read the land,
to see what is behind us and around us.
-

May we grow with the seasons
into your branching wisdom
putting up antlers as taproots into the sky

to draw down the power of heaven,
reaching into the wounded places
to heal and make whole,
walking as living candelabra,
crowned with light,
crowning each other with light.

I wrote this invocation many years ago, on a mountain in the Northeast where I lead advanced gatherings of shamanic dreamers. It is a very special place, where we draw on the deep fires of Earth, and the spirits of the land, and where the healing energy of the Deer is very strong. 

Art by Annick Bougerolle

Calling the Deer

Deepheart, mountain guardian
who harries the hunter
and knows what belongs to us
and what does not,
give us your speed,
your ability to read the land,
to see what is behind us and around us.
-

May we grow with the seasons
into your branching wisdom
putting up antlers as taproots into the sky

to draw down the power of heaven,
reaching into the wounded places
to heal and make whole,
walking as living candelabra,
crowned with light,
crowning each other with light.

I wrote this invocation many years ago, on a mountain in the Northeast where I lead advanced gatherings of shamanic dreamers. It is a very special place, where we draw on the deep fires of Earth, and the spirits of the land, and where the healing energy of the Deer is very strong.
     The symbolism of the antlers is vitally important in every tradition that knows the cervid family. The antlers represent spiritual connection; they rise above the physical body into the spirit realm. They also embody the power of regeneration; the bones die and fall away and grow back stronger and greater than before. 

Art: L'Arbre et la Brume by Annick Bougerolle

On the tracks of the Antlered Goddess of the Ways

The British visionary artist Chesca Potter says that when she moved to London, she had a vision of an immense goddess figure, dressed in green and gold, over the church of  St Pancras. This is the oldest church,  in the city, founded (according to legend) by Helen, the mother of the emperor Constantine, who is famous for her dreams; Helen is shown dreaming on the cover of my book The Secret History of Dreaming. It was another Helen - or rather Elen - who seized the artist's imagination. In her visions, Chesca saw her as an antlered woman. She painted and sketched several versions of this antlered goddess. My favorite is the one shown here, which appears on the card labeled "Lady of the Ways" in John Matthews' Celtic Shaman's Pack.

      Cernunnos, the male version of the Antlered One, is famous. It is less well known that there is solid evidence for the ancient worship of the Antlered Goddess. In the far north, she was a Reindeer Goddess. Female reindeer (and caribou) sprout antlers too. In early times reindeer were native to Scotland. Reindeer bones have been found in three caves near Inchnadamph, a hamlet in Assynt, Sutherland, Scotland. The name of the hamlet is an anglicization of the Gaelic Innis nan Damh, meaning "meadow of the stags". In the British Museum there is a bronze figure from the Iron Age, discovered at Besançon in France, of an antlered goddess.

      I am always delighted to come upon fresh material on the ancient forms of the Goddess. Elen is very special, for me, because she is the patron of roads and gates between the worlds.      In Chesca's image, she stands before a dolmen gate embellished with symbols suggesting access to the Upper, Middle and Lower worlds.  When you travel the British isles, you may feel Elen's soft footfall - beneath the traffic and modern construction - along the deer paths and ancient trackways and in the the lapping of quiet streams.

     Elen is Lady of the Ways in many senses. Most significant, for me, is her role as Lady of the Dreamways. In the great cycle of Welsh epic poems known as the Mabinogion, Elen calls a king to her in his dreams, and he finds her embodiment in the physical world when he learns to use his dreams as a map and to follow their roads.

    To know more of all this, we must study the literature and the archaeology, and we must dream on it. We can do this even on the other side of an ocean from Elen's ancient trackways, especially if our ancestors knew her - and if we know the right tree.

     I know a Camberdown Elm, transplanted from Scotland to a sloping lawn in western Massachusetts. I call it the Village Tree because its canopy resembles a collection of thatched cottages, especially in late fall, when the leaves are matted dull brown. In that season, I walked down to the elm in a light, cold rain. I caressed the scaly bark of the trunk, and wished the elm health and renewal. A wooden seat had been placed under the tree and I sat there, open to vision without insisting on it.

     Immediately Deer appeared to me. This time – the first occasion I remember – the antlered deer was wearing a saddlecloth. The saddlecloth was a deep red with a brocaded border. I understood that I was to get on the deer’s back and let it lead me. So I swung myself up, as I would have mounted a horse. Instantly we were off at a terrific pace, heading north across a landscape of frozen marshes. I looked ahead, and saw a huge orange disk very low on the horizon. It seemed we were flying straight into the face of the sun.

     Instead, I found myself in the presence of an immense being. She appeared as a beautiful, mature woman, white-skinned, deep-bosomed - and wearing antlers. When she invited me into her embrace, we became the same size. I understood that I was entering the embrace of an Antlered Goddess. Then I shot straight up through the sky, into the face of the Moon, and encountered a number of beings with historical identities in early Europe who gave me specific information I was able to verify and document in subsequent research. Another exercise in dream archaeology, but with even broader resonance.

     A big question was put to me recently by a questing young friend: "What is the white man's spiritual inheritance?" he went on: "it seems there is a dearth of relevant, culturally appropriate spiritual practice for white people." After gently chastising him for using the phrase "white man", i suggested that the answer lies in dreaming. Active dreaming is crucial to collective soul retrieval, to recovering and living our authentic spiritual inheritance.

     Let me add that Elen of the Dreamways has a double or close sister across the North Sea in Nehalennia, who was venerated at Celtic sacred sites on what is now the coast of the Netherlands. She was the patron of voyagers; seafarers and traders made offerings to her for safe passage and success in their transactions. Her name may mean “Steerswoman” or “Pilot”. She is depicted as a lovely young woman enthroned within a seashell, with a basket of fruit on her lap and a dog nearby, gazing up at her adoringly. Often she has her foot on the prow of a ship, and a boat rope in her hand.

     Nehalennia’s other close animal companion is the dolphin. She is the patron of astral as well as physical journeys, just as Elen is the maker of roads as well as dreamways. For the Celts, the happy afterlife on the Islands of the Blessed requires a crossing by water. And in ancient Europe (as in Polynesia) one of the favorite forms of transportation for the Otherworld voyage is the dolphin. Ripe fruits are often carved over the top of Nehalennia’s shrines. She offers abundance and ever-renewing life, as well as safe passage through the Otherworld, before and after death.

Illustration "Lady of the Ways" by Chesca Potter from The Celtic Shaman's Pack by John Matthews, published by Element.

The Antlered Christ and the Synchronicity Hammer

Sometimes synchronicity feels like a secret handshake from the universe. Sometimes it falls like a hammer. Synchronicity hammered me in a sunlit park, softly, to confirm the importance of a certain line of research.
     I had returned to studying the symbolism of antlers. Every world culture that knows the deer family has been fascinated by the horns that die and grow back. For many ancient and indigenous traditions, the antlers are a symbol of spiritual authority because they grow above the physical head, reaching towards the realm of spirit. They signify regeneration, because they die and grow back, bigger than before. They are worn by Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Master of the Animals, by Mongol women shamans, and by the rotiyaner or "men of good minds", the traditional chiefs of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, or Iroquois. 
   

Visually, deer antlers suggest the shape of a tree, even the World Tree that shamans climb; the resemblance is in the French word for antlers, which are called the bois - wood - of the deer. There is a mystical connection between the deer, especially the flying deer (cerf volant) and the early kings of France. [1] In The Secret History of Dreaming, I describe how a mysterious stag, taking the English archers by surprise, helped Joan of Arc win a battle, and hint that this may have been an animal guardian whose form she could borrow.
     Studying religious iconography in France in 2005, I became fascinated by the moment in the history of the Western imagination when the old pagan image of the Antlered One fused with that of the Christ. You can view the results on the facade of the great Gothic church of St-Eustache at Les Halles, once the site of the famous market. Look up and near the top, lording it over the gargoyles, you'll find the figure of an antlered stag with the Calvary cross between his antlers.
    According to legend, St. Eustace (to give him the Anglo version of his name) was formerly a pagan Roman general named Placidus, who reveled in the hunt until one day he confronted a magnificent stag through whose deep eyes the Christ light shone. Christ spoke to him through the deer. The general gave up hunting and converted to the new religion. This moment of conversion through the agency of the deer has been memorialized in numerous painted and woven and sculpted images, including a marvelous 15th century painting by Pisanello that I viewed in the National Gallery in London.
    The St.Eustace legend may be an invention, designed to claim the luster of a commanding symbol of the old ways for the new religion, just as churches were placed on the sacred sites where pre-Christian rituals were celebrated. However, the theme of the power of the deer spirit to tame the killer in man resonated with me deeply, because on a mountain in the Adirondack mountains of New York, I had heard a similar tale from mountain men who knew nothing of Placidus or Eustace: that three hunters, on separate occasions, had come face to face with a great stag in that wild terrain, and that each time, something in the deep, steady eyes of the deer had persuaded the hunter to lay down his rifle and go home. 

   Not long after that trip to France, I was talking about the theme of Christ in the Stag on my cell phone, while walking my dog in a park in upstate New York that is notably clean. As I described the stag with the cross between his antlers on the church at Les Halles, I glanced down and saw an orange cardboard disk at my feet. It bore the image of a stag with a Calvary cross shining between his antlers. This was one of those moments when the universe gets personal. I knew that in that moment, the symbol that was blazing in my mind was shining back at me, on the grass at my feet.
    I put the cardboard disk in my wallet and have carried it ever since, a token from the world. I did not identify the source of this version of the stag with the cross until, on my way to give a talk at a bookshop in Vancouver B.C. some months later, I stopped at an Irish pub across the street. I needed to use what Canadians call the washroom, and as I did what boys do, I saw the image from the cardboard disk in front of my nose, in a framed poster for Jägermeister, a herbal liqueur whose name means "hunt-master" and (I later learned from my youngest daughter) is a favorite on college campuses with kinds who want to get "hammered."

1. Anne Lombard-Jourdan, Aux origines du carnaval (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005) 139-141.

IMAGES
Pisanello, "The Vision of St. Eustace", c.1440.
Dream of flying deer in XIV century manuscript book in the Louvre. Photo (c) Robert Moss
Jägermeister coaster I found in the park.

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.

Dream Gatekeeper and Antlered Blessings

Hollyhock, Cortes Island, British Columbia

"What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?" asked the immigration officer at Toronto's Pearson airport when I arrived very early on Tuesday morning, from a noisy puddlejumper that seemed to be part of the early history of aviation.

"I'm leading a seminar on Cortes Island."

"What's the subject of the seminar."

I take a risk and say "Dreamwork," preparing to explain of asked what this means.

The face of the lady immigration officer is illuminated. She is positively beaming pleasure.

I can't resist asking, "Do you remember your dreams?"

"YES!" she exclaims. "I dreamed of an earthquake."

"If that were my dream, I'd wonder whether the dream is literal or symbolic. Maybe I'll find myself in a place where an earthquake could happened. Or maybe the dream is about a future event that will shake up my life in some way."

"We had an earthquake here in Toronto," she told me. "People were surprised. I had the dream before that, so I guess it could have been a preview. But it seemed that I was in Los Angeles in the dream."

"Have you been to Los Angeles?"

"No, but I've been to Mexico."

"Then if it were my dream I'd wonder if it contains something about the future that has not yet been revealed, maybe involving a trip to L.A. I don't know about yet, or something that could shake my world involving someone with an L.A. connection."

The line behind me was growing, so the passport control officer and I bid each other a pleasant good-day, and I moved on towards Baggage Claim. I was in celebratory mood. An immigration officer seems like the ultimate archetype of Gatekeeper, and this morning the Gatekeeper was not only in friendly mood; she was eager to explore dreams.

Outside the airport, the city of Toronto was being turned into a swimming pool by the heaviest rains on record. Later I sloshed through three inches of water on the sidewalk to get on the Canada Line to my interview on a CBS afternoon show. The rain stopped right after I chatted with the host, on live radio, about the significance of her dreams of finding herself in bed with various colleagues she would never think of sleeping with under regular circumstances. I observed that, while for Freud nearly everything in dreams was about sex, sex in dreams is very often a metaphor - in this case (if it were my dream) for getting closer to someone in other ways.

200 people turned out for my talk at the Vancouver Public Library that night, and I was moved by the depth of passionate engagement in that audience as I explained why we need to rebirth a dreaming society now and how dreamwork, for me, is all soul - helping each other to identify, through dreams, what the soul (as opposed to the ego) wants of our lives, and to locate where vital soul energy we may have lost through life's pain and disappointment can be found and brought home to our bodies.

On Wednesday morning, I embarked at Vancouver's South Terminal on the new journey that brought me to Hollyhock, a beautiful retreat center on Cortes Island. A 40-minute plane ride, then a joincing ride on a shuttle bus to a fast water taxi, where I sat in the back in the fierce blow off the Sound, and finally a van from Manson's Landing to Hollyhock. I met a participant in my "Way of the Dreamer" retreat at the shuttle bus. Her lovely name was "Celeste", which got me talking about the significance of names and the need to be sure that we claim the name we want.

When we arrived at the landing for the water taxi, the shuttle driver said, "I was listening to your talk about names and I'd like to tell you about my granddaughter's name. Her paernts naled her Ocean. She loves the sea and can tell you things about it that old salts don't know, though she's only seventeen. Last week she fell off a boat and there was an orca in the water right next to her. They swam together like they were best buddies." We agreed Ocean had been given the right name.

The naturalist who drove us from Manson's Landing to Hollyhock told me that, while there are gray wolves and cougars on Cortes Island, there are no bears. I informed him, "That has just changed."

I walked the stony beach in the afternoon, and a doe walked before me, slowing to look back at me, with no sign of fear. At the dinner table that night, we got into talk about indigenous ways of dreaming and Celeste - who was traveling with a copy of Dreamways of the Iroquois - asked me about how I had met an ancient Mohawk woman shaman in my dreaming, and that had changed my life. As I spoke about the Iroquoian practice of honoring secret wishes of the soul, as revealed in dreams, some young women were spinning hula hoops near an old apple tree, in my line of sight. A young buck stepped across the grass behind them. This inspired me to speak about the spiritual significance of antlers - the "living bones" - to the Iroquois. A second buck stepped into my field of vision, then a third, an older stag with a serious rack. He looked at the hula girls, then at me. I felt the tingle of confirmation that good things were afoot. I spoke of how the antlers, for the Iroquois and many other ancient and indigenous people, represent spiritual connection because they rise above the physical head into the spirit world. And they represent the power of regeneration, because they die and fall and grow back.

That night, in a meeting house deep in the woods, I offered tobacco to the ancestors of the land, and we sang and danced the Bear back to Cortes Island.

Photo by Steve Case, my neighbor at dinner on the night of the deer and the hula girls