Ariadne and the Moon Bull that Came to My Town

 

A dream shows me how to craft a new group shamanic journey into mythic territory in quest of the Minotaur. Then the Minotaur turns up, thirty feet tall, on a building haf a mile from my house in a little rustbelt city in the Northeast United States.

Like the Great Goddess,a myth we can live by may turn any one of a thousand faces to us. Sometimes they shine on us in dreams, as in  a dream I recorded on May 13,2018. Here is my unedited journal report:

Ariadne's Magic Ball

Overnight I led a workshop in which I guided eager participants on a new group journey modeled on the story of Ariadne's thread. The assignment was to find your way through a confusing maze to confront your own version of the Minotaur: the shape of the fear that prevents you from claiming your full creative gifts. I instructed the journeyers to take with them a magic ball of luminous thread. They would tie one end of the thread to the lintel at the entrance to the maze and then let the ball roll before them, guiding them to the place of encounter with the Beast. They would then follow the thread back, like Theseus the Minotaur-slayer.

Feelings: I came out of this dream cheerful and satisfied, also curious about the variation from the familiar story of Ariadne's thread,

Reality check and research: Ariadne's thread is usually described as something that will get you out of a hairy situation, rather than into it. I was excited to find that Robert Graves reports (in The Greek Myths) that Daedalus, the builder of the Cretan Labyrinth (actually more like a maze) gave Ariadne "a magic ball of thread" that would roll along winding ways to the place of the Minotaur. This is what she loaned to Theseus to get him to the "innermost room" of the Minotaur and back.

Dreaming with a myth: What was actually going on here? Is it possible the original reason for braving the labyrinth was not that you had been condemned as a blood offering to a monster,or called to a hero's quest to slay the monster,but invited to a place of initiation and union with the sacred?

Revisiting old sources, I was reminded that Minoan culture was Goddess-centered and that the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the Goddess and her Moon Bull consort was an essential rite. It has been suggested that the Goddess, embodied by her priestess, wore a cow mask and horns and that the King wore a bull mask and horns.

Was the place of the Minotaur (literally "Bull of Minos"; Minos means "Moon-being") a place of enactment of the sacred rite? Or an ordeal that must be survived to earn the right to enter the divine embrace? Was passage through the labyrinth (not the neat unicursal labyrinth of later churches but a wilderness of wandering ways) initiation in the deep womb of the Great Mother?

Has the simplified and familiar story of the hero killing the monster been overlaid on the more ancient Goddess story, and the Goddess reduced to a crazy queen and a girl with a crush on a strapping Greek?

"Without the names, the meaning of things is lost," wrote the great lexicographer Isadore of Seville,and that is especially true in threading this myth. When you know that the name Ariadne may be related to a Greek title of the Queen of the Underworld and may originally derive from a Sumerian name (Ariande) meaning “High Fruitful Mother of the Barley" you'll be freed from the notion that she is just a romantic girl with a useful ball of thread. 

When you learn that the name of Queen Pasiphae, mother of the Minoteur and his half-sister Ariadne, means "Shines on All" you might doubt those versions in which she is a cracked tauromaniac who has a wooden frame constructed so she can have sex with a very special bull by tricking him into thinking she was a cow  You may then be able to visualize ancient Minoans and Hellenes chortling over the rubes who bought an exoteric, literalistic telling of the Goddess's relations with the bull.

You'll find that boughs heavy with fruit were carried in rituals in her honor. She was worshipped as a goddess of the fertile earth, as well as the Underworld and the Moon, and was attributed the power to bring men inside the experience of women. In Cypriot rituals devoted to her, men simulated the pain of childbirth.

A ball of yarn is also called a clew. This, from Middle English, is the origin of our word "clue". Ariadne's clue can take you to a place of creative discovery,where you step beyond fear and blockage into the embrace of a greater power.

Let's hear from Joseph Campbell. Still writing in hero more than Goddess mode in The Power of Myth, he gives us further valid perspective:

“The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we thought to find an abomination we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another we shall shay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence."

If we find that we have to face a monster at the heart of the labyrinth, we may discover that the monster is no stranger, but a shadow self that must be recognized and integrated or overcome.

Men and women may have differing experiences of the Minotaur. A man man may be more inclined to fight,a woman more poised to gentle and heal and embrace. In his extraordinary short story "The House of Asterion", Jorge Luis Borges speaks in the voice of the Minotaur (one of whose Cretain names is Asterion) expressing his longing to be released from self-imposed isolation by the bronze sword of the hero.

Whatever we find at the heart of the labyrinth, let's be ready to recognize that what we feared as a monster may prove to be a teacher, as promised in the derivation of the word. Our word "monster" comes from the Latin monstrum, which means "portent" or "oracle" and is related to monstrator,or "teacher" and demonstrator, one who shows what we need to see. Threading the maze brings us to the center of the self, to what we need to confromt in order to release our full creative and erotic power, marry separated aspects of our energies, and embody the god/goddess of our greater nature.

Last week in my current online course Dreaming Your Mythic Life I invited participants to go on a group shamanic journey to thread the Labyrinth and meet the Minotaur. This went very deep and the journey reports shared later were amazing, turning the face of the myth in hundreds of fresh and original ways.

Then the Minotaur appeared, 30 feet tall, on the wall of a building half a mile from my home. We learned from a local news report that a downtown meadery called The Bull and Bee commissioned an artist to paint him. Unknown to me, this was accomplished in the dark the night before my class. The message, for me, is clear: when a mythic power comes after you, invoked or uninvoked, be ready for it to show up in the street.

Top image

The National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid houses an Attic black-figure cup from around 515 bc with this painting ofthe Minotaur iniside. There are letters around the edge. start just before the Minotaur’s left foot and ead in a counter-clockwise direction and you will the Greek phrase, χω παις καλώς ho pais kalos, which translates as “I play well”. Maybe not would expect and a clue tyhat a sacred game is afoot. It may be a sexual come-on. Such cups were used in symposia where older and younger men and boys partied together.

When the Bull was My Healer

I am going to continue to post and repost some of my personal narratives of healing through the imagination in the hope that they may arouse you to work more actively with your personal imagery, your animal spirits, and your inner guides. I recorded this experience in Barcelona on February 13, 2013

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I did [before the pandemic]. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and another depth workshop I was leading in Utrecht the following weekend. I looked forward to exploring Gaudi territory and enjoying a little sun and sea .
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today, Wednesday, in Barcelona. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It takes me some thinking before I get the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I say, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sense approval.
    Then a power rushes into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminds me of the bull, and I recall my encounter, walking the city the previous day, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I feel this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me, expanding my energy field. I start to feel huge, and strong.
    I feel a second stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light comes washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision forms spontaneously, showing me how my body has been invaded and how its defenders are now moving with decision to trap and destroy the invaders. The scene resembles the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the portcullis of the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watch with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders. Now I see the brilliance of allowing the agents of infection through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watch the mass execution of the germs under the direction of a lordly figure wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack falters and the grisly germ-warriors die, I see a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leap from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle has been won. I go to the bathroom and cough over the sink. No pain. The phlegm that comes out is now brown, not green or yellow. I am expelling the corpses of the illness army. I feel vastly restored.
     When I return to bed and close my eyes, I am back at the scene of battle. Again, it is vividly alive and the action has clearly continued during my bathroom break. I am delighted to see that the defense forces are now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summons women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appear on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.
     I get out and about happily that morning, and travel on to my next workshop full of bright energy.

What can you take from my story? For starters, the need to recognize that we have inner as well as outer resources and can invoke greater powers for healing. It is very important to set our intentions wisely. If we are going to engage the active support of those greater powers, we must do more than ask for a quick fix, or recycle some hand-me down stuff. It is no less important to trust in the vital reality of the imagination, and to work with the spontaneous images that come to us. And to recognize that the most propitious time for adventures in imaginal healing may come in the twilight zone between sleep and awake.

The key takeaways are these:

1. Remember to ask for help from greater powers
2. Be ready to work with animal spirits and mythic allies
3. Imagine that if an infection has entered your body it can be confined in a holding space and defeated there without gaining access to all of your body. My spontaneous imaginal battle, played out in what seemed to be the barbican of a medieval castle, becomes extraordinarily relevant when we look at the spikes of the virus, so reminiscent of a medieval war mace.

 

The wall that is a gate

Down a spiral tunnel, surprisingly light. Rock paintings on the walls quiver into light. A cave lion stretches and runs, springing for the kill. Aurochs thunder past. Ahead is a solid wall, no way past or through. But wait, it holds shapes that were made by intent. Long bull horns, pairs of globular breasts. I have seen these before, in a reconstruction of Çatal Höyük, from a mysterious Goddess civilization of ancient Anatolia whose language we know only in dreaming.

     I grip the horns, cup my hands over the breasts, then try this again, holding a horn and a breast. The wall opens like a door and I am out on a hot dry plateau. Huge dark birds wheel and hover overhead. The tilting of their wings identifies them as vultures. They have come for the meal spread for them on a high wooden scaffolding. The chosen man lies on precious furs and fabrics. They will strip him to the bones and release his spirit from the flesh.
   I want to get closer to the mourners or celebrants who are gathered nearby. But the earth is shaking. A great black bull is charging at me. I do not freeze or flee because I know him. We danced long ago. His tremendous bulk is over me and we are joined. His potency and hot ardor stream through me. I am ready to serve and pleasure the Goddess and ready to be the willing sacrifice in due season. 

- from my experiences in a group shamanic journey for power animals led by a gifted student teacher in my recent training for teachers of Active Dreaming in Prague. What happened at the cave wall - and through it - was quite unexpected and had the authenticity that comes with a shock of revelation. I have been given an assignment for dream archaeology.

Image: Reconstruction of a mural in a shrine at Çatal Höyük excavated by James Mellaart.

Your dreams give you myths to live by

I sense the iron inside my body, and I know that it is the dust of an exploding star. The iron in my body connects me with the supernova that created my galaxy, and as I move and stretch I feel the whole cosmology is alive in me. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe is leaving us. I see her starting to rise up off the sun-parched earth where her children in Mexico have been savagely abused. I am saddened to think that the cruelty and ignorance of humans may be losing us the support of higher powers.

I go to my special place in nature, by the white pines along the creek. For the first time ever,I find no solace here. I feel separate from nature, after separating myself from the hurry of people at the office. I try to imagine myself going deep inside the earth and finding refuge there, but today I can't manage that either. What has happened to divorce me from nature? Is it me, or is it all of us?

I am at a train station. I encounter an old woman with her daughter. Their heads are those of ravens. The old woman turns to me and her feathers turn white. The white-capped Raven Woman says to me, "Things are all happening too fast in your world. It's time to lift off. We'll come back at the right time." With this, she flutters up into the air. I realize that from her perspective it's possible to see far across time and space, beyond our present confusion.

I come to a living tree, There is the living face of a woman in the bark of the tree. The tendrils of her hair are like the serpents of Medusa. Now a great bull comes, stamping and snorting, magnificent and scary in his virile strength. As he stamps down, his hooves take root in the earth and little by little, he becomes part of the tree. I am amazed that the bull energy can be rooted and grounded like this. I want to plant this strength around me, in my life.

I am on the track of a part of myself that has been long buried in the ground. I feel the presence of a being that loves me, holding me by the shoulders, gently supporting me. The name of the woman that has been buried sounds like Michelle but is actually My-Shell, the part of me that had to hide and make itself small. I will dig as long and deep as it takes to bring her back to me.

These are summaries, in exact sequence, of dreams and visions that were shared one evening by members of an active dreaming circle that I lead in my home neighborhood. Not only does each report have mythic power; it is possible to read the whole sequence as a single mythic narrative.
     It starts (where else?) with the creation of our world. It dramatizes the perennial danger of the Dark Times that come when human behavior forfeits the support of higher powers and estranges us from the Earth. It introduces uncanny guides and living symbols: the woman who becomes White Raven, the bull (primal power of the ancients, consort of the goddess and preferred form of the gods) who becomes a tree. It brings the story home to us in the invitation to a personal quest for soul recovery, to bring out of the Earth what has been kept safe there through a time of trouble and trauma.

    Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators stalking in the bush. The trick is to put ourselves in a place where the Big stories can find us. We see from the reports I have quoted above that our dreams provide that place, if we show up and remember.

Image by French artist and dream teacher Véronique Barek-Deligny 

The Red Bull and the Morrigan

I see a huge red bull, with long silky hair. I know that he is the focus of an ancient battle.
    I see the warriors of two rival armies clashing together - kilted men swinging killing irons.
    Riding through the field of battle comes an immense dark figure, standing proudly erect in a chariot. She is three women in one. Their bodies are joined. Her chariot is not drawn by horses but races forward, powered by the intention of the War Goddess. Its great wheels are armed with scything blades, that mow down the fighting men like tall grass.
     As the bodies of the slain lie in heaps on the ground, the Morrigan divides into three huge black birds. They soar into the air, then swoop down on the fallen, picking out the eyes, stripping the flesh from the bones. They are separating what rots from what endures.
    When their work is done, they come together and the Goddess shows herself as a single being - a ripe, naked woman wearing deer antlers.
     In this form, she rises above the earth. She glides at tremendous speed from the site of the battle to a mountain whose name is Slievnamun. She shows herself here in yet another form - as a lovely young woman who sits above a natural cauldron, a bubbling spring among the rocks. Here and only here (I am informed) can the dread Morrigan be approached in beneficent human form.

This dawn vision, arising spontaneously in the liminal space between sleep and awake, has been with me since I led a retreat on a sacred mountain twelve years ago. I am posting it now because of my dream of the Scáthach last night. Here is the new report:

Sound of the Scáthach

SCAW-thach. The pronunciation is insistent, and the word is repeated. I know what it means. The Scáthach is the fierce warrior woman who trains the Irish hero Cúchulainn in the arts of war. I have heard her name said differently by contemporary Gaelic speakers (more like "Scath-ath"). Is my dream putting me on the trail of ancient usage, or simply incorporating the accent of whoever was urging me to think about a woman who was deadlier than most of the men around her?    Either way, I've been given a fresh research assignment, the kind that my dreams often give me. I go back to the Red Branch of the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology and learn that her name means "Shadowy" and that her home on the Isle of Skye was known as the Fortress of Shadows. Her father may have come from Scythia. She becomes a Celtic goddess of the dead, guiding the way for those killed in battle to the desirable Otherworld of Tír na nÓg.

Graphic: Louis le Brocquy, The Morrígan, 1969, lithograph. Illustration for Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin.

The Dream Interpreter at the Sign of the Bull

νύπνια κρίνω, | τοῦ θεοῦ πρόσταγ|μα ἔχων·
τύχ᾿ ἀγα|θᾶι· Κρής ἐστιν ὁ | κρίνων τάδε.

I judge dreams, having the mandate of the god.
To good fortune! The one judging these is a Cretan.

The text is on the shingle of an ancient dream interpreter at Saqqara in Egypt in the Ptolemaic age,  2nd century bce. Scholars debate the identity of the god he declared to be his patron, but a good guess would be Serapis, a composite deity who melded aspects of Hades, Osiris and the Apis bull. Serapis was a lord of death and of healing; the famous pool at Bethesda belonged to him before it became part of the Christian story. We know that the training of a kathodos, or candidate for initiation, in the ancient precincts of Serapis centered on incubating and working with dreams. We have records of a candidate in the time of Cleopatra being assigned to spend a whole year recalling and reporting dreams to his mentor.
    The image above is a wonderful gypsum copy of the stele mounted in front of the dream interpreter's kiosk. In the painted scene a bull approaches a horned altar. The bull was sacred in both Egypt and Crete and was the favorite animal form of gods around the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. A very dramatic form of dream incubation was practiced in a mausoleum of bulls at Saqqara where the supplicant slept amongst mummified bulls encased in giant sarcophagi.
    The dream interpreter at the sign of the Bull plied his trade near the Anoubeion, the House of Anubis. Very appropriate, since the canine-headed Anubis was the patron of dreaming and soul travel as well as the guardian of the portals to the Otherworld. This was a busy commercial district, with constant traffic between two great temple complexes at either end of the street, the House of Anubis and the Serapeion, the Temple of Serapis. There were lost of vendors and small businesses. The dream interpreter sat in a booth behind his sign, waiting for trade. By identifying himself as "Cretan", he may have hoped to appeal to the Greeks and Macedonians who now ruled Egypt under the Ptolemies, in the wake of the conquest by Alexander the Great.

We don't know exactly what the dream reader at the sign of the Bull did for his clients, but his prime location suggests that he did not lack business. In his age, it was generally believed that dreams are a field of interaction between humans, gods and others, and that dreams often reveal the future. Everyone knew that dreams are important, so important that help may be required to determine the exact meaning, to decide on appropriate action to be taken, and to disperse or ward off bad energies that may be operating during the night.

   According to Aristotle (a skeptic in regard to dream precognition and transpersonal communication) we need help with the meaning of dreams because the images are distorted: “dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement”.

    An older and more popular view was that we need help in discerning the origin and nature of dreams because not all of them speak truth. Some may be deceiving messages dispatched by evil spirits or manipulative “dream senders” (oneiropompoi). The Greeks thought that Egyptian sorcerers were especially good at this.

   It was said that we may need help in reading dreams because “the gods love to speak in riddles” in order to test us and goad us to expand our understanding.

The prime requirement for a dream interpreter, according to Artemidorus, the most famous practitioner of this trade before Freud, is “a gift for resemblances.”

   Our dream interpreter at the sign of the Bull claimed something more, a special connection with a greater power. "The mandate of the god."

For a full discussion of ancient dream interpretation, please see chapter 2, "Interpreters and Diviners" in The Secret History of Dreaming.

Celtic metamorphoses and the technology of enchantment

London

Your gatekeeper is a horned god who stands back to back with a second self.  You enter a field of metamorphoses. You may turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight.
    Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon. You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine and when  your hand closes on the handle it becomes the hound that is chasing a duck that swims into your mouth on a red river. Long-beaked bird-headed men are alive on a Shetland cross. Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats and on the forearms of queens and heroes.

I am thrilled at the British Museum by by the amazing exhibition "Celts: Art and Identity", despite stumbling in, unshowered, from a redeye flight from the US. The art of the Celts reflects a collective imagination in which everything is in connected, everything in flux, vital energies change form and surge beyond form.
    Some of the patterns are visual riddles. Some were designed, as Alfred Gell proposed, as "a technology of enchantment" [1] designed to capture minds and bind them like ivy. You feel that as the shapes become tendrils, endlessly looping, making knots without end or beginning, no strings you could pull. 

Some images are mysteries to dream on. Is that a bull's head with bulging eyes hidden beside the boss of the "Battersea shield"?     
    What is going on with the "ears" on the so-called Glauberg statue, dug up from a warrior grave in Hesse? Are they stylized horns or antlers, or leaves, or bunny ears, or the Moon worn as a neck rest? Symbols of hypersensory power - especially clairaudience - or the nimbus of Awen (inspiration) whose symbol he wears at his throat? Are these primal shamanic headphones? What would you hear and sense if you wore them?    
    I remember a dream of thirty years ago in which I was watching over my "family" of ancient deer as they grazed in a fertile, unspoiled valley. I felt the strength and weight of my antlers, larger than a moose's horns, and rose with the sense of power and connection.
    I look again at the statue. What is going on with that leaf-like shield over the abdomen? I think of how spirit men in my native Australia open the tjurni - located at the abdomen - to release the dream soul to go traveling. Sometimes they use a hand motion in doing this. Is that what the Celtic figure is doing with his left hand, under the shield - releasing a spirit self to go traveling, as dream shamans have always done?

The boar is everywhere, running before you and around you. Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx, with great leaf-like ears, recalling the statue.
    Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze. Shields that are plain at the front but have  hidden powers at the back, in the coiling serpents at the grip. Shields with glaring eyes at the front, with hidden faces of raging bulls or angry birds.   
    You find your end at last, craning over the great silver cauldron from the bog, braving the fierce stare of all those gods you cannot name. You find yourself swimming in bull's blood down to the scene of mystery at the base, where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand, over the immense body of a dying bull. His magnificent potency is evident, but it is about to be transferred, with the rush of his blood, to those who have willed this ritual.

How far did the Gundestrup cauldron travel to its sodden burial in Jutland? Some maintain that the scale and complexity of the silverwork reveals the hand of Thracian (or Dacian) smiths far to the south-east, in modern-day Romania.[2] There are elements - elephants and the half-yogi posture of the famous antlered god - that suggest contact with peoples even farther east.  

In my end is my beginning.

References

1. Alfred Gell, "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics" in  J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 40-66.

2. A.K. Bergquist and T.F. Taylor, "The Origin of the Gundestrup Cauldron" in Antiquity 61 (1987)10-24

When the bull was my healer

Saintes Maries de la Mer, May 31, 2015

It's a glorious sunny day in Provence. I am driving with a friend across the flatlands and rice fields of the Camargue. The lunar horns of the black bulls rise from the high grass. We are going to Saintes Maries de la Mer. The plural forms are not a typo. This seaside town in the  Département du Gard is named for two Maries who are counted among the first apostles of Christ: his aunt and the mother of James and John (called Salome). According to legend they made their escape to Provence by boat around the year 46. The walls of their church include extraordinary votive paintings showing how their intercession saved people from fatal accidents and storms at sea and life-threatening illnesses. In some of the paintings, they float in midair, above the sleeping forms of dreamers.
    I pause for tapas at a cafe near the beach, in front of a magnificent statue of the black bull of the Camargue. My friend captures us together. As I munch tapinade on crostini, and slices of saucisson de taureau, I recall a time when the bull was a central figure in self-healing.
    I am returning to Barcelona, where this episode unfolded, next weekend, to lead a workshop on Active Dreaming. Between now and then, I am leading a training in imaginal healing in southern France. After these adventures, I will launch a new online course on the practice of imagination for The Shift Network.
    So I inspired to re-pots my horns-and-all narrative of how the bull became my healer in a crisis of illness in Barcelona nearly two years ago. This provides a very personal answer to the question: how can we use images in healing?


Barcelona, Spain, February 13, 2013

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I do. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and my next depth workshop in Utrecht next weekend, exploring Gaudi territory and hopefully enjoying a little sun and sea.
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It took me some thinking before I got the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I said, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sensed approval.
    Then a power rushed into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminded me of the bull, and I recalled my encounter, walking the city on Tuesday morning, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I felt this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me and expanding my energy field and my sense of my physical size and strength.
    I now felt another stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision rose spontaneously, showing me how my body had been invaded and how its defenders were now moving with decision to trap them and destroy the invaders. The scene resembled the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watched with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders.Now I could see the brilliance of allowing them through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watched the mass execution of the germs directed by a lord wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack faltered and the grisly germ-warriors died, I saw a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leaped from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle had been won. I went to the bathroom and coughed. No pain. The phlegm that came out was now brown, not green or yellow. I was expelling the corpses of the illness army. I felt vastly restored.
     When I returned to bed and scanned my condition, I was delighted to see that the defense forces were now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summoned women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appeared on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.

I readily concede that my methods of imaginal self-healing may not work for everyone. And there is really no need to send me lists of remedies and preventives for my future use. I have known since boyhood that my body believes the images I allow in, and I most certainly know that we all do better when we remember to ask for help in the right way.
    
Photos: (1)  RM with black bull of the Camargue in Saintes Maries de la Mer on May 31, 2015 (2) RM with thinking bull on the Rambla de Catalunya in February 2013 

My new course for The Shift Network is titled "Dreaming Wide Awake: Tapping into the World-Creating Power of Your Imagination". It starts on June 11 and runs for seven weeks. Recordings and transcripts are provided for all classes. 

The dodecahedron is It - but I can't read the instructions

I announce, with high excitement, that the dodecahedron is a portal and a model of the multiverse we need to use. I have written down the instructions, given to me in dialogue with an impeccable guide on a higher plane.
    A friend asks me to read the text. I had recorded the dialogue in ink that has turned reddish over time - perhaps it is blood. Alas, my handwriting is more gnomic than ever. I can translate very little except for the phrase: "bull of reddish gold." 

Feelings after this dream from last night: excited, wanting more. 

Reality: A dodecahedron has twelve pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex. Plato suggested in the Timaeus that this figure was used by the Creator in "the delineation of the universe."
    My handwriting is all but illegible, even to me. I would have a very hard time deciphering any material that required real knowledge of mathematics. I am aware I have forgotten far more than I know.
    Over a hundred bronze dodecahedra from Roman times, like the one in the picture, have been discovered. They are hollow, with circular holes inside the pentagonal faces.

    In Salvador Dali's painting "The Sacrament of the Last Supper", the room is a hollow dodecahedron.
    In Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, the Dodecahedron is a character who presents one of his twelve faces at a time, according to his mood. "My sides are many, my angles aren't few. I'm the Dodecahedron, and who are you?"
    One of my students made a model of a dodecahedron after a dream.
    The bull has great significance in my personal mythology, as in the mythic imagination of the ancient world. 

Action: Find or make a model of a dodecahedron and use this as a focusing device and a launch pad for group shamanic journeying. Track the bull of reddish gold.

Barcelona journal: Thinking bull at the barbican

Barcelona, Spain

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I do. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and my next depth workshop in Utrecht next weekend, exploring Gaudi territory and hopefully enjoying a little sun and sea.
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It took me some thinking before I got the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I said, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sensed approval.
    Then a power rushed into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminded me of the bull, and I recalled my encounter, walking the city on Tuesday morning, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I felt this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me and expanding my energy field and my sense of my physical size and strength.
    I now felt another stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision rose spontaneously, showing me how my body had been invaded and how its defenders were now moving with decision to trap them and destroy the invaders. The scene resembled the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watched with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders.Now I could see the brilliance of allowing them through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watched the mass execution of the germs directed by a lord wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack faltered and the grisly germ-warriors died, I saw a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leaped from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle had been won. I went to the bathroom and coughed. No pain. The phlegm that came out was now brown, not green or yellow. I was expelling the corpses of the illness army. I felt vastly restored.
     When I returned to bed and scanned my condition, I was delighted to see that the defense forces were now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summoned women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appeared on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.

I readily concede that my methods of imaginal self-healing may not work for everyone. And there is really no need to send me lists of remedies and preventives for my future use. I have known since boyhood that my body believes the images I allow in, and I most certainly know that we all do better when we remember to ask for help in the right way.
    Oh, yes, I must add: the only teachers who interest me are ones who truly walk their talk.

Thinking bull on the Rambla de Catalunya. Photo by R.M.