Calling the Storm God: Private Myths, Collective Dreams

I run into storm gods quite often: Zeus and Perkunas, Shango and the Thunderers.. In a dream report I disinterred from my 2020 journals, I am reconstructing a ritual to call on the power of a storm god feared and revered in the ancient Near East. As so often, the dream set me the task Jung called "amplification": tracking correspondences in mythology and literature. 

August 9, 2020

dream

Calling the Storm God 

I am holding an extraordinary stone. It is dark reddish and may be a meteorite. There is the hint of a figure or scene, maybe its natural contours. Its shape reminds me, oddly, of the foreleg of a bull. I want to set it up in its ancient stand. I examine some bits of metal that were used to anchor it. I ask two lovely young priestesses who are assisting me to bring me some wire, figuring that I can bind the object in place. Before they return I have worked out how to get it securely into its bronze base. Power will be generated when the right words are spoken and the right powers evoked.

I have found an ancient text - Mesopotamian or Hittite - of a hymn to the storm god. I have written a free version of the scholarly translations and feel it has real power to move things for the benefit of communities as well as individuals. I share this with the priestesses and they are excited. I am going to read my work aloud for the first time to them.

I consider how to explain my hymn to a broader audience. One of the priestesses has a collection of my previous writings including an essay titled "Words from Ur". Perhaps somethng in this vein.

Now I have the stone standing securely on its plinth, I decide where I will deliver the prayer. There are three doors in the wall before me. I open the middle door. There is a tremendous surge of energy, seeking form, in the sky. 

 

Feelings: keenly interested, excited

Amplification: I knew that a storm god (Hurrian Teshub, Hittite Tarhan) was very important for the Hittites. I was soon reading up on Iškur (Sumerian) or Adad (Akkadian), a Mesopotamian storm god. Adad’s name is said to be derived from the Canaanite Hadad. The root meaning of both names is "Thunderer". He was also called Rammanu, Thunderer, in Akkadian. A text dating from the reign of Ur-Ninurta characterizes Adad/Iškur as both threatening in his stormy rage and generally life-giving and benevolent [1]. 
     I would imagine that meteorites and thunderstones were widely regarded as symbols of the storm gods. Early Hittite inscriptions speak of them as “stars falling from the sky” and the Hittites supposedly worshipped sacred stones set up at many places. A Hittite king sent a meteorite dagger to Tutankhamun. 
    The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed in Egypt to reanimate the spirit of the dead. A distinctive tool was used – an adze with a bent handle resembling the foreleg of a bull. It has been suggested that the actual foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull may have been used to pump blood to revive a deceased pharaoh. The Egyptians called Ursa Major Msḫtjw, the Foreleg of the Bull .[2]
    It seems that statue magic throughout the ancient Near East involved similar arts, to import the spirit of a deity or ancestor into a statue or stone and then bring it alive.
    I looked for hymns to the Near Eastern storm gods and copied phrases that might be part of an invocation:

Thunderer 

Owner of the House of Abundance
and the House Where Prayers are Answered

Bull Rider|
who leashes and unleashes the Lion Dragon

Guardian of the Tablets

Lord of Divination

Bringer of rain from heaven and floods from underground [3]

By the Old Babylonian period Iškur/Adad was one of the great gods of the Babylonian pantheon with sanctuaries in many cities  He is "the bringer of plenty" in Enki and the World Order . In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta he causes a storm that makes wheat grow on a barren mountainside  Elsewhere his violence is featured. In the Old Babylonian version of the creation epic Atrahasis, "Adad was roaring in the clouds" as the Flood began. The deluge "bellowed like a bull" and the wind screamed like an eagle. 

Five years on: I note that the priestesses in my dream were modern Americans, perhaps an alert that storm gods will be heard again. 

Notes

1. Alberto Green writes that "On a tablet among the adab compositions from the time of Ur-Ninurta of Isin, Iskur is metaphorically described as a howling tempest with flashing bolts of lightning, a butting storm, and a great lion who makes all his enemies tremble, yet he is simultaneously revered as a benevolent lord and warden of heaven and earth who gives life to the land...In this important series of liturgical incantations dated to Ur III, Iskur is the son of Enlil. In addition to being called a lion, he is also represented as an enormous bull-cloud, booming his name across the sky. Here the Storm-god rains destructive hail rather than life-giving showers. He is lauded as the august bull and the great lion, mounting the seven storms like donkeys; he is also the roaring storm, thunder, and lightning. The mythic picture is that of the Storm-god Iskur galloping in his frightful war-chariot, drawn by his steeds, the lion, and the bull." - Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003.) p.54.

2. Gábor W. Nemes, “The mythological importance of the constellation Msḫtjw in mortuary representations until the end of the New Kingdom” Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenn vol. 13 (2020) pp. 1-61.

3. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. 2005) p.784

4. ibid., p249.

Illustration: RM+AI

The fiercest dragons

Journal excavation turned up this report in which a dream gave me a quest to be pursued through conscious dream reentry as I drummed for a group at a magical site in a green forest.

I am striding through a verdant green landscape. The scene is a spectrum of greens, of fresh grass and soft ferns, of mint and sweet basil, of spruce and fir.

I am joyful because I am on a quest that is about to be fulfilled. Soon I will enter a cave that is the home of something that will challenge my courage. It takes on the shape of a traveler's deepest fears. If you can step through those fears, you can claim immense power for good. 

I woke from this dream excursion with feelings of elation.

The scene resembled a magical retreat center in the greenwoods, in the foothills of the Cascades, where I often lead group adventures and where Dragons are sometimes seen. The sense here was of a knightly quest, to a place of the Dragon.

I went back inside the dream, of course. The green world and the cave mouth gave me the portal for a shamanic journey, fueled by drumming. The original dream had traction, pulling me back in. Beyond the drumming, further juice was supplied by the circle of active dreamers around me, all embarked on similar adventures.

I encountered opposition, in my hyper-awake dream journey, before I reached the cave. While I drummed for the group, my traveling self had to face and overcome an ambush by villains in medieval garb. Exciting stuff. When I got through the attackers, I found the cave mouth filled with Dragon fire.

I willed myself to step through the fire. Beyond it, I entered a wonderful light, bright as the sun. Through the light, I came to a world-inside-the-world as fabulous and exciting as that of Lord of the Rings. A causeway plunged down and down, through underground cities to mines deep in the earth.    

Rilke was right when he said the fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures. Your dreams may show you their location, if you are willing to follow the maps.

- Journal entry for November 17, 2013

Photo: Drachenhöhle ("Dragon's Cave") near Mixnitz in Styria (Austria)

Know the myth you are living

As some people use the word, myth is synonymous with fake news, or superstition, or outmoded hand-me down beliefs. A myth may be a prevailing worldview – that the earth is flat or the still center of the turning universe, that humanity begins with Adam and Eve, that the world is enthralled by a dark Demiurge. For the Greeks, mythos was the spirit of the play, familiar to the audience yet as unpredictable as the gods in how it would unfold in a fresh drama.
      A myth may be a sacred teaching story that explains how the world came into being – and what is beyond it – and why bad things, as well as good, things happen, and what it means to be human. A myth may justify the ways of gods to humans, or those of humans before their Creator. A myth may introduce you, like the major arcana of tarot, to essential members of your archetypal family: to personified forces at play in your life and your universe.
      A myth may invite you to consider who among the gods defends you, and who has it in for you. A myth may also be a living reality beyond the realm of facts, a source of truth that cannot be confirmed in a laboratory experiment but may be evidenced by the data of raw experience.

      Your dreams can be a nightly screening of gods and archetypes. A dream may be your place of encounter with a Big story that is looking for you. It may call you to a tradition about which you previously knew nothing ."In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his primary, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream," as Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Psychologist Betsy Meador was called to study Inanna and her priestess after a dream that involved the prayer flags of the great Sumerian goddess, Queen of Heaven and Earth, that were previously unknown to her.
       I was seized by Kali in a terrifying night vision – beginning with sleep paralysis – when I was fourteen. I wrote a cycle of poems in her honor. Later her brother-consort Kala, better known as Yama, became one of my principal mentors, reminding me to consider every life choice in the presence of Death. A little-known Celtic deity came into my ken in a series of dreams in which I was defending my property with a long-handled hammer, like a weaponized croquet mallet. Some shelf elf produced a Gallo-Roman statue of a god with a similar hammer, named in the inscription as Sucellos, which means the Good Striker. He seems to share some qualities with Thor. He is also the consort of a great goddess of abundance, called Rosmerta by the Gauls and Abundantia by the Romans.

       We confirm our relationship with a patron deity, or power animal, when it comes to our aid. Athena came to me like this in Anatolia. The Bear has come to me like this many times since it claimed me when I found the courage to step back into the space of a dream where it had terrified me.

       Myths are a cauldron of stories and symbols that hold superabundant energy for life. You want to become conscious of the myth you are living. If you are unconscious about this, then the myth is living you and you may be driven into confusion and disaster, like Odysseus when his men lose control of the winds. In different phases of life, we may inhabit – and be inhabited by – different myths. We may find ourselves in the play of rival stories. We may be able to match and mix.
        The great scholar of religions Wendy Doniger writes about the “seed text”, bija mantra. In her book Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, she describes how she found this in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu, who cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.” 

      “Myth, by design, makes it clear that we are meant to be something more than our personal history,” declared P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins.

       The myths we are living now swing on hinges into other lives, whose myths swing back at us. Because our present life dramas are connected with those of other personalities, in other places and times, within our multidimensional family, it is not surprising that “old” gods and “dead” religions feature in our spontaneous mythology, as mediated by dreams and visions and by moments on the roads of this world when we experience a hidden hand, pushing us forward or holding us back, or rearranging the stage set.

Art: Frantisek Kupka, "The Path of Silence"

How to know when the god is present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess.
    We are inside the scene. We feel the coming of the god right now. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind.
    The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod among the fumes rising from the deep chasm.

Inside the dream, I feel educated pleasure. Some awe, but no fear. When I leave the dream, I have a deep sense of satisfaction. Also the strong feeling I have been in an entirely real situation, in another time and/or a separate reality.

Dreams set us assignments. It is agreeable for the ancient history professor in me to reopen books about the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. I am reminded that in preparing to become the oracle, the Pythia bathes in the sacred spring. She inhales pungent incense. She invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her.
   She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton (sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod that serves as her throne. In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl.
   She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as if it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages. 
    The philosopher-historian Plutarch, also a priest of Apollo, wrote that at Delphi the god makes his thoughts known “through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet, or, as it yields itself to the One that moves it, to remain of itself unmoved and tranquil, but, as though tossed amid billows and enmeshed in the stirrings and emotions within itself, it makes itself more and more restless.” [Plutarch, de pythiae oraculis in Moralia V]
    So the saying that truth comes with goosebumps comes with a mythic pedigree. I may have forgotten that, but my dream self clearly did not. Once again, I find myself racing to catch up with him.

Art: John William Waterhouse