Notes for the Road

 

To find yourself you must lose yourself.
The One you are seeking is not inside you.
You are inside the One.

To be present in every time
you must be here, now.
Now is the center of all times.

Here, now, you can step on and off
the trains to past and future
and travel on parallel lines.

To get to a place you do not know
you must go by a way you do not know.
Burn your maps to make beacons.

To wake up, you must dream.
Without dreams, you are a sleepwalker
who could join the ranks of the living dead.

There will be monsters, of course,
dark dwellers at every new threshold.
Without them, how could you be ready to pass?

In dealing with demons, you must learn
to choose the forms of your worst fears
and laugh at your creations.

If you wish to see marvels around you
you must carry marvels within.
A mirror can't show you what you don't bring.

The gates of the Otherworld open
from wherever you are. Don’t think
you have to drink jungle juice with anacondas.

Put your blade away, dragonslayer.
You only conquer the dragon when you raise it
and ride it and turn its energy towards Light.

Turn out the lights if you want to find the Light.
The visible is the skin of the invisible.
In the dark, it is easier to see with inner eyes.

Don’t list the Trickster among your demons.
He is your friend if you expect the unexpected
Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.

If you want to be fully alive, be ready to die.
How about now? You feel the cool breath
of Death on your neck. Give him some foreplay.

To find the One, don't spurn the many
Name only one God, and you’ll always end up with two.
Seek the nameless behind the forest of names.

Make your confessions on the road
not from behind a curtain. The hawk will hear you
and the rabbit, the lily and the stone.

Walk on the mythic edge. Let your life
become a stage for divine events.
Notice what neverending story is playing through you.

Look after your poetic health.
Notice what rhymes in a day, and a life.
Follow the logic of resemblances.

Practice real magic: Follow the passions of your soul
and bring gifts from the Otherworld into this one.
You’ll regret what you left undone –

the fence you wouldn’t jump, the dream you didn’t follow –
more than anything you did when your cool lover
stops licking your neck and takes you in his full embrace.

- My poem is included in Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: "Path in Transylvania" by RM

Inanna at the breakfast table

The plot thickens, the veil of mystery flutters and closes and opens. The night before I posted my blog piece titled "A Dream Doorway to Inanna", a male friend dreamed that he saw me having to deal with a skeptic in a group. Dream Robert revealed he was wearing a jeweled necklace with something resembling a "letter opener", studded with lapis lazuli, hanging down from it. Using this power tool, Dream Robert invoked a goddess. She appeared, raging at the ignorance and stupidity of humans. Her rage brought skyscrapers tumbling down. When my friend sent his report, I remarked, "That sounds like Inanna in her take-no-prisoners mode." He did not know about Inanna, which makes it all the more interesting that - as I study the original sources again - it seems that the placement of the jewels in Dream Robert's outfit strongly resembles the placement of jewels on Inanna's outfit as she dresses to visit her dark sister. I'm now guessing that the "letter opener" studded with lapis lazuli may be Inanna's lapis measuring stick, which is in her hand as she begins her descent to the Underworld, or one her other rods and wands of power. Lapis lazuli has great significance in the Inanna story; it was believed to supports powers of seership and to light the way to the afterlife.  

We dream of Inanna, and maybe she dreams of us, whether we call her goddess or archetype. Once, when I was leading a retreat in the foothills of the Cascades, Inanna took possession of the breakfast table where our group was gathered for coffee, waffles and dreams.    "How is your dream recall?" I asked the first person to join me at the table.    She proceeded to recount a dream in which she is traveling through a dusty landscape to the home of a tarot reader. Instead of spreading the cards, the tarot reader shows her two fish tanks, each containing elaborate dioramas. At the center of each is a statuette of a goddess. The dreamer recognizes the goddess forms: Isis and Inanna. The tarot reader tells her she must choose one. She chooses Inanna. Immediately a great tornado whips up,swirling everything around her. She wakes excited and curious to know mor eabout the power and the attributes of the goddess she chose.     We started talking about Inanna and the great cycle of poems composed in her name in ancient Sumer. I spoke of the terrifying praise-poems in which Inanna goes forth into battle, with a flashing carnelian at her throat and the mace of a warrior raised in her hand, with the force of a tornado. I mentioned that in my carry-on bag for this trip there just happened to be a copy of the beautiful versions of the Inanna poems composed by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer.     We were joined by a psychologist who had made a close study of the myths of Inanna and spoke about the story of the Descent of the Goddess as the model for a woman's journey to the depths to meet and integrate her Shadow side. She reminded us that one of the mysteries in this mythic cycle is that we are not given a clear reason why Inanna chose to make her descent to the darkest level of the Underworld, the realm of her dark sister, Ereshkigal, tobe hung in a meathook. We do know that she did this of her own volition. It was a choice she made freely.     We had now been joined by many other dreamers, all eager to take part in the weave of mythic associations that was taking place over the waffles and coffee. One woman shared that she was in the midst of a ritual journey through the Descent of Inanna organized by a women's group and unfolding over many days. She had made the descent, through visualization and ritual, through the seven gates of Inanna's descent, at each of which she was required to give up an aspect of her power and protection. As she made this mythic journey, she realized that it evoked many of her personal life dramas and passages - for example, losing a job and leaving a home - which now assumed even deeper resonance.    I confessed that Inanna, in full warrior mode, makes me, as a mere man, a little nervous. At that moment, a woman named Moon took the place at the table that someone had just left free. I smiled. Inanna is the daughter of Nanna, the Sumerian Moon god, and I am a very lunar man. We were at a mythic edge - with all the juice that brings - that was also a family situation.

We see again how dreams are only personal myths; they are swing doors between our world and the world of gods, archetypes and others. I am thinking again about my friend's dream of me invoking a goddess with a power tool that looked like a letter opener. In front of me now, as I write, is the letter opener I use every day. It has the form of the caduceus, twin serpents wrapped around a staff and here surmounted by wings. The earliest form of the caduceus was in Mesopotamia. It seems to have been one of the many forms of the staff or wand of power of Inanna. It turns up all over the world map later on, including as the want of Hermes and Mercury and Hermanubis. But it seems to begin with Inanna. Perhaps, without knowing it, I have been reaching to her every time I open mail.

That turns my mind to a famous statement from Jewish tradition, that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is left unopened. We do better than interpret dreams, in our Active Dreaming practice. We engage with the dream world, we enter it at will, and we bring gifts from it into waking life. We are ready to act in the understanding that our dreams may be a nightly field of interaction with greater powers, and that those powers - even of often camouflaged - are at play in our ordinary world. I look at the letter opener again. Inanna's people in ancients times did not have paper or parchment or papyrus. They recorded dreams on clay tablets that were then baked, making them strong and durable enough for us to read of Inanna's Descent to the Underworld and the Dream of Dumuzi more than 5,000 years later. They had an interesting expression in Sumerian for dreams that defy understanding. Such dreams are inside "a closed archive basket of the gods" - that is to say, a basket of dream reports written in cuneiform with a read stylus on those tablets of baked clay." Sometimes the gods open the archive basket and give us a myth to live by, even in our modern lives.

The White Goddess and the habit of coincidence

The White Goddess is a "queer" and difficult book, as the author, the poet and novelist Robert Graves, cautions his readers in a foreword. The subtitle in itself may scare away some readers: A historical grammar of poetic myth. Yet it is a book I find myself returning to, again and again, over the years - though since I was a teen I have never been mad enough to try to read it from front to back.
     The whole book is a celebration of the Goddess, as she may have been worshiped in matrifocal Old Europe, and other places, before the advent of patriarchal gods installed by patriarchal men. The material came to Graves, and came through him, in a marvelous flow; he dashed off the first draft (then titled The Roebuck in the Thicket) in just three weeks. Specialists will carp at his prodigious but errant scholarship, which is guided by rhyme and resemblance rather than any logical ordering. Few who are learned in the languages and customs of the Celts, in his day or ours, will accept him as an irreproachable source on the Battle of the Trees or the Matter of Britain.
     Yet it is impossible not to thrill to the passion of a poet who proclaims that the business of poetry is to serve the Three-fold Muse, and restore the Goddess, and gives us the most rousing and transfiguring (if not the most literal) version of the Song of Amergin that has ever been sung in English.

I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
sets the cool head aflame with smoke?

In writing The White Goddess, as in other inspired work. Graves was certain that he was not alone in his creative space. In addition to what stirred in his imagination, he noticed objects in his physical environment showed up in ways that suggested a hidden hand, from the realm of the Goddess. In a postscript he added to The White Goddess in 1960, he recounted that when he started on the first draft of that book

I had in my work-room several small West African brass objects - bought from a London dealer - gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a humpback playing a flute. I also had a small brass-box with a lid, intended (so the dealer told me) to contain gold dust. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated there; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid until ten years had gone by. The I learned that the humpback was a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of some Akan State; and that every reigning Queen-Mother (and there are a few reigning even today) claims to be an incarnation of the Triple Moon Goddess Ngame. The design of the box-lid, a spiral, connected by a single stroke to the rectangular frame enclosing it - the frame having nine teeth on either side means: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess Ngame!’ These gold weights and the box were made before the British seizure of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

 

When he learned the meaning of these African objects, Graves suspected that an African version of the Moon Goddess had played a part in his inspiration. The story deepened after World War II, when he returned to work on his manuscript. He was now writing about the sacred king, first the consort and then the sacrificial victim of the Goddess in certain traditions. Now a collector named Georg Schwartz bequeathed to Graves "five or six more Akan gold-weights, among them a mummy-like figurine with one large eye." Graves was able to have this strange figure identified as the Akan king's okrafo priest, who in later times served as a surrogate victim, in place of the king. "The okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I wrote about the Goddess's victims."
     After publication of the first edition of The White Goddess, "a Barcelona antiquary" invited Graves to choose a stone from a selection of Roman gems. Among them was "a stranger", a banded carnelian seal from an earlier culture, engraved with a stag galloping towards a thicket with a crescent moon on his flank - the very image that had given the poet his original title,The Roebuck in the Thicket.
     "Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life," Graves observed, "that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit." He hastens to add that he's not keen on the word "supernatural", since he finds patterns of "more-than-coincidence" entirely natural, though escaping the explanations of science.
     Call them a habit. I like that very much. Meaningful coincidences or correspondences do multiply when we are charged with passion, and in forward movement on the roads of life and creation, Goddess knows.

I first posted this little piece on a poet's experience of living on the mythic edge a few years ago. I am posting it again because a friend just told me that Robert Graves gave her important counsel on a mythic theme in a dream. I was invited to dine with Robert Graves when I was a 19-year-old student and he was on tour in Australia. I know, from my experience with other dead poets, that their advice is always worth heeding.

Moon Gate in the sea of the shaman who died and came back

Büyükada, Princes' Islands, Sea of Marmara, Turkey

For a portal to the Underworld, try the Şişhane Metro station, just above the Galata Tower at the end of the M-2 subway line in Istanbul.. Five very steep and long escalators, plus a moving walkway, are required to get you down to the track. The station is spotless (unlike similar portals in other world cities) with great mural art and no graffiti, putting London and New York City to shame.
    I started at Şişhane on a visit to the Princes' Islands. A quick ride to the Taksim Square station, three more escalators, then through another turnstile requiring an orange plastic jeton to the underground "funicular" down to the ferry terminal at Kabataş. The Jetonmatik at the ferry station delivered a metal token, more like the legendary coin for the boatman.
     The ferry stopped first at Kadıköy (the Chalcedon of the Greeks) and I again felt the thrill of crossing from Europe to Asia in the time required to drink a glass of the hot tea they offered on board. On to the Sea of Marmara, stopping at Henna Island and Carry-Bag Island before we came to Büyükada, the Big Island of the Princes'. 
     I was vividly aware that I was on the sea where an ancient poet and shaman named Aristeas, famous to the Greeks, used to fly beyond the body in the shape of a raven. He was said to have been a master of bilocation, showing up in more than one place at the same time. He was also said to have left his body, seemingly dead, only to rise again, showing up in another place and time. I had first heard the name "Aristeas" in a boyhood dream. More recently I have been dreaming the title and scenes of the Arimispea, an epic poem of adventure across mythic borders that is attributed to him; it survives in the world of documents only through second-hand accounts,
     I saw plenty of ravens on Büyükada, above the bustling restaurants and ice cream stands around the port. Cars are banned on the island, and the easiest way to get around - unless you feel like a long uphill climb - is by phaeton. Here the give the name of the chariot of the sun god to a horse-drawn carriage. I was again feeling the mythic edge, clattering up the hill behind a pair of silver gray cart horses. The streets were lined with tall Ottoman era mansions, some in desperate need of TLC, and acacia and bougainvillea was rife everywhere.

     We came to a restaurant below the Greek Orthodox church that is popular with pilgrims. When I saw the name of the restaurant, I had no thoughts of making the 30 minute hill climb to the church. Luna Park.
     I burst out laughing. "It's where I went when I died, aged nine!" I exploded. My friend was confused and concerned. Was it a terrible mistake, to have brought me here?
     "No, not all. I can't wait to see what is beyond the Moon Gate this time."
     Luna Park is the name of a popular theme park in Melbourne, Australia, my birth city. Its entrance is through the mouth of a huge moon face. At aged nine, when I died in a Melbourne hospital under the surgeon's knife, undergoing emergency appendectomy, I left my body in the operating theater and enjoyed the freedom of flight, leaving the scenes of blood and pain and grieving parents behind. I flew above the beach. When I saw the gate of Luna Park, in my second body, I was not too clear about my circumstances. I was excited by the chance to do things any ordinary nine-year-old would want to do, to go on the rides and have fun in the fun park. So I flew through the Moon Gate. And found myself in a different world. A world of beautiful, pale, very elongated people who received me as their own. Thay welcomed me and raised me and I lived a whole life among them until my new body was used up and I was required to return to the body of a nine-year old boy the doctors had finally managed to revive after he lost vital signs for some minutes.
     I tell more of this story than I have chosen to make public before in my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
     I bounded up the steps of the Luna Park on the Sea of Marmara full of eager curiosity. What would I discover when I went through the Moon Gate this time. As I passed the stands of postcards and shiny things and tourist knicknacks, it occurred to me to wonder whether I had any evidence that I was not actually dead again. I had paid a coin to the boatman to come here.
     The upper level of this Luna Park was more than a step or two above the milling tourists below. A charming, spacious restaurant overlooked one of the most glorious views I have ever been privileged to see from my table. I looked out through the pines, over Spoon Island in the Sea of Marmara, to the continent of Asia. The food was delicious, and the many dishes were brought by an old-fashioned waiter with grace and impeccable timing. They had fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, but I decided not to have it on this side, remembering what happened to Persephone. I drank of Ephesus (a popular Turkish beer called Efes, which is Ephesus in English) and lingered over coffee. If this was the afterlife, it was a lovely reception.
     On the return ferry, I thought again about the legends of the raven shaman who died and came back, and how the raven had spoken to me early that morning, from the streets of Beyoglu near my hotel. I was on a different ferry line than the one that had carried me out across the sea. As we docked at the neighboring island, named for a certain kind of carry bag, I wondered again about which side of which reality I was on. The sign on a portside restaurant read Terk-i Dunya. "Leaving the World." What an improbable name for a restaurant, in ordinary reality. The question became inescapable: which world am I leaving now?

Trotsky's island

Maybe Trotsky had similar questions, even if they went outside his standard belief system. I learn after the voyage to the Moon Gate on the Big Island that Trotsky spend the first four years of his exile here, after Stalin threw him out of Russia in 1929. 

The poet shaman who died and came back
    
Herodotus wrote about Aristeas in Book IV of his Histories:

I will now relate a tale which I heard concerning him both at Proconnesus and at Cyzicus. Aristeas, they said, who belonged to one of the noblest families in the island, had entered one day into a fuller's shop, when he suddenly dropped down dead. The fuller shut up his shop, and went to tell Aristeas' family what had happened. The report of the death had just spread through the town, when a certain Cyzicenian, lately arrived from Artaca, contradicted the rumor, affirming that he had met Aristeas on his road to Cyzicus, and had spoken with him. This man, therefore, strenuously denied the rumor. However, Aristeas' relatives proceeded to the fuller's shop with everything required for the funeral, intending to carry the body away. But when the shop being opened, Aristeas was not there either dead or alive. Seven years afterwards he reappeared, they told me, in Proconnesus, and wrote the poem called by the Greeks The Arimaspeia, after which he disappeared a second time. This is the tale current in the two cities above-mentioned.

Two hundred and forty years after his death, Aristeas appeared in Metapontum in southern Italy to command that a statue of himself be set up and a new altar dedicated to Apollo. He said that since his death he had been travelling with Apollo in the form of a sacred raven.

Proconessus, the island where Aristeas died and came back, is called Marmara by the Turks. There is no daily ferry service, so I contented myself on this visit with another island in the Sea of Marmara, and that choice seems to have been just right.