Dreaming with the Departed: First Responder

Drumming for a group to call up dreams of the departed, I found my mind going back to the produce section of a supermarket where I met Fireman Tom six months after he had come to a one-day shamanic workshop with me. He came to that class because he was hungry for contact with his departed wife. He had spent two years visiting psychic mediums and others and had received lots of messages but that wasn’t good enough. He needed direct contact. He was a one-woman guy who had married his high school sweetheart. No, he had not dreamed of her and rarely remembered dreams. I assured him that when we had set a clear intention and opened the right kind of portal, he would ride to his deceased wife on the shamanic drumming I would provide.

He came back from that journey beaming. He met a guide he thought was Gabriel but didn’t want to get too grand so they agreed Tom would call him “Gabe”. He escorted Tom to a pleasant green field where tables had been set up to welcome and process new arrivals. Tom recognized Mary working at one of the tables. She did not look up when he first approached her. When he got her attention she still seemed distracted by the papers in front of her.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Of course I do. But I’ve got a lot of work to do here – work I love – and you have lots of years ahead of you down their Tom. Please go back and enjoy them”

When Tom shared his journey report in my workshop, he concluded, with a shy grin, “So I guess it would be okay to ask that girl from the church out now.”

The “girl” was sixty-five. They had both felt some chemistry but Tom thought he would be disloyal to his wife if he went with another woman – until he met Mary on the Other Side. He really was a one-woman man.

When I met him in the supermarket thirty years ago, Tom was tanned and fit, not only looking fifty pounds lighter but fifteen years younger,

I asked, “What happened to you?”.

“I just came back from my honeymoon in Jamaica. I married that girl from the church.”

Warm memories from that exchange, in front of the oranges and tangerines, washed through me as I listened in class to the sounds of bubbling spring water. I had asked everyone to allow a story or image to come from the well of dreams and memory, Was it only a wonderful memory that was coming to me now, or was there more of the story to be reveled?

I knew in that moment that Tom had died since I last saw him. His honeymoon was thirty years ago and he was in his late sixties at the time. How was he getting on now?

Immediately, I found myself looking in on another scene. Its vividness scared away any doubt that this was absolutely real.

I saw Tom in an old brick firehouse, in his blue fireman’s uniform. The siren had just sounded, and he sprang into action. He wrapped his legs round the pole and slid down to the ground floor where the engines were waiting. He looked as he had done as a young man, hearty and strong, maybe thirty years old. Tom was a first responder again.

I saw him rush to the scene of an accident. A man’s body lay on the road. Above it, half-formed of smoke-like substance, was a second body, leaving him from the abdomen. His consciousness was in the second body but blurry. He had no idea what had happened. There was a real risk that as he settled into his dense etheric body, he would confuse it with his physical body and fail to understand his situation. Those who have died suddenly, without preparation for conditions after death, often get lost or confused in this way.

Tom acted decisively, as first responder for a victim of sudden death. I observed him comforting and steadying the spirit of the man who had been killed on the road. I knew he would soon lead him to the guides who would escort him on the next stage stage of his journey to his new life. I wondered whether Tom would still call one of them Gabe.

Drawing: "First Responder" by Robert Moss

Place of Leaping

 

Place of Leaping

 

The dead tree quickens. Its leaves unfold

And become a pillar of gentle fire

That bursts into butterfly wings

And blood oranges over the tide pool

Where fresh and falling water joins the main.

 

Here, at the Place of Leaping,

Things turn into their opposites and turn again

Faster than the Monarch’s metamorphoses –

Larva into caterpillar, shell into winged soul –

Death into life, this side into the Other Side.

 

You listen to the Speaker in the tree

Who dares you to come to the edge

Telling you, “Leap now, or forever regret.”

You take off everything except your body

On the high cliff, and plunge like a diver.

 

The rocks call you and claim your flesh.

You are light as a white crane over the waves

But lose your direction until your old friends,

The dolphins, come to guide and carry you.

You stand on their backs like Aphrodite in the foam.

 

Your soul’s compass brings you across the churning sea

To welcoming faces, and places of rest and recollection

And the scholar-city, and the path of the Blue Star

Until you are called to dream your way back to us

With blue fire in your heart, singing a mermaid song.

- Robert Moss

Photo "Where Sweet Water Meets the Salt" by Robert Moss

Why the Dead Come Calling

 

Handsome Lake, the Seneca Iroquois prophet, said that the distance between the living and the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a leaf of the maple tree. There may be not distance at all, just variable receptivity.

In dreams, the departed come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door, they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these visitations.

 

The Dead Come to Seek or Extend Forgiveness

One of the most important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death. This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their growing. 

It sometimes seems as if one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.  

 

The Dead Come to Settle Unfinished Business

Brian's deceased friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where is that book you took from my library?"  

What is "unfinished business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.

 

The Dead Bring a Warning or Health Advisory

Once they are free of their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers, since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see beyond these things. Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems that tend to run in families. 

Our dead may come to us in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men immediately to the right and left of his chariot.

 

The Dead Return as Guides and Family Angels.

A young woman I'll call Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman - around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've arranged to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do together, Sunshine." When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother would not really be there. 

"Pick up, Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream through every cell in your body!"

With the words, Kirsty felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight. 

Though Grandma was not visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed the house purchase in just one day. Magic. Grandma called again to say she wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling, just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty sees them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

 

The Dead Come to Prepare Us for Death

One of the most important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home, exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen her father come for her in the dream.  

 

The Dead Want to Pass on a Message through Us

The dead may call on us to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both parties.

But if the message is really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their appointment with death.

 

The Dead Come to Show Us their Realm

One of the most familiar and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace. 

I have heard many, many accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could ever imagine."

 

The Dead Come as Guardians and Guides

The ancients believed that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.

 

The Dead Need Guidance from Us

The dead come calling in our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented, enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be shy about getting to know new people.

Yeats observed, with poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.

 Jung described a dream in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed."  [1]

Jung subsequently speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the "traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2] 

I think it is certainly entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time - speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3]. 

 

References

1 C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307. 
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: Cemetery in Ann Arbor by RM

Dog as God and Psychopomp in Dream Archaeology

 

A small example from my journals of one mode of dream archaeology: following clues from a dream to an ancient culture and turning up evidence or documentation for something that was previously unknown or  incompletely known. It may also be an example of dream precognition:  

May 8, 2022

Dream  

Power of the Dog in Dream Archaeology 

I'm excited by essays and materials I find in what at first seems to be a big white-bound bound volume. They include maps and charts and line drawings on an archaeology theme: The Dog. I reflect on related sources I have available to go further on this theme in my own research and writing, including Barry Lopez's fine work Of Wolves and Men.

Later I am out in the woods with a man who lives close to wolves. He leads the way off the main path to the right. He says the wolves are out, moving clockwise. It seems to be his plan to meet them face to face. I notice he hasn't brought his rifle. I'm willing to trust that he knows what he's doing and that if we meet the wolves face to face it will be a sociable encounter.

 

Where Dog=God and Psychopomp

After recording my, I opened my email and found my daily pdf from an academic website, a paper on canine burials at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period.. [*] It describes the mass burial and mummification of dogs in ancient Egypt, 1,350 at this site alone, tens of thousands at Abydos.

The authors suggest that the primary reason for canine burial here was to provide an organic embodiment of Anubis in his role as psychopomp, guiding souls between this world and the afterlife. The dog buried beside or near humans becomes "an amuletic animal mummy... considered to be either an adequate replacement for, or a valuable complement to the Anubis amulet to ensure the continuing and unbroken assistance of Anubis for the deceased."

The article contains maps and charts and line drawings including one of a 2nd century funerary stele from Terenouthis (Kom Abu Bellou), where the deceased is seen in the company of a dog and a falcon, aspects of Anubis and Horus.

So my dream of the archaeology of the dog seems to be a minor example of precognition or clairvoyance. The incoming email enabled me to fulfill part of my dream research assignment right away. I would probably not have made time to read that scholarly article without the dream; I had a few other reading assignments. 

It is interesting to reflect on where the wolves are circling. Their presence off-stage in that part of my the dream leads me to reflect on the evolution of the human-canine connection, In the Egyptian context, it may be relevant that Anubis and his two jackal-headed brothers, Wepwawet and Duamutef, are especially associated with wild canids. 

In one of my big dreams of Egypt twenty years earlier, my two beloved black dogs (both deceased) came out of a hollow tree, dripping with what looked like amniotic fluid and might have been resin or honey. They guided me through the pylon gate of an Egyptian temple that was both ancient and newly constructed. A beautiful cupbearer gave me wine infused with blue lotus. In an inner chamber I received profound revelations about soul and self that are indelible. Recalling my guides, the two black dogs, I think of how in some funerary stelae from Egypt, like one in the picture above, twin canids share the role of psychopomp. 

[*] Mary Hartley, Alanah Buck, Susanne Binder, "Canine Interments in the Teti Cemetery North at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period" in Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens and Jaromír Krejãí (eds) Abusir and Saqqara in the year 2010/1 (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2011) 17-29.

Photo: Funerary stela of Kopres. Roman Period, late 2nd century from Terenouthis. University of Michigan Excavations, 1935

 

 

 

Doctors in Dreamland

 

One of a set of documents received through oneiric channels that describe a future commonwealth known colloquially as Dreamland.  Internal evidence suggests that the Dream Commonwealth was established as a "Switzerland of the mind" - and its independence and neutrality guaranteed by the world powers - after after an earth catastrophe known as the Singularity. 

Our doctors are dreamers. No one in Dreamland would consider diagnosing or prescribing without consulting dreams. In our medical schools, we learn, as Galen already knew, that the dreaming mind can travel throughout the body and report on its condition in exact detail. A change in a single cell can be detected in a dream many years before the condition has spread far enough to produce detectable physical symptoms.

Many of our physicians have a sign on their wall that reads “MY PATIENT IS MY COLLEAGUE”. Some have expanded this into a personal charter. One of the ways doctors and patients learn from each other is by swapping dreams.

But dream diagnosis begins long before a visit to a doctor’s office, in regular dream-sharing and – where the dreamer feels that specialist knowledge may be required – in wellness or pre-need clinics where the dream helpers are often nurses.

Imagery harvesting is central in the treatment of illness. Our approach is that any dream image can offer a path to healing, if it is worked correctly. This often requires continuing the dream, often with the aid of a helper who will accompany the dreamer on a conscious journey back into the dreamscape. Dream reentry is one of our core techniques for healing. A personal image provides the doorway for a conscious journey, in which the dreamer may be accompanied by a friend or guide, even a whole family of dream travelers. Relaxation and focused intention are the keys to this mode of conscious dream travel. In many cases, sonic driving (especially when generated by live shamanic drumming) is used to deepen and accelerate the journey.

Some dreams provide portals for soul recovery, an essential mode of healing that the ancestor shamans helped us to reclaim, to save at least some of our kind from joining the march of the husk people, the living dead. Shamans know that soul loss – the loss of vital energy and identity – it at the root of illness and despair. We loss vital soul through grief and trauma and heartbreak, through wrenching life choices that leave us divided against ourselves, through habits of deceit and addiction that drive our bright spirits to abandon us in disgust. Soul loss can reduce us to the condition of the walking dead, passionless and dreary, forever trying to fit in with other people's needs and expectations, lost to any sense of purpose.

Dreams show us where our missing parts may have gone, and invite us to reach in and bring them back. When we dream again and again of the “old place” (maybe a childhood home, maybe a space we shared with a former partner), we may be learning that a part of ourselves is stuck in that place, or went missing at the time we lived there. By going back inside the dream of the old place, we may be able to locate that lost aspect of our own identity and energy, and find the way to bring it back into our hearts and our lives.

In the hearthfire circles where we gather with our intentional families at least one evening a week, we tend the dreams that show us where the soul has gone and help each other with fierce compassion to bring it home.

Our flying doctors work with the souls of the dead as well as the souls of the living. Our best clues to where we are needed come from spontaneous night dreams in which sleepers receive visitations from the departed and travel, often unconsciously, into realms where the departed are at home. Such encounters can be the source of much-needed healing, forgiveness and closure, as well as mutual guidance. When they are released from the second body, the departed may become wise counselors and “family angels”. Prior to that liberation, they may need help from our healers because they are enmeshed in the sticky stuff of old cravings, rancor and desire. “The living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead,” as the poet said. Our flying doctors operate in this understanding, on both sides of the swing-door of physical death.

The First Peoples say that the Big stories – the stories that want to be told and to be lived – are hunting their tellers, like predators in the bush or sharks in the water. In healing, as in education and in family life, we are constantly engaged in helping each other to let the Big story come through.

All of us are living a story. If we don’t know what it is, it is likely to be a little story, a limiting one, woven from past disappointments and stitched tight by the people who are forever telling us who we are and what we can and cannot accomplish. If we fail to define ourselves, we let ourselves be defined by others. When we are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting definitions and beliefs. Great healing and great creativity become available because we can now draw on the immense energy that becomes available when we know we are serving a larger purpose.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Wolf Doctor" by Robert Moss

 

 

Psychorrhagy, or the Origin of Ghosts and Doppelgangers

I am walking near a neighborhood store. From a block away, I see a friend who works in the store walking a dog, a German shepherd. It would be more accurate to say that she is walking him; he is struggling to keep up as she pulls on the leash. I don’t call out because they are quite some distance away, and cars are moving between us on a busy street. But as I return home from my walk, I stop by the wine shop. My friend is behind the counter, and I notice he has changed his clothes.
    “Where’s your dog?” I ask him.
    “She’s at home. I never bring her into the store.”
    “She’s a German shepherd, right?”
    “Right.” He stares at me. “How did you know?”
    “I thought I saw the two of you outside just now.” I describe the scene – including the checked shirt and brown pants I saw the man in the street wearing, which my friend recognizes – and especially my vision of the dog pulling him as if she wanted to take him somewhere,
    My friend turns pale. “I know where that might be,” he allows.
    He tells me, haltingly, that the woman with whom he lived for many years recently took her own life. He has not seen her since they broke up, did not go to her funeral and has not – yet – visited her gravesite.
    I get the impression that such a visit is now very much on his agenda.
    I find it fascinating that my friend’s doppelganger appeared with the double of his dog, which seemed to be leading him on an important mission – perhaps into the realm of the dead. Cross-culturally, dogs play an important role as conductors of souls in mythology, folklore and shamanic practice: as fierce boundary guardians (like Virgil’s Cerberus), as hellhounds that seize the wicked (like the red-eyed hounds of Annwn, a Celtic underworld), but above all as psychopomps (like Anubis or the dogs of Nehallenia, a Celtic patron of Otherworld voyagers) who can safely escort travelers between realms.
    This incident is quite instructive about the origin and nature of ghosts – ghosts of both the living and the dead, subtle ghosts that are perceptible only to the inner senses and heavy ghosts that are audible and visible to the physical senses.
    In its heyday around 1900, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) took a keen interest in “phantasms of the living”, ghosts, and dreams of the dead, correctly fining common elements in these phenomena. One of the founders of the SPR, the great Victorian psychic researcher Frederic Myers, coined a word to describe the origin of the kind of doppelganger I saw on the street. He called an episode of this kind a psychorrhagy. The word literally means a bursting or breaking loose of the psyche, as a hemorrhage is a bursting of blood. In Myers’full definition, psychorrhagy is “a special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.” [1] This might be caused by strong emotion, such as grief or fear.
    Myers was a classicist and a poet as well as a parapsychologist. He was relentless not only in his quest for evidence of psychic events – and especially of the soul’s survival of physical death – but in his efforts to provide an exact vocabulary to describe such events. Drawing on his command of Greek and Latin, he coined the now familiar term telepathy as well as many other terms that are still in use by researchers in these fields – supernormal and retrocognition among others. Some of Myers’ coinages have caught on; psychorrhagy has not. It is rather hard on the eye of the average nonclassicist reader, especially when couples with diathesis, a medical term used to define a constitutional tendency towards certain ailments or symptoms. Psychorrhagic diathesis, in Myers’ lexicon, is “a habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a way as to produce a phantasm.” [2]
      Translation? Think of my sighting of the double and his dog in front of the wine shop. Some of the psychic energy of my friend seems to have “broken loose” and produced a double – dense enough to be mistaken for his physical self even under the midday sun. For a living person to go on missing so much dense etheric energy for any length of time would be likely to produce fatigue, debility, and illness – and later, possibly physical death. Hence the old popular belief that seeing someone’s fetch (an English and Irish term for this kind of doppelganger could portend death. The uncanny nature of the double is reflected in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting "How They Met Themselves" in which a couple in a dark wood are astounded to meet their second selves are react accordingly - the woman by fainting, the man by drawing his sword. [3]
     Ghosts, in our usual parlance, are already dead, in the sense that the physical bodies from which they were projected have died. But a ghost may have originated before the physical death of its unconscious maker, through the unwitting projection or psychorrhagy of dense energy.
      Ghost that remain stuck in one place for years after death are rarely very interesting. Either they have lost their minds or their awareness is smothered by a heavy energy sheath, like something wrapped in used chewing gum. Of ghosts in this sense, Andrew Lang observed correctly, “Since the days of ancient Egypt, ghosts have learned, and have forgotten, nothing”. [4]

References

      1.F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, 1903) vol.1, xx.

      2. ibid. 

      3. Rossetti was fascinated by the double, and painted and drew several versions of this picture. He drew the first version when he was 23 and called it his Bogie Drawing. He painted his first watercolor version during his honeymoon with his model,Elizabeth Siddal, who died two years later from a laudanum overdose. When I was nineteen, I played Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a repertory performance titled "An Evening with the Pre-Raphaelites".

      4.Andrew Lang, Dreams and Ghosts (Hollywood CA: Newcastle Publishing,1972) 13-15

Text adapted from The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "How They Met Themseves" (1864 watercolor version)

Swinging with Hermes on the Hinge of Fate

He is always in motion; he belongs to the journey (hodios); his home is the road itself. He is the angel of the Odyssey, the angelos, the messenger of the gods. He is “the quick one”, especially as angel of death. He is dios eriounios huios, the “swift as death son of Zeus.” He was born in a cave, through the mating of Zeus and a primordial goddess, Maia, who was shrunk in the later phallocentric theology to a mere nymph.
    He is ruler of dreams (hegetor oneiron) and guide of souls (psychopompos). The dream people of Phaeacia – who rescue Odysseus and send him safe to the harbor of the soul – make offerings to Hermes before going to sleep. (Odyssey Book VII, 138).
    He is the embodiment of synchronicity, and his oracles speak through natural events that convey supernatural meaning. The oracle of Hermes at Pharai, in the Peloponnese, was located at the center of a walled market, where there was a simple rough-hewn statue of the god. Consulting this oracle was as simple as this: 

You enter the market through the gate in the wall towards the close of business, as the vendors are packing up their stalls. You bring your question for the oracle with you. You walk to the statue of the god and whisper that question in his ear. Then you plug your ears, or press your hands over them, shutting out external sounds as you walk back to the gate. At the exact moment you reach the gate, you unplug your ears. The first sounds you hear – a snatch of conversation, the cry of a bird, the creak of an overloaded wagon – will be the response of the oracle. The god will speak to you directly through the everyday noise of the world, once you have set a clear intention and put yourself in a frame of mind to receive the message.

Hermes is “the friendliest of gods to men” but his actions are unpredictable, and he begins his career as a thief. He bestows on humans the gift of fruitfulness. The stroke of good luck, the windfall, is named after him in Greek; it is a hermaion. He can be roguish, and shameless in singing bawdy, teasing songs over his lyre, strung on a tortoise shell. He sings of love and riches. He tells the tale of his own begetting, the lusty embrace of his parents in their secret union in the cave. He carries memory. He has great appetites – for meat, for sex, for song, for improv. He is of the night. 
    According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Zeus fathered Hermes by making love to Maia, then oldest of the Pleaides, under cover of dark in a cave. When she delivered Hermes, Maia bundled him up in warm fleeces and fell asleep. Hermes is quick. Within hours, the newborn baby had crawled to Thessaly. Before nightfall the next day,now fully grown, he had stolen some of his half-brother Apollo's cattle and invented the lyre by stringing a tortoise shell. Hermes' theft of the cattle caused a dispute among the gods that was resolved only when Apollo agreed to receive the lyre as payment for his cattle.   
    In the older strata of the myths, preserved by Cicero in De Natura Deorum ("On the Nature of the Gods"), Hermes is the son of Heaven (Ouranos) and Bright Day (Hemera); Aphrodite is their daughter. He is the escort of the goddesses – on the reliefs he is always leading three of them. He is the lover and ally of the feminine world of springs and caves, trees and streams. He is the primal lover, seminal in every sense. He has associations with water; at Pharai he has a sacred fishpond. He is one of the consorts of Hecate, who also presides at crossroads and is a keeper of gates.

      He manifests a world, a world of spontaneous creation and fluctuation. The great mythographer Karl Kerenyi, colleague of Jung, struggled to explain this in his elegant little monograph Hermes, Guide of Souls:

The sum total of pathways as Hermes’ playground; the accidental “falling into your lap” as the Hermetic material; its transformation through finding – thieving – the Hermetic event – into an Hermetic work of art, which is always something of a tricky optical illusion, into wealth, poetry and every sort of evasion from the restriction and confinement imposed by laws, circumstances, destinies – how could these be merely psychic realities? They are the world and they are one world, namely, that world which Hermes opens to us. 

Hermes, Kerenyi declares, is “the source of his own world”.    

     He is the masculine aspect of the life force, represented as the herm, the phallus.

     His phallus is a pivot between the worlds. We begin to grasp this sexy mystery when we find a carved phallus used as grave marker. There is a stone phallus three feet high inscribed with the name and portrait of an ancient Greek woman named Lysandra of Alexandros. Priapus, the god of the permanent hard-on, according to some a son of Hermes, is a guardian of graves and gardens. Seed is also soul. On an Attic black-figured vase, an ithyphallic man blows on a double flute as he ejects four drops of semen towards a large fluttering butterfly – which appears to be emerging from the first of the drops. 

    Hermes embodies the phallic and active principle, reigning over the rebirthing of souls. Hermes steps through the door with a hard-on, as men often transit from the dream world to the waking world, and hanged men, universally, enter the afterlife. Hermes is penetrating, and this is the effect of synchronicity. It pushes through, it opens up, and it inseminates.
    He is depicted wearing winged sandals, and a winged traveler's hat, and bearing a caduceus.
    Hermes is one of the great mythic Gatekeepers. Through him, every house opens into the Otherworld. One of his names, sotheos, means The Socket, as in the socket of a hinge that enables the pin to turn and the door to open and close. So we can think of him as a Hinge guy – as in “hinge of fate” – or a Pivot. As he swings, so do our fortunes.

Image: Hermes watches Hypnos and Thanatos prepare to carry the fallen hero Sarpedon back to his homeland in Lycia. Painting from the Euphronios krater (c.515 bce), now in the Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri. 

To practice death is to practice freedom

We do not know where death awaits us, so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

This wisdom comes from the great French essayist, Montaigne, and I count it as one of the essential rules for living.

    To live today to the fullest, we want to be ready to die. When we approach life in the knowledge that Death is at our left shoulder, we find courage and clarity that may otherwise fail us.

.    I have known this since I was a child, when I died and came back, as Australian doctors put it, not yet possessing the term “near-death experience”. In my books and workshops, I encourage people to make Death their ally rather than their dread, and to be ready to meet him on any day, on any corner.

     What does it mean, to “practice death”?

     An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas:

1. Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death. This is not really an exotic or esoteric assignment. Every night, in your dreams, you travel beyond the body quite naturally and spontaneously; it’s a matter of waking up to what is going on and learning to use your natural gifts as a dreamer.

      2. Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit the deceased — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or milennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

3. Helping the dying. We can use dreamwork and the techniques of Active Dreaming – including vision transfer, which means growing a dream or a journey map for someone who needs one – to help the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.” In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. 

          As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth.
    The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are unable to speak or reason clearly. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dream sharing and dream transfer are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

4. Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. 

           Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead.
     Sometimes our deceased need help from us in dealing with unfinished business, passing on messages to survivors, and getting their story straight. I have become convinced that an essential stage in the afterlife transit is the effort by the departed to understand the full story of the life that has just passed, in order to be ready to choose the next life experience.

5. Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life.

   Further reading: Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death.
The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.
The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

     Drawing: "Great Bird" (c) Robert Moss