Dreaming with Nehallenia

Amsterdam

She appears each time I start drumming for the group journeys in my shamanic workshop at the De Roos Center in Amsterdam. She stands at the prow of a ship, looming out of a deep sea fog. She is robed, though her long golden hair floats free. Sometimes she has a dog, sometimes a basket of fruits or loaves of bread. When I go deeper, I see that her boat is part of a the back of a tremendous sea serpent, that may itself be part of the swell of the ocean.

I know her name, though its meaning is mysterious. It survives in inscriptions on votive altars erected by merchants and ship captains who credited her with safe passage through storms at sea. They called her Nehalennia. She was venerated at Celtic and Germanic sacred sites on the North Sea, especially on the island of Walcheren, and at Cologne.

She was the patron of voyagers; seafarers and traders made offerings to her for safe passage and success in their transactions. According to one etymology, her name derives from the proto-Indo-European root *neh₂u- (boat); so her name could be translated as "Lady of the Boat" or "Goddess of the Vessel". Others find the source of the goddess name in the root *nek- (death, to bring) in the reconstructed proto-Indo-European lexicon. We could then translate Nehallenia as "Death Bringer", which makes some of the scholars twitchy but seems to me to bring forth a central attribute of the Goddess who opens the doors of life and death and rebirth.

Nehallenia is depicted as a lovely young woman enthroned within a seashell, with a basket of fruit on her lap and a dog nearby, gazing up at her adoringly. Often she has her foot on the prow of a ship, and a boat rope in her hand.

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

I am glad for the presence of this kindly Death Bringer and Lady of the Sea, here below sea level, where it sometimes feels like the Netherlands is also the Nether World.

Rescuing my lightning-struck friend

He is quite alone, out in the midst of a choppy sea, on a moonless night. Great thunderheads roll over him. Forked lightning burns the waves. I see him turn ghost white, then he is gone, under the dark waters.

The man in this dream was my closest friend in my last year at high school and my first years as an undergraduate. I had lost contact with him decades before the dream. I woke from the dream with the grim certainty that my friend had died.

When I returned to Australia to speak at a Mind, Body, Spirit festival some months after the dream, I was approached by a middle-aged woman I did not recognize until she told me she was my friend's younger sister. She was eager to know whether I had heard anything from her brother. She explained that he had developed a serious drug addiction and had been in and out of halfway houses for years until he vanished altogether. The family feared he had died of an overdose.

When I shared my terrible dream, we agreed that being struck by lightning in a stormy sea could be a metaphor for the effects of a drug overdose on the brain.

Life went on, the years passed, and then I met my friend again, in a waking dream, during my workshop on death and dying last weekend.

I had invited members of our circle to make a journey to the Other Side for "timely and helpful" contact with a person who has passed on. While drumming for the group, I had the sense of a beautiful angelic presence that had guided me on similar expeditions in the past. Gently but firmly, this spiritual guide led me to a person and a place that had not been on my itinerary.

I saw a wild thing in a cage, with matted hair, frothing at the mouth, a bestial creature that barely seemed human. I was horrified to recognize something of my friend. I understood that he was still trapped in his drug addiction. I had no idea how to proceed. It would surely be imprudent to try to release this ravening, unreasoning creature from the cage.

The thought came to me, This is not your friend, only the body of desire that confines him. With this thought, I saw a second version of my friend. He was beautiful. He looked the way I remembered him from the nights when we stayed up until dawn writing poems that we read to each other, and talking about Pascal and Nietzsche, Camus and Rilke. This second, superior version of my friend was translucent; I realized I was looking at his body of light. Why was it here, with the thing in the cage?

I then saw the cord of attachment between the two energy bodies. I knew what to do, because I have often found it necessary to help the living to detach from unhealthy connections of this kind. I pulled the energy cord out of my friend's subtle body as you might unplug an electrical extension cord. I was moved to tears as I saw him rising into the Light. The thing in the cage could be left to disintegrate, as heavy energy is meant to do after death.

The man who told his son not to let him die

Call him Sol. He was a rich and successful Jewish businessman who came to one of my programs at his wife’s insistence. His veneer of cynicism cracked when he spoke of his father. He described how his father died in his arms in hospital, and that his father’s last words were, “Don’t let me die.”

Sol rarely remembered dreams, and recalled no dreams of his father in the decade since his death. But he confessed that he often felt a crushing sense of guilt and heaviness. In discussion, he also told me that, in his family and his religious upbringing, the afterlife was never discussed. His father’s belief was that life ends with death; after death (to quote Harold Kushner) we just become “soil”.

I worked with him and a woman who served as a second tracker. I asked him about what his father had loved. Travel and his tropical fish aquarium were two of the main things. I could feel that the father was not far away. We agreed we would set a location for a dialogue: the basement of the old house where he kept his fish tanks. It seemed promising that in recent years Sol had also been keeping fish.

We all found the father right away and had three overlapping and unfolding experiences. Sol had his first conscious encounter with his father since his death - a loving and ultimately very clearing and unburdening encounter which opened his heart tremendously. They had a very specific exchange about the father's surviving wife, who recently suffered a heart attack. The father confirmed that he had helped to send her back from her NDE in the ambulance because she "wasn't ready yet".

In conversation with the woman tracker and me, the father was initially confused by a number of things - what was this drumming noise? Where was Sol's wife? Who were these people in the basement? What was Sol doing on the floor with a pretty woman the father did not recognize?

Sol's father - in dialogue with me - proved quite eager to learn. Having absolutely no preparation for an afterlife, he had checked out without ever leaving. Like many Jewish people, he had been taught that there is nothing on the other side of physical death. The body decays until it is "earth" and that is that. Sol's dad now recognized that he was alive on the other side of death, but he had been living with the family all this time.

We discussed the risk that he might be transferring health problems he had suffered to his son (he had cancer, as well as other serious symptoms), being so tightly enmeshed in the energy field. He agreed to support an action to separate and relocate his dense energy so that his higher consciousness could move free. We explored this together and came up with a plan. He would not go to the expensive mausoleum where his body had been stored; he found that idea disgusting. He would be willing to have his dense energy transferred to a ring - one he described in specific detail - that was in the son's possession. Because of his love of fish and the water, we agreed that the ring would be placed among the "angelfish" (his favorites!) in the tabletop aquarium in the son's study. And he wanted Sol to eat some halvah in his honor.

In the sharing we learned that Sol had recently added angelfish to his collection. He also told us that he had an "inexplicable" desire to buy halvah the previous day - and that his father had left him a ring that perfectly matched the description I was given. We had the makings of a "sea burial" in a fish tank. Sol proceeded to place the ring in the aquarium, and we all felt we had launched a tremendous healing.

The next day (without knowing what had happened), one of the other women in the workshop presented me with a wonderful little carved fish fetish, very like an angelfish. Then yet another woman in the workshop presented me with a copy of a book with an almost identical fish on the cover. Synchronicity will tell us whether we are in the right waters.

Postscript: In some parts of Europe, an April Fools prank is known as an "April fish." However, this fish tale is no joke. I have described exactly what happened, just as it did. If I haven't published much fiction in recent years, it may be because it is hard for fiction to compete with what I encounter in my practice.