Dream archaeology at Bandelier

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

I was staying outside Santa Fe in an adobe house with extraordinary views across desert and mountains. The phrase Big Sky really applies here - you can watch the weather rolling in from fifty miles away. The night sky is extraordinary, a grainy, pulsing field full of animate energies. Nature feels quite personal here.

    I went out to the Bandelier State Monument, to visit the sites of the ancient and mysterious Anasazi people. I had two of those encounters with spirits of the land of the kind that are the stuff of dream archaeology.
    On the trail to the falls, I felt the mountain lion energy very strongly. Further along the trail, I lay down under ponderosa pines. I immediately sensed a presence. Scanning with my inner senses, I tracked it. Among the trees, a little person took form. He was very dark-skinned and no more than four feet tall. He was willing to give me a name, speaking the five syllables slowly and distinctly, so I could pick them up. I will not publish his name here; traditional peoples are very sensitive about the power of names.
    The name and the nature of the little man were connected with Rabbit. He could run like a jackrabbit. I saw him hunting small animals a long time ago, living very close to the earth. I asked to enter his Dreamtime and slipped inside the world of the animals. He belonged to a time when human and animal consciousness were not as separate as they are today, and when forms were not fixed. He seemed to be able to shapeshift his physical body as well as his energy profile into animal forms. I was attracted by his simplicity. There was even a sense of innocence in the just-so-ness of his relations with the land.
     I encountered a different presence as I stood  in front of the petroglyphs at the “longhouse” site - apartments built into the talus of a volcanic cliff - at the Anasazi village. A Gatekeeper figure emerged. He told me that white people still know next to nothing about what really went on here, but that he would show me certain things, under certain conditions.
    The wall opened to my vision like a window. I looked into the scene of an ancient rainmaking ceremony. The priest held up and vibrated a large stuffed serpent while a helper made the sound of thunder crashing with something resembling a mortar and pestle. I was shown the methods this ancient people used for appealing directly to the animate forces of nature. My tour expanded. I enjoyed looking into the everyday lives of these ancient ones, their foods and cooking methods, their rituals and their delight in theater and music.
     I recalled that the First Peoples of my native Australia talk of the Speaking Land. The spirits of the land are talking, talking. All we need to do expand our awareness, and listen without judgment. I felt privileged to have been invited into a space between the worlds to learn the ways of two ancient peoples of the American Southwest.

- from my dream archaeology casebook (2001).

Jackrabbit photo by Jim Harper

Time of the Dragon

 

Through the mist, there they were,

The sturdy ghosts, waiting for us

On the snow in their blanket coats. 

"Bring tobacco," they got to the point 

"We ride to the sky on a cloud of tobacco."

So we burned sweet and spicy tobacco 

Dried and cured in warmer lands 

And they said, when they drank the smoke,

"We will place a tree in your path

So you will stay with us till we are done."

 

The wind heard them and dropped pines

And birches across our trails

And took us off-grid and cut power lines

So we were in the big house of another time

In a world lit only by fire

Rubbing at smoke-seared eyes.

The old ones said, "To open the strong eye

You must close your everyday sight."

In the firepit cave I heard the heartbeat of the Mother. 

I closed my eyes and saw what I had come to see:

 

Earth begins in the womb of Ocean Mother, 

terrible to men but not to the man-boy

In his time of the Dragon. 

He follows the intent of minds

That have yearned for him,

Called for him, from many times

And many worlds. From the swirling deep

He raises the Shining One,

Silver-bright, in its winged glory.

He must gentle it to the purpose 

Of the Sisters who have called him

To ride a field of stars to the earth mountain 

Where they will make him

What they need him to be:

The bright warrior who can wield

Dragon fire without incinerating the world 

- from a work in progress

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

The people beyond the garden gate

Though mostly skeptical of reported sightings of the Little People, I’ve had some personal encounters – wide awake and dreaming in the animate world of nature – that have quelled my inner naysayer. Here’s a brief account of one such episode, when I stepped through a garden gate in Gloucestershire, into the greenwood:

I walk by the redwood - a newcomer to this English landscape,　and a link to a place of my heart - above the cow pastures, and past an ancient sycamore that leans over a softly bubbling spring. I am drawn to a path that leads up to the kitchen garden on a rise behind the stone manor house. The far end of the garden is aglow with pink and peachy roses, rambling and climbing over trellises, forming a bower.
　　 Beyond the roses is a gate in the high, old brick wall that separates the garden from the woods beyond. In the arch is a weathered gray door, secured by a simple wooden latch. The woods are bottle green, dark as an inkpot above the top of the door. I open the gate and step through, onto a trail part covered by ground ivy.
　　As I walk the path, a breeze picks up, and soon the woods are alive with whispers. The stir is most active beneath and around me, where the wind does not reach. I have the vivid sense of small creatures running and hiding. I am amazed by the thought that they are trying to hide from me. I can't see them, not yet. But I sense them quite distinctly. They are Little Ones.
　　 There's no need to be afraid, I tell them. I'm not going to hurt you.
　　 For a moment, the woods seem very still.
　　 Then a small country voice says, from among the roots of a tree, We thought you were one of the Lords.
　　 Oh, I don't think so. Who are the Lords? Do you mean the Normans? Or the Courts of the Fairies?
　　 Sshhhh. We don't talk about Them.
　　 This leaves me quite uncertain about the identity of the Lords they fear.
　　 Wait, they tell me. We'll get the Centaur.
　　 It seems that this creature is the Big Man in the society of the Little Ones. I am tremendously excited by the prospect of meeting a centaur. When he gallops up, I am amazed. He is certainly a Big Man, in this company, with a massive torso, a curling black beard, two stumpy horns - and a phallus like a club. But he is about six inches in length, from his chin to his tail. And his body below the waist is that of a billy goat, not a horse, although he does indeed stand on four legs rather than two.
-----The Goat-man tries to act bold in front of the Little Ones, but is plainly terrified. From his perspective, I am a giant, and of entirely unknown intentions.
-----I can see the whole company more distinctly now. The Little Ones are the size of elm leaves. I have no wish to disturb their society, or make their centaur lose face. I bid them good day, and follow the track deeper into the woods.

-----It does not surprise me that when I stroke the smooth bark of a beech, the tree responds. I absorb a deep knowing from within the beech, and have the impression of a feminine figure whose eyes are leaf-green, without pupil or irises. She instructs me on natural remedies for various bodily complaints; when I check them out later, they work brilliantly.

This is an excerpt from the travel journal I kept while leading a five-day summer adventure in “Reclaiming the Ancient Dreamways” at Hawkwood College in Gloucestershire, at the invitation of Celtic scholar and shaman Caitlin Matthews.

Drawig: "Gate to the Little People" by RM