A Mirror for the Sun Goddess

At the solstice, a story from Japan about the sun goddess. In Japan, as in many world cultures, the sun is feminine. The tale is a profound teaching story about soul loss and soul recovery comes from Japan. It is a mythic tale of Amaterasu Omikami, the Japanese sun goddess, and it offers a wonderful script for soul healing. Perhaps you can find yourself - and more of your soul - inside it.

     The beloved sun goddess Amaterasu is shamed and abused by a raging male, her stormy brother/consort Susanowo, who is a hero when is comes to fighting monsters but is no hero in the family home. They have had children together, born magically from gifts they have given each other – three girls from Susanowo’s sword and five boys from the jewels of Amaterasu.

     But Susanowo plays spoiler, smearing excrement where Amaterasu made fertile fields and crops, throwing a horse that is sacred to the goddess into the midst of her intimate weaving circle, and so on. The storm god’s violence reaches the point where Amaterasu takes refuge in a rock cave. And the light goes from the world.
      In her dark cavern the once radiant goddess sits brooding on the past, sinking deeper and deeper into feelings of guilt and shame. Maybe she starts telling herself that what has happened is somehow her fault, that she failed her consort in some important way, that she failed to give what was needed. In the depths, she has lost her inner light, while the world has lost her radiance. The myriad gods and goddesses are desperate to call the sun back.

     They try many ruses to lure Amaterasu out of the dark cave. They call on a wise god, whose name means Keeper of Thoughts, to advise them. He usually keeps his best ideas to himself, but the cold and darkness in the world have got him worried too. So he counsels the gods to gather all the roosters than can be relied to crow at dawn. He tells the gods to hang a mirror with strands of jewels on the branches of a Sakaki tree at the entrance of Amaterasu’s cave. The gods do this, decorating the tree with bright cloth banners, without fully understanding the plan. The cocks crow, the gods whoop and howl. And Amaterasu stays in her cave.

      Now one of her sister goddesses, Uzume, comes up with a plan of her own. Uzume is the goddess of mirth and revelry. She is also called the Great Persuader and the Heavenly Alarming Woman. Now we see why. Uzume overturns a tub near the mouth of the rock cave, strips off her clothes like a professional, and moves into a wild, sexy dance that has the gods laughing and bellowing with delight. Amaterasu is curious. Why is everyone having so much fun? She approaches the mouth of her cave and demands to know what is going on. Uzume calls back to her, “We’ve found you the perfect lover. Come and see.”

     Suspicious, Amaterasu peeks around the edge of the boulder she placed at the cave mouth to shut out the world. And she is awed and fascinated to see a figure of radiant beauty looking back at her. She is drawn, irresistibly, to this beauty, and comes up out of the darkness – to discover that the radiant being is her own beautiful self, reflected in the mirror the gods have hung in a tree near the cave. Now the god of Strength rushes out and holds Amaterasu, gently but firmly, to restrain her from going back into the dark. Another god places a magic rope across the entrance to the cave.

    Gods of passion and delight lead Amaterasu back into the assembly of the gods, and her light returns to the world. This is a marvelous collective dream of how soul recovery and soul healing become possible when we help each other to look in the mirror of the greater Self.

     Mirrors hang in the temples of Amaterasu today, to remind us to look for the goddess or god in ourselves. When we locate the drama of Amaterasu in our own lives, we begin to make a mirror for the radiance of the larger Self that can help to bring us, and those we love, up from the dark places.
     In some of my workshops, we have taken the story of Amaterasu's descent to the Underworld and turned it into a shamanic theater of soul recovery, with amazing results. However, the unfortunate cast as Susanowo must be depossessed of his role, and then welcomed back into the circle as a "new man", healed and enlightened. This can be profoundly healing too.

Illustration (c) Robert Moss

The Man with the Moon & the Woman with the Sun

Paris, 10th arrondissement

There they are, on a little grassy island where the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis meets the Boulevard du Magenta, a few blocks north of the place where I am staying and leading an adventure in Active Dreaming in Paris this weekend. I admire them from all angles, recalling Yeats' lines

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow land and hilly land
I will find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands

and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And I am thinking that the Turkish sculptor Cem Sagbil must have a fine instinct for how things operate in regions of the mythic universe that I have come to know well, and that work for me. I am one of the most lunar men you are likely meet (not to be confused, I hope, with "lunatic"). I have traveled much in the astral realm of Luna, and conversed with some of its more interesting residents. I have led shamanic group journeys to this realm. In my life I have been blessed to be balanced and warmed by the energy of the Solar Feminine. I resonate with traditions in which the Sun is a Goddess, as in Japan (Amaterasu), and the Baltic (Saule) and among many Australian Aboriginal peoples, and where the Moon is a male deity or at least a leading man to the Moon Goddess.
    I wander on into marché Saint-Quentin and admire glorious displays of cheeses and charcuterie, impossibly fresh and glistening fish, live eels and flowers that promise "20 Ans de Passion", Twenty Years of Passion. I buy a bag of cherries and munch them for breakfast, before coffee and croissant. I have to go back to the Moon Man and the Sun Woman and have my photo taken standing between them, balanced or otherwise, juggling dreams and spheres.
     This feels like the gentle beginning, in the Parisian spring sunlight, of another of the mythic irruptions that have stirred and confirmed or redirected my life. I like the word "irruption", which means a "bursting through". A mythic irruption, in my personal lexicon, is when archetypal powers of a deeper world break through the curtains of our ordinary perception and consensual hallucinations and carry us into a deeper game. This can be profoundly subversive of regular plans and expectations, of course. It can come as a blessing, as when we feel that an unseen hand has been placed over us, to protect, or that a sacred guide and ally is coming through - under many masks, or naked to our view (if we are able to look) - to help us find our way, as Athena came to Odysseus and spoke through a beam of the ship called Argo.
     So, on a lovely spring day in Paris, I give thanks for the day, and for the sense of the imminence of powers of the Otherworld within this one.  And I reflect that part of the practice of living consciously at the center of the multiverse is to be myth-prone, or even mythopoeic: to be willing to engage with those deeper powers, and in doing to make anew the myths worth living and reliving, telling and retelling, in the neverending, never static story of the interplay between humans and the more-than-human.

Sun of the Hanged Man in the Sky of Tallinn

Tallinn, Estonia

"Time to start dreaming" was the message of a card on the bed in my hotel room. Perfect counsel for a dreamer, especially after 20 hours of travel to Tallinn from New York, with long stopovers at JFK and at Stockholm's Arlanda airport.

But no dreams survived my first short sleep, a couple of hours when my aching body claimed some rest and relief. The restaurant was still open in the Wiegand restaurant downstairs, so I had a quick bite, preferring not to find myself waking ravenous in the middle of the night. I learned that the Wiegand in question - the 19th century manufacturer who founded the factory complex of which the fine modern Domina Inn Ilmarine is now a part - made a habit of feeding his workers a decent breakfast and lunch every day, so I seemed to be dining withing a good tradition. Wiegand produced the equipment for mass-producing vodka and other products (sugar, plywood). Optimistically, he named his factory after a character in the Finish epic, the Kalevala, who has a magic mill that spews out vast quantities of grain, salt and money. (The Estonian language is related to Finnish, and there is a lot of traffic across the Baltic between Tallinn and Helsinki.)

Back in bed in the early hours, I made it my plan to dream into my coming days in Estonia. I am leading an Active Dreaming workshop here for the first time, and also exploring the Old City of Tallinn and the coast, and meeting some shamanic practitioners who are working to recover old ways.

I woke from the following dream:

I look across the frozen sea at the sun, a great disk low on the horizon. The sun shines with a brilliant white-gold light, and I can look at it without blinking. To my amazement, the sun does a complete flip, like a gold coin. It falls flat over the ice, then turns over and shines brighter than before. I have never seen such a phenomenon.

I say in high excitement to the group I am leading, "This is the symbol of the Hanged Man when he has emerged from his oppression and the light is reborn in his life. It is the greatest of prizes - a new sun in the heavens, infusing all of life with new purpose and energy."

My excitement spreads through the group. I sit down and draw an image of the sun's revolution, about the size of a Tarot card laid out horizontally in one corner of a large sheet of art paper. Then, with rapid strokes, I give the impression of tremendous activity, in the sky and on the earth, on the rest of the paper, and hold it up to show the group.

Someone shouts that he recognizes "Catherine" in the larger and more impressionistic part of the sketch. We won't talk about that now, I respond. We'll save the details and go with the big picture.

I woke from this dream to look out through my hotel window at the sun shining on the red roof and towers of the Old City of Tallinn. I felt deep gratitude for this dream, whose imagery seems highly relevant to my purposes in returning to the Baltic. The Baltic republics are located in what has been termed the "Bloodlands" of Europe, the territories between Germany and Russia that have suffered repeated attack and occupation by both those powers. At the start of World War II they were seized by the Red Army (as Stalin took advantage of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a deal of devils to carve up Central Europe); then in 1941 they were occupied by the Nazis; and in 1944 the Red Army came back, to stay until the Baltic states won their independence in 1991.

The Hanged Man, usually shown as a figure hanged upside down, is the perfect image for an individual or a culture that has suffered oppression, which may include addiction. I am here to support the spiritual and cultural rebirth that can be born from the depths of suffering. The world saw the courage and rich folklore traditions of the Estonians at work in the Singing Revolution, when a quarter of the population came together to defy the Soviet tanks with their songs.

Catherine? Perhaps the wife of Peter the Great, whose bedroom survives in the cottage that the tsar used as a summer residence while Kadriorg Palace was being built.

Sunrise over the Bay of Tallin photo by Marko Kalmus