Praise the Goddess and Stop Being an Ass

 

"O holy, perennial savior of the human race, you are ever generous in your care for mortals, and you bestow a mother's sweet affection upon wretched people in misfortune. No day, no period of sleep, no trivial moment hastens by which is not endowed with your kind deeds. You do not refrain from protecting mortals on sea and land, or from extending your saving hand to disperse the storms of life. With that hand you even wind back the threads of the Fates, however irretrievably twisted. You appease the storms raised by Fortune, and restrain the harmful courses of the stars.

"The gods above cultivate you, the spirits below court you. You rotate the world, lend the sun its light, govern the universe, crush Tartarus beneath your heel. The stars are accountable to you, the seasons return at your behest, the deities rejoice before you, the elements serve you. At your nod breezes blow, clouds nurture the earth, seeds sprout, and buds swell. The birds coursing through the sky, the beasts wandering on the mountains, the snakes lurking in the undergrowth, the monsters that swim in the deep all tremble at your majesty."

- Lucius praises Isis in Book XI of The Metamorphoses of Lucius, better known as The Golden Ass, by Apuleius. (P.G. Walsh translation).

The Golden Ass is a second-century novel written in Latin by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. the son of a Roman magistrate in the colony of Numidia on the North African coast, in what is now Algeria. The comic, picaresque narrative follows the misadventures of a young man whose obsession with sorcery and sex leads to his transformation into a donkey. He is beaten and abused by successive masters, including ferocious bandits, and subjected to the lewd attentions of castrati priests of a Syrian goddess and ancient porn show promoters.

Lucius starts out as a young man obsessed by magic. He seduces Photis, the maid of the witch Pamphile. She tells him that the witch is going to turn herself into a bird so she can fly to the room of a man she wants to have sex with. From a hiding place, Lucius watches the witch get naked and smear herself all over with an ointment, as she voices incantations – and she sprouts feathers and takes off.

Lucius is now eager to fly as a bird. Photis is nervous, but he persuades her to steal some of the ointment. In a comedy of errors, she brings him the wrong one. It turns him into a donkey. To recover human form, he must eat roses. The antidote is nearby. But before he can get to them, robbers burst in, and then use him as a pack mule, and through all his misadventures in the first ten books, he somehow never manages to eat roses.

Through his long ears, we hear amazing stories, one of which – the story of Eros and Psyche – has become a perennial myth, inspiring artists, tickling the diagnostic nerve of psychologists, teasing anyone who knows what it is to yearn for the beloved. In the final, eleventh book, when Lucius is returned to human form, we move abruptly from low farce and gratuitous violence to a deep account of spiritual transformation that will blaze in the memory of any sensitive reader like the midnight sun of the initiate.

The goddess of Fortune (Tyche) is depicted as blind, but Lucius is convinced she has a malevolent eye on him.

Dreams and visions guide the man who became an ass through death and rebirth under the aegis of the Great Goddess. He wakes, still a donkey, near the sea in a sudden panic and finds the full moon shining in his face across the waves. He dips his donkey head in the sea seven times, while invoking the goddess by all the names he knows in a beautiful prayer. He is unsure which aspect of the Goddess to invoke, so he calls on the Divine Feminine who shines through the thousand faces like the Moon before him. O Queen of Heaven…

Cleansing and prayer are followed by what looks like dream incubation on four legs. He falls asleep on the sand. A divine figure rises from the sea and stands before him, crowned with a wreath of flowers, with the mirror of the moon shining at the center and serpents and ears of corn on either side Her jet-black robe is covered with shining stars. In her right hand she carries a sistrum - a bronze rattle - and in her left a boat-shaped vessel with a rearing serpent for a handle.

"Here I am Lucius, roused by your prayers." The Goddess announces herself as universal, mother of all life.  "I am the mother of the world of nature, mistress of all the elements, first-born in this realm of time. I am the loftiest of deities, queen of departed spirits, the single embodiment of all gods and goddesses.. I order with my nod the luminous heights of heaven, the healthy sea-breezes, the sad silences of the infernal dwellers. The whole world worships my single divinity under a variety of shapes and liturgies and titles…But the peoples on whom the rising sun-god shines with his first rays--Ethiopians, and Egyptians --worship me with the liturgy that is my own, and call me by my true name, which is Queen Isis."

She reassures him that she has come to his rescue. “I am come to you in your calamity.” 
She tells him to join the procession in her honor that will take place the next day and press forward until he comes to the priest with roses in his right hand. The priest will be prepared because, in that same moment, Isis is appearing to him in a night vision. Bilocation is hardly a big deal for a goddess. She cautions him that after he is changed back, Lucius will no longer be the man he was before; he must dedicate his life to her service and in return she will guide him through life and beyond death.

The priest, the next day, is indeed ready for him; he not only offers the roses but delivers a speech revealing that he knows Lucius' whole story and calls for people to bring a garment to clothe the naked human, and promises that under the aegis of Isis, Lucius will at last be freed from the slings and arrows of Fortune.

Lucius arrives at “the birthday of initiation”, natalem sacrorem [Book XI, 24]. He is transformed and dies to his former life. The whole narrative can be seen as a conversion story, wildly thrilling and never stuffy – taking the reader rollicking over a cliff into a place of awe.

Ridentum dicere verum quid vetat? May not truth in laughing guise be dressed? (Horace) The tale of Lucius, veering from bawdy farce and picaresque perils to the depth of spiritual awakening and divine dreaming, is at the top of my list in two categories (a) the comic novel and (b) visionary narrative.

Illustration by Jean de Bosschère: Lucius is returned to human form when he eats the roses being carried in a procession in honor of the Goddess, as Isis directed him in a dream.

Let's become imaginal cells for collective transformation

In many cultures, the butterfly is a favorite image for soul. In Greek, the word psyche means both “soul” and “butterfly”. The cycle of the butterfly is a model for a life that is open to transformation. I know this to be true in an individual life. Let us hope that it is true for our kind on a collective level in these dark and crazy times.
     To spread butterfly wings, you must transform again and again. You must let your old identity collapse into mush. You must use your imaginal cells to overcome the resistance of the old you, the little you, who clings to what you once were. You will progress through four distinct life forms. Each time you change, those who knew your previous self may no longer be able to recognize you, because you will be radically, almost inconceivably different.
    The butterfly cycle begins with an egg, stuck on a leaf. Out from the egg comes a very hungry caterpillar that tries to eat all the green available. Eventually the caterpillar stops consuming and settles on the underside of another leaf, or perhaps in the bark of a tree. It grows a hard casing, the chrysalis. Inside the chrysalis, it turns into a restless mush, a stew of contending elements.
    In the chrysalis, as in an alchemical retort, the worm produces new cells. Science calls these imaginal cells. They are quite different from anything that has been active in the caterpillar before, so different that the killer cells in the worm's immune system target them as enemies that must be destroyed. The job of the killer cells is to resist transformation and defend the old identity of this life form as a caterpillar hungry for green
   Enough imaginal cells escape the murderous attack  to create friendly communities. They resonate with each other. They have a social network, reaching each other on the same frequency band. They gather together, and soon the imaginal movement is so strong the riot police and death squads of the immune system are overwhelmed. The revolution produces a life form that could not be imagined without the magic of the active imaginal community. It is the butterfly, ready to burst from the chrysalis on bright wings and sparkle in the light.
    I love the biologists' choice of name for the cells of transformation: imaginal. It evokes the Imaginal Realm, the realm of true imagination known to poets, mystics and shamans.
   The struggle inside the chrysalis between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to - and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more.
    You can't stay a worm, if you want to become a butterfly. You are obliged to drop  old attachments and expectations and let your old identity be broken down in the mush as a new identity emerges. And you must allow time for the new form to grow, and be fully prepared to take wing. Don’t rush the butterfly.
    There is a wonderful cautionary story about this in the autobiography of Nikos Kazantzakis, the celebrated author of Zorba the Greek. He found a cocoon in the bark of an olive tree. He saw that the butterfly was beginning to emerge. He watched for a time, then became impatient. He blew on the cocoon, intending to speed up the process of emergence with the warmth of his breath. To his delight, the butterfly emerged from the cocoon. But it had been brought out prematurely. Its wings were crumpled and unusable. They had needed the heat of the sun, not merely the hot air of a man with hurry sickness. The butterfly died in Kazantzakis’ hand. Towards the end of his life, he wrote, “That little body is the greatest weight I have on my conscience.”
    Don’t rush the butterfly, and don’t pronounce it dead prematurely. I learned about that when I started teaching at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur in California. On a chill November morning, on the path from the Big House to the ravine, I stopped with a foot in mid-air because I noticed  just in time that what I had taken for a fallen leaf was a Monarch butterfly, lying dormant with folded wings. As the sun’s rays streamed down, warming its body and drying its wings, the Monarch stirred and flew off, towards the gardens..

Let those of us who can dream and imagine become active imaginal cells in our society. Let's help to relegate the very hungry caterpillars to past history. Let's help each other survive the stew of confusion in which old fears and old habits try to abort transformation. Let's encourage each other to allow each locked-down environment to become the chrysalis in which something brighter and lovelier takes form. Let's support what is new and vital, and help our kind emerge from our time of confinement shining, spreading wings of fresh creativity and compassion and soul.

Text adapted from "The Change in the Very Hungry Caterpillar"in  The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo by Kevin Bruff on Flickr

On Dying and Coming Back

I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.

     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
    The first person who gave me a model for understanding what had happened to me was an Aboriginal boy. He told me, “When we get real sick, our spirit goes away. We go and live with the spirit people. When we get well, we come back.”

    At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions.
    In the mid-1980s, I left the fast-track life of a bestselling thriller writer and moved to a farm 130 miles north of New York City, thanks to a hawk and a white oak. I found myself drawn into trans-temporal dramas and the spirit world of a Native American people. I became deeply engaged in issues and dramas from the life of an 18^th century Irishman, a major historical figure who knew the Mohawk very well. My engagement with him opened a link to a woman of his time, an extraordinary dream shaman, the Mother of the Wolf Clan of her people, who tried to influence him and most certainly succeeded in influencing me. She reminded me why dreaming is central to healing, and I cherish our continuing relationship across time. I learned what it means to be so deeply involved with a personality from another time that your lives turn together. I was eventually required to undergo death and rebirth in the mode of a shaman. I see now that, as with the years Jung recorded in his Red Book, all the important work of my subsequent life has flowed from this stormy period of spiritual emergence.   
    What happened to me in midlife was another experience of dying and coming back.  I learned that when you change your life, your true friends are those who will support you through that change and your worst friends are those who try to keep you in the frame of past expectations.
    Dreams showed me how to find my way in my new life as a dream author and dream teacher.    Young children, especially my own daughters, became my most important mentors in ordinary life on what dreams require from a family or community. Time among children confirmed my understanding that dreams are for real, that there is magic in making things up, and that we change the world when we tell a better story about it.

    I started teaching what I had learned, and learned through teaching. I found, as Emerson counseled, that “there is one direction is which space is open to us.” When I followed my calling, doors opened in astonishing ways. When I slipped back and away from my path, doors stayed resolutely closed. I am grateful for that.
     I was now able to give people who were willing to share dreams and other experiences of the larger reality the confirmation and validation I had desperately needed as a lonely boy. I developed an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and primal shamanic methods for shifting consciousness and operating in the spirit worlds, and called this Active Dreaming. I found people everywhere were hungry for this. The more I gave them, the more happy and fulfilled I felt. I knew joy every time I saw more of spirit shining in someone’s eyes in one of my workshops.

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

My personal relationship with Death informs much of my teaching and practice. "Going Beyond Death: The Survival of Consciousness" is Part 4 of my new online course for The Shift Network, "Quantum Dreaming". Classes begin on August 14 and run for 24 weeks.