Finding the Well of Creation and Delight in an Old Journal

With a few weeks off the road as winter deepens, I find myself reaching, again and again, for old journals. This has renewed a most creative engagement.

    Right now, I am playing with my journals from a week in 1996, nearly 20 years ago. There is a vast amount of material here that I never transcribed, and a lot that I typed but saved on "floppy disks" that can no longer be played on computers. So part of my time with the old journals is about rescuing material from oblivion. But I am avoiding the donkey work of transcription, pulling out themes, tracking a series of episodes, flagging evidence of time travel, noting the many roles of my dream self and his world of symbols.
     A recurring theme is close encounters with deities of Old Europe whose names and cults have slipped from modern consciousness but are still alive in the land and in what Jung called the collective unconscious. I have a close encounter with a thunder god in Celtic guise and receive confirmation from what seems to be a case of mutual or social dreaming:

Visit with Taranis

He appears in many forms, as rain and thunder, as human, animal and god. He is surprisingly gentle. Sometimes he wears my face, pink but strong. The wheel symbol recurs. I wake filled with strength and optimism. That morning, I receive a message from a friend who says that I appeared to her the same night in a dream, chanting Celtic verses she thought were related to "Taliesin".[July 23, 1996]

In another dream, a real thriller, I fend off intruders on the wooded border of a property with an unusual weapon, a long-handled wooden hammer that looks a bit like a heavy duty croquet mallet. I note in my journal that there is a gatekeeper in Celtic tradition who carries a similar weapon. His name survives in several inscriptions from Romano-Gaulish territory. He is Sucellos, the "Good Striker". I see again that a dream may be a personal myth just as a myth may be a collective dream. 
    As always when I look over old journals, I am fascinated by the evolution of personal symbols, and the transformations of recurring locales, like the dream house and the dream elevator.

Going Up in the Sea Shell Elevator 

The elevator cabin is quite beautiful, lined with mother of pearl. As I ascend to the fourth floor, I feel I am traveling inside a sea shell. A numinous being is waiting for me. [July 29, 1996]

I read report after report tagged HG (for Hypnagogic) or HG/CD (Hypnagogic/Conscious Dream). I notice how easy it has always been for me to slip into lucid dream adventures from the launch pad of the hypnagogic zone, the liminal space between sleep and awake. 
    My journals confirm that we must take dreams more literally and waking life more symbolically. My nights are full of real adventures across time and across dimensions. My days are filled with symbols:

The Butcher’s Promotion

The assistant comes to the meat counter in his bloodied apron. Hearing my accent, he asks where I’m from. When I tell him, he asks, “Are there many funeral homes in your country?” I am startled by the question. He explains that he is moving up in the world. He is going into the funeral business. As he wraps my meat, his manner shifts to that of a funeral director, prim and unctuous. He is standing so straight he leans backward a little and rocks on his heels. “From dead animals to dead people,” I remark. “It seems like a natural progression.” [July 25, 1996]

I study closely my experiments in this period with many methods of shifting consciousness, developing imagery for healing, releasing the earthbound dead and helping people to get more of soul into the body. I note that my dream self often goes ahead of me, test-flying new techniques and rituals with groups of people in the night before I adopt those techniques or enter those situations in regular life.
      None of this journal scrutiny is anything like work.
      To give myself even more fun, I set myself the playful assignment of grabbing a couple of old journal reports any day I feel like it - and writing from them, using them as the raw material for a story. Some of my journal narratives of adventures in the dream world and the surface world are already close to chapters from a fantasy novel or scenes from a screenplay.
      I'll say it again: if you want to be a writer, you must keep a journal. No ifs or buts..
      If you want to know what a treasure house a journal will be, you must keep one, with dedication and delight, for at least five years. That's how it is.

Be kind to dream fragments

Be kind to dream fragments.

Feel them as twitches on the line that tell you there are big fish in the water. Hold to that thought, and something from the deep may allow you to reel it in later. It may leap into your hand, if you are quiet and patient and ready.

Sprinkle your dream bits on the breakfast table, and through the day. Let them be the trail of breadcrumbs that will draw bright birds and wild foxy friends from the forests of the night.

Make sure you put lots of little dream scraps in your journal. Let it become the bird feeder that will draw the gorgeous hummingbirds of the heart. Let them fill your life with all the colors of imagination.

photo by Meredith Eastwood

Lions in the tree tops: when someone else's dream is a gift for your life

I am in the woods. They are lovely, dark and deep, as in the poem. I am thrilled by the movement of many wild animals among the trees. I look up, and see big cats in the tree tops. Can they be lions?
    I have no sense of fear. I want to watch, and explore.
    However, my friend doesn’t want to stay here. She keeps talking about chores and social engagements, all the little things she needs to deal with at home and at work. She tells me she’s taking off and I let her go.
    Paths diverge in the woods. I sense that any of these paths will lead to new adventures. I’m not sure which one to follow. The lions are moving fast in the tree tops now. I trust them to show me the way. One of them makes a fantastic leap, pursuing a deer that I glimpse further along the trail. A second lion lopes ahead along a second path.
    I get it. It’s not either/or. More than one path is open to me in life, and I can follow both at the same time, if I let the lions in me show the way.
     

This is a dream that I heard in an intimate circle of dreamers last night. I am telling it as my own dream because that is what it has become. Let me explain.
    We were playing one of the coincidence games I have invented. In this version, members of a group are invited to write a brief summary of a dream on one side of a small index card. The cards are collected and shuffled and they become an oracle deck. Before the game begins, the players are invited to set an intention by stating a theme on which they would like guidance. They take turns to pull a card from the deck. It is suggested that whatever is written on the card you pull will be a direct response from the index card oracle to your life question.
    My theme last night was simple and practical: "I would like guidance on the next six weeks." Over these winter weeks, I will be at home for the longest period in more than a decade. I want to be sure I take full advantage of this break from my almost incessant travel.
    The card I received gave a glimpse of the scene in the woods, the choice of paths, the friend who wanted to go back to everyday routines. At my request, the dreamer told the fuller version. As soon as she identified the big cats in the tree tops as lions, I found myself quivering with excitement and entirely there, in my inner senses. I could smell the forest, and the hot breath of the lions,
     The first message I received came loud and clear, in the behavior of the dreamer's friend. I must part company with the part of myself that encourages me to get caught up in small assignments and minor distractions.
     I need to put myself, in the weeks ahead, in a place of wild freedom.
     I want to accept that I can follow more than one path, in my new creative work.
     I have always felt close to lions, and I put a lion on the cover of two of my books, Active Dreaming and the new one, Sidewalk Oracles.

     What is the lion, to me? It is courage, the power to speak my truth and be heart by others, wild and primal energy for life. My lion self follows the path of heart, the only path worth following.

We may find that there is a message for us in another person’s dream because, quite simply, we are human and we are all connected. This is part of the beauty of learning to share dreams in the right way. We recognize something of ourselves in another person’s dream because, while every dream is unique and requires close attention to specific details, dreams also reflect universal situations and living symbols that speak to all. 

For the rules of playing the Coincidence Card Game with dream reports, see my book The Three "Only" Things. For further ways to play the game, and on building a personal index card oracle, see Sidewalk Oracles.

Drawing: Sun Lion by RM

Dream gifts: the mystery name of a Goddess

It's happened again. My dreams have given me the assignment of tracking a mystery word. I am pretty sure that this time it is an ancient name of the Goddess in Celtic realms. In a dream in the early hours:

I am walking with a friend on the embankment of a river in a great city, near the museums. The whole scene is wrapped in thick fog, and it is getting quite dark. However, our spirits are bright. We are discussing a female name in an ancient inscription that is new to us and may only just have been discovered. The name is something like SOMERSA.

I can see the letters, in Roman capitals, in a longer text, but cannot freeze the whole tableau as I rise from the dream. And as I listen to my voice in the dream, I am not sure whether I pronounced the name as "Somersa" or "Sumersi".

     Fully awake, I am happy and excited. As so often in my life, I feel that an unknown word from a dream is a gift that will open rich new avenues of exploration..

     I am fairly certain that the mystery word is the name of a goddess. I think of the Gaulish name of a great Celtic goddess: Rosmerta. Her name appears on a number of inscriptions from what are now France, Germany, Luxemburg and Romania. Etymologists think that her name means “Great Provider”. Smert, the stem, means “provider”. Ro means “very” or “great”. The –a suffix is a typical Gaulish feminine ending.

     In the iconography, Rosmerta is usually shown holding a cornucopia and a purse or patera. In Roman times, she is often accompanied by Mercury holding the caduceus of the divine messenger and a money bag. In one image, Mercury offers his money bag to her, a worthy consort indeed. In a statue from Clermont-Ferrand, she is not merely wearing a winged cap, like Mercury; her head has sprouted wings.
     Mercury and Rosmerta. A political marriage between a Roman deity and a Celtic goddess? The Romans were fond of this kind of mix-and-match. It seems that Celtic realms as far east as the modern Czech Republic, the deity the Romans named Mercury had a previous and parallel Celtic identity, as Vinucius, the “Raven-Wise”.
     The Romans had another name for Rosmerta: Abundantia. She is the personification of abundance. A marvelous statue of the goddess under this name, now in the Musée de la civilisation gallo-romaine, in Lyon, shows her with an offering dish containing two birds in her right hand, while her left hand holds up an abundance of fruits in a fold of her dress.
     If I play a little word assembly game, putting the modifier Ro in front of my dream word and compressing it a little I get Rosmersa. Close to the more familiar goddess name, but not a match. And I hear the hiss of that final S in my mind. No getting away from that.

      Maybe my flirtation with Rosmerta and abbondanza is coming down like that river fog over a fresh revelation that I have yet to grasp. I listen to the name I dreamed, as I spoke it in the dream. Was it Somersa, or Sumersi?
     Some might associate either version with ancient Sumer (to which other dreams call me) or with the Sumari songs of Jane Roberts. For me, the trail goes cold when I turn in those directions. I do hear the echo of “Summer” in the name. A goddess of abundance might well have a summery name.
     The dream detective in me will remain poised for new clues. Maybe he will try to go back into the mists of that dream, and see if he can view the inscription and hold it in steadier focus. Perhaps he will try to fold time, as a dream archaeologist, and journey back to the world from which it comes.

Graphics: Top, Rosmerta as Abundantia. Bottom, Morning by the River Vltava in Prague.
    

Celtic metamorphoses and the technology of enchantment

London

Your gatekeeper is a horned god who stands back to back with a second self.  You enter a field of metamorphoses. You may turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight.
    Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon. You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine and when  your hand closes on the handle it becomes the hound that is chasing a duck that swims into your mouth on a red river. Long-beaked bird-headed men are alive on a Shetland cross. Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats and on the forearms of queens and heroes.

I am thrilled at the British Museum by by the amazing exhibition "Celts: Art and Identity", despite stumbling in, unshowered, from a redeye flight from the US. The art of the Celts reflects a collective imagination in which everything is in connected, everything in flux, vital energies change form and surge beyond form.
    Some of the patterns are visual riddles. Some were designed, as Alfred Gell proposed, as "a technology of enchantment" [1] designed to capture minds and bind them like ivy. You feel that as the shapes become tendrils, endlessly looping, making knots without end or beginning, no strings you could pull. 

Some images are mysteries to dream on. Is that a bull's head with bulging eyes hidden beside the boss of the "Battersea shield"?     
    What is going on with the "ears" on the so-called Glauberg statue, dug up from a warrior grave in Hesse? Are they stylized horns or antlers, or leaves, or bunny ears, or the Moon worn as a neck rest? Symbols of hypersensory power - especially clairaudience - or the nimbus of Awen (inspiration) whose symbol he wears at his throat? Are these primal shamanic headphones? What would you hear and sense if you wore them?    
    I remember a dream of thirty years ago in which I was watching over my "family" of ancient deer as they grazed in a fertile, unspoiled valley. I felt the strength and weight of my antlers, larger than a moose's horns, and rose with the sense of power and connection.
    I look again at the statue. What is going on with that leaf-like shield over the abdomen? I think of how spirit men in my native Australia open the tjurni - located at the abdomen - to release the dream soul to go traveling. Sometimes they use a hand motion in doing this. Is that what the Celtic figure is doing with his left hand, under the shield - releasing a spirit self to go traveling, as dream shamans have always done?

The boar is everywhere, running before you and around you. Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx, with great leaf-like ears, recalling the statue.
    Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze. Shields that are plain at the front but have  hidden powers at the back, in the coiling serpents at the grip. Shields with glaring eyes at the front, with hidden faces of raging bulls or angry birds.   
    You find your end at last, craning over the great silver cauldron from the bog, braving the fierce stare of all those gods you cannot name. You find yourself swimming in bull's blood down to the scene of mystery at the base, where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand, over the immense body of a dying bull. His magnificent potency is evident, but it is about to be transferred, with the rush of his blood, to those who have willed this ritual.

How far did the Gundestrup cauldron travel to its sodden burial in Jutland? Some maintain that the scale and complexity of the silverwork reveals the hand of Thracian (or Dacian) smiths far to the south-east, in modern-day Romania.[2] There are elements - elephants and the half-yogi posture of the famous antlered god - that suggest contact with peoples even farther east.  

In my end is my beginning.

References

1. Alfred Gell, "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics" in  J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 40-66.

2. A.K. Bergquist and T.F. Taylor, "The Origin of the Gundestrup Cauldron" in Antiquity 61 (1987)10-24

Kin to lightning

Drummer in the clouds

you awaken me.

In childhood, you put a spear
of bright fire through my body.
I did not die,
I did not even cry out.

When I was in the dark water
you leaned over me
and told me to get out.

When you came to my farm
and moved over the barn roof
as a serpent of red fire
you were kindly
choosing to ground yourself
in the one unlikely place
that left us safe, but awake.

On a night among strange days
you fired your bolts into the corn
like a long-range gunner
homing in on a target
until you accepted the embrace
of the white oak that knew you well.

Soul of Thunder, Bright Awakener ,
may I ride with you
on your return journeys
to your kingdom above the clouds

From the collection Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

Art: J.M.W. Turner, "Lake Thun, Switzerland'

The White Goddess and the habit of coincidence

The White Goddess is a "queer" and difficult book, as the author, the poet and novelist Robert Graves, cautions his readers in a foreword. The subtitle in itself may scare away some readers: A historical grammar of poetic myth. Yet it is a book I find myself returning to, again and again, over the years - though since I was a teen I have never been mad enough to try to read it from front to back.
     The whole book is a celebration of the Goddess, as she may have been worshiped in matrifocal Old Europe, and other places, before the advent of patriarchal gods installed by patriarchal men. The material came to Graves, and came through him, in a marvelous flow; he dashed off the first draft (then titled The Roebuck in the Thicket) in just three weeks. Specialists will carp at his prodigious but errant scholarship, which is guided by rhyme and resemblance rather than any logical ordering. Few who are learned in the languages and customs of the Celts, in his day or ours, will accept him as an irreproachable source on the Battle of the Trees or the Matter of Britain.
     Yet it is impossible not to thrill to the passion of a poet who proclaims that the business of poetry is to serve the Three-fold Muse, and restore the Goddess, and gives us the most rousing and transfiguring (if not the most literal) version of the Song of Amergin that has ever been sung in English.

I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
sets the cool head aflame with smoke?

In writing The White Goddess, as in other inspired work. Graves was certain that he was not alone in his creative space. In addition to what stirred in his imagination, he noticed objects in his physical environment showed up in ways that suggested a hidden hand, from the realm of the Goddess. In a postscript he added to The White Goddess in 1960, he recounted that when he started on the first draft of that book

I had in my work-room several small West African brass objects - bought from a London dealer - gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a humpback playing a flute. I also had a small brass-box with a lid, intended (so the dealer told me) to contain gold dust. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated there; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid until ten years had gone by. The I learned that the humpback was a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of some Akan State; and that every reigning Queen-Mother (and there are a few reigning even today) claims to be an incarnation of the Triple Moon Goddess Ngame. The design of the box-lid, a spiral, connected by a single stroke to the rectangular frame enclosing it - the frame having nine teeth on either side means: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess Ngame!’ These gold weights and the box were made before the British seizure of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

 

When he learned the meaning of these African objects, Graves suspected that an African version of the Moon Goddess had played a part in his inspiration. The story deepened after World War II, when he returned to work on his manuscript. He was now writing about the sacred king, first the consort and then the sacrificial victim of the Goddess in certain traditions. Now a collector named Georg Schwartz bequeathed to Graves "five or six more Akan gold-weights, among them a mummy-like figurine with one large eye." Graves was able to have this strange figure identified as the Akan king's okrafo priest, who in later times served as a surrogate victim, in place of the king. "The okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I wrote about the Goddess's victims."
     After publication of the first edition of The White Goddess, "a Barcelona antiquary" invited Graves to choose a stone from a selection of Roman gems. Among them was "a stranger", a banded carnelian seal from an earlier culture, engraved with a stag galloping towards a thicket with a crescent moon on his flank - the very image that had given the poet his original title,The Roebuck in the Thicket.
     "Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life," Graves observed, "that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit." He hastens to add that he's not keen on the word "supernatural", since he finds patterns of "more-than-coincidence" entirely natural, though escaping the explanations of science.
     Call them a habit. I like that very much. Meaningful coincidences or correspondences do multiply when we are charged with passion, and in forward movement on the roads of life and creation, Goddess knows.

I first posted this little piece on a poet's experience of living on the mythic edge a few years ago. I am posting it again because a friend just told me that Robert Graves gave her important counsel on a mythic theme in a dream. I was invited to dine with Robert Graves when I was a 19-year-old student and he was on tour in Australia. I know, from my experience with other dead poets, that their advice is always worth heeding.