Dream Archaeology: The Columns of Siq

I returned this morning from an excursion to an archaeological site. I did not have to wait for my bags, clear customs and health checks, or catch an Uber home from the airport. Yet my travels were entirely real. I walked that site, studied it with the help of a guide and a little bilingual guide book, felt the sun and sand in my face, and gratitude for the warm water of that wadi. I felt goosebumps in the presence of stones that might be eidola, breathing images. My outing has given me a new research assignment in the field I call dream archaeology. I'm juiced, especially because I knew very little of the culture involved before my dream self traveled to Petra overnight.

September 13, 2021

Dream

The Columns of Siq

My guide is a younger woman, Arab or Turkish, wearing a hijab. We are walking around a vast archaeological site in the desert. We came through a dark, narrow passage lined with niches and columns, some natural, some carved from the rock. Some of the stones around us give the impression of humanoid forms, perhaps of gods or jinn.

“This place is protected by them,” she tells me. She gives the protectors a name I can’t quite understand. Is it “The Daniels”?

The place, or some part of it, is called Siq. I see it in a section head in a little bilingual guidebook. Between us and the barren mountains, on a rise, is a ruined colonnade. I have the sense that there is life in these stones, even the ones that may have belonged to a Roman marketplace. Perhaps holographic memories of what happened here.

She walks me up a hill. I feel sun and sand on my skin. I am getting very thirsty, in the dry heat. There is water below us, across a slope of fine greyish sand, apparently rich in metal content. I enjoy the walk down. She tells me, again, “This place is protected by The Daniels.” Again, I can’t quite get the key word.

The pool is very shallow, perhaps only the last of water that fell in the last rains. But we are now in welcome shade from the mountains and I long to drink. I reach down into the water with cupped hands.

I am surprised when she tells me that I need to go to Cyprus. She says she has family there. Is she also telling me that cousins of "The Daniels" are there? I know Cyprus is the island of Aphrodite. I tell my companion that I have always wanted to go to Cyrus, because “I have a relationship with Aphrodite.” Whoops. I must avoid provoking the goddesses again.

 

Feelings: Excited, intrigued. Just so: this was an entirely real experience, engaging all the senses.

Reality check : The word “Siq” was crystal clear but I did not recognize it. An online search told me instantly that it is the name of a long passage through a narrow gorge leading to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.  Siq means “gorge”. It is lined with niches that once held “god-stones” called baetyls or betyls. Some were meteorites. It is speculated that the ancient Nabataeans thought they contained the energy of gods, and that contact with the stones could open a portal to other worlds. I suspect that what I heard as “The Daniels” was actually “The Betyls”. The Arabic is betel. Related to the Hebrew Bethel, “House of God” as in the place where Jacob had an immense night vision while sleeping on a stone he afterwards set up as a column. I see that Wendy Doniger, the religious scholar, thinks that the betyls in their niches – they have counterparts in many cultures - were the first of all altars.

If you want to know what I mean by "provoking the goddesses" read my story "How Much Ephesus Have You Had?" in Mysterious Realities.

Action: I love taking on the research assignments my dreams give me. In my memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back I give detailed reports on the dream archaeology missions that have taken me into other times and other lives. I have barely started to follow up my visit to Petra and the magic stones. The dreamer and the independent scholar in me look forward to more discoveries.

Follow-up: Pillars of the Goddess

I had just started my research when a friend found a report by a German scholar who surveyed hundreds of betyls at Petra.  This added some interesting leads. The style of Nabataean religious art was basically aniconic; in other words, not figurative, though stones were sometimes given a hunt of anthropomorphic form. 

It was notable many betyls were dedicate to al-Uzzah, the mother goddess of Petra, or to Allat, the Great Goddess worshipped especially in the Arabian peninula. Some of these betyls had "eyes" in the form of simple rectangles, or twin stars. "The eyes can be interpreted as the morning and the evening stars, the two aspects of the planet Venus." [1] The betyls of Petra were typically set in niches on bases,. Quite a few were carved from free-standing stones and could be carried in procession. 

A relief carving from Bab al-Siq ("Gate of the Siq") shows a betyl being transported on the back of  horse of mule. Some betyls were simply carved from rock walls.

Where stone was quarried for such purposes, efforts were made to show respect to Dushara, Lord of the House among the pantheon at Petra, whose energy was strongly felt in sacred stones. Columns were left standing in his honor. Other standing stones around Petra were for the nephesh (the same word as in Hebrew). The nepheshes held spirits of the dead rather than the energy of the gods. 

I later found photos of an unusually anthropomorphic version of the "eye-betyls" of Petra. It stood in a niche in the wall of the temple of the Wnged Lions and is believed to represent al-Uzza or Allat. The eyes here are almond shaped and the nose and lips are formed naturalistically. The face is crowned by a wreath with an opening in the center that mikght have held a jewel or a horn. This iamge,carved from limenstone in the 1st or 2nd cetury of the common era, may reflect syncretism between Nabataean religion and the Isis cult.

1.Robert Wenning, “The Betyls of Petra” in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 324, 2001, p.83.

Journal drawing: "The Columns of Siq" by Robert Moss

Naked adventure in the Arabian Nights

 

Notes from a Reading Life

Robert Louis Stevenson notes in "A Gossip of Romance" that the Arabian Nights are entirely amoral. "You shall look in vain for moral or intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough." This is especially true of the stories delivered outside the frame of Scheherazade's nightly narrations. 

We are not told why Aladdin - a tearaway street kid who is the despair of his impoverished mother - is selected for favors and a potentially fatal assignment by the African magician who poses as his uncle. (This fools no one but the largesse he delivers gets him in.) Aladdin is to go down a well and through tunnels and overcome many obstacles to obtain a lamp the magician (for reasons unexplained) can't get for himself. In addition to directions Aladdin is given a ring that is a talisman. He finds the lamp, empties it as instructed, and wraps it inside his garment where it is soon buffered by all the beautiful balls of colored glass the boy plucks from the trees, not knowing them to be precious jewels. 

The magician's plan is to seize the lamp from Aladdin as he comes up the tunnel, and seal him below the stone lid to die. But Aladdin evidently has some street smarts. He won't yield the lamp before he gets out. In a rage, the magician seals the tunnel and leaves him to die. Rubbing the ring, he produces a genie (called a demon in Husain Haddawy’s recent translation), hideous but required to serve him without conditions. He wishes to be out and so he is. 

At home he discovers that rubbing the lamp produces a bigger and even scarier genie and a whole host of jinn (perhaps the best term for this genus)all bound to serve the master of the lamp. There is no limit to the number of wishes and their magnitude and no conditions for the user. Aladdin goes from ordering up a good dinner to demanding vast riches and armies of slaves that persuade the king to give him the beautiful princess in marriage. They live in a palace more splendid than the king's created by demons overnight. 

Things go on until the African magician returns, guided by his geomantic box of sand. Aladdin survives the first take back attempt but not the magician's brother, who takes possession of the lamp when Aladdin is away hunting and has the whole palace including the princess transported to Africa. The genie of the ring eventually enables Aladdin to locate them. When he has possession of the lamp he can move everything back to "China" where the main action is supposedly playing out 

Utterly amoral. Whoever owns the lamp has full control of the genie - in fact legions of genies - unconditionally. Things created by enchantment don't vanish. They stay solid in the world. A couple of quick prayers to Allah are said here and there but not a modicum of virtue or any appeal to higher powers or even personal intelligence are required for success. There are no threats to the immortal soul, not even a hint that - as in other tales of invoking captive spirits - there will be dire consequences if the genie escapes captivity, or even that he can escape.

This puts the story on a cruder level than Scheherezade's tale of a genie confined in a copper jar who has been made to wait so long that- having originally promised to reward his liberator with untold riches- he will now kill him.

When RLS develops the theme in "The Bottle Imp" he introduces conditions and concern for the state of the soul (though on a transactional rather than moral basis). An imp perceived as a mysterious white shadow inside the bottle will manifest your wishes but as a result you will be sent to hellfire when you die unless you can sell the bottle to someone else for less than you paid for it, after apprising them of the risk. The money must be paid in coin. Our protagonist pays the $50 he has in his pocket to the haggard owner of a mansion in Nob Hill who got his house from the imp. 

The drama now turns on a series of efforts to sell the bottle at ab ever lower price (after fulfilling a series of wishes) until we are down to one cent and hell for the owner is certain. Then it is recalled that there are places where there are coins worth less than a cent. And we are off to Tahiti and traffic in centimes. It ends with a drunken longshoreman, not afraid of hell, taking the bottle with its imp for one centime.

 

Illustration by René Bull' (1872-1942)

 

When dreams do a morning flit

Some mornings I have a dream – it might be a big one, full of romance and adventure – but it gets away before I can find any way to hold it. Then I am like a fisherman kicking his creel, stretching his arms to show the size of the one that got away, but not managing even that. Sometimes I know a night visitor slipped out the window in the instant I rolled over and turned my back..
     How do dreams do this vanishing act? Notice I am not talking about the absence of dreams, not at all. We can absent ourselves from dreams. We might even say, “I don’t dream” which only means “I don’t remember” or “I don’t want to remember”. Because dreams are never absent from us. We dream for hours every night. The guys in white coats in the sleep laboratories can show you the physiological evidence for that.
     I am talking about something more specific than a chronic or occasional lack of dream recall. That is a common condition and when it is protracted it is a real malaise, gravely injurious to your health and well-being, for which I have offered remedies, notably in my book Active Dreaming.
     I am talking, quite specifically, about how and why dreams get away. Waking, you have them. You may feel you have perfect recollection of what you were doing and with whom in another reality, just a raised eyelid ago. The next moment, all that is gone. Your memories have been erased, as if a Man in Black zapped you with a Neuralyzer
    What’s going on here?
     I’ve been going over some of my own experiences of dreams doing a morning flit. Here are some of my thoughts on how dreams get away:

It is hard to remember one world when you are in another world

Neuroscientists talk about how retrievable memories are established when data is passed from the cortex to the hippocampus. But what we experience in dreams is not just a matter of seeing movies between our ears. We enter an altered state of consciousness and then find ourselves in other realities. So the memory download is not just between areas of the brain, but between the nonlocal mind or the traveling dream soul and the brainbox receiver. The brain is an awesome organism that can handle far more than most of us ever imagine. But the download from multidimensional reality into forms and linear narratives we can recognize and use in ordinary reality is an awesome operation. We grasped something in the deep but it slips from our hand as we rise into the shallows and soon all that is left is a little froth, until that is gone too.

Your dream was so real you didn’t think you could forget it

On the other hand, our experiences in dreams may be so very real, engaging our inner senses, that – whether or not we become aware we are dreaming – we may feel no need to lay down a memory trace. Few of us would feel the need to write down that we took a certain road to work, or that a lover’s kiss tasted of wine or raspberries, at least not right away. These are actual events, they happened, how could we forget about them moments later? Well, it can be the same with dreams. They happened, they were real – and so we let them slip away.

You haven’t been taking action to honor your dreams

If we do not take action to honor our dreams, we do not dream well. Our dream producers may become so disgusted by our lazy neglect of what they have been giving us that they actually close down their movie-making, or pull a heavy curtain after a screening. As a writer, I am grimly aware that I have been given far, far more ideas for all kinds of new productions – novels and screenplays and novellas and short stories, as well as new nonfiction – than I have developed. When I have a patch where I can’t hold onto my dreams (or the dreams I do snare seem paltry) I often ask myself: Is this because I have not been doing enough to create from the scenes and scripts I have already been given?

You got zapped

Sometimes it feels like something intervenes to erase dream memories. When I write this, I remember the Neuralyzer used by the agents in the Men in Black scifi movies to make sure that regular people are not freaked out by memories of alien life forms.
    We are all subject to inner censors, and maybe sometimes to psychic interference.
     However, I like the idea that sometimes there may be a benign agency at work that seeks to ensure that we don’t bring through too much from other worlds before we are ready to integrate the knowledge.
     I gained insight about this from a good friend who is usually a prolific dreamer. She is also one of those who rarely fails to take action to embody the guidance and energy of dreams. Even so, she entered a period when her dreams were doing that morning flit. She willed herself to stay present, alert and conscious, in that moment when she felt herself stepping through the door between the dreamworld and her ordinary reality. When she did this, she noticed there was a figure standing beside a doorway, with a large timepiece in his hand, a pocket watch as big as a clock.
    “Who are you?” she demanded.
    “I am the Timekeeper,” he told you. “I decide when it is time for you to remember what happens over here.”

So, what can we do if we want to prevent our dreams doing the vanishing act?
    I like to visualize a door-stopper, that holds the door between the worlds open, just a chink, when I come back to this side, with dreams fluttering all around me. This gives me a chance to reach back in and grab a few before they have flitted away entirely. In my house, we use an old flat iron and a brick, and a stone the shape of Africa as door stoppers. In my imagination, the door stopper is sometimes a black dog, generally bigger than this little cutie I acquired from an antiques store.

Please Note: This article is not about the general problem of lack of dream recall, a widespread malaise in our society which is partly related to the absence of social reinforcement for the practice of sharing and working with dreams. You'll find my thoughts on common causes for a generalized dream drought n my book Active Dreaming, together with many fresh and effective suggestions for restoring your dream flow. This book also explains the Lightning Dreamwork process I invented, which gives us a safe and fun way to share dreams, get helpful feedback, and be guided towards actions to apply the guidance from a dream and embody its energy. This gives us a strong incentive to bring more from our dreams to the table of life.
    

Dream interpretation by mating birds

 

Jung was a master of navigating by synchronicity. His practice in this field is, to my mind, far more impressibve and instructive than his theory. He practiced pattern recognition, noticing what was going on in his field of perception as he wrestled with an idea or tended to a patient, following the wind and waves on the lake, the rustle of leaves and the cries of animals and birds in the woods near his house. 

I came upon a choice example of how he used coincidence to get a second opinion on dreams - and sometimes to get a point across to a dreamer who seemed to be missing the point.

A patient whose dreams seemed to Jung to be full of strong sexual imagery declined to look at this aspect of her dream life, drifting off into associations that seemed to Jung to be far removed from what the dreams contained. His efforts to get her to look at the possible sexual content did not prosper until, on the day of the woman's next appointment, a pair of sparrows fluttered to the ground at her feet and "performed the act" right in front of her.-

This incident, recorded in the notebooks of Jungian analyst Esther Harding, recalls the famous epiphany of the scarab that Jung recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He felt stuck in his analysis of another female patient until the session in which she recounted a dream of a scarab, vitally important to the Egyptians as a symbol of rebirth. At that instant, Jung heard something scraping at the window of his consulting room. He opened the window and caught in his hands a flying beetle known as a rose-chafer, the closest thing to the Egyptian scarab that was likely to be found in Switzerland. He presented the golden-green beetle to the woman, saying, "Here is your scarab" , and noted this as the breakthrough point in her analysis.-

These episodes are fine examples of how (to borrow from Richard Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche) "spontaneous archetypal resonance" can act as "a healing solvent on the hardened polarities - between self and world, subject and object conscious and unconscious - of the person experiencing the synchronicity."

Attend to synchronicity, as Jung did every day,and you may become a magnet for it.

You Can't Understand a Dream Without the Dreamer

 

Listen to Jung on this theme: “No interpretation can be undertaken without the dreamer. The words composing a dream narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings. If, for instance, someone dreams of a table, we are still far from understanding what the ‘table’ of the dreamer signifies, although the word ‘table’ sounds unambiguous enough. For the thing we do not know is that this ‘table’ is the very one at which his father sat when he refused the dreamer all further financial help and threw him out of the house as a good-for-nothing. That is what our dreamer understand by ‘table’. Therefore we need the dreamer’s help in order to limit the multiple meanings of words to those that are essential and convincing [for the dreamer]." [*] 

In our Active Dreaming approach, we respect this cardinal rule through the first questions we put to a dreamer about their dream. The very first question is, “How die you feel on first leaving the dream?” This provides immediate – and often the best – guidance to the basic character of the dream, whether it is negative or positive, urgent and personal or something else. If a bear turns up in your dream house and you wake up feeling cheerful, your bear is clearly very different from the kind people flee from, at least in your perception and availability for interaction. If you are at work in a humdrum situation but wake with feelings of crawling dread, there is something in that scene – perhaps something that will unfold in the future – you need to understand and be ready to contain or head off.

The next question we ask is the reality check. It has two aspects:

What do you recognize from this dream in the rest of your life, including the life of your imagination; and

Could any part of this dream play out in the future, literally or symbolically?

The question about the future is vitally important because dreams often rehearse us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and sometimes give us very clear precognition (a phenomenon that Jung, for all his brilliance on many fronts, was slow to accept).

The first part of our reality check answers Jung’s concern by taking the elements of the dream straight to the dreamer and locating them in the context of thir outer and inner life. I will never forget listening, in a dream sharing circle, to a dream of bats. Everyone there had strong feelings and associations with bats, across a wide spectrum from bats in the belfry to witches, from speleology to being able to navigate in the dark.  Some were quivering with eagerness to offer feedback on the dream. “If it were my dream, the bats would mean…”
     But wait. First we do the feelings: cheerful, confident. Then we do the reality check. “Have you encountered bats in your life?”
    “Oh yeah,” the dreamer said nonchalantly.”I kept bats as a pet when I was a kid.”
     I don’t think we had ever met someone who kept bats as pets and regarded them as delightful childhood playmates. This took our dreamwork in an entirely different direction from where it might otherwise have gone

*  C.G. Jung, “On the Nature of Dreams” in Collected Works vol 8, p 539

Photo: Australian flyig fox (a fruit bat)

 

 

The state of our soles

In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.  

    Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in a fancy store persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city. 

     A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes usually fit just right. 

     In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.  

      That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more. 

    There is an angel of shoes, or more especially sandals, the most common footwear when his name was most commonly invoked. He is Sandalphon, and his name is still important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes. 

     In the Terry Gilliam movie "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", a well-heeled lady is whisked away to a paradise of shoe-lovers, and stilleto heels by top designer Jerome C. Rousseau dance along the seabed. 

     Common expressions involving footwear may provide clues to where your dream is walking. A few that jump to mind:

- Goody two-shoes
- if the shoe fits...

- well-heeled
- given the boot
- pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
- to know someone, you must walk in his shoes (or moccasins)
- if you were in my shoes...

- those are big shoes to fill

- get your skates on

- put on your dancing shoes

So - what's in your shoe closet, in your dreams?

For more on dreams that show the state of our soul - and can provide portals for soul recovery healing - please see my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

The passions of the soul work magic

 

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung) is practical counsel for living fully and creatively.

Our passions can lead us into madness. They can also give us the creative edge to do our best and most original work and the magnetism that generates extraordinary opportunities and serendipity.

The stronger the emotion, the stronger the effect on our psychic and physical environment. This may reach much further, in our nonlocal universe, that we can initially understand. It can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who knew a great deal about these things, write that  “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

There are two conditions for working positive magic with the passions of the soul.

The first is that we must choose to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it towards a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world – if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always Now; but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also GO. 

I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through now – if I use that edge and make myself available to the work any time it is coming through. In these states, like Balzac, I often write for fifteen hours a day, fueled only by coffee, and sleep only a couple of hours out of the 24 – and stream into joy, the joy we all know when we are in the zone whatever our field of endeavor, and are giving our best.

Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality - and his prodigious literary production - were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination. His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by the reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality - even an entire world - inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But he comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world.

   The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world - or else  go mad.

    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us.”

     What kind of desire makes these things possible? “A desire is a fact entirely accomplished in our will before being accomplished externally.”

     The passion that works magic is "the will gathered to one point" so that "man can bring to bear his whole vitality."

     The man who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere”, a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. He produces “a contagion of feelings”.

    Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance. Women, says Balzac, are especially good at this. Watch out for a woman whose passions are high, because she can see and sense things at a distance very clearly.

     Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space”.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things by Robert Moss. Puiblished by New World Library.

Photo: RM with Balzac's doppelganger at MOMA in New York City