Dreaming Is a Contact Sport

Many of my dreams are workaday in the sense that I am doing quotidian things: reading. writing and editing, giving lectures and workshops. Just now, in a sleep dream, that became lucid, I was selecting and posting excerpts from Chinese texts that described social interaction by dreamers traveling in their astral bodies, with distinctive terminology. I pictured bustling scenes of many soul travelers coming and going, meeting and parting in astral realities.

My first action, on getting out of bed, was to reopen relevant books from the current piles on my desk, At the top of the heap, Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China 300 BCE-800 CE by Robert Campany, a professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt. The book fell open at a page I had marked up heavily in pencil in a previous reading. The passage was on my oneiric theme: how people meet up and

make trouble in dreams.

"To dream is to contact or be contacted...This notion, often implicit, occasionally emerges into clear view, as in a passage in the Qiwu lun chapter of the Zhuangzi (ca. 300-150 bce):

"While it [the heart-mind, xin 心] sleeps, the cloudsouls contact [things]
When it wakes, the bodily form opens up [to sensory contact]
Whatever we come in contact with entangles it
Each day we use that heart-mind of ours for strife.

"The view of dreaming implied here is that dreaming occurs when one of our multiple souls - cloudsouls (hun 魂 ) whitesouls (po 魄 ) or simply the dreamer's spirit (shen 神 ) - wanders outside the body during sleep. But it is specifically the souls' contacts with other beings that constitute dreaming and therein lies the risk."

Campany notes that jiao, one of the verbs used for oneiric contact, means more: it implies touching with the senses of the dreambody; it may suggest "intertwine" or "intercourse". There is a note of caution here: watch who you are with when your body is sleeping. Those multiple souls get around. In the Later Han period, Daoist sages fixed the number of hun souls at three and the number of po souls at seven. We are many, and we can be in two or more places at once.

To Find the Face We Had Before the World Was Made

 

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

So W.B. Yeats declared, in his poem, "Before the World Was Made". What could he mean?

The couplet is with me as I read about the life of Yeshe Tsogyel, the Guru Dakini sometimes described as the Mother of Tibetan Buddhism. The first pages of her biography, channeled by an ecstatic 18th century yogin named Taksham Nuden Dorje, put us right  there: looking at a face that existed before the world. 

When we first meet Tsogyel she is in the form of the goddess Sarasvati, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike for her learning, her devotion to sadhana or religious practice, and her lovely singing voice. As Sarasvati, she says to  Padmasambhava, known as Guru Rinpoche, and celebrated in Tibet as the Second Buddha, "It is time to project an emanation into the savage world." This confirms the Guru's desire to bring a female partner to Tibet to complete his mission of converting that wild and warring country - a militaristic empire at the time - to the dharma teachings. 

"Let the fire burn!" exclaims the Guru.
"We are burning together! “says the Dakini.

We are told that “the Guru's vajra and the Dakini's lotus are joined" and they enter the trance of union. They are surrounded and protected by the goddesses of the five Buddha families, and legions of fierce deities and dakinis. Beams of light blaze from where their bodies are joined and rush towards Tibet like shooting stars, to enter a royal couple who are joined in lovemaking.

The name of the mother-to-be is Getso. In the arms of the prince, Getso sees a swarm of golden bees, Making the sound of lute music, they enter the prince through the fontanel. In the same moment he sees a vision of the princess with three eyes holding a beautiful young girl. The visions multiply and spill into the world. Lightning flares, thunder rolls, a spring near the castle becomes a lake. And dreams flower into majesty.

In the night the prince dreams of an eight-petalled lotus that casts light across the multiverse. A coral stupa rises from the crown of his head - where his wife saw the bees fly in - and multitudes come from all over the world to pay homage or try to steal it. He dreams that he plays a lute, and the music reverberates through countless universes. In her dreams, the princess - now pregnant - is given a rosary of coral and conch shell beads from which red and white ambrosia streams in a never-ending fountain..

Nine months later, Getso gives birth without pain to a baby girl who already has waist length hair. When she is offered the traditional knob of yak butter, Tsogyel sits up in a half-lotus posture and explains herself:

I am an apparitional being, a yogini.
After eating immaterial essences for so long
The memory of coarse food has vanished But I will eat to complete my mother's happiness.

The Dakini proceeds to swallow the whole knob of butter with one gulp, and with it "the whole of samsara”. She is now fully in the world.

This can all be read as a magnificent tale of the descent of spirit from Light through Imaginal realms, in changing vehicles of consciousness - though here I am at risk of forsaking Buddhist terminology - to settle in a vehicle in the realm of Illusion known as the physical world. 

It is time to project an emanation into the savage world. Now that's a way to embark on a journey towards incarnation. If we can presume to make some part of the story our own, it may give us clues to how we can pursue Yeats' intent: to find the face we had before the world was made.

I have drawn here from a remarkable work by Keith Dowman, Sky Dancer: The Secret Life and Teachings of the Lady Yeshe Tsogyel (Ithaca NY: Snow Lion, 1996). In a lively and creative translation, Dowman gives us the life of Yeshe Tsogyel delivered as a "mind-treasure" to a yogin on "black days in a forest hermitage". Tsogyel is credited with seeding many termas (“treasures”) on behalf of Padmansambhava, and some of her own as well. These hidden treasures might be concealed in a landscape, in the clouds, in a dream or in a mind, to be revealed at the right times across generations. Taksham claimed to have received no less than Tsogyel's autobiography, and this is how it reads in Dowman’s version. As Dowman tells us, he “took poetic license to use the first person throughout” and to “convey the precise meaning and feeling-tone of the original in fluent English, rather than to reproduce the peculiarities of the Tibetan style and diction.” In my opinion, he has succeeded brilliantly.

Far beyond the Buddhist community, the story of Yeshe Tsogyel will be of compelling interest to those of us who want to reclaim the suppressed history of women and contribute to the restoration of the Divine Feminine. If you are drawn to the Dakini, you may want  to compare the oral telling dictated by Tarthang Tulku in Mother of Knowledge, The Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyel (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing. 1983) and the classic early text by Namkahi Nyingpo and Gyalwa  Changchub, Lady of the Lotus Born. The Life and Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambala, 1999)

“The Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal is the mother of all Buddhas– the Wisdom Consort of Guru Padmasambhava. Yeshe Tsogyal possesses inconceivable primordial wisdom, compassion, and the power of protection and manifestation of the enlightened activities…From a historical point of view, it is due to Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal’s compassion, wisdom and power of total recall that we have the entire teachings of Guru Rinpoche intact." - Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa (1951-2009)

Tendrels of Dreaming: Shamanic Dreamers and Tibetan Buddhists

 

There is a fascinating ambivalence about dreams and dreaming in Buddhist tradition. On the one hand, Buddhism begins with a conception dream of the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, in which a numinous white elephant enters her body and is then born through her. On the other hand, ordinary dreams are often dismissed as the product of confusion and the work of the “three poisons” of desire, hatred and fear.

The dreamworld is a realm of illusion – but so is everything in the experience of a human who has not attained spiritual liberation. The great Tibetan lama Milarepa counsels his disciples that dreams are of no importance – and then instructs them to pay close attention to their dreams and tell them to him in the morning; his favorite pupil, Gambopa, brings a powerful prophetic dream that previews the spread of Buddhism in Tibet.

In Tibet, the Buddhist ambivalence about dreams is accompanied by a dynamic process of conflict and engagement over many centuries with indigenous shamans known as “heroes” and “invokers”. Dreaming is a basic mode of shamanic operations, a means of travel by which shamans interact with the powers of the deeper world and guide souls of the living and the dead. As mediators for the community, shamans meet and negotiate with the conscious, spiritual aspects of all life, including the Earth itself. By contrast, the first Buddhist rulers of Tibet planted twelve pagodas at strategic points on the body of the land, to “nail” and hold in subjugation the Earth Mother they characterized as a “demoness”.

In an excellent and very readable scholarly study, Angela Sumegi explores the creative tension between Tibetan Buddhism and shamanic dreaming. In Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, Sumegi demonstrates how, while retaining its philosophy of transcendence, Buddhism in Tibet has adopted many of the characteristic techniques of shamanic dreamers, healers and diviners. She explains that she was drawn to this theme by records of the highly shamanic visionary experiences of the Fifth Dalai Lama who once, during a serious illness, invoked a fierce deity who projected a scorpion inside his body that proceeded to devour his organs until he seemed to burst into flame; his illness then passed.

I interviewed Angela Sumegi on my “Way of the Dreamer” radio show in 2010, when her book came out. There was a little magic in play that day. I rose on the morning of the interview with two fragments from the hypnopompic zone, the intermediate state between sleep and full waking. In a vivid dream scene, I watched Central Asian riders gallop across a great plain where everything was verdant green. Above them, thunderheads came rolling across the sky. When I looked at the lightning, I suddenly saw it as the riders did – as a fiery god, resplendent in red garments, hurling thunderbolts as he rode the sky on a great charger.

When the scene receded, a word came into my mind with quiet insistence: Kalachakra.

I thought these scraps from my dreamlife might be a rehearsal for my interview. Prior to recording the radio show, I took Angela’s book along to a conference at a medical center, where I was kept waiting for much longer than expected. This gave me a chance to re-read sections of her book, including a discussion of the concept of tendrel to which I’ll turn in a moment. The person who cleared the logjam at the doctors’ office was a very efficient and pleasant Jamaican. His origin interested me, because I had noticed that Angela Sumegi was born in Jamaica, though she migrated to Canada many years ago and now taught at Carleton University in Ottawa. I had not met anyone from Jamaica for many years. Now, in the space of a few minutes, I was going from one Jamaican to another.

This seemed like a meaningful coincidence. It also felt auspicious, in relation to the interview, since the first Jamaican had played such a helpful role. Might this be an example of the workings of what Tibetan Buddhists call tendrel?

I put the question to Angela Sumegi on the air. She reminded me that the word tendrel is a contraction of a longer phrase referring to the Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination”, according to which all phenomena arise “dependent on causes and conditions”. It is also used to mean “sign” or “omen”. So the word applies both to the practice of reading signs in coincidence, natural phenomena, divination kits and dreams - and to a deep philosophy of hidden causes. Tibetan paintings show the twelvefold manifestation of the principle of dependent origination around the Wheel of Life: old age and death arise from birth, etc., etc. As Sumegi explains in her book: “The principle that all phenomena arise interconnectedly and interdependently applies without exception to every existent, linking them throughout time and space; what appears to be a random or chance occurrence can be analyzed in terms of its connections.”

We agreed that my Jamaican sequence might be an example of tendrel at work in the divinatory sense of an omen that felt promising. It also hinted at hidden patterns of causation and connection.

We were already deep into the practice of dreaming. In dreaming cultures, dreams are not isolated from “signs” in the way of Western dream analysis. You read signs in dreams; you also look for dreamlike symbols in the midst of everyday life.

I told Angela the fragments from my dreams and asked her what the Tibetan mind would make of these. She went to the right place (from my point of view) immediately, by telling me that Tibetans would want to know my feelings around the dreams. I am firmly convinced that the first thing we need to know about a dream is how the dreamer felt about it, on first waking. My feelings around the dream scene of the horseman on the verdant plain were of excitement and driving energy, which Angela proceeded to confirm in commenting on the positive energy she felt in the horses and the lush green of the landscape.

What about that word, Kalachakra?

“It’s the great Wheel of Time,” Angela explained, “and the most complex and profound of the approaches to Tantra. It is also the name of a ritual His Holiness the Dalai Lama conducts frequently.”

As we discussed the Kalachakra ceremony, we noticed that it features dreaming. Monks hand out sheaves of kusha grass – long blades to place under the mattress, shorter ones to tuck under the pillow. Grass to dream on, and to invoke only good dream experiences.

Angela suggested that the way the word “Kalachakra” had come to me might be an example of what Tibetan Buddhists call a dream of “permission”: an invitation to proceed to a deeper connection with a practice or a deity.

By now, I was enjoying our conversation hugely. I knew already the depth of Angela’s research, including the years she has spent in India studying with Tibetan religious communities and learning the languages. She now confirmed her credentials in the way that dreamers instantly recognize, by sharing a night vision from her childhood in Jamaica in which a huge figure with three eyes and fearsome weapons entered her space. She was able to identify this entity many years later, as she embarked on Tibetan studies and first saw images of the deity known as Mahakala (the “Great Black One”).

Picture: 12th century Tibetan Mahakala in Rubin Museum of Art

Up All Night with the Daimon

 

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It. My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to work on the  book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 
      In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.
     Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet. From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:
- When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.- - -
-  We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.
- Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and is repelled by us when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.
- The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

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

Photo: On the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman

 

 

 

Homer's Book of Portents

The homecoming is often the hardest part of the hero's journey. Odysseus has survived sea monsters and sirens and the wrath of a sea god and is at last on his home island. But he has been away for ten years since the war he went to fight, and almost everyone believes he is dead. His palace is full of brutish and lustful men, suitors vying for the hand of his wife Penelope and with it, his kingdom. Their appetites are laying waste to his livestock, his wine cellar and his female servants.
     At the prompting of his constant guide, who is no less than the goddess Athena, Odysseus has disguised himself in the rags of a beggar, with a funny traveler's hat. He is mocked and scorned by the suitors and even some of his own retainers. Nobody recognizes him. They will find it hard to recognize him even when he shows himself in a different form. His homeland seems stranger to him than the magic realms from which he has returned. He must be asking himself, Which is the dream? He may be wondering whether he is dead.
    He spends a sleepless night, tossing and turning. This is wonderfully conveyed in the muscular modern verse of Robert Fagles, which will speak to anyone who has struggled through a night like this:

...But he himself kept tossing, turning,
intent as a cook before some white-hot blazing fire
who rolls his sizzling sausage back and forth,
packed with fat and blood - keen to broil it quickly,
tossing, turning it, this way, that way - so he cast about

- Odyssey Book 20, lines 27-30, Fagles translation

    The "man of many ways" is seeking a way to expel the suitors who have taken over his home. But they are many and he is one, and even if he finds the way to kill them all, their kinsmen will come to take revenge. The goddess Athena now appears to him in mortal form, "swooping down from the sky in a woman's build and hovering at his head". She wants to know why he is still awake, fretting and exhausting himself. Why does he distrust her when she assures him that he will gain victory that day? Athena promises that "even if fifty bands of mortal fighters closed around us, hot to kill us off in battle" - because she is with him.
     Athena "showered sleep across his eyes", but when Odysseus wakes, on the morning of Apollo's feast day, even the promise of a goddess is not enough. He wants further signs. He speaks to the All-Father, Zeus. "Show me a sign." In fact, Odysseus asks for two signs, "a good omen voiced by someone awake, indoors" and "another sign, outside, from Zeus himself."
     He is answered at once by a great roll of thunder, out of a clear blue sky.
     Then he hears a "lucky word" from a woman grinding grain inside the halls. Hearing thunder from a cloudless sky, the woman recognizes a sign from Zeus. She speaks aloud to the king of the gods:

Sure it's a sign you're showing someone now.
So, poor as I am, grant my prayer as well;
let this day be the last, the last these suitors
bolt their groaning feasts in King Odysseus' house!
- Odyssey Book 20, lines 128-131

    The twin oracles - from the sky and from overheard speech - harden Odysseus' resolve, and the scene is set for the astonishing slaughter of the suitors under the rain of arrows from the bow that none but the hero (and his son) can bend. In the Fagles version, Book 20 of the Odyssey is given the title "Portents Gather", and it is a good one. Here we see oracles speak in ways the Greeks observed closely and valued highly: through brontomancy, divination by thunder, and cledonomancy, divination by overheard speech or sound.
    In the Odyssey, as in ancient Greek society, dreams and visions are the most important mode of divination. Yet our understanding of dreams may be deceptive, as Penelope explains in Book 19, when she speaks of the since-famous gates of ivory and horn. So even when blessed by a direct encounter with a goddess, the hero turns to the world around him for confirmation.

Quotations are from Robert Fagles (trans) The Odyssey published by Penguin Books.

Graphic: Odysseus in beggar's disguise, about to be identified by his childhood nurse Eurykleia, when she sees the scar on his thigh from "the wound I took from the boar's white tusk on Mount Parnassus."

Punch a Hole in the World: Listening to Children’s Dreams

 

Young children know how to go to Magic Kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was very young, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels, and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them. 

One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, "Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?"

 "I'd love to."

 "Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world." 

I've never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life. we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming - sleeping or waking or hyper-awake - is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them. 

When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the Magic Kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention; to attend, in its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers on how to dream and what dreaming can be. 

Here's what we need to know about listening to children's dreams and supporting their imaginations: 

1. Listen up! When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake. 

2. Invite good dreams Pick the right bedtime reading or better still, tell stories. Help your child to weave a web of good dream intentions for the night - for example, by asking "What would you most like to do tonight?" Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian. 

3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to move out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible. 

4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, about the color of the sky, and about exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there's something about the future. Say what you would think about this if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call grandma, etc. 

5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while they do the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, "This is my secret book and you can't read it any more" do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she'll let you look in that magic book. 

6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams come alive through art, dance, theater and games, and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It's such a release for kids to portray mom or dad or other grown-ups in their lives - be ready to be shocked! 

7. Help construct effective action plans Dreams can show us things that require further action - for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help. may require adult help, starting with yours. This will eventually require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork (hint: you can start with my books).

 8. Let your own inner child out to play As you listen to children's dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play. 

9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you'll find it's about the best home entertainment you can enjoy. 

Notice two things that are not on this list, but would be at the very top of a list of what not to do with your children's dreams: 

1. NEVER say to a child "It's only a dream". Children know that dreams are for real and that scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.

2. DON'T INTERPRET a child's dreams. You are not the expert here; the child is.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss

Photo by RM

 

Healing in the Dog House: In Praise of Gula

All of us who love dogs know that they are great natural therapists and healers. Our dogs love us no matter what and that in itself can boost our immune systems and raise our spirits. Their slobber may be a salve.
    Many cultures have revered dogs as both therapists and sacred guides - and sacrificial animals. The catacombs of Anubis at Saqqara in ancient Egypt contain seven million mummified dogs [1]. If you made the journey to a temple of Asklepios (Aesculapius to the Romans) the great god of healing and dream incubation in the Greco-Roman world,you would expect to meet many dogs, as well as snakes, his companion animals.
   Among  all the cultures that valued the healing power of dogs, ancient Mesopotamia rises like a step pyramid because of the immense popularity of Gula across millennia.. Gula ("Great") was the Babylonian name for a goddess of healing and medical arts first reverenced in Lagash as Bau (sounds like bow-wow). Gula, mistress of herbal remedies, healed bodies and souls. Her epithets included "She Who Makes the Broken Whole Again" and "The Lady Who Restores Life". She is always accompanied by dogs and clay dogs inscribed with her name were buried at thresholds to protect the household from disease and demons.
    If most of us have never heard of her, that is because history involves forgetting as much as remembering. Writing, invented in ancient Mesopotamia, was highly valued there and people competed to go for a prized education in the tablet schools where they learned to write in cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") strokes with a reed stylus on moist clay. However, writing was the skill of an elite. The successive city states and empires, from Sumer and Akkad to Babylon and Assyria were basically oral cultures. What was of most importance to ordinary people – in body or spirit – cannot be found in the often broken and fragmentary fired clay tablets that have survived time, giving us omens and accounts and king lists and dream reports and the world's first recorded literature.. Setting bones, plant medicine, and the healing of souls are not recorded, though we do hear about how to appeal to a god or exorcize a demon or an evil dream. We have over 1,000 tablets relating to Babylonian medicine but they tell us almost nothing about the belief system involved, partly because only 15 percent have satisfactory translations .
    Let us introduce Gula with due ceremony, through one of her hymns  

Gula Hymn of Bullussa-rabi

I am the physician, I know how to heal
I take along all healing plants. I expel disease
I am girded with a bag containing life-giving incantations
I carry a scalpel for curing
I am giving medication to people:
the pure bandage softens the skin sore
the soft poultice eases the sickness.
My very glance at he moribund revives him,
my mere words make the weak stand up ...

I am merciful; even from afar I am listening
I bring back the moribund from the netherworld…
I am the Lady of Life
I am the physician, I am the seeress, and I am the exorcist [2]

In other texts, she is called Great Healer, Healer of the Land, Lady of Health, She Who Makes the Broken Whole, She Who Creates Life in the Land. At Nippur, Gula was called the Lady Who Gives Life to the Dead. 
     In religious art, Gula is often shown holding a lancet or scalpel in one hand and a bandage or swab in the other. The modern sculpture at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London [top photo]  is true to her spirit. This is the very image of a hands-on surgeon and physician. She is called “mother with the soothing hand” and “faithful hand of heaven”[3] She soothes with her hands, draws out infection, and her bandaging is so effective that the craft of the physicians is characterized as “laying on bandages” [4]
     Her greatest temple was in the city of Isin, south of Nippur.. Her vast precinct there  has been compared to a Mesopotamian Lourdes. It was always full of people, lots of pilgrims coming for healing, a glimpse of the goddess, a statue being carried through the streets.

    The streets were full of dogs, barking, sniffing, wandering, There were guard dogs at important portals and some evidence that dogs were included in sacred rites of healing. At Isin, Gula's title was Inisina, Lady of Isin and the name of her temple E-gal-makh means Exalted House.
    Within the vast temple complex, there was one space that had special cachet. It was  é-u-gi₇-ra, the Dog House, or Kennel. If you are in need of healing in this part of the world 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, you want to go the the dogs of the Lady of Isin. You may have your request for healing inscribed on the back of a little terracotta dog as a prayerful appeal to the goddess. Many such votive offerings have been found, along with human figurines holding organs that were in need of repair.
    In Isin archaeologists have disinteerred the remains of more than thirty dogs that were buried below the ramp leading up to the main entrance of the dog temple. [5] Here physicians were also dog keepers. A major function of city officials was to ensure a constant supply of sheep for the dogs of the goddess.
    There was a constant stir of activity here. The scene at the great temple complex has been compared to a "Mesopotamian Lourdes, a place of pilgrimage for the sick, maimed, and dying." [6] The temple provided midwives\). The temple complex was alive with sufferers seeking treatment, priests performing rituals and incantations, and of course the  dogs During festivals in the goddess's honor, her statue, freshly draped and anointed, would have been carried through the city to the music of drum and lyre and general rejoicing. 

Dreaming with Gula

Texts from the later Neo-Babylonian period suggest that Gula was also revered as a mistress of dreams.. She was invoked in dream incubation and dreamers prayed to meet her in their night visions. [7]
    Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king (who reigned from 555-539 bce)  dreamed of the goddess "who restores the health of the deathly ill and bestows long life." He prayed for "lasting life for [him]self and that she might turn her face towards [him]." Then she "looked steadily upon [him] with her shining face (thus) indicating (her) mercy" [8]

Sending or Releasing

the goddess was not only beneficent, but could also inflict the miseries which, normally, people asked her to allay. The lawgiver Hammurabi invoked her under anther of her names, Ninkarak,  to bring disease to  those who violated his code Like the other healing goddesses, Ninkarak had Underworld associations, as her indicated by yet another of her titless:: Nin-E-ki-siga "Lady of the House of Offerings for the Dead."

Boundary Protector

Both Gula and her consort Ninurta were protectors of boundaries, and her name and image appeared often on kudurrus or boundary stones. Seated regally on a throne, she had her sacred dog beside her. Guard dog on duty.

The Journey to Gula

In a recent class, I invited a large group of active dreamers to make a shamanic journey to Gula and her Dog House at Isin. After reading her hymn and her praise name, I gave a general description of the Exalted House and the dog temple.
     I noted that Gula is sometimes depicted enthroned above sweet water. So there is a sense of the freshness, the life-giving qualities of sweet water with her and about her. Her dogs are with her.
     If you wish, you can imagine right now that you have been invited to enter her sacred city, the city of Isin, south of Nippur, in what is now Iraq. You can't go there right now in physical reality. But you can go there in imaginal reality. You may find yourself received and escorted by a dog. The dog might want to lick you. If that happens, you may be in real luck.
     You may be bathed and cleansed.You may want to make an offering to the temple attendants. Snacks for the dogs will be welcome. You be admitted to a space where you will be in the presence of a statue of the goddess, a "breathing image"that  may come alive. You might find that her dogs is taking away from you things that don't belong, shadows of dark place of your life, symptoms of pain and illness.
     For the group journey, we used the sounds of bubbling spring water rather than our usual drumming - though drumming is profoundly Mesopotamian [9] - to power and focus our excursion. The journey was wonderfully successful for most who took part. We found ourselves blessed by a form of the sacred guide and healer that is feminine, soothing and gentle, and can raise souls from the dead. And of course we confirmed that going t the dogs is always a good idea when we are in need of loving care.

References

1. Paul T. Nicholson, Salima Ikram and Steve Mills, "The Catacombs of Anubis at North Saqqara" in Antiquity 89 (2015) 645-661
2.W.G. Lambert, "The Gula Hymn of Bullutṣa-râbi"in Orientalia 6 (1967) 105-32.
3. Barbara Böck, The Healing Goddess Gula: Towards an Understanding of Ancient Babylonian Medicine. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014) 15
4. ibid, 17
5. http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/gulaninkarrak/index.html. Accessed May 20, 2020
6.  Johanna Stuckey, "'Going to the Dogs': Healing Goddesses of Mesopotamia" in MatriFocus: Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman" vol 5, no.2 (2006)
7. Reiner,"Fortune-telling in Mesopotamia." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19 (1960) 23-54.
8. A. Leo Oppenheim in James B. Pritchard (ed) Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 310.
9. Uri Gabbay, “Drums, Hearts, Bulls, and Dead Gods: The Theology of the Ancient Mesopotamian Kettledrum” in Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 18 (2018) 1-47

Photos

Top: modern sculpture Gula at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London 
Below: Plaque of dog with puppies from Isin in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa in  Chicago.