Meeting a Merlin of the Baltic

I saw him again last night, in the twilight between awake and sleep. He first appeared as a giant dark eagle atop a conical hill, able to see across vast distances. He showed himself again as hybrid, eagle-man, and then as able to project the form of an iron wolf. Lyzdeika. I have not forgotten you. 
     Shall we recall our meeting at your birthplace in May, 2013? Here is my report of my quest for a Baltic shaman-priest:

The Shaman from the Eagle’s Nest

 On my second visit to Lithuania, I was taken to the old city of Kernave and shown a conical hill that was the reputed birthplace of a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, he was found, as a baby, in an eagle’s nest on that hill.  Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form. He plays a central role in the unfolding of the most famous dream in Baltic history.
    Camped with an army near the present site of Vilnius, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that howled. He consulted Lizdeika - by now the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion — on the meaning of the dream. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. The city of Vilnius was founded because of this dream, and in front of the cathedral is a statue of Gediminas’ iron wolf.

 On my fifth visit to Lithiuania, several years later, I stood in the rain on Lizdeika’s green hill and asked for the blessing of the ancestors, in the midst of a circle of Baltic dreamers who were eager to reclaim the old ways. Kernave means Wet Place, setting a perennial weather forecast in a country whose name means Rain Country. We had managed to perform a traditional Baltic fire ceremony that morning, despite the unremitting rain, and I had been impressed by how greedily the fire spirits swallowed offerings of Lithuanian beer, the heavy, dark beer that is like liquid bread. Now I was drumming for our circle, to open direct communication with the spirits of this land. My personal hope was to make contact with Lizdeika. I believed I had dreamed of him, before this trip, as a Baltic Merlin whose story needed to be told.
     As soon as I tapped the drum, the landscape opened, to my inner eye, as if a zipper has been pulled from the zenith to the muddy path at my feet. I saw a windswept figure above me, at the top of the hill. He was a man wearing a feathered robe, or a bird the size of a man. I sensed his fierce determination. I understood that I was required to earn the right of entry into his realm. I must start, now, by disclosing my shamanic connections, by showing him that I was his peer. This was not so hard.
     I found I had at my left shoulder a kinsman in his own feathered cloak. It was raven black. I recognized the druid from fourteen centuries ago who had often been my companion, in my time and in his own. On my right side was a wolf pack. It seemed to have traveled here with me. I had been privileged, in this country of the wolf, to have enlisted the protection and guidance of the wolf family before, because of my connection with the ancient Mohawk Mother of the Wolf Clan. This soon proved to be extremely important.
     We were given a private tour of the archaeological museum of Kernave later that day. Kernave is an active site, with ongoing excavations. The museum director, who participated in my workshop, responded cordially to my request that she should tell us about unsolved mysteries that we might be able to investigate as dream archaeologists. 
     We heard a singularly creepy ghost story involving a mutilated corpse. On the night local archaeologists excavated a grave at the edge of the ancient burial ground, strange things happened. They had dug up the remains of a woman who had been decapitated. Her head had been buried face down in the earth. Her hands and feet had also been cut off and transposed. The archaeologists speculated that she was a witch who had been dug up and mutilated in this way to prevent her from going around bothering the living. There was a second theory; that her body had been hacked up this way to turn her into a cemetery guardian, a protector of bodies and souls and grave goods. That night one of the archaeologists heard rushing winds outside her tent on site. She went out to see the energy form of a giant stallion reared up on its hind legs. All the animals around went wild, dogs howling, birds screaming. All the archaeologists rushed out. What was going on that night? What had they released? They covered up the body in its original site.
     After lunch, I suggested to our group that we might use objects we had seen in the museum, as well as any impressions we had picked up around Lizdeika’s hill, as portals for a journey to encounter the spirits of the land and recover essential history. One of our explorers chose as her portal the skull of a princess that had impressed all of us. The princess had been buried wearing a diadem with symbols of a mother giving birth and the Tree of Life. In her journey, our dream archaeologist traveled through one of the eye holes of the skull and then looked out, through the priestess’ eyes, into scenes of her life and her world. Another brave explorer used the skeleton of a horse that had been buried alive at the center of a circle of human graves; it was buried standing, its neck and legs were broken. Another of our trackers chose to investigate the mystery of the missing swords; only one sword (and this just the hilt and pommel) was in the museum. I gently discouraged tracking the phantom of the mutilated corpse.
    My own intention for this expedition was to go back to the scene at Lizdeika’s hill when I saw the landscape opening as if it had been unzipped. After I began the drumming, however, I was distracted by the tale of the mutilated body and our discussion of the missing swords. I traveled rapidly through many scenes of violence from the past. I saw a duke hurrying down wooden stairs and ladders to fight or flee under sudden attack. I saw raganas, wood witches, as ancient masters of psychic warfare, creating Baltic versions of the golem to menace and terrify enemies. It seemed that they had used bodies like the one in the cemetery, rather than clay, in this cause. Some may even have worked with Kabbalists in times when the survival of the Lithuanian Jews was imperiled.
     I saw warriors and/or their weapons — swords and spears — and/or figures of wood or amber representing them planted vertically in the earth with the idea that in need they would spring from the ground, fully armed, to fight invaders.
      Now I was back at the place of Lizdeika. He stared at me from pale blue eyes. The human features around the eyes kept changing, and I became aware that he has occupied many bodies. Then the shape around the constant pale blue eyes became the head of a wolf. He really is a wolf as well as a man.
    He began running like a wolf, pelting across the landscape. I ran after him, adopting a similar wolf form. Then he rose from the ground and became a dark eagle. I became a bird and flew after him. There were several more animal transformations. Then he became a grass snake and slipped through a crevice among the rocks. I became a snake and slid through after him.
     We were now in a different space, a kind of sanctuary between the worlds. I felt the presence of one greater than him, a female presence. It came to me that as a wolf, he is subject to the Alpha in his pack, who is the She Wolf, the Mother of the Clan. They have relations in other forms, on other planes. He is linked to Menulas, the Moon God; she to Saule, the Sun Goddess. They seemed to enjoy my own encounter with Moon Man and Sun Woman in Paris.      It came to me that Lizdeika’s main obligations were not as counselor to dukes or high priest of the recognized pagan line, but to these hidden powers. What happened to the Lizdeika of history, who advised Gediminas? He had wanted his body to be left for the bird, up on a tree on the hill where he was found as a baby. But it was necessary to dispose of his body faster, because enemies — and maybe witches — were coming who would desecrate it or (worse) use it for sorcery. So he was burned and the ashes were dropped in the river. However, his vital soul was preserved inside a soul catcher, an amber whose natural shape resembled that as a man. It is from this container that he was able to enter and use successive human (and animal) bodies.
     I met a Merlin of the Baltic, neither good nor bad, just so, and — like the Merlin of my Celtic ancestors — never confined to one time, ever shape-shifting, through the stories he weaves and the stories that are woven around him.

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

Photo: At the hill of Lizdeika, Kernave, May 2013. 

 

Freudian slips and others

I am leafing again through the book in which Freud gave the most complete account of the phenomenon known (after him) as the Freudian slip. First published in 1901 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's a collection of essays that was probably better-known and more widely read in Freud's lifetime than any of his other works.
    In my favorite local used bookstore, a shelf elf placed a copy of an elderly Macmillan edition, with A.A.Brill's translation, in my line of sight. The paper label on the spine had rubbed nearly away, like the label on a well-soaked bottle of wine, so I had to pull the book off the shelf to see what was facing me, which begins to sound like a Freudian joke in itself.

    The merits of Freud's study of slips of the tongue and memory lapses are threefold. First, he assigns meaning to incidents that many of us tend to overlook. Forgetting the name of a town where you once stayed, or giving the wrong name to someone you know perfectly well, isn't simply a memory lapse or passing confusion; it speaks of something in you and your life situation which merits close attention, because you can learn from it. Second, Freud does dreamwork with these incidents, applying the same principles of analysis to episodes in waking life as he applies to dream symbols. Third, his prime lab rat, first and last, is himself. Like Jung (and unlike lesser scientific minds that fail to realize that knowledge is state-specific) he knows that understanding begins with self-knowledge, and that the most important data on inner events (and their interplay with outer events) must be gathered from first-hand experience.

    We follow Freud down some interesting trails as he studies such phenomena as forgetting names and otherwise well-known phrases and word substitution. He recounts a chance encounter with a fellow-traveler on a train who begins to quote the famous line, in Latin, in which Queen Dido of Carthage issues a terrible curse against Aeneas, the hero who loved her and left her. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625). "Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger."
    In the days where a good education still required Latin, Freud's educated companion would be expected to get the quotation right. But he cannot recollect the harmless indefinite pronoun aliquis. By the end of a long conversation in which Freud guides his travel companion through the free association process he also applies to patients' dreams, they understand that there may be deep significance to the suppression of a seemingly harmless pronoun. In aliquis the speaker now recognizes the echo of "liquid" and "liquefaction" in the Latin word. This reminds him that he's alarmed that his girlfriend may have missed her period. He's scared that he is the "someone" who will be cursed if he abandons his girl and a baby he doesn't want.

    Now we come to the defect in Freud's approach to Freudian slips, which he called Fehlleistungen, which means "faulty actions" or "misperformances.". He wants to insist that word-amnesia and name substitution are related to "disturbing complexes" that prompt the psyche to seek to repress memories and information that may cause us pain. We hear of a man who simply cannot remember the name of a business partner who stole his girlfriend and married her; he just doesn't want to know. Freud can't remember the name of a town he knows well (Nervi) when treating a neurotic at a time when he himself is feeling nervous and may be heading for a migraine.

    While Freud's theory of repression may apply to some of his examples, there's both more and less going on with our slips and memory lapses than he allows for. Common sense tells us that memory gaps can be the result of all sorts of life factors, from fatigue to drug or alcohol abuse to migraine to information overload. Einstein once made people laugh because, asked for his phone number, he had to look it up in the book. He declared that he had so much on his mind that he didn't need to burden it by adding the need to remember things he could easily look up.

    I am generally pretty good with names, so when I call someone I know by a name that isn't their own I pay attention to what may be showing through my slip, In one of my workshops, I kept calling a man "Michael" though I was perfectly well aware that his name was "Don." Finally I asked, "Who's Michael?" Through tears, he explained that Michael had been his partner for many years; Michael had died but Don felt him close and was actually wearing his sweater that day.

     One of my rules for life navigation is: Notice what's showing through your slip. To which I will now add: And don't tag it a Freudian slip until you've explored what else may be going on. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, where you will find more on the game of noticing what's showing through a slip.

Photo: RM at Freud's last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens Hampstead

Walking the Dream of the World War II Pilot

 

One of the games I like to play with my journal is to open an old one to the same month and day in a previous year and see what was going on then and whether life is rhyming today.It seems an appropriate pastime at anniversaries, and as the year turns. I went back in my journals to the beginning of 2015 just now. Here is how I recorded the start of an ordinary day at home back then. Nothing big going on. There was the dream, though..

In my dream, I am in London in the time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and deeply stirred. My dream took me into the life of a Royal Air Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to spend much time together. They were with each other in my dream. 
     It seemed I was in his body, in his situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed in my time. I was grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be a member of my soul family in another time, and outside time. .
     When I was satisfied I was holding the essence of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with my dog, heading for the park.
      I was now taking the second step in my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.
     As I walked the dream, I was ready to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you. You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.
    Paying attention to things like this, on any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.
    That morning, while the dog sniffed a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse. Nothing unusual here, but those letters RN were very special to me, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I had the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. I felt that an unseen hand had patted me on the shoulder.
    I walked on with my dog into the big park. We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair. 
    When I returned to my house, I grabbed a full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might be missing certain details by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and added a few lines about the connection between this dream and my other dreams and “far memories” of a British pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my sighting of the RN’s license plate. This morning I did not record three sidewalk sightings. The RN was enough.
    I was now ready to play another game that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had books.
    I do my book-dipping with whatever book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.
    I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world. 
    But my dream was still with me, the dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle.  I thought of another line in Heraclius, about the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes of mortals and immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.
    I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition and gratitude and blessing.  I wrote a one-liner from this: 

I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.