Thursday, February 13, 2025

Real and Really Real

 


There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real. 

Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say that the dream world is “really real”.

If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human. 

You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,  you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet to be seen down there.



Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Wyrd and weirder

 



Read the Eddas (literally the “great-grandmothers”) and the Icelandic sagas with care, and you will find not only Viking battle stories, but some profound insights into the human condition and the interconnectedness of things.

The key word here is Wyrd, from which “weird” derives. Wyrd is often translated as “fate” or “destiny” but it is related to weohrtan, which means “to become”. Wyrd is best understood as a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds. 

Events that may appear to be separate in time or space are connected by threads that are fine, supple and strong. Any movement in any part of the web may be felt anywhere else. Omens point to patterns, they are not just about something that is going to happen in the future. If you know the ways of Wyrd, you use them to read the patterns of connection. If you are a master of these things, you may be able to pull on the threads to change the patterns.

Wyrd is beyond the gods. The web precedes gods and men and lives after them. We call it a pattern, but like the Tao, as it plays through the Book of Changes, it is in constant motion. A lively guide to these matters is Brian Bates’ “documentary novel” The Way of Wyrd, where an Anglo-Saxon sorcerer instructs that “Wyrd itself is constant change, yet because it is created at every moment it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool. All we can see are the ripples dancing on top of the water.” [1] Yet by studying the ripples you can detect what is moving at the bottom of the water, or far away across its expanse. 

Because we are part of Wyrd, we can never see the whole. So we look for ways to see enough to help us navigate. Carving and casting runes is a way. So are dreams, and those special moments when you awaken to the workings of the deeper pattern. “Man is touched by wyrd when he becomes involved in matters whose nature and origins extend beyond existence on earth,” Germanic scholar Paul Bauschatz explains. “There are times…when apparently ordinary activities acquire special significance, and it seems likely that at these times daily life is touched and colored with elements beyond our limited perceptions.” [2] There is room to re-weave the threads of Wyrd. 

Jenny Blain, who has participated in the revival of ancient Norse seiðr, or shamanic rituals, observes that “this concept of Wyrd is one that is being developed within the community. Though often translated as 'fate' and sometimes equated to 'karma', it has a more dynamic sense. People are active agents in the creation of their own personal wyrd, or ørlög. Their deeds and vows, strands of ørlög, become part of the fabric of Wyrd.” Those who work the seiðr  rituals feel they are “'reading' Wyrd, seeing along the threads of the fabric to possible outcomes. Others within the community consider that seiðr in the past involved active interception of the fabric, 'tugging' at the threads,"[3] 

In English, the word “weird” derives from Wyrd. It declined from common usage in England until Shakespeare revived it, with a sinister twist, with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. It retained some of its original meaning a little longer in Scotland, where if you called someone “weirdless” you were saying that he was unlucky. 

In more recent times, to call something “weird” is to say that it is strange, uncanny, hard to explain and maybe spooky. A “weirdo” is someone who is very strange. Yet thanks to a campaign that started in Austin, Texas, “weird” has been making a comeback. Austin is the first North American city to sprout a poster campaign to keep the city weird. Keep Austin Weird. Other cities followed suit.

One of my favorite books on Northern European traditions is The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner, who embarked on a quest to reclaim the mythic wisdom of his ancestors from the Nazi curse. He was drawn to Odin, not as a war god but as the poet-shaman wandering between the worlds, facilitating direct and personal revelation. In the course of his quest, he writes, “Often I felt as though I was seized, or inspired. I would think of Odin and get insights or answers to my questions, including questions about the meanings of certain myths. Or I would suddenly find pertinent myths that I had not known before. Strange though it may sound, I would have to say that much of what I am relating in this book has been directly given to me by Odin.” [4]    

I have had similar experiences since Tolkien told me in a dream, many years ago, “You must study Scandinavian mythology.” I was at first reluctant to follow that advice, partly because of the long shadow of the Nazi attempt to hijack the gods and symbols of the North.  As I began to walk this ancestral path (I have Scandinavian blood on both sides of my family) in my reading and travel and in my dreams, I was rewarded by special moments of encounter and discovery that left me in no doubt that forces beyond the veil of the world were in play. During a trip to Europe, I had a personal vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from which I wrote a poem.

Since then I have had spontaneous encounters, usually in the fertile space between sleep and awake, with Odin and Freiyja, with Idunn and Loki, and with a powerful völva, or seeress, of the old ways.

The ancestors are calling, calling. And they can use the worldwide web as well as the web of the worlds. It is amusing to note that “wired” is an anagram for “weird”. A woman named Kim shared the following story. “Sprit likes the wires. The Web, in particular. The deities who work fate, don’t they spin and snip threads? My Mom's picture popped up on a dating app my ex-husband is on. He sent a screen shot. I'd just asked my Mom that morning for a sign that she was there. He had been on that app over a year, and he showed me how faces appeared as you scrolled through and how you could indicate interest or not. My Mom was never on a dating site, and certainly wouldn't be suitable to his selected age range. I think that via the Web, we can have communication with the Other Side.”

 

References

 1. Brian Bates The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (London: Century, 1987) 75

2. Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 28

3.   3. Jenny Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in Northern European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002), 15

      4. Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 10

 


Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing withSigns, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Oh Baby! Don't You Love to Fly in Your Dreams?




Nothing beats the sensation of flying on your own in dreams. Frequent fliers have their preferred styles. Some fly with their arms out in front of them, Superman style. Some swim through the air, some pedal. Some sprout wings, or borrow the wings of a bird, or become a bird. Some perform aerial acrobatics. Some are content to drift and gaze and ride a thermal.

It's fun to whizz around the multiverse as a point of light or a disembodied thought form, but I relish the carnal, corporeal quality of many of my flying dreams. In the big OBABE (out-of-the-body-into-another-body) experience [*] that brought me to an ancient indigenous arendiwanen ("woman of power") I knew the joy of catching the right wind and the mild discomfort of brushing the dried-up needles of an old blue spruce as I flew on the wings of a red-tailed hawk tailored to my size.

If I am not getting around in the air on my own, the next best thing is to catch a ride in a seaplane. This sets the mood for Indiana Jones type adventures, though I was flying in seaplanes in my dreams long before those movies were dreamed up. Sometimes I have a flight companion: a wise professor who used to look old but now appears to be younger than me. He is excellent company and isn't scared to go where medieval cartographers cautioned. "Here Be Dragons".

This matter of dream flight raises so many interesting questions. Try any of these as conversation starters. Do you fly in your dreams? Do you enjoy it? What is your preferred style? What is your takeoff procedure? Are you aware you are traveling outside your physical body? What kind of a body are you in now?




[*] Pronounced "Oh Baby". Yes, I made this up.


Trainer Bikes for Dream Fliers

There are flight schools for oneironauts. You can sign up for some that I lead on this side of consensus reality, but of course you won't stay there for long. You must dream your way to a real school of this kind. I train dream pilots and lead flight missions, on the far side of consensus reality, several nights a week, and what happens in the dream world sometimes stays there.
     I enjoy comparing what goes on in other flight schools. Every shamanic lineage and Mystery order has created one. Some have been operating for many centuries.

During one of my dream rambles, I discovered a flight school with period French ambience and interesting training equipment. Here is my journal report.




I am walking on the beach. The colors are the wonderfully vivid hues of poster paints. The sea is French blue, with fluffy little whitecaps. The sand is oriole-yellow. There is a distinctly French Impressionist quality to the whole scene, so much so that I feel that if I turn around quickly, I might catch a glimpse of the artist who has just painted it - and maybe the scene will end at the edge of his canvas. Yet the scene is entirely alive.
    I walk with a male companion, studying the scene. He is wearing a frock coat and a top hat, has a neatly trimmed black beard, and is swinging a walking stick. I notice that everyone on the beach, like my companion, is dressed in the clothes of another era. The women wear full bathing costumes, and the men wear sleeveless tops with their bathing trunks. There is something more remarkable. Nearly everyone has a cycle. More sedate couples ride bicycles - including at least one tandem bike, built of two - along the esplanade. Others are riding on the sand, or through the shallows of the water. More daring cyclists are riding in mid-air, ten feet off the ground.
    While many of the bicycles are intact, some are just the vestiges. One lady sits on a padded seat, gripping handlebars and pedaling away, but below her the bike has vanished - no frame and no wheels, A beaming boy is riding high into the air, riding a bike that is invisible except for the handlebars. A dashing young man with hair like a raven's wing and an artist's silk scarf billowing from his neck is showing off, doing aerial acrobatics, on a bike that has completely vanished, while he has his fists clenched as if gripping the handlebars and his legs are cycling away.
      My companion explains to me that this is a school for dream fliers. "All the bicycles you see are training bikes. As dreamers become conscious that they are dreaming and grow their understanding of what is possible here, the machines become less and less necessary. The bicycles fade and finally disappear." I follow his upward glance and see some high-flyers among cotton-wool clouds who move through the air like swimmers, or rocket-men. [
September 22, 2008]




When I turned up this report many years later, I decided to return to the scene of the flight school with trainer bikes and see what is going on now. I have developed a method for revisiting a dream whose simple name is dream reentry. You can do this right after you awaken from a dream, which may be the best time, because the scene is fresh and so are your feelings around it. You can also do it years or decades later if the dream still has real energy for you. I lay on my back, pulled the memory of the school on the beach up on my mental screen, and willed myself back inside. My first strong impressions were kinesthetic. I foud myself gripping the handles of a bike. I did not need the handlebar to fly. However, I thought it would be fun to experience what others did with a prop like this. As I tightened my grip, I was off - whizzing far from the scene of the flight instructor and his cadets on the beach. I was speeding ten or twenty feet above golden fields of grain, wind in my hair. I was delighted to see I now had a companion, a black Shepherd-Labrador mutt pacing me on the farm road below, reveling in his run. I abandoned any thoughts of a further agenda, giving myself to the sheer pleasure of flight in the company of a dear friend. [December 29, 2021]

I wonder whether the Marquis of Dreams, Léon d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, found the flight school on the beach. It feels like they belong to the same period and the same culture. The marquis was the first to use the term "lucid dream" (rêve lucide) in his book Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques, first published anonymously in 1867. His "practical obseravtions" did not include guidance on dream flight or astral travel. Howver,his book includes a memorable page from his journal in which he dreams that he leaves his body as if dead. He finds himself with a “savage" tribe, engaged in their battles.  He decides to go the Moon, and is there quick as thought. He describes a cratered landscape that is quite real to him. He decides to go back to earth. As he descends into his chamber, he sees his body lying in the bed before he gets back inside it.
The marquis was a sinophile and in his essays on Chinese, literature and his selection of Chinese poetry and fiction for translation, his imagination must surely have been fired up by the frequent description of dreams as excursions by the aerial hun soul and "roaming with immortals". In Poésies de l'époque des Thang he writes that "sometimes it is the spirit of a sleeping man who takes advantage of the body's sleep to travel alone through space, crossing distances with the speed of thought."

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

Oracles Full of Omphê

 


There's oomph and then there's omphê. In ancient Greek, omphê [ὀμφή] is the divine voice. It may speak through an inspired priestess, or through a special tree, or the cry of birds, or a lightning storm. Before you can hear it, you may feel your world shaking.

Philostratus wrote of Dodona, the place of the great oak oracle of Zeus and Dione, "this place is full of omphê."  It is un univers sonore, Stella Georgoudi takes up the chorus. [1]

The divine voice is different from the human voice though it may use human vocal chords. Homer's gods might seem to feel and behave like humans, especially in their domestic dramas, but they have powers that mortals cannot understand: amazing speed and strength; an endless capacity to shapeshift or disguise themselves; invisibility. Then there is the voice thing. The voice of a god can be thunder or leaping fire or the roar of ocean or a graveyard hiss that stills the breath. "Whereas gods have the power to imitate the voices of mortals, no mortal without divine assistance can speak with the voice of a god: a mortal voice (Homer uses the term audê) is different from omphê or ossa, a divine voice. Gods not only have different and remarkable powers of voice production, they also have (or once had) their own language." [2]

Omphê is the voice of the Pythia when she speaks for Apollo. In the Argonautica it is also the voice of a talkative crow who speaks to the seer Mopsos [Apollonius of Rhodes III 927-939]. Even at Delphi, famous for prophecies delievred in poetic speech, omphê could be heard in the voices of birds, especially crows and herons and wrens. [Plutarch, Pythia].

In the Odyssey,the hero visits Dodona to ask the oak whether he should go home or remain in hiding. Zeus speaks to him from the oak. It is not specified whether the divine voice was heard through the rustling of leaves or the creaking of bark or the birds among the branches. One way or another, the will of Zeus was audible from the oak.

In Ovid, an oak at Aegina sprung from an acorn from Dodona speaks when it starts to tremble and its branches shake without wind. [Metamorphoses VII 629-630]

Athena, the daughter of Zeus who sprang fully-armed from his head, carved an oak bough from Dodona into the prow of the Argo, endowing Jason’s ship with prophetic power in the perilous voyage for the Golden Fleece.

Sophocles calls the oracle oak poluglossos: polyglot, many-tongued, many-voiced. To hear it can be like hearing a crowd. The voices may rise and swirl in any language, and of course in the language of the birds. Wasn't the oracle founded by three black doves who flew here from Egypt?

The Hesiodic Catalogues speak of three doves who lived in the oak tree. They may correspond to three female shaman-seers known as the Black Doves. The far-seers at Dodona prophesied in a shamanic ecstasy, and “afterwards they do not know anything about what they have said.” [3] Herodotus called them the Black Doves, Peleia Mêlaina. [Herodotus II.55]

The oracle at Dodona was older than the Olympians, always dedicated to the Goddess as well as the God. In its heyday, it was full of noises at the trembling edge of omphê. There were the many voices of the variable winds in the leaves, the rush or babble of nearby streams, the chanting of barefoot priests sworn to live close to Earth Mother, the prophetic speech of the black doves advising clients. In later times there was also the  clash and clang of bronze cauldrons suspended from the trees. They sounded like gongs when the winds pushed them together. 

References

1. Stella Georgoudi, “Des sons, des signes et des paroles : la divination à l’oeuvre dans l’oracle de Dodone”in Stella Georgoudi et al (eds) La raison des signes. (Leiden: Brill, 2012). P.71

  • 2. Elizabeth Minchin, "The words of gods: Divine discourse in Homer's Iliad" in Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011)  pp.17-35.

  • 3. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. trans. John Raffan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p.114

    Photo: Remains of the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona in Epirus

       


      Wednesday, February 5, 2025

      If you can't remember your dreams




       "I can't remember my dreams."

      1. Ask your cat to share a dream.
      2. Be kind to wisps. You may have a tiny something from a dream if you don't close the door right away.
      3. Write in your journal every day, whether or not you have a dream to report.
      4. Wake up to the fact that you don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams- through signs, symbols and synchronicity - if you pay attention.
      5. Try to assure the beautiful bright dreamer in you that you are safe and you are fun. She may have been in hiding for a long time.
      6. Find friends with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in a fast, fun way that leads to action to embody creative and healing energy from another world in ordinary life. Make dreamwork socially rewarding, and you have a strong incentive to bring a new story to the table every day.
      7. .Learn the Lightning Dreamwork process. Accept no substitutes!

      Yeats on the Daimon and the Mingling of Minds

       


      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.
       According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times and other beings. - 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 the larger self 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 detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose. The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

      There is a passage in Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae (“The Friendly Silence of the Moon”) that may explain how we can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times or other dimensions. It should be understood that when Yeats refers (in the first line) to "fellow-scholars" he is not thinking about people of his own time, but minds that are working and reaching out from beyond time and space: 

      I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who made some discovery. Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put it together so ingeniously?...The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose. 

      – W.B.Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) pp. 345-6.

       

       Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss. From a vision.

      Saturday, February 1, 2025

      May Brigid's blessings be with you






      Blessings to you on the day of the High One, the Exalted One. That is the meaning of Brig, from which the name Brigid (also Brigit, Brighid, Brigantia of England and Brigindo of eastern Gaul) derives. The church made the goddess a saint, one of the most beloved saints of Ireland, with various biographies, the best of which is recollected in Kildare, where the flame of Brigid burned constantly until Henry VIII, and burns again today. She is a power of the land, and of the deeper world, that the church and the people can agree on. In Ireland and in Scotland, you feel her presence in stones and trees, in high places and in deep wells.
      In the stories told at Kildare, the woman Brigid is born at sunrise, as her mother stands straddling a threshold, one foot out and one foot in. When Brigid’s head comes out, the sun’s rays crown her with flame. We can see why she is the patron of people who open doors between the worlds – of shamans, seers and poets – and of all who work with fire, in the peat, in the forge, in the cauldron of imbas, the fire of inspiration.
      Marija Gimbutas wrote of her (in The Living Goddesses): “Brigid is an Old European goddess consigned to the guise of a Christian saint. Remove the guise and you will see the mistress of nature, an incarnation of cosmic life-giving energy, the owner of life water in wells and springs, the bestower of human, animal and plant life.” She is “Mary of the Gael”, and she is the Triple Goddess and Robert Graves’ Three-fold Muse. She is patron of poetry, healing and smithcraft. In Scotland she is Bride, and the White Swan and the Bride of the White Hills. In the Hebrides she is the protector of childbirth.
      Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats’s friend, described Brigid in Gods and Fighting Men as “a woman of poetry, and poets worshiped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith’s work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night.” We are now entering the prime time of this High One, when nature awakens around February 1.
      She may appear as a snake from beneath the earth, even in Ireland, the country without snakes:
      This is the day of Bride the Queen will come from the mound
      This is the time of Brigid’s feast of Imbolc which coincides with the lactation of the ewes and the first signs of spring. You know the lambs are coming soon. You see snowdrops pressing up from the hard earth, perhaps through its white mantle. You offer the gifts of the goddess to the goddess: you pour milk on the ground, you bake and leave out special cakes. To she who spins and weaves life itself, you offer woven fabrics or offer a cloth – a handkerchief, a scarf, a pillowcase – to be blessed as it rests on the earth overnight. To this bringer of fire, you light a candle and offer your heart’s flame.
      In the old country, in the old way, young girls carry her images – straw dolls or brideogs – in procession from house to house, and the goddess is welcomed and decked with finery. The dolls are laid on in “bride beds”, with a staff or wand of power resting beside them. At Imbolc, as on other days, you may raise the High One’s energy with poetic speech. Best to do this by a stream or a spring, or (if you know one) a sacred well. She does have a fine love of poets and those who bring fresh words into the world.
      There is a legend that, in one of her womanly forms, Brigid married the great poet Senchan Torpeist,  foremost among the learned fili (bards) of Ireland. It was this same Senchan, it is said, who recovered the great poem known as the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) when it was feared lost forever, by raising the shade of the druid poet Fergus to recite all of the verses.
      Among the bevy of Celtic blessings in the great repository know as the Carmina Gadelica, collected by Alexander Carmichael in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland around 1900, some of the sweetest call on Brigid. In “Womanhood of Brigit” (#263 in the Carmina Gadelica)
      Brigit of the mantles
      Brigit of the peat-heap
      Brigit of the twining hair
      Brigit of the augury.
      Brigit of the white feet
      Brigit of calmness
      Brigit of the white hands
      Brigit of the kine.
      Many kinds of protection are then asked of Brigid – safety from death or injury or mishap in many forms. Next comes a verse that makes it plain that Brigid is regarded, among all else, as a guardian of sleep and dreams:
      Nightmare shall not lie on me
      Black-sleep shall not lie on me
      Spell-sleep shall not lie on me
      Luaths-luis shall not lie on me.
      I need someone more learned in Scots Gaelic than myself to translate Luaths-luis. Its literal meaning seems to be something like “fast-moving lice” for which our modern phrase might be “creepy-crawlies.” In the “Blessing of Brigit” (numbered #264 in the Carmina Gadelica) we have words that might please the Lady on her feast day, or any day:
      I am under the shielding
      Of good Brigit each day;
      I am under the shielding
      Of good Brigit each night.
      Brigit is my comrade woman,
      Brigit is my maker of song,
      Brigit is my helping woman
      My choicest of women, my guide
      Brigid’s Day is also a fine time for courting, and a time to dream, and seek guidance from dreams.

      Brigid's Flame

      I dreamed this poem at Imbolc in 2020




      May the radiance of her blue mantle
      surround you and protect you
      May you burn with her fires:
      fire of seership,
      fire of craft,
      fire of inspiration,
      fire of healing,
      fire of transformation
      fire of heart.
      May you always stand ready
      to wrest the killing irons
      from evildoers and oppressors
      and to take up the Sword of Light
      in defense of the weak and the just
      May you always be a lover of poets
      and commit poetry every day.