When you rest your head Egyptian style

Lying on my back with my head propped on a second pillow, it is not hard to imagine that my head is supported by the crescent of an ancient weres, an ancient Egyptian headrest. The crescent is supported by a pedestal so my head is raised the height of a couple of pillows above a bed that rests on lion legs. I can see the paws.
    Instantly a scene forms before me an around me, suffused by wonderful soft blue light. I am lying at the edge of a huge pool. The water is aquamarine and luminescent. The pool is contained inside the hall of a temple or palace.
    Very consciously and carefully, I step out of the body lying on the bed. I am naked, strong and buff.  Beautiful women attendants greet me. My first priority, however, is to bathe in the pool. I enter the water and swim laps. I return to my body refreshed. I notice, unlike dreams in which we seem to live the events of weeks or months in a few minutes of tick-tock time, it took me the same time to swim lengths of the dream pool as it would have done in the physical world.

I wonder now whether the Egyptian headrest was designed with the aim of facilitating lucid dreaming, a certain mobility of consciousness between the worlds. Headrests of this kind are still in use in hot countries in African where they may serve to cool the user by lifting the head so that air can circulate freely underneath. In elite Egyptian houses, the headrest may also have served to protect elaborate ladies’ hairdos.
     A little research informs me that the Egyptian headrest was sometimes loaded with figures and designs– a carving of the dwarf warrior god Bes, or of the hippo-crocodile demigoddess Taweret, lion statuettes – as apotropaic defenses, to keep ghouls and ghosties away.
     Is it also possible that the headrest was meant to help facilitate awakening into a dream, including the dream of the afterlife? There are hints in some of the funerary texts. Headrests were buried with the dead and spells were assigned to them. Some of the spells in Coffin Texts, designed to help the deceased make a successful passage into the afterlife, make explicit reference to the headrest and compare it with the sun’s rising in the horizon. Coffin Text 232 reads: “A spell for the headrest. May your head be raised, may your brow be made to live, may you speak for your own body, may you be a god, may you always be a god” (R. O. Faulkner translation).
     In the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead spell 166 states is announced as a “spell for a headrest (to be put under the head of Osiris N.). Doves awake thee from sleep; they alert thee to the horizon. Raise thyself, [for] thou dost triumph over what was done against thee. Ptah has overthrown thy enemies. It has been commanded to act against him who acted against thee. Thou art Horus the son of Hathor, the [fiery] Cobra [of] the [fiery] Cobra group, to whom a head was given after it was cut off. Thy head cannot be taken from thee hereafter; thy head can never be taken from [thee].” (T. G. Allen translation).

     The hieroglyph for wrs (headrest) resembles the hieroglyph ws (awaken) and they may both be related to rswt (dream).

Hieroglyph for wrs, headrest

Egyptian Gates to the Afterlife: Flying to the Sky Goddess

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is full of spells for becoming a bird - a swallow, a falcon, a heron, or the benu bird the Greeks identified as the phoenix, the bird that is reborn from the ashes of its own funeral pyre. Sprouting wings was clearly one of the preferred Egyptian ways of entering the Otherworld and embarking on a happy afterlife. The ba soul is already winged; it is depicted in many inscriptions as a human-headed bird coming or going from the body of the soul traveler.

I come to you, O Nut.
I come to you, O Nut.
My wings have grown into those of a falcon.
My two plumes are those of a sacred falcon.
My ba-soul has brought me
and its magic words have equipped me.

- PYRAMID TEXT OF UNAS, Utterance 245

    In the Pyramid Text of Unas, the star traveler calls to the sky goddess that he is ascending to her on falcon wings, leaving the realm of Osiris below and behind. Nut, the great goddess , mother of Isis and Osiris, Set and Nephthys, is depicted as a naked woman or a heavenly cow whose body is filled with the starry sky. When the soul voyager calls to her, she gives him the following welcome:

May you split open a place for yourself
among the stars of the sky
for you are a star...
Look down upon Osiris
When he gives orders to the spirits,
you stand far above him
You are not among them
and you shall not be among them

    A true pharaoh ascended to the realm of the gods in such ways not only to rehearse for death, but to marry the worlds and return to the body with superabundant energy and insight. Initiates made the journey of ascent to enter the realm of the Akhet - the shining ones - and to be made "shining" (akh) in transformed energy bodies.
    The transformations recorded in the pyramid texts reflect a passage through several levels of reality, requiring movement beyond successive energy bodies and the putting-on of a celestial body. Like the shamanic journeyers who find that they are required to give up human or animal form to transcend the astral plane, the royal traveler becomes lightning in the Unas text, "a blinding light...a flame moving before the wind to the end of the sky and the end of the earth."

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

The waters of dreams

In drugstore dream dictionaries we are told that water, as a dream symbol, is about emotions. Well, ye-es, it maybe, but what you find in your dream waters and what I find may be very different things. 

     As with any dream, a dream of water may be symbolic, literal, or an experience of a separate reality. I have dreamed, over decades now, of being able to travel to the sea floor without any breathing problems and of encountering a Mother of the Deep and various other characters who seem to embody the elemental powers of the ocean. I have dreamed of healing in sacred pools, and delight in mermaid coves, and the kind of inundation that brings fresh new growth bursting into the world.

     I have also noticed that some of our dreams of water may be both literal and symbolic. We dream of a tsunami or a hurricane - and that event turns out to be both a natural event that is played out in the world and a terrific emotional storm that blows up in our personal lives. 

     How water moves or fails to move in dreams is a very important source of guidance to me on the state of my body and my creative energy. Clogged pipes and logjams - in physical reality as well as in night dreams - alert me to the need to do some clearing and free up energy that needs to be in flow. 

     Water transforms, and it goes through its own transformations, from vapor to liquid to solid and back through the sequence. We come from the water, and our bodies are mostly composed of seawater. Our dreams may open us to the teachings of water: to flow rather than to push, to stream round an obstacle rather than charge it head on.
     The waters of dreams offer entry into a different element, sometimes a different universe. In the deep, we may receive deep healing or encounter sacred powers.

     In one of my workshops, a scientist from Virginia shared a wonderful dream in which he plunges deep into the ocean and then up into space, doing the butterfly stroke, repeating the motions until he is circling the planet. We didn't analyze this dream. We plunged into it and enjoyed its energy. With the dreamer's permission and the aid of shamanic drumming, our whole circle accompanied him back into his dream in a marvelous adventure in group lucid dreaming. Some of us met creatures of the deep beyond those chronicled in National Geographic, with mutual respect. Some joined dolphin pods. I enjoyed skimming the Pacific, in waters around my native Australia. 

     When I think of water, and the need for flow in any satisfying and creative life, I remember my favorite statement in the Negative Confessions that were made in the Halls of Osiris in an ancient Egyptian passage to the afterlife. In the presence of grim assessors, the traveling soul is required to swear that he or she has not committed various crimes and immoral acts. This is the affirmation I love best, as recorded in the so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead, whose literal title is The Book of Coming Forth by Day:

I have not obstructed water when it should flow.

I want to be able to say that on any day.

When the Devourer stands guard over the W.C.

London

In our dreams, a visit to the rest room may be about more than the ordinary bodily functions. In the British Museum, during my recent visit to a splendid exhibition devoted to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I found that some inspired designer had chosen a fearsome mythic gatekeeper for the descent to the loos.

There, at the head of the long, turning flights of steps next to the exhibition space, was a hybrid monster that seemed to combine features of the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the lion.

This entity appears again and again in ancient Egyptian paintings of the scene of afterlife judgment in which the heart is weighed against the feather of Truth. If the heart is found to be burdened by guilt and darkness, it is tossed to the monster, whose name - Ammit - is translated as Devourer. The unhappy soul is now denied passage to the desirable afterlife of the Field of Reeds, and must wander restless and homeless.

In our bathroom dreams, we often learn about what we need to dump, not only from our bowels but from our lives. When the Devourer of the Heart stands guardian over the way to the W.C., the mind may be drawn to focus on what needs to be released in order to pass the test of the Weighing of the Heart.

Hoping for Ma'at

London

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall."

- Ahdat Soueif, The Map of Love

-

Back to the British Museum last night for a public "conversation" with a pair of contemporary novelists, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love) and the Sudanese-British Jamal Mahjoub (Travelling with Djinns). Their books explore travel and identity and liminal spaces, and are said to contain echoes of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, described by the Director of the British Museum, in his introduction, as "the oldest surviving travel literature".

Ahdaf Soueif had some interesting comments about how, after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, the idea of Ma'at (truth, justice, fairness) was revived and "re-articulated" in Egypt. This produced a passionate statement of the need for social justice in an early Middle Kingdom text known as the Eloquent Peasant, which has come down to us intact because it was copied and re-copied over many centuries. Ma'at was personified as a goddess wearing the feather against which the heart of the deceased is weighed in athe Hall of Truth; if the heart, burdened by guilt and darkness, drags down its side of the scale, the soul is consigned to a hybrid monster known as the Devourer.

Out of the wreckage of an ancient Egyptain regime came the luminous description of the Negative Confession, in which the deceased person, in the presence of 42 assessor gods, must swear that he has not committed a long list of crimes or infractions, not only of the order of "I have not killed" but extending to "I have not caused tears" and "I have not obstructed water when it should flow". While it's clear from the surviving texts that plenty of Egyptians approaching the afterlife hoped to get around some of these provisions by loopholes, deals and magical spells, a vision of a last judgment "based on behavior, not belief" (as Ahdaf noted) has a modern and very progressive ring.

Naturally much of the discussion last night focused on the current state of affairs in Egypt and the less-publicized coming partition of Sudan. The novelists, correctly, did not purport to be social prophets. Ahdaf Soueif, who has been journaling her days and nights with the protesters in Tahrir Square, said of the Mubarak regime, "They've been messing with the soul of the country" and held out the hope of a coming order - informed by openness, diversity and the characteritic Egyptian sense of humor - where Ma'at will reign.

Freud among the breathing idols

London

The exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the British Museum is the most exciting Egyptian exhibit I've seen. A portal image just inside the doors is worth the price of entry: a statuette of the ka-soul of Senoru, master of horse, clasping his ba-soul, depicted as a human-headed bird, to his heart.

The exhibition was crowded (Egypt is the perennial favorite of museum-goers) but there was good flow control. Kids were able to push their programs into slots and receive an Egyptian spell in return - for example, for changing into a bird, a snake or a crocodile.

Figures from 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, sculpted to hold an aspect of the soul, or a spirit that would "answer" for it (shabti) in the afterlife, or to guard a tomb, seemed strangely alive. I was reminded that the Greeks, who were fascinated by Egyptian statue magic, described such figures as "breathing idols".

It was strange to go from this to the Freud Museum, in the modest brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead where he lived for the last year of his life. It is filled with literally thousands of statuettes of gods and other supernaturals, mostly Egyptian, that Freud collected in Vienna. Some fifty are stationed like a battalion of soldiers on his desk. He placed others, like palace guard, between himself and patrients. He claimed to know all of them intimately and would choose different ones to stroke or consult - with his focused gaze - during sessions with patients.

I had known that Freud was a collector of antiquities, but the vastness of this collection is stunning. He compared his practice of psychoanalysis to archeology, in the sense of digging things up from buried levels of consciousness, and it seems that archeology was his favorite area of reading.

Freud, the doubter of the soul and its survival of physical death, who denied that life has any ultimate meaning, surrounded himself with images of ancient gods and spirits. He was surely aware that the Egyptian figures he collected were ritually ensouled, and thus believed to hold a part of the spirit of the dead, or something of the power of a god or psychic guardian.

In the British Museum exhibit was a beautifully carved torso of a dead woman, used as a kind of interworld telephone. A letter addressed to the funerary bust by a survivor began:

How are you?
Is the West [region of the departed] being good to you?
Look, I am one you loved.

May I see you fighting for me in a dream?

Did Freud's "breathing images" come alive in his dreams? My bet is that they did - and also that it is rather unlikely that he left records of those encounters, which would have run so contrary to his rather narrow doctrine of what goes on in dreams.

He did speak of how his art collection illuminated his understanding of symbols and colored his theories about neuroses. No surprise to find a picture of Oedipus with the sphinx on his wall. I see that a fellow-Australian, Janine Burke, has written a study of Freud's collection titled The Gods of Freud published, so far as I can ascertain, only in Australia. Naturally (since bibliophilia is an incurable condition for some of us) I have now ordered it from Oz.