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. 

 

Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see. She gave me words in Old Lithuanian that Lithuanians in my workshop at Nida, on the spit of land in the Baltic Sea called Nieringa, were able to translate with some difficulty.

On my second visit to Lithuania, I dreamed again of the People of Amber. Here is the report I wrote in my journal at the tme:

October 6. 2009. Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a tractor beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". 

As I surfaced from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shone bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blew above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lay back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic lands where I was traveling.
    I was staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. After attending my workshop in Vilnius, she invited me here to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She had burned amber in a ritual the evening before my dream. In the morning, after hearing the dream, she continued my instruction. She demonstrated how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she showed me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talked about the significant of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

My dreams of the People of Amber offer light in more than one landscape. I have invited groups near and far to enter that amber space of sanctuary and healing.One of those groiups met with me in a forest of dark green pines and silver birches at Kurzeme on the Bay of Riga in neighboring Latvia . Fueld by shamanic drumming, we journeyed tigether therough the dark woods of histiry and personal struggle into the amber light.In Riga, I found the egg-shaped amber in the photo. It fitted my palm, and my dream.

I recount furher adventures in Lithuania, including an encounter with a Merlin of the Baltic and dream archaeology at a working site in Kernave, in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

Dreaming with the People of Amber

Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a traction beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber the size of a spaceship, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

As I surface from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shines bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blows above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lie back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic country where I am traveling.
    I am staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija district in Lithuania. She invited me to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She made the invitation after she heard me speak words of ancient Lithuanian after a shamanic journey I led at a workshop she attended in Vilnius. During that journey, I met a  priestess of Žemyna, the Earth goddess of Lithuania, who brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, a smaller version of the space I was in last night. It glowed with golden light. The priestess instructed me that I could use a pocket size version of the amber egg as a place to see.
    The wood witch burned amber in a ritual in her house the night before my new dream of the Amber People. In the morning, after hearing my dream, she continues my instruction. She demonstrates how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she shows me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talk about the significance of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

From the Journal of a Dream Archaeologist  2009

The lost books of the ancient Balts

I have been thinking about how we recover vital history that may have been suppressed or simply lost. I lead adventures in dream archaeology in which we combine shamanic journeying, dream clues, and careful scholarship to find missing bones and make them live. The great Lithuanian artist and book illustrator Arvydas Každailis did this for ancient Baltic peoples, including the original Prussians, and their deities with his etchings.Here I recall my visit to his home in Vilnius, where we shared our dreams.

Vilnius, Lithuania, March 2010

Winter still has the Baltic in its grip, and my head is lowered against wind and snow flurries as I navigate the icy sidewalks of the Old Town in search of the small street where Arvydas Každailis has his studio. Two unlit courtyards and five flights of mostly darkened stairs bring me to the cheerful room at the top, crowded with the artist's work, the tools of his etching craft, and ancient statues and artifacts. 

     The artist welcomes me with tea and local brandy, his eyes glinting merrily behind half-moon glasses. Nearing 70, the artist looks like a master craftsman of another era in his suspenders, cardigan and tie. "I know Russian well," he tells me as he accepts a copy of the new Russian edition of Conscious Dreaming. "Thanks to the Soviets who forced me to make guns." Prior to 1990, when Lithuania was the first of the captive republics of the USSR to claim independence, Lithuanian boys were drafted into the Red Army.-

     Leafing through Conscious Dreaming, Každailis recalls dreams that made him grab the pencil and paper he kept by his bed and start drawing immediately on waking. He shows me reproductions of a couple of works from 1967 that were directly dream-inspired. "Old House" shows a multi-layered interior dreamscape of improbable angles and strange corridors; you sense that a deliciously creepy encounter might take place along any one of them. "Beast" is an inchoate, nightmare animal.

     I have come to talk to Každailis to talk of collective dreams of the Baltic peoples, those that were crushed or interrupted by a brutal history that he has been helping, through the power of his artistic vision, to requicken. Walk in some of Lithuania's depleted forests and you will come upon whole groves of horrible carved figures with evil, twisted features that purport to be gods and nature spirits and raganas (witches). These may be products of the deformation of the imagination by those in the Church or the Communist Party who tried to demonize or dismiss the spiritual world of Old Europe. Certainly, they are unlikely to represent the imaginal truths of the old ways.-

    By contrast, Každailis gives us images of the old Baltic tribes and their gods and rituals that look like pages from the lost books of these peoples. He gives us Žemyna , the great Earth goddess of Lithuania, as an immense mothering figure who holds a whole communal banquet within her embrace. He gives us a stag whose great antlers, feathered by birds, form a nine-branched candelabra rising to draw down the light of Heaven. He gives us the goddess Medeina as a warrior armed with a bow and a giant bear at her back. He gives us ducks that fly as messengers between humans and the Upper World.

    In his illustrations for Peter of Dusburg's Chronicles of Prussia, Kazdailis offers a vision of the vanquished as a vital corrective to this medieval apologia for the destruction of the Prussians and neighboring tribes by the Teutonic Knights. The Prussians were a proud Baltic tribe before their name, as well as their land, was stolen by the Germans. Každailis shows simple village festivals, harvests and weddings, and ancient priest-kings and warrior chiefs in days of thunder. Here is Diwans, nicknamed "Lokys" (Big Bear), the fighting chief of the Barta (a Baltic people whose very name has all but disappeared) with helmet and mace; and here he is as a desperate standing bear with an arrow through his neck.
    Here is Kriveis Krivaitis, a priest whose power was as great among Balts (said John of Duisberg) as that of a pope, gripping dual symbols of temporal and spiritual power as he passes judgment on a criminal who has violated the laws of gods and men. No cute stuff here; the convicted prisoner, trussed in ropes along the whole length of his body, will be buried alive in a deep hole. Down inside the Earth, we see the image of a beast of evil confined in a cage of ropes whose patterns suggest interweaving Mobius rings.-

    The artist and I talk of callings - how dreams and synchronicity can call a creative mind to a path of connections with traditions that were previously lost or unknown. Kazdailis recalls that when he was three and four, he spoke a coherent language that no one could recognize or interpret, though he was completely at home within it. Songs in the old Prussian language, revived by a friend of Každailis who has taken the name of the ancient priest, Kriveis Krivaitis, gust through the studio, evoking the blossoming gifts of Earth and the hammer of thunder around the oak of Perkunas, who speaks in storm and lightning.

Graphic:  Arvydas Každailis, "Perkūne, dievaiti" (Perkunas God of Thunder), etching to illustrate Prūsijos žemės kronika  (Lithuanian edition of the Chronicon terrae Prussiae) 2003.

The need for dream archaeology

Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Old Europe and its Goddess traditions, declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess, her chef d'oeuvre:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth." 

The new art and science of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed.  I invented the term "dream archaeology".  It is the study of first and essential (arche) things with the aid of dreamwork and techniques of shamanic lucid dreaming. It is a discipline that enables us to access the living past, to enter into direct communication with the keepers of ancestral wisdom and heal the collective and cultural soul loss that is a feature of our age. 

The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective. 

We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us in dreams. As dream archaeologists, we learn to work with such dreams, both through focused research and by learning the technique of dream reentry, which means making a shamanic journey through the doorway of a remembered dream to harvest more information, to deepen communication with the ancestors, and to travel beyond the maps. 

When we are already engaged in a line of research, we draw on the skills of shamanic lucid dreaming, as well as spontaneous gifts of the night, to find what cannot be located in ordinary ways, but can often be confirmed by subsequent dream-directed research. We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. 

After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”. She describes this encounter in an essay in From the Realm of the Ancestors, a magnificent Festchrift in honor of Marija that she edited. 

I have been privileged to lead six workshops in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in Lithuania. Each visit has been a grand adventure and a deepening encounter with the ancestors of the land. On my first visit to Marija’s native country, in the summer of 2004, 40 Lithuanians joined me at Nida to reclaim the arts of dreaming. With the aid of shamanic drumming, we made a group journey together through the gateway of an ancient oak, with the aim of establishing direct and authentic communication with the ancestors of the land. 

I found myself in direct contact with a priestess of Žemyna, the Earth Goddess. The priestess belonged to an earlier time, but seemed to speak from a place of amber light outside time. She instructed me in methods of healing and visioning involving the use of amber, and gave me symbols and words in old Lithuanian – a language previously unknown to me – that others in the workshop helped me translate. I am glad to report that I am returning to Lithuania in May this year to lead new adventures in dream archaeology and shamanic dreaming in Vilnius and Kaunas. 

Wherever I go now, I find myself traveling in two worlds. From behind the curtains of ordinary perception, the ancestors are calling. I am reminded again and again that one of the gifts of dreaming is that it opens authentic connections to the ancestors, offering us the chance to heal the wounds of the past and to perform cultural soul retrieval.

For much more on dream archaeology in the Baltic, and elsewhere, see my book The Boy Who Died Came Back

Photo: Žemaitiu alka, sanctuary of the old gods in Samogitia

 

 

Becoming Dean of Dream Archaeology

 

I have just been honored by the invitation to become Dean of Dream Archaeology of the University of Užupis. As some of you - including those who have read The Boy Who Died and Came Back -  will know, I have been Dream Ambassador for the Republic of Užupis since 2013. Here is the story of how this connection was made.

Republic of Užupis, May 29, 2013

I sit down to lunch at a breezy café table at the edge of the little Vilnelė river, just across the bridge from the Old City of Vilnius and the bed and breakfast where I am staying on a narrow cobbled street. There is a mermaid in a wall on the other side of the river. My companions are a Lithuanian therapist and Zen practitioner named Agne, who is a brilliant translator for my workshops here, and dreamers from the Netherlands and Sweden who will soon be traveling with us to Kernave for the depth adventure in dream archaeology I will be leading there over the weekend. Our conversation is lively, and turns (of course) on the play of dreams and synchronicity.
    I pause to swallow a mouthful of an excellent local "live" (unpasteurized) beer, and a bright-eyed, bearded man with long hair leaps up from a neighboring table. "Your conversation is fascinating," he declares, "I invite myself to join it." He introduces himself as Tomas Čepaitis , the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Užupis. Is he joking? He doesn't look like any foreign minister I have ever encountered, and his republic sounds like something from a story book. Our Swedish friend has heard of it, though. She tells us she read a big feature article about Užupis in the Stockholm paper that same morning; she later showed me the article, which describes Užupis as "the coolest little republic in the world." 
    Tomas gives me a copy of the constitution of his republic, which includes such fundamental principles as "A dog has the right to be a dog" and "Everyone has the right to be unique." I learn that the word Užupis means "On the Other Side of the River" and has double meaning. The territory of the republic is about 150 acres of a once largely Jewish and then (post-Holocaust) notoriously seedy and dangerous neighborhood across the river from Old Vilnius. But "the other side" also means the other side of reality. "Our work is similar," Thomas tells me. "Like you, we are dedicated to bringing the dream world and the ordinary world closer together."
    He introduces me to the President of Užupis and other government officials. The Republic On the Other Side of the River declared its independence in 1997, unfurling its own flag, currency and cabinet of ministers. This is essentially a republic of artists, and their work is everywhere on the cobbled streets, in luscious murals and voluptuous goddesses, in pagan symbols and Surrealist provocations. At one of the main art centers, the Gallera, a Belgian-Lithuanian exhibition is opening that weekend, Tomas tells our dreamer from Belgium.

We have our picture taken and Tomas informs me that he wants to appoint me Ambassador of Dreams for the Republic On the Other Side. I tell him, naturally, that I would be delighted to assist the Republic in growing its factory of dreams.
    In a later email exchange, the web of synchronicity became tighter and stranger, Tomas told me that he had lived for several years in upstate New York, not far from my present home. Specifically, he had lived in the village of Ghent, N.Y. Ghent is about 10 miles from the farm where I used to live near Chatham, N.Y.; one of the people who worked on my house renovations after I purchased the farm lived in Ghent. The story gets better still. Tomas added that he had some "Mohawk drawings and dreams" from that period in his life that he was still trying to understand. It was in that same neighborhood on the edge of traditional Mohawk Indian country that I started dreaming of an ancient Mohawk woman shaman and entered the visionary adventures that persuaded me to give up my previous life and become a dream teacher.

I returned to Užupis on Monday, to admire the goddesses and have lunch at the same cafe on the river with a view of the mermaid in the wall. I discovered that the Republic also has a king, a splendidly fat and self-confident tiger cat named Nicas, who has his private entrance to the restaurant and is well-fed and well-petted by everyone, including the group at our table. Consulting the constitution of Užupis, I read that "Everyone has the right to love and take care of the cat."

We were distracted by banging and wailing from the river below us. From the railing, we saw a couple who had lost control of a hired canoe, banging against the rocky bank. Agne sprang into rescue mode. She took fresh strawberries from a bag we had been carrying around and started tossing them to the inexpert boat people, who caught and ate them with gusto, calling up that these were the first strawberries they had tasted this season. However, they had now managed to tilt their craft so it was half-full of water and sinking fast. Agne rushed down to the river and pulled them up onto the bank. I congratulated her on her efforts and declared that I would use my high station as Dream Ambassador to recommend that she should be appointed Commandant of the Coast Guard of the Republic on the Other Side of the River. I wasted no time in penning Rules of Riverine Safety in Užupis:

1. Carry strawberries at all times.
2. When a boat is sinking, pelt the occupants with strawberries.

Note: While Užupis declared its independence in 1997, it has yet to be recognized by any government in ordinary reality, but it has a seat in the United Nations of Dreams.

June 8, 2013

It's official. I have now received my formal credentials as Dream Ambassador of the Republic of Užupis. I solemnly undertake to execute all my rights and responsibilities, including the most important clause 5:

enjoy life and sustain in people the feeling of life as Brazilian Jazz

November 22,2020

My invitation arrives to be Dean of Dream Archaeology for the University of Užupis. From his official portrait, the Pro-Rector is clearly a serious fellow.

The Goddess Lives in the Dreaming Land

Lithuania is one of my soul countries and a place where I feel close to the Goddess. It is a country where the old Goddess tradition has survived unbroken from before the arrival of the Indo-European gods and is the country of the great scholar of the goddess, Marija Gimbutas. I have led six depth workshops in Lithuania over 15 years and had extraordinary encounters with the Goddess tradition here, as described in three of my books The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, Dreaming the Soul Back Home and The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

On my first visit, I led a shamanic group journey to the ancestors through the gateway of an ancient oak, and I found myself in direct contact with a priestess of Žemyna, the great Earth goddess of Lithuania. The žyne (priestess) belonged to an ancient time. She instructed me in methods of healing and visioning involving the use of amber, and gave me symbols and words in old Lithuanian – a language previously unknown to me – that others in the workshop helped me translate.

On a later visit,the priestess came to me in dreams suffused with amber light. She told me “You belong to the People of Amber. Your duty – and that of those you train here – is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness.”

A woman healer in my workshops- a woodwitch from Samogitia (bear country in the west of Lithuania) - was inspired by my dreams and visions to invite me to her summer home. She taught me how to use amber and beeswax for healing, spiritual cleansing and soul keeping. She taught me spells in Old Lithuanian handed down in the maternal line for countless generations. She said these had never previously been shared with a man or a non-Lithuanian. I found, yet again, that the right dream can be a visa.

I discovered first-hand that despite the long nightmare of invasion, occupation and persecution, the Goddess lives in the dreaming land, as the fire lives in wood. In my visits to the Baltic, I have been reminded again and again that one of the gifts of dreaming is that it opens authentic connections to the ancestors, offering us the chance to heal the wounds of the past and to perform cultural soul retrieval.

Image: Žemaitiu alka, a shrine to the old gods and goddesses at Palanga, Lithuania.

The need for dream archaeology

Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Old Europe and its Goddess traditions, declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess, her chef d'oeuvre:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."
    The new art and science of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed.  I invented the term "dream archaeology".  It is the study of first and essential (arche) things with the aid of dreamwork and techniques of shamanic lucid dreaming. It is a discipline that enables us to access the living past, to enter into direct communication with the keepers of ancestral wisdom and heal the collective and cultural soul loss that is a feature of our age.
     The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.
      We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us in dreams. As dream archaeologists, we learn to work with such dreams, both through focused research and by learning the technique of dream reentry, which means making a shamanic journey through the doorway of a remembered dream to harvest more information, to deepen communication with the ancestors, and to travel beyond the maps.
      When we are already engaged in a line of research, we draw on the skills of shamanic lucid dreaming, as well as spontaneous gifts of the night, to find what cannot be located in ordinary ways, but can often be confirmed by subsequent dream-directed research. We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field.
      After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”. She describes this encounter in an essay in From the Realm of the Ancestors, a magnificent Festchrift in honor of Marija that she edited.
     I have been privileged to lead several depth workshops in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in Lithuania. Each visit has been a grand adventure and a deepening encounter with the ancestors of the land. On my first visit to Marija’s native country, in the summer of 2004, 40 Lithuanians joined me at Nida to reclaim the arts of dreaming. With the aid of shamanic drumming, we made a group journey together through the gateway of an ancient oak, with the aim of establishing direct and authentic communication with the ancestors of the land.
     I found myself in direct contact with a priestess of Žemyna, the Earth Goddess. The priestess belonged to an earlier time, but seemed to speak from a place of amber light outside time. She instructed me in methods of healing and visioning involving the use of amber, and gave me symbols and words in old Lithuanian – a language previously unknown to me – that others in the workshop helped me translate.
     Wherever I go now, I find myself traveling in two worlds. From behind the curtains of ordinary perception, the ancestors are calling. I am reminded again and again that one of the gifts of dreaming is that it opens authentic connections to the ancestors, offering us the chance to heal the wounds of the past and to perform cultural soul retrieval.

Photo: leading a dream archaeology expedition at Kernave, Lithuania. Photo (c) Giedre Rein

On the trail of a Baltic dream shaman

The beautiful old city of Kernave was the medieval capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the last great fortress of the Old religion in Europe, defended by five hill forts overlooking the Neris river. It has been described as the Troy of Lithuania because so much of the past, from prehistoric times, is buried here, and rising again. Kernave was burned by the Teutonic Knights in 1390, and this savage act resulted in the preservation of layer upon layer of archaeological strata under soil and ash that became wet peat.
     Myth and legend swirl around the green conical hills, the deep forest, the burial mounds and river islands. When I came to Kernave for the first time, I was shown the hill that is the reputed birthplace of Lizdeika, a great medieval shaman-priest and dream seer. Legend has it that Lizdeika was born in an eagle's nest on that hill, and could take flight in the form of an eagle.. Under cold rain, I paused to take a photograph of the shaman's hill.

     Lizdeika lived close to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into the form of a wolf. He plays a central role in the unfoldment of the most famous dream in Baltic history. 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. That city is Vilnius, where you can see a statue of Gediminas' iron wolf in front of the cathedral. There is a second version of the Iron Wolf statue in Kernave.
     I dreamed two years ago that I discovered a Baltic hero, a dreamer and warrior, and wove a mythic story around him. I don't know whether the dream figure was Lizdeika, but I will soon have the chance to find out. I have been invited to teach in Lithuania again in May 2013. This will be my fifth visit to the land of Marija Gimbutas, the gerat Lithuanian archaeologist of the Goddess, and of Lizdeika, the dream shaman. This time my workshop will take place in and around Kernave, and we will be able to practice dream archaeology and shamanic dreaming, and celebrate sacred rituals, at the ancient sites. 

I have written about practicing dream archaeology in Lithuania in two of my books, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead and Dreaming the Soul Back Home (which will soon be published in Lithuanian).

The Baltic city built on a dream

Vilnius, Lithuania


In front of the cathedral in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a statue of its founder, the Grand Duke Gediminas. Carved in the plinth that supports his towering figure is a howling wolf. This recalls the dream that led directly to the foundation of Vilnius.
    In a military camp on a hill, Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that opened its jaws and howled. For guidance on the meaning of his dream, he sought out a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, Lizdeika was born in an eagle's nest on a conical hill at Kernave. Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form.
    When the grand duke dreamed of the iron wolf, Lizdeika was recognized in Lithuania as the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. Vilnius is a city founded on a dream, and over the past week it was a grand place to be dreaming with a spirited circle of Lithuanians.

The Goddess, Her Bridegroom and a Romanian Word-Magician

We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."

- Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess.

Marija Gimbutas was so many things: an extraordinary and indefatigable archeologist, linguist and mythologist, a lover and restorer of the Goddess traditions, a survivor of one of the worst nightmares of history, "an embodiment" (as her friend and editor Joan Marler puts it) "of an essence of the Lithuanian soul". Marija created the multidisciplinary approach she called "archaeomythology". It has taught us essential things about the Old Europe of the Neolithic that revive the hope that in our times we, too, can cherish the Divine Feminine and nourish a "partnership society" in which the sexes are balanced in a dynamic harmony that tends the earth, and the soul.

Marija's work is being continued and furthered by the passionate and scholarly work of Joan Marler and her colleagues at the Institute of Archaeomythology. From their base in the gentle wine-country town of Sebastopol, California, they reach across the world to support the work and publications of remarkable scholars like the Romanian linguist and archaeomythologist, Adrian Poruciuc. I have just read his recent book, Prehistoric Roots of Romanian and Southeast European Traditions, with great pleasure and profit.

Poruciuc is an etymological detective, and if you are a lover of words, and are willing to jump from Homeric Greek to Old Church Slavonic at the drop of a diphthong, you could find his work as exciting as an episode of NCIS on television. Take his investigation of the root meaning of two famous names from Greek mythology, Demeter and Dionysos. After tracking the components and variants of "Demeter" through many languages, he confirms what many of us knew in our gut and our atavistic memories, but many cavilers (nothing to do with "cavaliers") in the academic fraternity long doubted: Demeter means "Earth Mother." Then he takes us into fresh and thrilling territory by demonstrating that Dionysos, all but certainly, means "Bridegroom of the Mother." Drink that one in deep (as is Dionysos' way). Reflect on what the meaning of that name reflects from the civilization of the Goddess in Old Europe. The roistering, hard-drinking god of ecstasy is, first and last, the consort of the Goddess and her partners in the Mysteries that renew and fertilize the earth.

Poruciuc probes mysteries that are more arcane, to non-Romanians. Why are the folk songs or "carols" (colinde) sung around Romanian holidays full of references to a great flood that is clearly very different from the Biblical one, since it has nothing to do with rain but only with a wildly rising sea? Romania, after all, has only a small coast, on the all-but-tideless Black Sea. Do these songs of flood carry on the memory of an ancient event, older (perhaps) than the flood of the Book of Genesis? On those stormy waters, in some of the songs, comes a great bull or antlered deer with the goddess rocking between his horns, on a swing. Here we are, again, in realms of the Once and Future Goddess.

Lovers of mythic beasts will be intrigued by Poruciuc's mythic bestiary of creatures that populate those old Romanian folk songs and folk memories: of the sea-monster known as the dolf (which sounds like dolphin but probably isn't) that comes on land to steal apples; of a fish-goddess, and a snake-goddess; of a lion that is spoken to like a dog. I was hoping to find the wolf-headed dragon of the ancient Dacians here - terror of the Romans, and source of one of the most ferocious battle standards I have ever seen - but I gather we'll need to wait for another volume of Poruciuc's studies for that. I look forward to it.

The book discussed: Adrian Poruciuc, Prehistoric Roots of Romanian and Southeast European Traditions. Sebastopol, CA: Institute of Archaeomythology, 2010.