"I was visited last night in my sleep by one whom I presently recognized as the famous Adept and Mystic of the first century of our era, Apollonius of Tyana, called the 'Pagan Christ'."He was clad in a grey linen robe with a hood, like that of a monk, and had a smooth, beardless face, and seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age. He made himself known to me by asking if I had heard of his lion. He commenced by speaking of Metempsychosis."
This is the start of a dream report that Anna Kingsford entered in her journal in Paris on May 11, 1880. [1]Her visitor proceeded to give her a tutorial on reincarnation and the conditions under which humans might be reborn as animals. Apollonius explained, "There are two streams or currents, an upward and a downward one,
by which souls are continually passing and repassing as on a ladder. The
carnivorous animals are souls undergoing penance by being imprisoned for a time
in such forms on account of their misdeeds." As a leading Victorian "platform lady" on behalf of Vegetarianism, Anna was clearly pleased by the harsh description of carnivores.
There is a tradition that the lion of Apollonius was the reincarnation of an Egyptian pharaoh named Amasis and that the lion wept when his past identity was recognized. Occultist Éliphas Lévi also saw Apollonius as a beardless man robed in a grey garment when he evoked him, although in this case the linen was a shroud.
Those ancient philosopher-shamans know how to get around. Let me recall the story of Apollonius' visit to the Cave of Trophonius. Plutarch (who knew what he
was talking about; his brother was a priest of Trophonius) describes a Mystery initiation at the Cave of Trophonius in
ancient Boeotia in which the candidate, after lowering himself through a hole
in the ground into total darkness, experienced a stunning shift in
consciousness that released his soul from his body and set him sailing among
the stars. Freed from the body, his soul expands and flows like a sail, among
the “islands” of stars in the ocean of
ether — each one presided over by a god except for the moon,
which is inhabited by “Epichthonian daimons.”
He stays in the underworld two nights and a day. He
receives much information from an invisible spirit about the afterworld and the
beings who inhabit it. He is instructed on the relationship between higher and
lower self — on how gross appetites pull people down, and how
those few who listen carefully to their eudaimon (“good daimon”) may become daimons
themselves, playing the role of guardian angels to others. [2]
The kathodos, or underworld descent, to the Cave of Trophonius was a
true initiation ritual, requiring a literal
experience of death and rebirth. Preparation normally involved sacrifice,
purification and discipline. But the Trickster is always at play
when authentic shamans appear, and at the Cave of Trophonius a shaman-philosopher flouted the rules.. Philostratus preserves the story of a visit to the sanctuary
by Apollonius of Tyana, who told the priests, “I wish to descend into the
cave in the interests of philosophy.” The priests refused to let him in, telling the people
they would not allow a “wizard” to enter the sanctuary.
Apollonius went despite the
priests. Under cover of dark, he and his companions pulled down part of the
security wall. He went down the shaft in his regular clothes — his “philosopher’s mantle” instead of the prescribed
shroud. He vanished for seven days, then reappeared miles away, at Aulis, with
a book in which he had recorded the daimon’s responses to his questions. This book distilled the
teaching of the “golden chain” of the Pythagorean shaman-philosophers. [3]
1. Anna Bonus Kingsford, Dreams and Dream-Stories (London: John M. Watkins, 1908) "The Metempsychosis" dream XVI.
2. Plutarch's accounts of the Cave of Trophonius initiation are in two essays, "On the Demon of Socrates" and "On the Spirits Who Live in the Face of the Moon". Translations appear in Plutarch, Moralia (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Pres, 1994, 1995), vols 7 and 12 (respectively). For full discussion of the Trophonius initiation see my book Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (Novato CA: New World Library, 2020) pp.143-146.
3. Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana ( trans. F.C. Conybeare (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1969) vol 2, pp.381-383
Illustration: Original drawing by Robert Moss with digital color effects.
