Celtic Shapeshifting

In the dream, I walk through a house, speaking with fervor about my plans for a new class on Celtic shapeshifting. I walk briskly between rooms, waving my arms like a swan on the water. Standing in the kitchen, I declaim the first lines of the Robert Graves version of the Song of Amergin

I am a stag: of seven tines,

I am a flood: across a plain,

I am a wind: on a deep lake,

I am a tear: the Sun lets fall. [1]

I repeat the phrase, "Celtic shapeshifting". I say it again as I leave the dream. The Song of Amergin claims affinity with all animate life, with the swan and the stars, with a tear the sun lets fall. I also feel breeze from the tale of Tuan mac Cairill, who survived the Flood as a mighty salmon, and became a hawk and many other creatures after. [2] How can I not recall his kinsman Fintan mac Bochra, who changed form when he changed his moods?

In his prose poem "Stone Boat", the poet John Moriarty gives us this grand Irish shifter of moods and forms. Once he has been paid with a story - in the Celtic way, you never come in to the good stuff without a story. sung more than spoken - Fintan reveals, "At Connla's otherworld well it was that I first realized that being human is a habit. It can be broken. Like the habit of going down to the river by this path rather than that, I broke it. And so it is that, although I always know who I am, I can never be sure that what I am going to sleep at night is what I will be when I wake up in the morning. In me the mutabilities of sleep survive into waking. What I'm saying is, my shape depends on my mood."

Then Fintan gives a lively poke: "You only need to break the habit once, the habit of being human I mean, and then you will be as you were between death and rebirth. Between death and rebirth our bodies are mind-bodies, and that means they are alterable. Alterable at will. We only have to will it and it happens, we flow from being a swan in Lough Owel into being a hind on Slieve Bloom into being a hare on Beara." [3]

Through the texts, we hear ancient bardic voices celebrating and affirming our connection with all living things in an animate, conscious world, and the shaman's ability to recruit allies in many realms and borrow their forms and their powers.

In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram tells us that "traditional tribal magicians or medicine persons seek to augment the limitations of their specifically human senses by binding their attention to the ways of another animal... The more studiously an apprentice magician watches the other creature from a stance of humility, learning to mimic its cries and to dance its various movements, the more thoroughly his nervous system is joined to another set of senses...Like anything focused upon so intently, the animal ally will begin visiting the novice shaman’s dreams, imparting understandings wholly inaccessible to her waking mind."[4]

Sometimes, of course, the forms are unwelcome, the result of a curse or of karma.

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. [5]

Now I am away with Aengus, following fire in the head into an enchanted apple orchard to catch a silver trout that becomes a lovely girl with apple blossom in her hair.....[6]

References

1. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1986) p.13 2. Kuno Meyer “Tuan mac Cairill’s Story to Finnen of Moville”, appendix to The Voyage of Bran to the Land of the Living. (London: David Nut 1897), pp. 285–301
3.John Moriarty, "Stone Boat" in Dreamtime (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2020) p. 21

4. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010) pp. 217-8

5. Cad Goddeu, "The Battle of the Trees". Graves version, White Goddess p. 30.
6. W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1958) pp.66-7.

Illustrations: RM+AI

Proteus

 

Proteus

 

I am in many forms before I am bound.

I am the starwalker who won't come down.

I am the pond dweller who won't come up.

I am a hawk on a hill.

I am a bear in a berry wood.

 

I am the giant of the deep

who walked the Earth for ten thousand years

before he went back to the sea.

I am the sleeping king

who mated with the Earth

and dropped his horns in due season

and grew them back

 

I am the blasted oak that drew the lightning

I am the man in the Moon

I am the Hanged Man, and the Emperor, and the Fool.

I am medicine and I am poison.

I am the springing tiger and the quaking goat.

I am the one who makes a prison of the world

I am the one who makes the world his playground.

I am the death lord on his dark throne

I am a humming bird courting a flower.

 

I am the heaven bird in the World Tree

and the dragon coiled at its roots

and the squirrel that makes mischief between them.

I am a shard from a mirror

that was broken in transit from a blue star.

 

To release me, you must tie me down.

Published in Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss

Photo by RM

 

Paleopsych 101

 At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president once asked, “What exactly is it that you do?”

I told her, “I’m a paleolithic psychologist.”

She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt.

I had stolen the phrase from Frederic Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher. Myers coined the term Paleolithic psychology as an erudite joke, to describe “the habits of thought of the savage who believes that can travel in dreams.” [1] He apologized to his respectable readers for “the apparent levity of a return to conceptions so enormously out of date” — while sowing the seed of doubt that “modern science” had actually surpassed the “primitive” understanding of the soul. 

Myers chose the path of true science, which is always ready to revise the reigning hypotheses in the light of fresh evidence. “My own ignorance…I recognize to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well-attested.” He arrived at a “root-conception” of “the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other’s actions,” and that “segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism.” [2] Myers observed such phenomena in “true apparitions” of the departed, but also in “traveling clairvoyance” by living persons, which sometimes produce “phantasms of the living” that are visible in other places.

Myers’s contemporary Edward Tylor, who held the first chair of anthropology at Oxford, beautifully summarized the challenge to modern science that is posed by shamans and frequent fliers who are at home with the spirits and often journey in their realms: 

"The issue raised by the comparison of savage, and civilized spiritualism is this: do the red Indian medicine man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer and the Boston medium share the possession of a belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import, which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are habitually boating of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of degeneration and the savages on whom some ethnographers look as degenerate from a higher civilization may turn on their accusers and charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge."[3]

The basic insights of paleopsychology are as follows:

 

1.    Spirits are real.

2.    We are not alone: we live in a multidimensional universe peopled with beings — spirits of nature, gods and daimons, angels and ancestors — who take a close interest in our affairs and influence our lives for good or ill.

3.    We are more than our bodies and brains, which are only vehicles for soul.

4.    The soul survives the death of the body.

5.    Soul journeying is the key to the spiritual worlds and the knowledge of ultimate reality. The soul makes excursions outside the body in dreams and visions. The heart of spiritual practice is to learn to shift consciousness at will and travel beyond time and space. Through soul-flight, we return to worlds beyond the physical plane in which our lives have their source and are able to explore many dimensions of the Otherworld.

6.    Souls are corporeal, though composed of much finer substance than the physical body.

7.    People have more than one soul. In addition to the vital soul that sustains physical life — closely associated with the breath — there is a “free soul,” associated with the dreambody, which can travel outside the body and separates from it at physical death, as well as an enduring spirit whose home is on the higher planes.

8.    Souls — or pieces of soul — can be lost or stolen. This is the principle cause of disease and misfortune.

9.    Some people have more souls than others and have the ability to make excursions to different places at the same time.

10. At death, different vehicles of soul go to different lots. Through conscious dreaming, it is possible to explore the conditions of the afterlife to prepare for one’s death and to assist souls of the dying and departed.

11. We are born with counterparts in nature. For example, we are born with a totem animal and a relationship with natural forces (wind or water or lightning) that are part of our basic identity and help to pattern the natural flow of our energy.

12. We are born with counterparts in other places and times, and in other dimensions of reality. When we encounter them through interdimensional travel, they become allies and sometimes teachers.

 References

1. Frederic W.H. Myers. The Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green,1903). 1:247.
2. ibid., 1:249
3. Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray,1871)

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: Sketch of a Siberian udagan (female shaman) reconstructed from remains found in a burial site by the Lena river near Ust'-Uda by a Soviet era archaeological team led by A.P. Okladnikov.

Note the fringes on her costume. They suggest her ability to take flight like a bird and travel to the Upper World. In rock art from this era, shamans with wild fringes are shown flying with birds. "This ornithomorphic essence appears to have been the most ancient characteristic of the shamanic coat, and by extension its fringe was the most crucial symbolic element in its decoration." [Ekaterina Devlet, "Rock art and the Material Culture of Siberian and Central Asian Shamanism" in Neil Price (ed) The Archaeology of Shamanism (London: Routledge, 2001) 44]