Time for the Night Watch

Seregei Lukyanenko’s theme in the Night Watch fantasy series is one of the eternal ones that is never out of date: the battle of Dark and Light. The Night Watch is composed of Light Others who keep the Dark side in check. Office hours are 20:00-8:00. The Day Watch consists of Dark Others who check the Light. Office hours are 8:00 to 20:00. In Moscow (where much of the action takes place) the style of both is like that of hard-drinking, somewhat seedy secret agencies of the Russian government. (The only non-drinkers are the vampires of the Day Watch, who can’t metabolize alcohol.)
     The Others live much longer than humans and have the power of seeing a traveling through a world-behind-the-world known as the Twilight. The Others are described and graded as magicians. Only magicians of the higher levels can see or travel below the first and second levels of Twilight. We eventually learn that there are seven levels of twilight, but not even Gesar and Zabulon – Higher magicians and chiefs of the Night Watch and Day Watch respectively can go there.
     The protagonist is Anton Gorodetsky a Light watchman with a sympathy for vampires and a girlfriend/wife (Sveta) who is a notably more powerful magician than he is, even after he becomes a Higher magician in book three (Twilight Watch).
     Light and Dark Others are monitored by the Inquisition, also known at the Twilight Watch. The inquisitors are drawn from both Watches and their job is to police the rules of the treaty that is supposed to prevent the balance between Light and Dark from being overthrown.
     In book three Dark and Light must combine to fight forces inimical to both. The plot centers on a book long held to by mythical – the Fuaran – that contains the secret of how to turn humans into Others. If all humans are turned into Others, the Others will cease to exist. We are given to understand that the most powerful magicians are actually those with the lowest personal energy, sucking in vitality from the humans all around them. In book four, we learn that the magician with absolute power is the “zero-point” magician, an interesting idea.
     I like the way the Others enter into twilight by “pulling up their shadows”. This becomes banal in the movie version when they put on dark glasses, like Neo in The Matrix. I wish the film crew had spent a moment considering how to film the act of stepping into your own shadow. Sometimes, in unpropitious conditions, the only shadow available to Anton is the shadow of an eyelid. A wily adversary in book four places himself in front of the window, preventing Anton from casting a shadow he could use to see into the twilight.
     On the first level of twilight, the world goes gray apart from the “blue moss” which feeds and thrives on human emotions, especially fear and lust. Some structures appear as they do in the ordinary world, but leached of color and substance, so an Other can step through them. At the second level, the world is grayer and emptier, and travelers shed their normal appearance. The deeper you go, the more you risk losing your vital essence and the harder it is to come back. But higher magicians can practice rapid teleportation by diving through deeper levels of the twilight. On the fifth level, you learn the terrible truth about the Others – that they gain their power by stealing it from humans, as air rushes to fill a vacuum.
     In Last Watch, Gesar gives a reason why books will never disappear and why drafts whould be written the old way. “We only use books for studying magic. When a text is typed into a computer, it doesn’t retain any of the magic.”

The Empress and her red-hot lover, Jesus

Empress Zoe does not appear to mind that the emperor has installed his official mistress in the Grand Palace, right opposite her own apartments. She has her own red-hot lover, Jesus.
    The rapture she shares with him is not a disembodied transport of the spirit. She has helped to create a physical body in which she may commune with Jesus in her private chamber. This is a full-size statue, anatomically complete, that has many properties that seem bizarre but were not unknown to crafters of "breathing images" in many cultures, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the crumbling Byzantine empire to Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist temples today. A modern sex shop could no doubt produce a superior technical version, but you would have to shop elsewhere for the psychospiritual battery.
     The empress believes her statue to be fully aliveand ensouled. She kisses and caresses it. In moments of distress, she alternately clasps the icon, speaks to it as to a living person, addresses it as her lover, or flings herself to the ground, wailing and beating her breast.
     Beyond this, the complexion of her savior of the bedchamber is quite changeable. She uses the changes in color as a mode of divination. When Jesus turns pallid, she is stricken with fear than an evil event will take place, to the point where she may throw herself to the floor and beat her breast and rend her clothes. When Jesus turns ruddy, however, she is assured that her affairs - and those of the empire - will go well. She gives advice to her husband, the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, based on the skin tone of her holy statue.
    She feeds the spirit in the statue with perfumes and incense, in immense quantities. Any necromancer knows that spirits don't feed on gross food and drink, but on the essence or vapor of things; they are sniffers rather than swallowers. Fires burn in braziers day and night in the empress' chambers, even in the full heat of summer, as she keeps her retainers working to produce new aromas to please and feed her spirit lover and keep him lively in the body she has crafted for him. Aromatic substances are placed inside the effigy, to fuel and recharge its spirit.
     A fantasy story? No more than other episodes of Byzantine history, carefully recorded in the 11th-century Chronographia of Michael Psellus and available in a Penguin translation retitled Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Psellus [1]was no minor clerk who gathered gossip; he was the foremost philosopher and orator of his day and an imperial counselor who rose as high as prime minister. He became a monk but loved the Neoplatonists more than the scriptures, on the evidence of his books, and did more than anyone in his age to rescue their w0rks from obscurity. Byzantine scholar John Duffy says of Psellus: "Singlehandedly, he was responsible for bringing back, almost from the dead, an entire group of occult authors and books whose existence had long been as good as forgotten." [2]
    His understanding of what was going on between Zoe and her Jesus statue was informed by first-hand observation, and also by the study of works on theurgy: a lost commentary by Proclus and the Chaldaean Oracles, an essential text for practitioners of high magic in late antiquity. Psellus was not only a learned man; he sought "a wisdom which is beyond all demonstration, apprehensible only by the intellect of a wise man, in moments of inspiration." [3]


Graphic: mosaic of  Empress Zoe with Jesus and her third husband, the emperor Constantine IX. Her face was repainted at least twice. Here she is at least 70 but made to look much younger. 

Notes
1. Psellos, in Greek, means "Stammerer". Maybe Michael Psellos (like Demosthenes) had to overcome an early speech defect; he was certainly no stammerer when it came to winning the ear of emperors. His surname is widely latinized as Psellus.
2. John Duffy, "Reactions of Two Byzantine Intellectuals to the Theory and Practice of Magic: Michael Psellos and Michael Italikos" in Henry Maguire (ed) Byzantine Magic (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995) p. 83.
3. E.R.A. Sewter (trans) Fourteen Byzantine Rules: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p.175

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

 You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. Your poet is not hiding from you, but you may have been hiding from him or her. Let your inner poet walk with you in your world, and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light.

Here is some of what I hear when I attend to my hidden poet.

 

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? Your real problems begin when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.                               

Dreaming, you can travel without leaving home.

You can meet your loved ones at any distance, including beyond the apparent barrier of death.

Dreaming, you are a time traveler. You visit past, future and parallel times

Your consciousness is never confined to your body and brain, except by your failures of courage and imagination.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

Coming events cast a shadow before them. You have felt this some mornings as you emerge from a dream you may or may not remember. The shadow of a mass event can fall like a mountain over many. Most days the shadow is softer and more intimate. As you rub sleep from your eyes, the shadow that falls over you may be cast by your roving dream self, returning to your time with a sun at its back that has not yet risen in your world.

Dreams can be the revenge of the imagination. In ordinary life your imagination may be bound to old stories and crushed by your efforts to fulfill schedules and fit in with other people’s expectations. You may have lost the power to visualize anything beyond the surface world and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. You may have so lost contact with your great imagineer, your inner child, that you reject the magic of making things up.

Dreams can blow a hole in the hard carapace of your self-limiting assumptions through which the moreness of life comes shining through. That opening can be the portal to realms of true imagination where creators, shamans, and mystics have always wanted to go.

Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

 ~

In the world you now inhabit, you need to chop wood, carry water, as dreamers do in their daily practice. Write in your journal every day. Wait like a trout fisherman in those waters between sleep and awake for the fish to arise. Light beacon fires by letting others know, at any distance, that you have dreams to share. Make a safe space to share your dreams with a friend or a circle. Help each other discern what your dreams reveal about the secret wishes of the soul, how they may show you ways to survive in the dark times and bring treasures back from darkness, and what action your dreams require of you. Let the beacon fires spread and lift up the dark.

You can heal your body and your life by dreaming a better story. Why not dream a better world? How about now?

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Writing desk in Yeats' tower, Thoor Ballylee, County Galway by RM

Robin Hobb's Ways of Magic and Dreaming

Notes from a Reading Life

I don't know why it took me so long to start reading the exceptional fantasy novels of Robin Hobb. Since I devoured Assassin's Apprentice,the first book in her Farseer trilogy,I have been cracking a new novel in the vast cycle every week or so. I might have finished the 13 novels by Hobb that I have in my current reading pile (she has published many more, under more than one name) except that I have just a few other reading assignments. I must also confess thatI have a polyamorous relationship with books, hopping in and out of bed with many in a single night.
     The names of her characters - King Shrewd, Prince Chivalry, Lady Patience - looked silly to me before I started in, but within a few pages I had made the adjustment. I wasn't sure to begin with that I wanted to give time to yet another neo-medieval series, replete with swords and sorcerers and dragons, but soon she had me in her spell, and her dragons are most superior..
     I am fascinated by the ways of magic described in Hobb's splendid series and by the wildly shamanic and moving treatment of human-animal bonding. Best of all, as her protagonist deepens his practice, he - and the reader - learns more and more about the power of dreaming.

At the start of Royal Assassin, Book 2 of The Farseer Trilogy).we are told we are in a world where there are three kinds of the magic.

The first is the Skill, inborn in royals of the Farseer dynasty and sometimes appearing as a "wild strain" in people whose ancestors came from outside the settled lands of the Six Duchies. "One trained in the Skill is able to reach out to another's mind, no matter how distant, and know what he is thinking. Those who are strongly Skilled can influence that thinking, or have converse with that person. For the conducting of a battle, or the gathering of information, it is a most useful tool."

The second magic is the Wit, denounced by many as "beast magic" and sometimes punished by a gruesome triple execution by hanging,cutting and immersion in water.  We are told by a cautious chronicler that "The Wit, it is said, gives one the ability to speak the tongues of the beasts. It was also warned that those who practiced the Wit too long or too well became whatever beast they bonded to. But this may be only legend." We will learn much more through the voice of the protagonist-narrtaor, FitzChivalry as we enter his deep bonding with a wolf, which gives us some of the most powerful writing and most moving scenes in the cycle.

Then there are the Hedge magics: potions and palmistry, skrying and spell-making and herbal remedies.

 The force of the Skill is dramatized when Fitz comes to the tower room where his master, King-in-Waiting Verity, has been using it to confuse the minds of the terrible Red Ship Raiders. Startled by his entrance, Verity "turned to me and his face was like heat, like light, like wind in my face. He Skilled into me with such force that I felt driven out of myself, his mind possessing mine so completely that there was no room left to be myself in it. For a moment I was drowning in Verity, and then he was gone, withdrawing so rapidly that I was left stumbling and gasping like a fish deserted by a high wave." The Skilled royal steadied him and apologized.

Our hero Fitz, a royal bastard, is both Skilled and Witted, though he is given no useful training in either magic. He learns the depth of animal bonding after he purchases an abused wolf cub from a vendor who has been keeping it in a cage. The wolf hates and distrusts humans. But with time and exquisite care Fitz is able to grow and gentle their relationship until they are closely bonded, able to converse mind to mind, to protect and heal one another and even to share, for a time, each other's bodies. The country folk who are Witted call themselves Old Blood. Hobb's description of what evolves between Fitz and the wolf he comes to call Nighteyes is wildly and truly shamanic, also so deeply human and canine.  

In Assassin's Quest (Book 3 of Farseer trilogy) we learn more of the risks of the "magic of minds"known as the Skill.  "It requires a great deal of energy to wield it on a daily basis, and it offers to its practitioners an attraction that has been misnamed as a pleasure. It is more of a euphoric, one that increases in power proportionately with the strength and duration of Skilling. It can lure the practitioner into an addiction to Skilling, one which eventually saps all mental and physical strength, to leave the mage a great, drooling babe." 

We are given further ruminations on the magic of the Old Blood: "The Wit seems to be a form of mind linking, usually with a particular animal, which opens a way for understanding of that animal's thoughts and feelings...What the Wit may be is a man's acceptance of the beast nature within himself, and hence an awareness of the element of humanity that every animal carries within it as well." 

As his faculties come more fully alive, Fitz finds himself able to enter the perception and seemingly the bodies of people at a distance, initially without control. When the coastal duchies are plagued by the raiders, his dream self joins a boy in a desperate battle ."I do not think the boy could sense me. This was not my Skilling out but his reaching to me with some rudimentary Skill sense of his own. I could not control his body at all, but I was locked into his experience. I was riding this boy and hearing his thoughts and sharing his perceptions." . Before he can figure it out, the boy's throat is cut and for a moment he is joined in the rapture of a bloody death. 

Later he Skill-dreams into another desperate fight against the Red Ship Raiders. He enters the body of a Duke's daughter and wields his battle ax, through her, with amazing effect. The cost of his unplanned Skill dreams is terrible headaches and fatigue for which he takes a dreadful remedy. 

He has to learn discernment, targeting, how to set up walls so he is not open to anyone, Skilled or Witted, who leans his way. The urgency becomes clear as we witness the continuing raids, which deploy a mode of psychic warfare that reduces opponents to ravening zombies, and a vicious struggle for the Farseer throne. We learn that the Skill unlocks powers initially beyond imagination. Ancient masters created portals and highways into a deeper universe and sculpted living dragons from black memory stone, and the arts can be revived. 

In Fool's Errand (book 1 of The Tawny Man trilogy, the sequel to the Farseer threesome) Fitz discovers the treasures of hypnagogia. experiences in the liminal space between sleep and awake: "I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind. " 

SPOILER ALERT: You may want to skip the two following short paragraphs if you have not already read Fool's  Errand

His communication and bonding with the wolf deepens. He escapes death by fleeing the "battered husk" of his physical body and sharing the wolf's body, with his consciousness, for a time. "I shared residence with the wolf in his body, perceiving his thoughts, seeing the world through his eyes."

Later, when Nighteyes is near death, Fitz risks everying by projecting himself into the wolf''s body again, to heal his heart by becoming his heart, moving it back to a regular pattern. You have a hard head indeed if either of these passages leaves you dry-eyed. 

 In Fool's Fate (Book 3 in The Tawny Man trilogy) we learn more, with Fitz, about traveling in dreaming and joining others in their dreams. Without giving away too much of the plot, a character who is richly endowed with the raw power of Skill but has very little brain is bringing down the energy and spirit of a whole ship's crew through his nightmare visons. Fitz can't contain this alone. He must travel into the dream space of a young woman who is a more powerful dreamer. He gets through the dark thorny woods that oppose him, finds her in a glass tower and begs her to help calm the dark dreams that are afflicting many. He tells her, "You are very strong in the magic that lets one person go into another person's dreams and change them." 

Together they enter the space of  man who is drowning in his dream. The girl is able to change the dream. "Now it's my dream, and in my dream we can walk on the waves." She helps construct a pleasant new dreamscape woven from the dreamer's happy childhood memories, where he can lie safe and warm on an immense bed. She tells him -in the new dream - that he can return to this sanctuary whenever he chooses. All he has to do is think of a pillow on the bed.

Robin Hobb is weaving some true dream magic here, even as her character says, "This dream-changing is not magic. It is just a thing I can do."

My favorite character in the series,the Fool (no room to explain him here) says early in the stories,  "You can only understand a thing when you become it." As we follow what this means for Fitz, we come alive to what it may mean in our own lives.

 

What the old ones know about dreaming worlds

Some things I have learned through dreaming that wise ancestors of all traditions knew:

The doors of the Otherworld open from wherever you are.

The visible world is the skin of the invisible multiverse.

Souls can be lost or stolen.

True shamans can heal the body and call the soul home with story, song and poetic enchantments.

We are more than body and brain: we are mind and heart and spirit, and all need care and feeding.

Dreaming is traveling. You make visits and you receive visitations.

Dreams are a field of interaction between human and more-than-human.

By entering the portal of a dream, you can find your way to worlds of magic, healing and adventure, reclaim parts of your own vital soul that went missing – and meet the beloved of your soul.

Everything is alive and conscious and we are connected with all animate life.

The distance between the living and the dead is thinner than your eyelids.

The ancestors are talking, talking. We need to discern who and what is with us and which relations we need to heal, end or affirm.

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world to this one. We do this when we go dreaming and bring back guidance and energy we embody in our lives, and when we wake up to the fact that the world around us will speak to us in the manner of dreams if we pay attention.

You don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It's about waking up to the deeper reality.

Your Big Story is hunting you. All you need do is place yourself where you are easy prey.

You are here in this world on a mission

You had a life before you were conceived, and you’ll have a life after death.

You belong to a spiritual, as well as a biological family. You have counterparts in other times and in alternate realities, aspects of your larger, multidimensional self

Nothing happens until it is dreamed. Dreaming, whether you remember or not, you help to pluck definite events out of the quantum soup of possibility.

- from "Maxims of the Hidden Poet", a work in progress

"Eye in the Sky". Drawing by Robert Moss from a spontaneous vision in the hypnagogic zone.

A universe inside a stone

I am intrigued by tales in which we find a universe inside a very small space, such as the space between subatomic particles. These give us a window into what physics is telling us about the nature of hidden dimensions, and they provide a context of understanding for dreams and visions in which we experience these realities directly.

In the vast Yogavasistha the sage Vasistha entertains and instructs the despondent Rama with a series of tales that include his first-hand account of his travel to and from a world of beauty and magic that he created in subatomic space.

At a certain time in his life, the sage recalled, he wished to leave the “busy world” behind and live in a quiet place “free from all imaginings, where I would be invisible to everyone.” Through “yoga and imagination” he created a little hut in a “far-distant corner of the space of emptiness” and lived there unmoving, in the lotus posture, meditating. A century passed in a flash.

In my meditation I saw the thousands of universes that are nested one within another, even inside the smallest atom of a stone.

He surfaced from meditation and heard the beautiful voice of a woman. He searched for her. “I went into the space of my mind and saw countless worlds, all unable to see one another.” After many years, he heard the sound of a lute, and followed to a beautiful young woman singing sweetly. She was a celestial magician [vidyadhari]. Vasistha wanted to know how she came to be here.

She told him her home was inside a tiny atom of a stone in a peak of the mountain called Lokaloka (World-Not-World) “which encircles the disks of the worlds on the outer rim of the universe”. She was the wife of an ascetic scholar who created her from his imagination but never consummated their marriage, because he was wholly given to his studies and meditation. As “the most beautiful woman in the world” she was frustrated. She flew to the sage to seek release for both of them.

She invited Vasistha to visit her world, and by magic, made it possible for him to fly with her to it. At the border of her realm, the sage could at first see nothing. She told him this was because he had become too remote from the worlds of manifestation. In order to see her “illusory” world of forms, he must recall his life experiences from before the time when he achieved full enlightenment. Vasistha went into trance and saw “as in a dream, a great stone and a whole universe inside it.”

In the world inside the stone, Vasistha met its creator. The creator opened his eyes and told him: “As you are to me, so I am to you; this is a mutual story. For a man who is dreaming becomes a man in another man’s dream.” The beautiful woman created an illusory world out of her own desires; now it would end. He withdrew his mind from external images, and the world collapsed in fire and flood, into stillness.

Vasistha looked at the stone again, “like a country boy standing at the door of a palace”:

Everywhere I looked, in every single atom of it, I saw a whole universe. Each of these worlds was different from the other; some had a few resemblances, some more, some no resemblance at all. Some were made entirely of rock, some of water, some of air. In one of them I saw Rama killing Ravana, and in another I saw Rama being defeated by Ravana. Then I understood that all of these worlds were the ideas of various people. Each person imagines his own world, and that becomes his world.

He went back to meditation in his hut in the corner of emptiness. His body was gone. In its place was a magician [siddha] seated in meditation.

Vasistha decided to stop imagining this place. As his mind fell “from the sky to the earth” the magician dropped from the hut that had ceased to exist, still in meditation, falling like a stone. Vasistha roused him with some difficulty, using rain and thunder and hail. They swapped life stories, become friends, and agreed to live together in a world of the magicians where each eventually found a congenial home.

Much to dream and reflect on here! We see how worlds are made by imagination and how what is conceived in the imagination takes on its own life. Vasistha creates a beautiful woman in a trance, and then she comes to him when he has emerged from his trance.

It seems that others can live in our self-created worlds. While some mental worlds ceased to exist when we cease to imagine them, others continue. The people we dream are dreaming about us. We have interesting doubles in the multiverse.

The incredibly large can be found within the incredibly small.

Parallel worlds coexist at every level of the cosmos.

Source: Yogavasistha 6.2.56-94. There is an elegant summary in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities.