Raven Eye

 

In myth and legend, the raven is many things: trickster and creator, messenger and seer, personification of ravening greed, harbinger of death, companion or form of the Goddess. Here I want to speak about raven as an oracle bird, one that can lend us his or her sight. 

Odin sees far with the help of twin ravens, named Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. They fly all over this Middle World, returning with information. In the Prose Edda, Odin is called "raven god" because of his close association with these birds. 

The raven has an equal role in the legends of Celtic seership. The raven is also the seeing-bird of Apollo, the owner of the most famous oracle of the ancient world, at Delphi. In the Greek story the raven was white until it brought the god the news of the infidelity of his mate Coronis (the Crow-Woman); his fury blasted it until it was black. 

In dreams and journeys over many years, I have found the raven an impeccable ally when there is a need to see into dark places or see into the future. It has served as an ally in shamanic healing, plucking out the cells of disease. When I look into the raven's eye, I see a screen like a television monitor on which images of things I need to know appear; sometimes I can also travel through the screen, to explore a scene beyond it. 

In seership trainings in my Active Dreaming workshops, I suggest to participants - after they have done some foundation work - that they can borrow the keen sight of twin ravens named Thought and Memory to go scouting the possible future. They don't have to rely on their own intuition or intelligence; they are to let the birds do the work. The quality of the information gathered by raven trackers in these exercises is often remarkable, even when the scouts have had no prior experience of doing anything remotely like this. 

Despite their literary reputation, ravens aren't solitary birds, unless forced to be; they mate for life.  

Here's a poem I wrote to honor some of Raven's gifts:

 

Sun Stealer  

They say you stole the sun. 
This is inexact. 
You hid the light in darkness 
where the light-killers could not find it 
so the sun could shine brighter than before. 

They say you are black
because you are evil and unkind.
They do not say you swallowed
your own shadow and mastered it
at the price of wearing its colors.

Shivering, they call you death-knell,
Death-eater, bad omen, flying banshee
because you feed on death that feeds on men.
You strip what rots from what remains. 
You give us the purity of the bones. 

Trickster, they call you. 
Oh yes, you'll do your wickedest
to ensure our way is never routine 
and we are forced to improvise and transform. 
You won't let us swap our souls for a plan. 

At least they don't accuse you of minor crimes.
I praise and claim your gifts 
of putting on darkness to come and go safely 
in the darkest places, jesting with Death.

Illustration: "Two Ravens" by Robert Moss

When it's time to cut the cords

 

We are linked to those with whom we have shared significant life experiences by cords of psychic and emotional attachment. The Hawaiian kahunas maintain that an aka cord of "sticky" etheric substance runs between us and everyone who has ever touched our lives unless it is detached. 

     When our relations with the people close to us are strong and healthy, there is no problem in being joined to them in this way. On the contrary, we want to be connected to those we love, those with whom we are engaged in a common purpose, and our family of chosen life companions. We still need to notice that, linked in this way, we can very easily pick up other people's stuff. Dreams teach us about how this works. We can find ourselves, in dreams, in another person's situation, or receiving their imagery or their visitations across the psychic bridges that are open between us.

     The problem with the psychic cords arises when a relationship has gone sour, or become unbalanced, so that energy is moving only one way, draining one of those involved. A very common issue is that when we break up with a spouse or partner or close friend, the psychic cords between us remain intact. What flows along them now is no longer healthy emotional energy but bad feelings and rancor that can bring both members of the old relationship down. More seriously, the surviving psychic bridge can become a means by which a jealous or bitter ex comes calling, confusing night dreams and wakeful perception and energy.

      To maintain psychic good health, we want to learn to scan our energy fields and locate the psychic cords of attachment between ourselves and others.I recently had members of a training do this by the method explained in my book Active Dreaming in the chapter on "a low maintenance plan for psychic well-being". Our special interest was to determine the appropriate ways to "unplug" unwanted or unhealthy cords of attachment. Simply picturing yourself hacking away at a cord might not be the best way!

      For many in the group, color was a guide to the condition of psychic cords. Toxic attachments appeared black; old, energy-draining attachments appeared grey, sometimes the grey of used chewing gum. Some fresh and improvisational approaches to releasing or cleansing psychic links emerged.
      One woman pictured herself swimming in healing waters while little fish nibbled away gently at the psychic cords that needed to be released. A man found that an ally (a "Chinese doctor") entered the scene; he tiled "little bows" in the problematic cords, leaving them to wither and drop away gradually. For another member of the group, the ally appeared as a crow that pecked away at the root of a black cord of connection to a deceased friend, until all the stagnant dead energy drained away.

     Some found it possible to cleanse and restore proper flow in the cords of attachment involved in current relationships. A woman found that the psychic cord between her and her boyfriend was a very mixed picture; it was mottled grey, black and red. She did not like the deadness of the black and the drabness of the grey. She pictured herself drawing the energy of a waterfall to which she had recently hiked to cleanse and refresh the connection. She continued with this powerful and spontaneous mediation until the cord glowed red and gold, the black and grey gone.

drawing by Robert Moss

Secrets of Dr Taverner

In his nursing home, Dr. Taverner reaches the parts that physicians and psychiatrists cannot reach. A shaman in country tweeds and a psychic Sherlock Holmes, Taverner deals with complaints that result from psychic attack, soul theft, energy vampires and diseases of the group mind. His creator, Dion Fortune (born Violet Firth) knew her stuff.     
 

  The founder of her own esoteric school, which came to be known as the Society of the Inner Light, Dion Fortune (1890-1946) modeled the hero of the stories collected in The Secrets of Dr Taverner on one of her own early mentors, an extraordinary Anglo-Irish magus named Theodore Moriarty. Some of the stories were first published in the Royal Magazine in 1922, a year before Moriarty's death. Remarkably, the illustrator made the fictional Dr Taverner look very much like Moriarty, though the artist had never seen a picture of Moriarty or even heard a description.
     Jelkes, the bookseller in Dion Fortune's novel The Goat-Foot God, says that "writers will put things into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose." Dion herself said that while books of hers like The Mystical Qabalah give the theory of high magic and spiritual reality, "the novels give the practice."
   There are five of those novels, and some of them have left a profound mark on esoteric and neo-pagan practice. The Sea Priestess contains a ritual for Drawing Down the Moon that has been much-borrowed in ceremonial work, not always with attribution. But of all her fiction, it is the stories of Dr Taverner to which I return again and again. I have asked some of my advanced classes to read several of these stories as the basis for focused discussion and investigation of such phenomena as the nature of the energy bodies, past-life connections, psychic defense and astral repercussion.
    Fortune is rather direct about what she is doing in The Secrets of Dr Taverner. She describes her tales as "studies in little-known aspects of psychology put in the form of fiction because, if published as a serious contribution to science, they would have no chance of a hearing." She wants it understood that her stories are based on fact. Her characters are mostly composites, but they are based on actual people and situations. She states that the first of the stories she completed, the tale of a hungry ghost attached to a living person that she titled "Blood-Lust", is "literally true". Noting that she was one of the first British students of psychoanalysis, she expressed the hope that the Taverner stories would be received as "a serious study in the psychology of ultra-consciousness."
     In my opinion, she succeeded beyond her ambition. The Taverner stories are both gripping and entertaining, and a valuable source of practical guidance on psychic protection and spiritual cleansing and many other facets of psychic well-being that are missed in our standard approach to healthcare and therapy. In its fictional wrapping, The Secrets of Dr Taverner is a practitioner's casebook, of the greatest value to subsequent practitioners. It is perhaps the most accessible of all Dion Fortune's works for the contemporary reader.
     Her narrator is a medical doctor named Rhodes, a supposed ingénu in regard to psychic phenomena and esoteric techniques. This makes it easy for Fortune to draw the veil over certain procedures. But enough shows through to make the story collection a kind of manual, especially when read together with Fortune's well-known later (nonfiction) work Psychic Self-Defence.

Dr Taverner releases a soldier from a hungry ghost

Dion Fortune said that she told the story titled "Blood-Lust" exactly as it was played out in physical and psychic reality.
    Captain Craigie, back from war, starts killing for blood. He starts by raiding chicken coops and works his way up to sheep. Along the way, he can't help trying to sink his teeth into his fiancee's neck. He tells Dr Taverner,that he suffered "shell-shock" in the trenches. This was a familiar term in the World War I era; today we are more likely to speak of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). But in this case, "shell-shock" seems an exact description. Captain Craigie was blown out of a trench.
    The source of the problem becomes literally visible when people start seeing the apparition of a German soldier in a flat cap and field-gray uniform. This, we learn, is the etheric or dense energy body of a dead enemy soldier who has attached himself to the unfortunate Craigie, seeking to feed his "vitality hunger" (as Taverner diagnoses his condition) through his living host.
    Dr Taverner's solution involves baiting a trap, by nicking the neck of the captain's girlfriend. While Craigie is physically restrained, the hungry ghost of the German soldier leaves his body to seek the fresh blood. Taverner stands between the ghost and its host and forces it into "a psychic killing-pen" in the form of a triangle.
    Dion Fortune is discreet about what happens next. Taverner makes "a Sign and a Sound". The gray etheric form spins into a whirling spiral and disintegrates. Captain Craigie is released from the hungry ghost that was riding him,
    Dr Taverner pronounces that the source of the problem was "a corpse who was insufficiently dead."

While some parts of the plot summary may sound like the script for one of those old Hammer horror flicks, the story touches on themes of perennial importance, including the plight of veterans of foreign wars yesterday, today and tomorrow, who may be carrying unwanted energies of the dead.
     One of Dr Taverner's lessons, in this story, is that we have more than one physical body. To be specific: 

We have two physical bodies...the dense material one...and the subtle etheric one, which inhabits it, and acts as the medium of the life forces, whose functioning would explain a great deal if science would only condescend to investigate it.


By my observation, this is exactly correct. Failure to understand the nature of the etheric body and its survival of physical death confuses our relations with the dead and delays or prevents recognition of the need for spiritual cleansing and releasing in healing cases of PTSD, addiction and other disorders.
     Dr Taverner instructs that "it is possible to keep the etheric body together almost indefinitely if a supply of vitality is available". In "Blood-Lust", the supply of vital energy comes through "a human feeding bottle" that feeds on others in an effort to replenish itself.
     How common is the problem? Well, literal vampirism and blood-drinking may be rare (despite the contemporary vampire fad) but energy vampirism has never been uncommon, alas. Dr Taverner, the magician, alludes to dark side magical practices by those who seek to avoid the second death (of the etheric body) by forming "a connection with the subconscious mind of some other soul that still has a body." He cautions that "the lower type of medium" is especially vulnerable to this type of parasitism. But "higher" types can be vulnerable if in a weakened or absent condition, as when Captain Craigie was blown out of his trench, and (for a period) out of his body.
     Who ya gonna call, if you don't have a Dr Taverner down the street? Well, there is rather specific guidance on spiritual release, including staging a "second burial" for an etheric body that does not belong with the living, in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. And we have Dion Fortune's classic Psychic Self-Defence. 

Dr Taverner reunites lovers from ancient Egypt

Dr Taverner is guided by dreams and coincidence in his work with an airman named Arnold Black, who spends his nights driving around the country at crazy speed, feeling that he is on his way to an encounter with a woman he loves but has yet to meet.
    In his first session with the wild driver, Taverner says, "If chance brought you to me, you are probably in my line." In his effort to solve the mystery of what is driving Black, Taverner asks him about his dreams, and finds that they glow with an "oriental light." He is inspired to show the airman paintings of Egypt, and Black recognizes scenes from his dreams in the ancient images.
    Taverner is encouraged to follow one of his basic procedures. When confronted with behaviors and mental states that have no adequate cause in the current life of the subject, he probes for a possible past life context, "getting the record of the previous lives of his patient by those secret means of which he was master."
    Black was in a recent airplane crash. Dr Taverner concludes that the trauma "had the effect of hypnotizing him, and he got into that particular part of his memory where the pictures of previous lives are stored."
    The woman Black is seeking may have shared a past life with him in ancient Egypt. The question now is whether she can be found - and what will happen if she is. The violent urgency of the airman's need to find his love from a previous life cannot be contained. He is in imminent danger of killing himself on the road if nothing can be done.
    "These attractions that come from the past," Taverner observes, referring here to past lives, "know no barriers. Black would drive that car through the Ten Commandments and the British Constitution to get at her. He will go till he drops."
    Coincidence comes into play again. A listless young woman is brought to see Taverner in his consulting rooms in London. He prescribes rest at his nursing home in the country, where she encounters a ghost of the living: the etheric body of the man who has been seeking her.
    Black is discovered in a car wreck close to the nursing home. The extrusion of his etheric double has left him close to death; so much of his vital energy has left his body. Taverner saves Black by leading the girl into the emergency room. At this point, the airman's etheric body rejoins the physical one. As the girl stays with him, holding his hands, he begins to revive. He eventually recovers, and the lovers who knew each other in Egypt are able to marry, reunited in their current lives.


This is a summary of a story titled "The Man Who Sought", in The Secrets of Dr Taverner.
   It raises many interesting questions. I have no doubt that our current dramas and relationships are connected to stories that played out - and may still be playing out - in the life experiences of personalities in other times. What triggers memories of those other lives, other than something like the airman's trauma?
   How do we balance, and help others to balance, the legacy of a past life with the needs and obligations of the present one? Can karma and past-life connections be mediated a different way, perhaps by taking all of this up to the level of a Greater Self? How can we be sure that the past life is truly that of a contemporary individual, as opposed to the obsessive memory of an obsessing entity?
     These questions are central to my own work and are addressed, in part, in my book Dreamgates, in Dreaming the Soul Back Home and in my spiritual memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Do you need a vampire chastity belt? (and other dreams of the undead)

Vampires are probably more popular today than at any other time in history. And they continue to get more glamorous and sexy, thanks to TV series like "True Blood" and the BBC's "Being Human", and of course the Twilight series of novels and movies. We are a long way from Nosferatu, and old horrors like the blood-sucking ghoul of south-eastern Europe the Greeks call the vrykolakas.
     So it's not surprising that vampires feature in plenty of dreams, and not only the dreams of teen girls - especially when we remember that Stephanie Meyer's inspiration for Twilight came from a dream. As she recalls, the dream was so juicy she had to stay in and write it all out, though she was supposed to go somewhere with her kids, and later used her dream report as a first draft for a chapter in the first of her vampire books.

     I am reflecting on a report from a mature woman who dreamed she was back in school, where the teacher was reading a love story in which she was a leading character. In the story, she falls in love with a vampire. She kisses him, then runs away, then kisses him again, and takes off again. The teacher stops reading the story in the middle. The kids in the class moan, "Oh no, we want to hear the rest!"

     I commented that if this were my dream, the fact that I am back in school would suggest that I am being offered a life lesson, something I need to know now. I'd think back to the times when I was seduced by someone - or a series of someones - who turned out to be energy vampires. Rather than seeking to know the end of this kind of love story, I would want to avoid repeating it.

     Energy vampires are for real, and the transaction involved is far from glamorous. We can all think of people who tend to drain our batteries. Sometimes it's so obvious you can sense them trying to suck you dry, slurping away, as if with a straw.

     What do you do to stave off the energy vampires in life? Another woman dreamer I know came up with a fabulous solution. In her dream, she was being kissed on the neck by a vampire. She found this very seductive and sensual. But her dream protectors didn't let it go too far. They conjured up a "vampire chastity belt" that fitted her neck perfectly, frustrating the vampire's efforts to suck her blood. I think there might be quite a market for vampire chastity belts if some savvy entrepreneur wants to produce them!

    I have traveled in Transylvania and stood in the shadow of the statue of Vlad Tepes, "the Impaler", better known as Dracula, in his birth city of Sigisoara. I must tell you that the vampire isn't really a Romanian phenomenon; Bram Stoker located his Dracula story in Transylvania, where he had never been, because it was so remote he could get away with saying anything about it.        
    Due diligence, though: the werewolf is a bona fide Romanian production. Check out the wolf-headed dragons of the ancient Dacians, who terrified the Romans by going into battle as wolf-men.

Painting of vampire by Edvard Munch, who actually titled it "Love and Pain" (1883).

Photo: RM in the shadow of Vlad Tepes, the original Dracula, in his birthplace, Sigisoara.

Female mirror guards of an African king

In the African galleries at the Field Museum in Chicago, I came upon two ladies I greatly admire. They are bodyguards of an oba, or king, of Benin, complete with armor and helmets and fierce expressions.
   Their weapons, or rather shields, are what seized my attention. They are holding up mirrors. These are intended to deflect any intended harm from the king and return it to the sender.
    The mirror defense against psychic attack is well-known across the ages, and the mirror is an ancient tool of shamans. The mirror ladies of Benin must have been formidable psychic bodyguards.