Dreams are a stage for history: wisdom from a medieval Muslim historian

One of the history books that draws me back every few years is Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah - or "Introduction" - to world history. Writing in the 14th century, in the midst of constant war and turmoil between the rival Muslim dynasties of the Maghreb, he brought modern principles of evidence to the grand ambition of writing a universal history. Many scholars of historiography see him as the first true world historian.
     He was an evolutionist, in his way. He observed that every order of creation may evolve into one above it. For humanity, this would mean evolving to the condition of the angels – “angelity”. For now, only the prophets are at home in that realm.
     Ibn Khaldun wanted to understand the reasons for the rise and fall of different cultures, and identified cycles - or "returns" - throughout history.
      I see I am engaged in one of the "returns" of my own life. In 1967-1968, I considered writing my MA dissertation on the Muqaddimah, partly influenced by a Pakistani scholar of Ibn Khaldun who was at the School of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He thought I would find the Maghreb historian's approach refreshing. I even embarked on studying Arabic in this cause - but my wife of that era complained that I kept sounding like I was gargling or throwing up, so I switched my thesis topic to West African history.
    Though Ibn Khaldun’s project was often delayed or interrupted by needs of state (he was a minister and ambassador and occasionally a general for the dynasties of Tunis, Fez, and Andalusia) his Introduction is extraordinary, and an extraordinarily good read today. He begins with six essays defining the stage on which history is played out, covering (for example) the influence of climate and geographical features in human affairs, the human need for community, and the nature of group consciousness.
     His sixth essay is the most arresting and arousing. He explains how knowledge of the future, the realm of angels, and the Divine purpose become available through dreams and visions. He distinguishes the "true dream" (which requires no interpretation) from lesser dreams. Ibn Khaldun describes how in dreams the soul travels outside the body, remaining connected by a "thin vapor" whose seat is in the heart. He is very interesting on the theme of how dream experiences are reshaped into more conventional or familiar - and sometimes deceptive - imagery (in ordinary or "confused" dreams) as the dreamer returns.
     He defines the nature of the prophet, making it clear there have been many, though Muhammad is unique because he received and retained the vast and unique revelation that is the Koran. Ibn Khaldun reports that prophets, in the grip of revelation, can appear to lose control of their senses and feel overwhelmed - sometimes "choked", as Muhammad complained to Gabriel - by what is upon them. But unlike mediums or victims of possession, they retain their knowledge and bring it back with clarity, and that knowledge serves and sustains humanity and furthers its evolution.
     All this in laying the foundation for writing history! Today's historians should take note. I was partly inspired by this approach to write my own  Secret History of Dreaming,which reveals how dreams and visions have been a secret engine of history and evolution throughout the whole human odyssey on the planet.

Photo: Doors in Sarajevo by Robert Moss

Where Too Much Sleep Is Perilous for the Soul

Heavy, uninterrupted sleep is dangerous, reports Roberto Romero Ribeiro, a Brazilian ethnographer who lived with the Maxicali (aka Tikmũ’ũn) of Minas Gerais. [1] In common with most if not all indigenous peoples, the Maxicali believe that in dreams the soul (koxuk) goes wandering. It can fall into bad company, or get lost, or even be taken captive. You don’t want to wake a sleeper because the soul may still be out there and could have a hard time getting back.
     On the other hand, you don't want to sleep like white folks who go out for the count for seven or eight hours. If your soul is away too long, you’ll get weak and sick. The ideal is to sleep lightly and wake several times and share the dreams that are with you with those close to you. 
     When Roberto, exhausted by native rituals, grabbed a few hours' extra sleep, his hosts were worried about him. "Are you sick?" they asked when he stirred. “Get up, get up! You’re going to get sick! ã yok, ã yok! ã pakut ax!"
     The striking vocabulary of dreaming among the Maxicali reflects the view that in dreams the soul is projected from the body. Their word for "dream" is  yõnkup The root yõn means “to throw”.It also appears in the verb mõ’yõn, “to sleep",  a combination of mõ, “to go” and yõn. During lively football matches in the villages, you hear all the time: Nũy ã yõn!  So, to sleep is to go throw the soul. The Maxicali say the dream soul exits through the mouth. It may follow dangerous paths that lead to the villages of the dead. They are uneasy about encounters with the dead, because the departed may be eager to get surviving family or friends to live with them - which would mean that the soul would not return to the body.
      In its excursions, the dream soul may meet many other spirits, of the forest or the waters, of sorcerers or allies. Forgetting your dreams is bad because you lose track of your soul and miss what it can show you from the future. You need t remember where your dream soul went because this can reveal sources of illness and potential for healing.     
      When you tell a dream to relatives or shamans, they will want to know whether you heard singing. The spirit people called yãmĩyxop are famous for their songs. They can be wonderful allies, but they may also demand rewards for their favors, for example in the form of feasts and rituals. The language of debt and payment is used by the Maxicali to describe their relationship with spirits. Someone who is cured by the shamans “owes” a debt to the spirits and must “pay” by performing a new ritual. In this context the shamans are called “collectors “for the spirits. 
     Early chroniclers noted that the habit of sleeping light related not only to the need to keep track of the wandering soul but to scan whatever was going on in the external environment at night. "The sleep of these people is not like, in general, that of civilized people, continuous and long...They sleep poorly and their precautions are constant, whether day or night, throughout the occupied area. A dry leaf that falls, a branch that breaks off from the trees, as soon as the care is heard, it is carefully observed, examined; Stopping what you are doing, you listen while the incident lasts.” [2]

 

[1] Roberto Romero Ribeiro Júnior “Numa terra estranha: sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3 (Nov. 2022).
[2] Jacinto Pallazollo. Nas Selvas do Mucuri e do Rio Doce (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1973) p. 118

Picture: Text-to-image, RM with DALL-E 3

When the Emperor Sends You a Letter about Dreams

 

Manuel II Palaiologos was Byzantine emperor from 1391 to 1425. Perilous times. He hunted, campaigned and clashed with the paranoid Ottoman Sultan Bayazid, called The Thunderbolt, and was held ceremonial hostage by him. His capital, Constantinople, was besieged and blockaded by the Ottomans several times. Provinces were lost and won back and lost again; family members plotted to assassinate him or drive him into exile. He made a long journey west, to the crowned heads of Europe, all the way to France and England, seeking support against the Turks. He was received with great pomp at the court of Henry IV. He stood at the crossroads of a trembling world. His fourth son, the last Byzantine emperor, died on the city walls when Constantinople finaly fell to the Turks. 

A scholar by nature, who said that he loved to write, Manuel made time in the midst of war and intrigue to write discourses on many things, including marriage.The most intriguing of his productions may be the dream book that bears his name. Scholars dispute the authorship, some asserting that a highly literate emperor would not stoop to contribute to the lowly and "superstitious" genre of the dream dictionary.

Yet the few pages of this Byzantine dream book that survive suggest that the author was intimately familiar with life at the imperial palace, and the approach to dream meanings is reasoned and nuanced. Dream books of this era - tracing their descent from the Greek interpreter Artemidorus of Daldis, or from Persian, Indian and Arabic traditions, or all the above - were popular in elite circles as well as among the largely illiterate populace who would gather round a reader to hear a story or interpretation. The two surviving texts of the dream book have been assessed to be from the late fourteenth century, contemporary with the reign of Manuel II. Incidents are described involving high imperial officials. And we have an epistolary essay that was certainly written by Manuel that confirms his deep interest in dreaming and what it reveals about soul.

The Oneirokritikon kata Manouel Palaiologon, or Dream Book of Manuel Palaiologos, is not organized as a dream dictionary, with an alphabetical list of dream symbols, tagged with supposed meanings. It is arranged thematically,and it gives a rationale for interpretations. [1] The author had a taste for puns. and an ear for homophony. If you dream of mosaics, he says,  you may hope for a fair adjudication, because the Greek word for "mosaic pebble" (psephos) also means "judgement". The Greek word for “cheese” τυρί [tyri] sounds like a word for “disorder” or “turmoil” τύρβη  [tyrbi] so when things get "cheesy" you might prepare for more trouble than English slang would suggest.[2] 

The dream book describes the precognitive dream of a high official who saw the unexpected death of his son-in-law [3]. In the thirteen pages of printed text we have from the manuscript, seven dreams that proved truthful are reported. The commentary insists on factual reporting of possibly portentous dreams.

Dream symbols are discussed elsewhere in ways that recall Artemidorus. Thus: wells, cisterns and vessels that hold water relate to women. There is the  distinction that Artemidorus made between insignificant incidents in sleep  (enypnia) and meaningful dreams (oneirata). 

Let's turn to Manuel's letter on dreams.[4] It is not a letter as we think of them today. In her recent biography of Manuel II as  "author-emperor", Siren Çelik observes that Byzantine authors crafted letters as "beautifully ornate, polished compositions filled with literary features....Instead of offering concrete information, a letter aimed at providing literary delight to the recipient; sophisticated language, metaphors, allusions and quotations were highly desired and appreciated features in this context...Letters were meant to be circulated among a literary circle, and sometimes performed aloud in literary gatherings called theatra."[5] 

The emperor's epistle on dreams fits this mode. He is writing to one Andreas Asan, a provincial governor who may be his cousin. He takes his theme from a question Andreas has previously asked: Is it true that all dreams are prophetic, but become false or deceptive through the weakness of our interpretation? This sounds as if the questioner has read Synesius of Cyrene, who wrote that if dreams are read correctly then they all come through the Gate of Horn.

Manuel introduces a brief personal note by mentioning that he is writing (or more likely dictating) his missive in the spring, but a cold snap has caused him to draw close to the fire. This puts the reader inside the scene and also takes up at once - craftily and indircetly - the theme of veracity. It was commonly taught in the old Greek dream books that spring is the best time to look for veridical dreams because life is surging forth from  the earth. [6] 

On the question of whether all dreams are prophetic, Manuel delivers a short  philosophical homily, citing Hellenic and Christian authorities. He assigns dreams to three categories. There are dreams that are generated by the dreamer's “disposition”, daily habits, and the balance of the four humors. This first category includes the dreams you bring on yourself by eating too much or too fast. No prophecy here, though a doctor might find something to work with.

Next, there are dreams that are experiences of the soul. During sleep the soul “comes closer to its divine origins”, though it is still under the negative influence of the body. The emperor appears to acknowledge that the soul travels beyond the body in dreams. It may still fall into states of illusion, and the heavy influence of the body causes it to come back from its excursions blurry and confused.

Third, there are dreams that are true prophecies because they come from God. They are sent to the “pious and pure” who may also have waking visions. A prophetic dream is not only for the receiver but for the people. 

The emperor says that care must be taken to discern whether a prophetic dream is for real or a deception of the devil. Some dreams and omens, as well as some forms of divination, are used by the evil spirit in order to deceive. Thankfully, oneirokritike, dream interpretation, is not mentioned as a possible vehicle for the wiles of the Dark One. Back in the ninth century, the emperor Leo the Wise decided to give dreamwork a clean bill of health. Dream interpretation was formally removed from Byzantine lists of evil practices in the compilation of laws known as the Basilika, issued in 892.

The emperor writes that the devil does not have the gift of prescience: he can only speculate by calculations that either come true or not. The devil not only deceives; he may be deceived. [7] Whew. 

 Much of what Manuel puts in his epistle on dreams is borrowed from earlier writers, as he is happy to acknowledge. The theory of the influence of the four humors on dreams goes back to Galen and Hellenic medical writings. “Theoretical discussion and practice of divination was de rigeur in Byzantine learned circles in the fourteenth century.” [8]  Manuel weaves Platonist and Christian teachings on the soul into his discussion, but this emerges as the most original part of his epistle on dreams.   

His writing indicates he knew something of Neoplatonist philosophy and theurgy, as well as Orthodox mysticism and patristic literature. He recognizes that dreams may be experiences of the divine and imperishable soul, and that (contrary to Aquinas ) the soul may have greater access to divine wisdom than the angels.[9]  However, because of its long bondage to the body, the soul is heavy and distracted, drawn down towards darkness and its light dims. So the flight of the soul in dreams may follow the shifting border between truth and illusion, and the memories it brings the dreamer on its return will require interpretation. 

Did the emperor set himself up, as author, to play dream interpreter in the manner of Artemidorus or the anonymous author of the popular Oneirocriticon of Achmet? Byzantinist George Calofonos says, " I believe that still one cannot give a definite answer, although his letter and the dreambook show some similarities. Both texts are systematic, lengthy, and quite original. If Manuel was not the author it could be someone from his immediate circle."[10]

If we return to that dream book, we find one prognostication the emperor surely knew to be true: If you dream you become emperor, you will "face humility, dishonour, persecution, and accusations at the hands of many people" [11] 

Notes

1. The Greek text of the Manuel Palaiologos Dream Book (Oneirokritikon kata Manouel Palaiologon) is in Armand Dellate (ed.) Anecdota Atheniensia 1 (Paris: Vaillant-Carmanne 1927), 511-24. Translation in Steven M. Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2008)

2. Maria Mavroudi, "Byzantine and Islamic Dream Interpretation: A Comparative Approach to the Problem of ‘Reality’ vs ‘Literary Tradition’” in  Christne Angelidi and Gerge T. Calofonos (eds), Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2014)  169

3. ibid 166

4. The Greek text of Manuel's epistle On Dreams (περί ονειράτον) is in Jean François Boissonade, Anecdota Nova (Paris: Apud Dumont 1844) 239-246. For an extended paraphrase and discussion, see George T. Calofonos,  ‘Manuel II Palaiologos: Interpreter of Dreams?’ in Anthony Bryer, Manzikert to Lepanto: The Byzantine World and the Turks (1071–1517) Papers Given at the Nineteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, March 1985.  Byzantinische Forschungen 16 (1991) 447–55

5. Siren Çelik, Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425): A Byzantine Emperor in a Time of Tumult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 6-7

6. Mavroudi, Maria V., A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 133-35

7. Based on text in Calofonos, op.cit.,450

8. Mavroudi, "Byzantine and Islamic Dream Interpretation"  173 

9. Manuel insists on the equality of the human soul with angels, contradicting Aquinas' statement in Summa Theologica 2:2, 172.2, on how the gift of prophecy comes to angels. “The angels hold a middle position between God and men, in that they have a greater share in the perfection of divine goodness than men have. Wherfore the divine enlightenments and revelations are carried to men by the angels.” 

10. Calofonos op.cit., 454

11. ibid 454-5 

Art: Manuel II Palaiologos depicted as a gift-bearing member of the Magi (Melchior) in Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. On his visit to France, Manuel feasted and exchanged gifts with the Duc du Berry, the uncle of the mad French King Charles VI

On Dying and Coming Back

 

I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.

     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
    We did not have terms like “near-death experience” in Australia in that era.. The first person who gave me a model for understanding what had happened to me was an Aboriginal boy. He told me, “When we get real sick, our spirit goes away. We go and live with the spirit people. When we get well, we come back.”

    At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”.
    I can’t remember a time when I did not understand that our personal dreams can take us into the Dreamtime, which is about more than the bargain basement of the personal subconscious; it is the place where we find our spiritual kin on a higher level and remember the origins and purpose of life. That’s the way the First Peoples of my native Australian see it. The Aboriginal boy who befriended me did not think it was extraordinary to dream future events, or to meet the dead in dreams, as I did all the time.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions.
    In the mid-1980s, I left the fast-track life of a bestselling thriller writer and moved to a farm 130 miles north of New York City, thanks to a hawk and a white oak. I found myself drawn into trans-temporal dramas and the spirit world of a Native American people. I became deeply engaged in issues and dramas from the life of an 18^th century Irishman, a major historical figure who knew the Mohawk very well.
    My engagement with him opened a link to a woman of his time, an extraordinary dream shaman, the Mother of the Wolf Clan of her people, who tried to influence him and most certainly succeeded in influencing me. She reminded me why dreaming is central to healing and to living our bigger and braver stories, and I cherish our continuing relationship across time and dimensions. I learned what it means to be so deeply involved with a personality from another time that your lives turn together. I was eventually required to undergo death and rebirth in the mode of a shaman. 
    Borrowing from Jung, I sometimes describe this period in my life as a protracted "confrontation with the unconscious." I see now that, as with the years Jung recorded in his Red Book, all the important work of my subsequent life has flowed from this stormy period of spiritual emergency and emergence.   
    There are few subjects more important than how we navigate the big transitions in life. A transition is more than a change; it is literally a “crossing over” from one state into another. What happened to me in midlife was another experience of dying and coming back.

    I learned that when you change your life, your true friends are those who will support you through that change and your worst friends are those who try to keep you in the frame of past expectations.
    Dreams showed me how to find my way in my new life as a dream author and dream teacher. When I still thought I had to return to writing thrillers to pay the bills, my dreams told me that it is never a good idea to trade the soul’s calling for a bag of groceries, or even a truck full.
    Young children, especially my own daughters, became my most important mentors in ordinary life on what dreams require from a family or community. Time among children confirmed and renewed my understanding that dreams are for real, that there is magic in making things up, and that we change the world when we tell a better story about it.

    I started teaching what I had learned, and learned through teaching. I found, as Emerson counseled, that “there is one direction is which space is open to us.” When I followed my calling, doors opened in astonishing ways. When I slipped back and away from my path, doors stayed resolutely closed. I am grateful for that.
     I was now able to give people who were willing to share dreams and other experiences of the larger reality the confirmation and validation I had desperately needed as a lonely boy. As I developed my practice, I found I was able to offer more: safe ways to travel into the deeper reality, have adventures, and return with gifts of guidance and healing. I developed an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and primal shamanic methods for shifting consciousness and operating in the spirit worlds, and called this Active Dreaming. I found people everywhere were hungry for this. The more I gave them, the more happy and fulfilled I felt. I knew joy every time I saw more of spirit shining in someone’s eyes in one of my workshops.
    There is no better confirmation that you are on the right track than a secret handshake from the universe, one of those meaningful coincidences you simply cannot dismiss. I got a bisou, or kiss, from the universe in a delightful and entirely unexpected way, on the day I told my editor I was going to write a book titled The Boy Who Died and Came Back. My last action that morning, before rushing to the airport to catch the first of a series of planes to France, was to send  her  a couple of sample pages about what happened to me as a young boy.
    I was traveling to southern France that day because I had a date with Death. I was going to lead one of my favorite workshops, titled “Making Death Your Ally”, at the Hameau de l’Etoile, a restored seventeenth-century village near Montpellier that is now a retreat center.  On my last short flight from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport to Montpellier, I took out my in-flight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first-hand knowledge of what happens after death.
    "This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!"
    I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening my workshop. Les portes du rêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates.
    Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?"
     Yes, indeed. 
    People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Violette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself."
    I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere."
    There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people.
    "I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information.
    I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l’au delà, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves.
    This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences.
     "Do you have no fear of death?
     "Do you talk to many people who have died?"
     "Are there many different places where people go when they die?"
     The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"
     That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a counselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring."
     The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information.
    "You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l’au delà, here in France."
     Her lips grazed my cheek.  I felt a bisou from the universe, a little kiss from Death.

 

 

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist inthe Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "Stormbird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss

The Angel Whose Wing is the Color of Peacock Feet

 

I love the small discoveries in my overnight studies that bring a subject to quivering life. I am reading the visionary tales of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi in Henry Corbin's French translations published as L'Archange empourpré. Suhrawadi, the medieval Persian Shaykh al-Ishraq ("Master of Illumination") melded Neoplatonist philosophy and mystical Islam. I read some of his visionary treatises forty years ago, in a translation by W.H. Thackston that I found in the tiny offices of the publisher opposite the British Museum on Great Russell Street [1]. I was called to deepen my study of Suhrawardi by lucid dreams and inner conversations in the liminal space between sleep and awake, and the play of synchronicity, of dreams literally spilling onto sidewalks. 

In a story whose Farsi title Corbin translates as "The Rustling of Gabriel's Wing"[2], the teller walks the night in a half-dream state until he encounters ten sages of shining beauty, only one of whom can speak to him in a way he can begin to understand.

The sage tells the traveler "that everything in the four corners of the world proceeds from Gabriel’s wing". Then he explains that Gabriel has two wings. light and dark. The left wing is dark because it bears a reddish "imprint", the color of "the moon at its rising or of peacock feet." It is from the shadow of that wing that human events unfold. 

What a stunning image, and goad to contemplation. A difficult and barely animated philosophical text whose terms resist easy translation and definition is suddenly gloriously alive, its words swishing and fluttering in the air. The peacock would have been quite familiar to Suhrawardi's audience, both the literal bird with its gorgeous many-eyed back feathers (not actually its tail) and the symbolic bird central to many forms of religious art and belief in the general area from the Peacock Angel of the Yazidis to the companion of deities in India. What are we to make of peacock feet in a mystical account of emanation from the Highest Word down to the human plane? Will we hear the peacock scream, as Yeats did?

There are other phrases to bite on and savor in Suhrawardi's didactic story. Why does the angelic speaker declare that the business of the ten sages is "tailoring" (in Corbin's French translation, couture)? We know that 'garment" is a term often used in theo-sophy of many stripes for the vehicles of soul or consciousness on various levels. 

[1] The Mystical & Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi trans. W.M. Thackston (London: Octagon Press, 1982)

 [2]"Le bruissement de l'aile de Gabriel" in Shihaboddin-Yahya Sohravardi. L'Archange empourpré: Quinze traités et récits mystiques. trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976)

Images

Top: Detail from "Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation" Folio from a manuscript of the Majma' al-Tawarikh. Herat c. 1425

Bottom: "Calligraphic Composition in Shape of Peacock," Folio from the Bellini Album, Turkish ca. 1600

Both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Public Domain.

Sunset Road

 

I

 

A piece of sky has fallen into the sea,

So this must be the time.

The Sound is banded pink and heron blue

By the gentle palette of the lowering sun.

 

I strip at the shore of the shelly beach

And fold my clothes neat as Christmas packages.

I was never tidy in life, except in leaving it,

So they’ll know that I left with intention.

 

The water receives me in a lover’s embrace.

Discreetly, the watcher on the reef takes off

And becomes a black arrow, flying west,

Beyond the lighthouse island, pointing my way.

 

There has been a sea-change. The chop and current

That resisted me fiercely, day after day,

Pushing me always toward the Old World,

Now streams with my strokes.

 

I am riding blue water, crested with burning bronze.

How my body loves the sea, its element and its nature!

I swim through all the colors of memory

And I remember the water-world that is my home.

 

Something slips from me like a swimsuit

Whose elastic has snapped, and I am free of human form.

I am a cormorant, fishing and skimming the waves.

I play with the shapes I remember:

 

I am a dolphin, leaping and plunging in its joy

I am a sea-king in his chariot, plowing the waves

I am the Blue Man, tireless lover from the deep

I am the one who fell from the sky like a shooting star. 

 

 

II

 

I remember the sunset road. Perhaps I looked too long

Into the black light at the heart of the sun

Because I have skipped a continent, and return to myself

On the white sand of Manly Beach.

 

For a moment, I am in the body and memory

Of an awkward Australian boy of eighteen

Learning how to make love. Quickly I am drawn

Through green shadows and groves of familiar dead

 

To the World Tree. It has an everyday name:

A Moreton Bay fig. The flocks of ibis birds around it –

Travelers from the precinct of Thoth the Star Voyager,

Measurer and Rememberer – herald its greater name.

 

Its corkscrew roots drill a passage to the Underworld.

Its manifold trunks and branches open many ways.

Its upper limbs are ladders to the World Up Top

Where a couple with black opal eyes help me up.

 

In the lubra’s opulent body I read a pattern of stars.

Her eyes shift. She is flying fox, and echidna,

And black Venus. Her eyes turn as spiral galaxies

And I find she is a way through the Milky Way.

- This poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

 

Photo by RM

A Night with the Princes from the East

The Assignment

An old friend has asked me to lunch with a pair of foreigners, a man and a woman who are Persian or Near Eastern. We go to a restaurant where he disappears to converse with staff in the background. I join the foreign couple at a table. We seem to be the only patrons in the restaurant, which is either windowless or has the windows heavily draped. the decor is expensive but anonymous, generic hotel or airport lounge style.
     The first phase of the conversation is guarded and superficial. I decide I'm ready to go, having discharged my personal obligation.
     My friend approaches me, highly agitated, as I prepare to leave. He gestures at a set of handwritten notes and a typed memo that he slipped to me earlier but I haven't bothered to read. These papers, especially the handwritten notes, make it plain that the people I am lunching with are top priority. It is vitally important for me to pursue the conversation and draw them out, so that their words can be recorded. I have been picked to pursue this opportunity because the couple trust me.
     I yield, lingering at the table to drain glass after glass of armagnac. The man matches me, glass for glass, with cognac. The mood is increasingly jolly and intimate. I can only guess at the size of the bill for all these drinks, but I plan to present the bill to my friend. The waiter seems to be in on the plot. He refers to us as "Excellencies" and "Your Highnesses." It seems the "assignment" will be completed by the end of our session, which looks likely to continue for the rest of the afternoon.

I woke from this dream in a pool of moonlight, lying on a bed in a cabin on North Hero Island on Lake Champlain. I was excited and intensely curious, wanting to know much more about the message I was supposed to record. I needed to go back into the dream, and made it my intention to do this, lying on my back on the bed. I kept a pad and paper close to my hand. If I succeeded in resuming my conversation with the mysterious strangers, I was determined not to forget my assignment to record the proceedings.

The Prince and Princess of Fars 

I focus on the restaurant as my portal for dream reentry.. The name of the restaurant is "The Golden Cage" or "The Golden Bowl". I confirm that the restaurant, though spacious, is tightly sealed - no views of the outside. 

     I try to examine the papers my friend gave me. I find there are three documents, in a large manila envelope: handwritten notes, on several smallish pieces of high-quality bond; a typed memo; and a clipping from a newspaper. The newspaper is the Tehran Times. The headline describes a visit by "The Prince and Princess of Fars."

     I need to talk to them.

     The man shows himself. He is pleasant-looking, clean-shaven, with an oval face, black hair combed straight with the slightest suggestion of sideburns, large dark brown eyes, immaculately dressed. The woman's features, by contrast, are indistinct. She is veiled, not in Islamic style but in "High Priestess" mode of the Tarot trump.

     The man is Shams. I met him in a previous dream. He is wearing a beautiful grey-blue shirt with a narrow white banded collar under his tailored suit. He says I may know the veiled princess as Fatima. He urges me to study the typed sheet my friend gave me. I review the paper, and find it contains a list of 20 questions. The first questions give me shivers:

1. What is the nature of exile?
2. What are the conditions for the return?

As I record the questions on my pad, Shams, gives me his responses, for the record:

1. What is the nature of Exile?

To be an exile is to be separated unwillingly from your homeland. This is the condition of the soul when it comes into the body. It is the condition of the higher man when he is separated from his Higher Self.

2. What are the conditions for Return?

The return requires courage, the willingness to deny the ways of the world. It is always a journey to the Mountain. It requires cutting the cord of attachment to worldly things.
    There are many tests and obstacles along the way, also distractions and temptations. But Home reaches out to guide the returning exile. There is always a guide. The appearances of the guide are almost always unexpected. The face may be that of a familiar friend, or a stranger.

3. What is the Source?

The Source is the bottomless well of remembering. You may see it as a passage or a bore-hole, leading to inexhaustible reserves. Do not confuse the bore-hole with what lies beyond it. From a certain viewpoint, the bore-hole is also the birth canal. You may learn to swim back, into the Water of life, into the womb of the Ancient Mother.

4. Who is the Guide?

The guide is the emissary of the level of Intelligence - the level of the Real - that you are able to work with at this time. The guide takes the form you are ready to recognize.

5. What is the Kingdom?

The kingdom is this world. But a true crown is earned only through the blessing of the Other World. the true crown is Xvarnah.

6. Is there eternal conflict between good and evil?

There are competing forces in the cosmos. Humans interact with the battles and struggles of races beyond the human. The conflicts of this world are related to those of subtler kingdoms.
In dealing with problems of good and evil, humans must know that
- In the universe, humans interact and have intercourse with beings other-than-human that are friendly, neutral, hostile or inimical to men.
- Demons are real, often generated by human thought and emotion.
- There are "criminal souls".
- The principle of "active evil" is also a real phenomenon.
- In the world of duality, it is necessary to take sides. Embodied beings, in a world of duality, cannot evade this choice.

7. What is the work of the Invisible Schools?

You are born (which is to say, re-born) within a spiritual tradition or lineage. You are called in dreams and visionary states to resume contact with teachers of your Order. You may be invited to attend other schools but you are born with one primary connection.


8. What are the conditions for soul travel?

The keys to the practice are in meditation, concentration, the presence of the guide, courage for the journey. Also a trustworthy map and a password. Above all, the traveler's robe.
It is not only a matter of leaving the physical body, but of putting on the heavenly body.
This has to be earned, to be grown (or rather, re-grown).
     The celestial body, the true Body of Light, is required for the high experience of soul travel.

I broke contact for a moment to tiptoe into the bathroom. When I returned, I was given some personal information, and was then able to return to the questions. The ninth question involved the nature of the soul. We got through 13 of the 20 questions, but the quality of my reception began to waver, and we agreed to reserve the completion of the dialogue for another time. I dated my journal report as I always do. August 1, 1998.
     I pulled on shirt and shorts and walked down to the lake. In the twilight before dawn, I lay out on the floating dock and watched the changing light on the lake. A silver streak near the horizon gradually increased in size. 

      A rosy blush spread over it, cloudlike against the silver, until the water looked more like the sky than the sky itself. A field of bright, clear blue, shaped like an elongated triangle, emerged within the rosy "clouds". I seemed to be looking into a lake in the sky, into an Otherworld landscape. Fish broke the surface. The black silhouettes of nightbirds and early fishers glided above the lake, to plunge after fish. I saw a kingfisher, mighty in head and chest, take possession of the far shore.

Drawing by Robert Moss: "The Princes from the East"

The Midnight Library and the Café Jet-Lag

 

"Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you."

It's a great moment in Matt Haig's great novel The Midnight Library, when Nora, who is sliding between parallel lives, discovers there are others like her. This is what Hugo, the first to reveal himself, tells her.

"We are sliders. We have a root life in which we lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place...A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant..."

And this place becomes the portal to a parallel world where you find yourself in the body and situation of your parallel self as they are in this same moment. You'll be challenged to catch up with their divergent biography, with a lover you never knew, a job you never had, songs you never learned, muscles you didn't know you had.

The many worlds interpretation of reality, as it has evolved, makes sliding acceptable to theoretical physics. The architecture for transit - the library, the video store - is easier for human minds than theorems about quantum waves.

You don't need to be half-dead to explore this field for yourself, though we all exist somewhere between life and death. I use a very special library, and a cosmic video store, and an art gallery or museum often as portals for lucid dream adventures in parallel worlds and others and play guide for groups that want first-hand experience of these things..

Matt Haig's slider remind me that perhaps I haven't made sufficient use of restaurants, though I often dine well in my dreams and return with the taste in my mouth. I think I will see whether the Café Jet-Lag in Paris, where I would often stop for coffee or vin rouge after overnight flights, is a friendly transit lounge for interdimensional travel. The name matches my condition when I return from world-jumping.

The double who arrives at a place ahead of you

 

When Fred, an engineer deeply interested in dreamwork, told me he was planning to drive across the continent to my neighborhood in upstate New York, I invited him to come and stay. The night before he was scheduled to arrive, I stirred from sleep and was startled by a ghostly form the foot of my bed. Man-sized. Peering through the grainy dark, I recognized Fred. He looked dozy and out of things.

    “Fred,” I spoke softly so as not to wake my wife. “You are not due here until tomorrow. Get back to your body and get some rest.”
     You may glean from this that the appearance of what the old paranormal researchers used to call a  “phantasm of the living” was not exotic for me. I had long been aware that consciousness can travel outside the physical body -and does so every night in dreams – and that when it does so it may be using the vehicle of a subtle or astral body. This energy vehicle may resemble the physical body closely, or take other forms.
    I assumed that Fred had slipped out of his dormant body during sleep and found his way to my house, unaware of the time or the circumstances. Uninvited callers who seek to enter my psychic space get an unpleasant reception, But Fred had, after all, been invited – only not for 3 o’clock in the morning.
    When he showed up for breakfast after sunup, I asked him if he remembered any dreams from the middle of the night. “I’ve been on the road since midnight,” he told me, holding out his coffee mug for a refill.
     This was an interesting twist. I had assumed that while Fred was asleep, his dream double went walkabout in the direction of my home. It now seemed that, cruising along the highway, he relaxed enough to release his energy double to arrive at my house early.
     The Norwegians have a word for the kind of double who arrives before you at a place where you are heading. The word is vardøgr. It is probably derived from the Old Norse vardhygi, which fuses vǫrd, ("guard" or "watchman") with hugr ("mind" or "soul"). "Early arrival" and “spirit predecessor” are suggested translations of vardøgr. The etymology might lead us to "soul watcher" or "soul guard" in the sense of advance guard.
    In the Viking era the Scandinavians were quite familiar with several forms of the double, and their ability to travel outside the physical body and shapeshift into many forms. This is such a central feature that a French scholar, Régis Boyer, titled a book on Old Norse magic Le monde du double, "The World of the Double". 
     When I recently returned to research on this theme, I was interested to find that my encounter with Fred the engineer has a parallel in a report from another engineer. In an article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, L. David Leiter, a mechanical engineer in Pennsylvania, describes how his double appeared at his home ahead of him. He took the highway home on a pleasant sunny afternoon and felt completely relaxed at the wheel, almost on autopilot.
    When he got home, his wife was surprised. Why had he gone out again? She explained that he had come in ten minutes before. Unusually for him he had skipped his usual greeting and kiss on the cheek and gone straight upstairs. She called their child to confirm her story. Worried that there might be an intruder in the house, they checked upstairs and found no one.

Engineers may survive projecting an astral double while at the wheel of a moving car, but I would strongly recommend avoiding this kind of thing while handling mechanical equipment! I have no doubt the safest and easiest way to explore these roads is in dreaming. It is quite likely that you are projecting an astral double every night in your dreams. It is also probable hat among the places you visit in your subtle body are locations that lie in your physical future.  Precognitive dreams can be “memories of the future” in the sense that your double arrived somewhere ahead of you and left you some souvenirs when they came back.

"Dream Double" drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

 

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]