The Muse and the Flame

Before I went up on a magic mountain in the Adirondacks  last Friday to lead a gathering of frequent flyers over the weekend, I dreamed that I was handling the completed typescript of a book, and very happy with it. Associated with the book was a single sheet of paper on which I had written words as an offering. I knew, waking, that my ability to bring through the very best in this book would require me to make an offering.

      I thought of the opening of the Odyssey, where the poet begins by invoking the Muse in lovely speech: "Sing in me, O Muse". Not "sing through me" but "sing in me". I borrowed this locution as the opening for a poem I wrote on Saturday. I decorated the text with my drawings, and offered it to the fire when we did "wishcraft" on Saturday night in front of the great hearth in our lodge on the mountain. 

    The original poem has gone upward on the smoke of the fire. But I have written a version that resembles it.

Offering

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world;
and of how (being human)
he falls down and gets up, over and over,
forgets and remembers,
remembers and forgets.

Let me explain through his story
how the world is a playground, not a prison
when we awaken to the game behind the games.
Let this story help those who read it
to find their bigger and braver stories
and live them, and tell them well enough
to entertain the spirits,
win the indulgence of the gods
and bring through effortless healing.

Reincidence and the Rule of Three

I dreamed a new word for a run of coincidence: re-incidence, or reincidence. Waking, this seems to me to be a very useful term to describe a run of coincidence.
     While the words "coincidence" and "synchronicity" define a meaningful conjunction of an outer event and an inner sense of significance in a given moment of time, "reincidence" describes a sequence of conjunctions of the same kind, playing out over time. For example, you might dream of a flamingo, or see one on the side of a van, and then it's flamingos all over - on a suburban lawn, on a beer coaster, in the description of staff officers (with red stripes on their pants) in a thriller set in World War II, on a baby blanket.
      Back in April, 2010, I shared my oneiric word invention with a gathering of my frequent flyers on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks where we have been engaging in group adventures in shamanic journeying, mythic theater and dream exploration for many years. I had quite forgotten this discovery, and failed to make use of this handy neologism in my writing on synchronicity, until a friend reminded me about "reincidence" up on that same mountain over the past weekend. As we walked by a mountain lake, she also reminded me that I had cited my experience of a run of threes - as in three redheads, and the Triple Goddess - in Asheville shortly before my dream of "reincidence" as an example of how this phenomenon runs.
    I pulled out my 2010 journal and noted the following sequence:

April 15, 2010 - Big crowd at Malaprops for my talk and signing. A woman asks me about the significance of the number 3 in the title of my book The Three "Only" Things. I give her a bit of a lecture about three as the Celtic number, the number of the Trinity and of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, ending with the statement, "Three times makes the charm".

April 16, 2010 - I wake from dream feeling super-charged, with a shimmer of possibility all about me. I have learned to associate this shimmer with the play of numinous forces. In my dream, taking giant steps across a beautiful landscape, I feel that each step I take is being taken in more than one world, and is bringing worlds together. I notice three red haired women walking together up the slope towards me. They move so close together that their bodies appear to be joined, and I notice their heads are all enclosed by a single hood. Am I looking at the Triple Goddess? I have seen them before, going a different way. They look at me with intent interest and I feel a stir of excitement that they are in the field.

April 16, 2010, afternoon -  I sip a glass of wine at a civilized establishment, the Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, in the former Battery Hotel, and admire the griffins that guard the entrance of The Grove Arcade across the street. Three women, two of them redheads, the third a blonde, take the next table. In jolly mood, sipping margaritas, they strike up conversation with me and prove to be very interested in dreams. I say to the blonde, "If you were a redhead, I would think that the three of you are manifesting my dream from last night." She replies, "Oh, I'm a natural redhead. I colored my hair just last week for fun. I think I'll go back to red."

April 16, 2010 - evening. A cheerful crowd gather for my Synchronicity playshop at Jubilee, a lively community church downtown. I drum for the group, asking them to relax into the rhythm and pull up a dream or memory we can use in a game. My mind turns again to the three redheads of my dream, the many forms of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, and the distinctly Celtic quality of all this. Through my stir of images comes the keening of bagpipes. A piper is playing at John of the Wood, the Celtic pub behind Jubilee. The sound of the pipes, skirling over the drumming, is irresistible. When the time comes for us to write on index cards a summary of a dream or memory that came during the drumming, I write: "My ancestors are calling me, reaching through my stir of memories. They want me to honor and celebrate and embody their knowing."

April 17, 2010 - I wake from a dream in which Lady Charlotte Guest, one of the first to translate and make accessible Celtic literature including he Mabinogion, invites me to stay with her at a country house . We discuss how events and opportunities recur in a life or in a day, and how when something recurs three times, we are prompted to pay attention.

Later that spring, in a powerful dream of love and longing, I was presented with a choice of three paths in the greenwoods.

The mountain lake where my friend reminded me that I invented the word "reincidence"

The Triple Goddess Rules in Asheville

I dreamed a new word for a run of coincidence: re-incidence, or reincidence. Waking, this seems to me to be a very useful term to describe a run of coincidence.
     While the words "coincidence" and "synchronicity" define a meaningful conjunction of an outer event and an inner sense of significance in a given moment of time, "reincidence" describes a sequence of conjunctions of the same kind, playing out over time. For example, you might dream of a flamingo, or see one on the side of a van, and then it's flamingos all over - on a suburban lawn, on a beer coaster, in the description of staff officers (with red stripes on their pants) in a thriller set in World War II, on a baby blanket.
      Back in April, 2010, I shared my oneiric word invention with a gathering of my frequent flyers on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks where we have been engaging in group adventures in shamanic journeying, mythic theater and dream exploration for many years. I had quite forgotten this discovery, and failed to make use of this handy neologism in my writing on synchronicity, until a friend reminded me about "reincidence" up on that same mountain over the past weekend. As we walked by a mountain lake, she also reminded me that I had cited my experience of a run of threes - as in three redheads, and the Triple Goddess - in Asheville shortly before my dream of "reincidence" as an example of how this phenomenon runs.
    I pulled out my 2010 journal and noted the following sequence:

April 15, 2010 - Big crowd at Malaprops for my talk and signing. A woman asks me about the significance of the number 3 in the title of my book The Three "Only" Things. I give her a bit of a lecture about three as the Celtic number, the number of the Trinity and of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, ending with the statement, "Three times makes the charm".

April 16, 2010 - I wake from dream feeling super-charged, with a shimmer of possibility all about me. I have learned to associate this shimmer with the play of numinous forces. In my dream, taking giant steps across a beautiful landscape, I feel that each step I take is being taken in more than one world, and is bringing worlds together. I notice three red haired women walking together up the slope towards me. They move so close together that their bodies appear to be joined, and I notice their heads are all enclosed by a single hood. Am I looking at the Triple Goddess? I have seen them before, going a different way. They look at me with intent interest and I feel a stir of excitement that they are in the field.

April 16, 2010, afternoon -  I sip a glass of wine at a civilized establishment, the Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, in the former Battery Hotel, and admire the griffins that guard the entrance of The Grove Arcade across the street. Three women, two of them redheads, the third a blonde, take the next table. In jolly mood, sipping margaritas, they strike up conversation with me and prove to be very interested in dreams. I say to the blonde, "If you were a redhead, I would think that the three of you are manifesting my dream from last night." She replies, "Oh, I'm a natural redhead. I colored my hair just last week for fun. I think I'll go back to red."

April 16, 2010 - evening. A cheerful crowd gather for my Synchronicity playshop at Jubilee, a lively community church downtown. I drum for the group, asking them to relax into the rhythm and pull up a dream or memory we can use in a game. My mind turns again to the three redheads of my dream, the many forms of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, and the distinctly Celtic quality of all this. Through my stir of images comes the keening of bagpipes. A piper is playing at John of the Wood, the Celtic pub behind Jubilee. The sound of the pipes, skirling over the drumming, is irresistible. When the time comes for us to write on index cards a summary of a dream or memory that came during the drumming, I write: "My ancestors are calling me, reaching through my stir of memories. They want me to honor and celebrate and embody their knowing."

April 17, 2010 - I wake from a dream in which Lady Charlotte Guest, one of the first to translate and make accessible Celtic literature including he Mabinogion, invites me to stay with her at a country house . We discuss how events and opportunities recur in a life or in a day, and how when something recurs three times, we are prompted to pay attention.

Later that spring, in a powerful dream of love and longing, I was presented with a choice of three paths in the greenwoods.

The mountain lake where my friend reminded me that I invented the word "reincidence"

Zeus sends a deceptive dream

I was just asked the following question,  "Can a dream ever be misleading or false? Or are dreams always based in truth, vision and foreshadowing?"

    My immediate response: With dreams, as with anything else, we want to check on the reliability of our sources, trust our feelings, test and verify and apply that rare commodity, common sense!
    The dream archaeologist in me then recalled a most instructive story about deceptive dreams from the Iliad..

     For the early Greeks, Homer was the closest thing to the Bible. One of the things they learned from him was that the powers beyond ordinary humans speak through dreams, but can also use dreams to transmit deceptive messages. And that we want to check what is behind the mask of a dream messenger. A familiar face may be a disguise, and we want to grasp the motives and agenda of the guiser.

    In a scene in Book II of the Iliad, Zeus decides to avenge the honor of his protege Achilles, who is sulking in his tent, by making it clear to the Greeks that he is the indispensable hero. Zeus lays a trap for Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek host, who has dishonored Achilles. 

    Zeus summons Oneiros and orders him to deliver a misleading message to Agamemnon. The name Oneiros means "Dream". Here a dream is actually a dream messenger, an independent entity. 

   To carry out Zeus' command, Oneiros puts on the semblance of Nestor, a trusted comrade of Agamemnon, and visits the sleeping king in this form. Standing over Agamemnon's head, the dream visitor tells him - quoting Zeus himself -that the gods are no longer taking sides in the war. Therefore the  Greeks should make haste to attack Troy, which will fall easily.

    Trusting the dream, Agamemnon recounts it to his battle captains, and they launch their attack - only to find that the walls of Troy are not easily breached, and they cannot succeed without making amends to Achilles and bringing him back into the fray.

    We understand from this tale the sources of the Greek suspicion of oneiropompoi, or "dream senders". These might be sorcerers who were adept at projecting thoughts at a distance. There are many stories in later Greek literature about human "dream senders" who abused their psychic skills in this way.
    We see that in dreams, as in other situation, we want to check the reliability of our sources.

    In his treatise on divination, Cicero observed of Homer's depiction of dreams, , “although these stories were made up by a poet, they are not far from the usual matter of dreams.” 

Zeus sends a deceptive dream, by John Flaxman (1793)

The Blood Red Fairy Book

A lovely girl is left to tend the ashes at home while the mother takes her ugly sister to the ball at the king's palace. However, by magic the cinder-girl is dressed like a princess and transported to the ball where the handsome prince falls in love with her. When she disappears, all he has of her is a slipper and some other personal items. He vows to marry the one whose foot fits the slipper. Eventually the prince finds the cinder-girl, and they are wed.

    Sounds familiar enough, doesn't it? But in the version told (as “The Wonderful Birch”) in the first of Andrew Lang's famous color fairy books (The Red Fairy Book, first published in 1890) and identified as “Russo-Karelian” in origin there are certain further elements.
     Cinder-girl's mother is neither her birth mother nor her stepmother; she is a witch who turned the real mother into a black sheep and took possession of her body. The father didn't notice the swap; he “thought the witch was really his wife, and he did not know that the wife was the sheep.” At the witch's suggestion, he killed the sheep for dinner, but before it died it counseled cinder-girl, in her true mother's voice, not to eat of the meat or broth but to keep the bones and bury them at the edge of this field.
    This she did, and a birch tree grew at the spot in which the girl could commune with her mother’s spirit, which told her to lay birch branches over the hearth to work magic on the three nights of the royal entertainments. So cinder-girl appeared in glorious garments, winning the prince's heart, while the ugly sister gnawed bones like a dog under the banquet table. On successive nights the king, kicking without noticing what was under foot, broke her arm, her leg, and gouged out an eye.
     Despite these aesthetic challenges, when the prince comes looking for the girl who will fit the slipper (and a ring and a gold circlet) the witch files and cuts the ugly sister’s various appendages so she’s a match. The prince is obliged to keep his promise. But when cinder girl later appears and identifies herself in a whisper, he throws the witch's daughter over a ravine where she becomes a bridge from which a hemlock grows.
    Now prince and cinder-girl marry and have a baby boy. Do they live happily ever after? Not yet. The witch changes cinder-princess into a reindeer and inserts her daughter - released from the hemlock - into the prince's bed.
    Baby isn’t happy. A wise widow woman is consulted who advises that the baby should be carried into the forest, among the reindeer. He is nuzzled and nursed by his mother in reindeer form. Is she still lost to the prince? Not if the wise woman can trick her into taking off her reindeer skin - which the wise woman burns. Reindeer-woman shifts into other forms, all of which are burned, until she is obliged to stay human.
   Now witch and ugly sister flee and we may presume happy-ever-aftering...but, boy, how much violence and dark-side sorcery we had to go through.

How wild and primal is the world of the pre-Disney fairy story! The raw accounts of shapeshifting and dismemberment and the imaginal geography of ladders of bones, and talking trees, where a palace can fit inside an egg and an egg can open into a world, are in no way strange to the shaman, and appeal to the natural shamanism of children. While grown-ups marvel at the current vogue for vampires, witches and demons in children's literature, we see that this is not a novel phenomenon. Kids have always loved scary stories, and they used to be a lot scarier than in most popular fantasy today.
    My youngest daughter loved the color fairy books as she approached her teens, and we managed to acquire the whole set over the years, at a favorite used bookstore. She told me last night, “they got me through my difficult patch in middle school. They were my reading therapy, and they tuned up my imagination.” She has permitted me borrow the color fairy books, on condition that I “don't mess them up”.    
    Forests have been felled to publish books about what is going on in fairytales. You can read a sympathetic Freudian (Bruno Bettelheim) or reductionist ones, a legion of Jungians (commanded by Marie-Louise von Franz), or the Guild of the Goddess (who contend that fairytales are essentially women's work and come from a matriarchal past), feminists and anti-feminists, on and on. What counts is the stories themselves, best consumed neat and unbowdlerized. Transactional analyst Eric Berne rightly observes that the stories we remember are the ones that matter most to us.
    Our favorite fairytales are clues to our character and life history. Do you recognize anything of your own trajectory in the tale of a mother who was turned into a sheep and replaced by a witch? No? Then keep looking. When you have found the story that resonates with your life, you can claim it - or change it.

Making Songlines

A song is bursting from me. I sit on a rise overlooking the coast, and sing the first couplet:

We are singing till we're flying
We are flying till we're swimming

The last part comes in an easy flow

We are swimming till we're traveling
into the Land

A woman singer-songwriter is beside me now, carrying the melody in her lovely voice, laughing with me as I experiment with additional lines.

We are laughing till we're bouncing
We are bouncing till we're flying

I know what this is. It's a wing song, a journey song. I am excited to think that I can share it right away with the people who are joining me for a week-long adventure here, on this dreaming part of the coast where I have led many adventures before.
    I know what the Land of the song is. It is a happy Otherworld, a land of heart's desire. And the song can help to take us there. We are making songlines.

I woke from this dream, after less than three hours sleep (because I was happily working on a new book, and new art, all night) juiced and happy. When I lay down after 5:00 a.m., I set no intention for dreaming except to rise with even greater creative energy. I was given that energy, and a song to carry it. I decided to start the day by making a picture of "Making Songlines", a quick drawing in oil crayons distantly inspired by the Aboriginal art of my native country.
    Oh yes, I recognize the dream location. It's the Esalen Institute, where I am leading my five-day "Dreamgates" adventure - a prime desination for frequent flyers in the multiverse - in November. Yes (encore) I will carry the song with me.

"Making Songlines". Drawing in oil crayons April 22, 2013 (c) Robert Moss

Shelf elves, dream detectives and Dante

I am determined to hold on to my copy of Dante. This is a paperback edition with a black cover. I want to finish my notes on his description of different orders of reality, and of angels. Numbers are very important here, including the number 12.

I jotted this dream in my journal on Saturday morning, and went back to work on the first chapter of my new book, especially scenes from my life when I was nine and when I was 18 going on 19. Aged nine, I died during surgery in a Melbourne hospital and seemed to live whole life somewhere else before i came back. At 18, I wanted to die because I had lost the first woman I loved; instead of dying that night, I wrote a poem.
    I paused in my writing and reflection and posted a quick note on my Dante dream on my Facebook page, which I use for punctuation and refreshment in a day or night at my desk. My brief report immediately had a score of dream detectives working on my Dante clues. One of them found a reference to the number twelve early in Dante's poetic memoir La Vita Nuova (The New Life).
    I jumped on this lead. I could not locate a copy of Dante's Vita Nuova in my own library (where the resident shelf elves are known to hide as well as reveal) but the excellent used book shop down the street was open. No, they did not have a copy of La Vita Nuova but it might be in a copy of The Portable Dante that had come in just that morning; it was there on the stand with the New Books, a paperback with a black cover. Yes, it contained the full text of La Vita Nuova.
    Three minutes later (I live dangerously close to this book store) I am at home leafing through the text. The translation is somewhat florid. Ah, this is because it is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I am seized by a personal connection. When I was 18, I played Dante Gabriel Rossetti and read some of his poems in a repertory performance of "An Evening with the Pre-Raphaelites" in Canberra, Australia. I read on. Nine is Dante's number in this unusual memoir, a medley of poetry and prose. He sees Beatrice for the first time when they are both nine years old. He encounters her again when they are both 18 (2x9, as he insists, at length). That is the year when he dreams her death, and then sees her carried to the heavens by angels when she actually dies.
    In La Vita Nuova, we see the first hints of the Divine Comedy that is to come, and begin

to understand how Dante could borrow the form of a lovely woman he could not have (because she was married young and died so young) for the spiritual guide who meets the pilgrim inside the gate of Purgatory when he has come up through all the terrors of the Inferno and opened his heart.
     Dante's "New Life" contains a very interesting account of a dream conversation with an inner guide. The guide appears as a beautiful young men dressed in white but addresses Dante as "my son." Dante makes it clear this experience is unfolding in a sleep dream, in which he recognizes the voice of The Young Man in White from previous dreams. As the poet tries to feel out the nature of their relationship, perhaps asking himself whether the Young Man in White is a projection (though that is not the language of the late 13th century), the inner guide tells him: "I am as the center of a circle, to which all points on the circumference bear an equal relation. With you, it is not so." (ch.XII; my translation).
    I was thrilled with the sense of recognition when I read these words. For me, they are a very exact description of the relationship between our ordinary personalities and a self that is at the center of a family of aspect personalities.
    The Dante of La Vita Nuova is ahead of himself. He not only takes the conventions of courtly love to a higher and more creative level, and helps to birth Italian as a language of literature (in the Tuscan dialect); he demonstrates the central importance of dreaming in the life of the soul and the sources of creativity.
    What is most important for me personally in this adventure in literary synchronicity and memory is that Dante created a new kind of autobiography. His "book of memory", as he called it, is woven from his dreams, visions and poems with just a little connective narrative. He omits personal names and details, making it clear that this is a memoir of his spirit, not his ordinary life. In my current book project, am attempting to do something analogous, untrammeled by traditions of courtly love and medieval religion. 

Dante as I met him at the Marché aux Puces,  St-Ouen de Clignancourt (c) Robert Moss