Dreaming with the Goddess

She has a thousand faces.
She is virgin, mother and crone.
She is creator, preserver and destroyer.
She gives birth, endlessly. 
Her womb is the gateway of death and rebirth.
She is Queen of Earth and Heaven.

She fell through a hole in her world
and danced our world into being on turtle’s back.
She hid the sunlight from the world
when she was abused by men
and could only be lured back
when shown her radiant face in a mirror.

She is lover, warrior and shaman.
She is the one who repairs the broken soul.
She raises the god in man with her breath. 

Men tried to confine her to limited roles,
to force her into wedlock with despotic gods.
Then the Church sought to bury her.
But the Goddess returned as Mary,
and now she is loose again,
asking us to honor and embody her
in the forms that please her.

I am only a man, but I serve the Goddess.
When I was still a virgin, she claimed me
in one of her most fearsome forms,
and I carry her mark in a secret place.

I have been taught by ancient priestesses
in a mountain temple in the sky
in a mandorla of amber light
in worlds that open through an oak door
and a bee hive and a sea mist.

I have met the Goddess in molten lava,
as Spider Woman and Reindeer Queen
and as Great Mother Bear.
Bees flew me to a place of her mysteries.
I feel her hair stream in the sea waves.
I love her in the deep loamy earth.
I see her robe swirl in the shifting stars. 

Images: Top: Venus of Willendorf
Bottom: Nut at Esalen (c) Robert Moss

Making real magic

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. In dreaming, we go to other realities, that may include places of guidance, initiation, challenge, adventure, healing. When we bring something back from these excursions, and take action in ordinary life to embody guidance and energy, that is a practice of real magic.
    We go dreaming in the night. We do it quite spontaneously. We can do it by setting an intention for our nocturnal adventures. We can do it as lucid dreamers, awakened to the fact that we are dreaming and able to navigate the dreamlands consciously.  We can do it in the way of the shaman, traveling intentionally, conscious and hyper-awake, riding the drum to locales beyond the ordinary, and bringing back gifts.
    We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols, and how a deeper order of events may reveal itself through the play of synchronicity. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors.

     Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Navigating by synchronicity is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7. Though the word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of coincidence.
      When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead End or Fast Lane.  Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.
    Through the weaving of synchronicity, we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory of our world and our lives. As in the scene in the movie The Matrix when the black cat crosses the room in the same way twice, riffs of coincidence (for which I have coined the term reincidence) can teach us that consensual reality may be far less solid than we supposed.

    You do not need to travel far to encounter powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the multidimensional universe right now. The doors to the Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways. 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo by RM

Symbol magnets and something fishy about Jung

The magnetic power of a symbol, in our lives, can bring together inner and outer events in ways that shift our perception of reality. We learn best about these things through direct experience, and through stories - like Jung's fish tales - that we can trust.     
    When Jung was immersed in his study of the symbolism of the fish in Christianity, alchemy and world mythology, the theme started leaping at him in everyday life. On April 1, 1949, he made some notes about an ancient inscription describing a man whose bottom half was a fish. At lunch that day, he was served fish. In the conversation, there was talk of the custom of making an "April fish" - a European term for "April fool" - of someone. 
    In the afternoon, a former patient of Jung's, whom he had not seen for months, arrived at his house and displayed him some "impressive" pictures of fish. That evening, Jung was shown embroidery that featured fishy sea monsters. The next day, another former patient he had not seen in a decade recounted a dream in which a large fish swam towards her.
    Several months later, mulling over this sequence as an example of the phenomenon he dubbed synchronicity, Jung walked by the lake near his house, returning to the same spot several times. The last time he repeated this loop, he found a fish a foot long lying on top of the sea-wall. Jung had seen no one else on the lake shore that morning. While the fish might have been dropped by a bird, its appearance seemed to him quite magical, part of a "run of chance" in which more than "chance" seemed to be at play. 
    If we're keeping count (as Jung did) this sequence includes six discrete instances of meaningful coincidence, five of them bobbing up, like koi in a pond, within 24 hours, and all reflecting Jung's preoccupation with the symbolism of the fish. Such unlikely riffs of coincidence prompted Jung to ask whether it is possible that the physical world mirrors psychic processes "as continuously as the psyche perceives the physical world."
    In her discussion of how inner and outer events can mirror each other, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz suggested that "if the psychic mirrorings of the material world - in short, the natural sciences - really constitute valid statements about matter, then the reverse mirror-relation would also have to be valid. This would mean that material events in the external world would have to be regarded as statements about conditions in the objective psyche." 
    Some of the greatest minds of the past century - Jung and Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm - sought to model a universe in which mind and matter, subject and object, inner and outer, are everywhere interweaving. Events, both physical and psychic, unfold from a unified field, the unus mundus of the alchemists, that may be synonymous with Bohm's "implicate order", Their interaction escapes our ordinary perception of causation and of time and space. “Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent...they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.” 
    Living symbols deeply ingrained in the imaginal history of humankind are charged with magnetic force, which can draw clusters of events together. For those familiar with tarot, it feels at such moments as if one of the Greater Trumps is at play in the world. Traditional diviners understand this, as do true priests and priestesses. Thus one of the Odu, or patterns, of Ifa, the oracle of the Yoruba, is held to bring the fierce orisha Ogun into the space, while another is believed to carry spirits of the dead into the realm of the living. When that happens, you don't just study the pattern; you move to accommodate or propitiate the power that is manifesting.
    To grasp the full power of a symbol, we need to go back to the root meaning of the word. "Symbol" is derived from the Greek σύμβολον (sýmbolon) which combines συν- (syn-) meaning "together" and βολή (bolē) a "throw" or a "cast" A symbol is that which is "thrown together" or "cast together". This is very close to the root meaning of "coincidence". In Latin, to coincide is to "fall together". So it's not surprising that when symbols are in play, coincidence multiplies.
   The first literary mention of a symbol is in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which the god Hermes exclaims, on finding a tortoise, "O what a happy symbol for me", before turning the tortoise shell into a lyre. In the ancient world, sýmbolon came to mean a token, that which brings things together. Thus a symbol might be a pair of tokens that could be fitted together to make a single object. Such tokens might be broken halves of potsherd, a ring or a seal. They would vouch for the truthfulness of a messenger, or an enduring loyalty.    
-  Jung noted in his foreword to his most important work on synchronicity that "my researches into the history of symbols. and of the fish symbol in particular, brought the problem [of explaining synchronicity] ever closer to me" His experiences of symbols irrupting into the physical world led him to sympathize with Goethe's magical view that "We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike."  Such powers are magnified when our minds and our environment are charged with the energy of a living symbol.

Graphic: Oannes, from a relief in the Assyrian city of Dur-Sharrukin, today called Khorsabad.

The Flitcraft Shift

"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand."

It's a great parable, told by Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. On the way to lunch, a real estate man named Flitcraft is almost killed by a beam falling from a high floor of a building under construction. A chip thrown up from the sidewalk leaves a scar on his cheek. 
    By the end of lunch, Flitcraft decides to simply walk out of his comfortable, middle-class life in Tacoma - and vanishes, walking out on his family, his job and his savings without a goodbye to anyone.
     Sam Spade explains, "He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life."
     A close encounter with death, and awareness of the role of the "haphazard", changes people, that's for sure. Ironically, when spotted years after his vanishing act, Flitcraft has settled into a life very similar to the one he abandoned, with a similar wife and car, and the same date with the golf course at four every afternoon.
     In his brilliant novel Oracle Night, Paul Auster tells the story of a novelist who accepts the challenge to write a new version of the Flitcraft parable.

Invitation to the Voyage of Imagination

The secret of manifesting a desirable future through the power of imagination is to take yourself to a scene in which you are enjoying the fulfillment of a deep desire.
 
You will name that desire and you will check that your body believes you and your heart is with you. You will project yourself into a place in the possible future where you have manifested your heart's desire.   

This is more than a visualization. You must taste it, touch it, feel it, inhabit it richly with all your inner senses. You must bring back sensory impressions you can hold in your body.   

Then every day you arouse those impressions in your body and let them become fully physical. With this your vision of the outcome you desire will grow stronger and closer.   

Do you need a prompt to get you started? Frame your intention: to find your dream home, or publish your book, or achieve healing and recovery, or union with your perfect partner. Make sure you reach into your heart and your gut in framing your intention. Let it be more than an agenda coming from your head.    

Now picture this: you are looking at a golden path leading into deep, rich woods. You are going to follow this path as far as you need to go to reach the place or the encounter that will embody your fulfillment of your desire. 

You will be in this situation with all your inner senses. I do mean be there. Taste it, touch it, smell it, open your hearing as well as your vision.

You will bring back a vivid, tactile impression you can hold in your body as well as your mind.     

Here's a simple example of how this recently worked for me. On the eve of a total knee replacement, I set the intention of achieving fast and full recovery. I had been told that while the surgery today is usually straightforward and successful, the rehab phase can be long and painful and frustrating.    

With the aid of a little shamanic drumming - less than five minutes - I set off on that golden path into the woods. I breathed in the freshness of evergreens, laced with wild berries and the sweet decay of nurse logs. I heard birdsong and the stir of animals in the undergrowth.    

I found myself moving at increasing speed, excited by the wild beauty of the woods around me, eager to see what might be waiting for me round the next bend of that golden path. 

And there he was, three times my height. I was shocked to find him on my path, though I have long counted him an ally in healing and all my shamanic work. The bear was the color of golden honey. 

He swept me up into his embrace and we danced together. His fur was soft and smelled like fine cashmere. He span me loose and inspired me to dance solo, in a free-spirited Irish jig. My body felt strong and supple.  
 
I came back from this journey certain that I had been given the perfect vision for manifesting fast and full recovery. I immediately celebrated the bear by eating salmon and berries. I purchased a fine honey-colored cashmere scarf to hold the wonderful smell and feel of the golden bear's fur in my senses.    

After knee replacement, I found my body healing very well with the help of the golden bear. I was discharged from hospital the morning after surgery after a physical therapist checked me out and declared that my body had remarkable flexibility, already able to accomplish exercises that might take others months to master. 

Two weeks after surgery, I took myself off opioid painkillers and was given a rating of 121 percent for mobility by an outpatient physical therapist. I started walking my little dog and managed an 8-block ramble round the neighborhood less than three weeks after surgery.  
  
I'm pretty sure the day will come when I will do that Irish jig.   
 
Are you inspired to embark on a journey towards manifesting what you deeply desire? Your ideal departure point for this voyage of imagination is the twilight space between sleep and awake when your body is dormant. 

You can set off the shaman's way, with the help of drumming. I have made a recording of my own shamanic drumming that is ideal for this as well as lucid dream adventures.

Bon voyage!

Art: "The Invitation" by Lalenya Laurie Vann

Dialogue with the Vintage Cab Driver

One of the best ways to work out what your dream characters are telling you is to ask them. Though this is best accomplished by dream reentry, you can make fascinating discoveries by simply taking up a pen, addressing your question to a figure from the dream, and jotting down whatever comes to you on a piece of paper.
    Your question may be as simple as "What are you telling me?". You will need to decide who or what inside the dream may be able to answer that question. You are not confined to dialoguing with human characters! Everything in dreams is alive. (Shamans know the same is true of waking life.) I once had an extraordinary dialogue with a Persian rug.
    In a series of dreams, I was constantly changing trains, getting off at the wrong stops and having to reverse direction, which was an accurate reflection of my dithering and indecision about some important matters at that time. In one of these dreams, after being squeezed into a third-class compartment where I could hardly breathe, I decided to find a better way of getting around.
    I left the station to hail a taxi. One pulled up immediately. It was magnificent, Genevieve-style vintage roadster, its chrome lovingly polished. There was plenty of room inside for all the luggage I had been dragging around with me, piles of suitcases and steamer trunks. The driver was cheerful and friendly. As I left my dream, I was completely confident I had finally found my way, and I rose into the day in excellent spirits.
    I was curious about the vintage cab, which had also appeared in previous dreams. I decided to ask the driver about this unusual mode of transportation. Here is part of the dialogue that ensued:

R: Why are you in my dream? What are you telling me?

Driver: I'm telling you that you should pursue your plans to write more historical fiction. Your novels make a splendid vehicle, roomy enough for everything you want to put into them.I'll get you wherever you want to go. You don't belong on other people's tracks. The third-class compartment is an accurate image of how disgusted you feel when you submit to other people's agendas and expectations.

R: Okay, but my historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. So why didn't you come as a coachman, with horses?

Driver: Because I need to fit into the landscape of your dreams. You were riding on trains, around modern cities. A coach and four would seem improbable, at best a tourist attraction.I wanted you to believe in me. Besides, I wanted to remind you that your historical fiction need not be confined to any period, or even to the past. You know from your dreams that the future, as well as the past, belongs to history - which is to say, that both are with you, and accessible now.

     I found this counsel very helpful, and pay special attention to taxi drivers who appear in my dreams. A taxi (unlike a train or bus) is a mode of transport that will take you from where to exactly where you choose to go, for a certain price. Since this dialogue I am ready to look carefully at other taxi drivers in dreams as guides in colloquial costume.
     Dialogue with dream characters is especially rewarding in dealing with scary dreams and nightmares. Dream pursuers and assailants are often bearers of messages we need to hear, and this is a way to tune into those messages.
     You may also want to try dialoguing with your dream self. If your dream self was more cowardly or passive than you perceive yourself to be, you might ask, "Why did you run away?" or "Why didn't you do something?" If your dream self was wiser or braver than you know yourself to be, you might ask, "How can I be more like you?"

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.


My historical novels (so far) include Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper and The Interpreter.

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.