The Rhyme Rats Hear Before They Die

 

Yeats was a great believer in the power of "poet speech" to change minds and circumstances, and of course he was a master. Opening his Collected Poems at random, I found myself rereading “Parnell’s Funeral", in which he draws from a dream of an Artemis-like goddess on horseback shooting an arrow at a star. He moves on to characterize politicians and phases of Irish history. In a commentary, he said he was versifying things he had spoken in lectures in a recent tour of the United States. I came to the lines

All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the contagion of the throng
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die. [1]

In a previous reading, in the old Macmillan edition I was given as a prize for writing verse in school, I had assumed the reference to “rats” was another example of Yeats’s haughty patrician dismissal of critics and group think he disliked. This time I was using volume one of the Collected Works, which is enriched by the copious scholarly notes of Richard J, Finneran. Thanks to Finneran, I made this fascinating discovery about the reputed power of poetic “rhymes” even on rats.

In “The Proceedings of the Great Bardic Institution” ed. & trans. Professor [Owen] Connellan, Transactions of the Ossianic Society, 5 (1860), the poet Seanchan causes ten mice to die by his satire. In a long note (pp. 76-77), Connellan refers to a paper presented to the Royal Irish Academy in 1853 by James H. Todd “on the subject of the power once believed to be possessed by the Irish Bards of rhyming rats to death or causing them to migrate by the power of rhyme.” [2]

Shakespeare knew something of these things.  In Act III Scene 2 of As You Like It, Rosalind says, “I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras time that I was an Irish rat, which J can hardly remember “. In German folk tradition - which gave us "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" - the rat catcher uses a flute. It seems his Irish counterpart needed no instrument other than his voice box. 

The Irish rhymers often had larger targets than rats and mice. I followed Finneran's lead and read about several instances of Irish bards rhyming to death even Lords Lieutenants of Ireland.

The following is an instance given by the Four Masters at the year 1414 in which an unpopular Lord Lieutenant was rhymed to death by the Irish bards: "John Stanley, Deputy of the King of England, arrived in Ireland, a man who gave neither mercy nor protection to clergy, laity, nor men of science, but subjected as many of them as he came upon to cold, hardship, and famine." Then, after mentioning some particular instances, especially his having plundered Niall, son of Hugh O'Higgin, the annalists proceed to say : "The O'Higgins, with Niall, then satirized John Stanley, who lived after this satire but five weeks, for he died from the virulence of their lampoons." [3]

References

[1] "Parnell's Funeral" in Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume 1 The Poems ed. Richard J. Finneran Second Edtion (New York: Scribner, 1997) p.285

[2] CW vol 1, Explanatory Notes p. 677. n.304.I.28.

[3] Transactions of the Ossianic society, for the year[s] 1853-1858 vol. 5 (Dublin, 1860) p.80.

"I am your double from the jinn"

 

Kuthayyir 'Azzah was born in Medina and died there in 723 after many years in Egypt. He had the ear of caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, was favored by courtiers for his flattering verses, and was no stranger to the charms of women. He became famous for his ghazals, songs of love and longing, often spiked with the absence of the lady he thirsted for, graceful as an antelope, fleeting as a raincloud over the desert - and unfortunately, wed to another man. His poems survive in palaces including the library of the Escorial in Spain.

When asked for the source of his poetic inspiration he gave a stunning response. He did not mention a lady, or the voices of birds or a rising flood inside him. He spoke of his double in the world of the jinn, a world normally invisible to humans where great games are nonetheless in play.

Asked, "When did you start reciting poetry?" the love poet replied, "I did not start reciting poetry until it was recited to me."

"And how was that?"

"One day, I was in a place near Medina. It was noon. A man on horseback rode toward me until the horse’s breath blew on me. He was hard to make out, quite bizarre. He seemed to be made of smoke, then of brass of brass.  He commanded me to recite poetry. Before I could figure out how to respond, he started speaking poetry to me.  

“I said, 'Who are you?'

“He said, ‘I am your double from the jinn.’

“That is how I became a poet."

As for those songs of longing: poets and dreamers know that yearning for a lover who is far away loosens the soul from its physical bonds and makes it easy for it to leave the body and to travel in its etheric vehicle.

Source: Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017) 126-7.

Drawing by Robert Moss

“Induced Coincidence”

 

 

An episode reported by Gareth Knight, former student of Dion Fortune and leading figure in the Society of the Inner Light. It involves an exchange between an inner guide identified as David Carstairs (first contacted by DF in 1922) and Soror A., a student of Gareth Knight, in 1996.

In a communication in March 1996, Carstairs explains the mechanism by which a 1920s postcard of Ypres fell into the hands of Soror A unexpectedly when she was working on psychic history related to the battle of the Somme in the Great War. The postcard subsequently provided a strong “talismanic link powerfully charged with a sense of [the Master’s] presence’. It was later used in ritual. Carstairs explained that synchronicities are useful for “concentrating the mind”. 

The postcard incident was not the effect of direct control of the physical from the Inner planes. Rather, it was a case of the merging of consciousness in mutual concentration setting up a “kind of energized imprint which straddles the planes”. This generates “a kind of cosmic magnet” drawing in relevant forces, some of which can precipitate synchronicities or “induced coincidences”.. 

The process is not guaranteed to work every time. Carstairs likened it sending a message in a bottle and hoping that it will somehow reach its destination. He suggested it was possible that the card had been wending its way to the student ever since it was first purchased. Through a series of mailings and hand-to-hand transactions, the destiny of both card and final recipient were influenced retrospectively by the Master. 

Time on the Inner planes is not to be linear, the time constraints we experience in the tick-tock world make such an incident look anomalous when in deeper reality it is not. We might see manipulation of the past but the past is not past in the greater perspective. .

 

-     Source: Gareth Knight in Don Fortune and Gareth Knight, An Introduction to Ritual Magic (Loughborough: Thoth, 1997), p. 116

Where Shamans Use Paintings As Prostheses of Gods

"Korean shamans, called mansin, hang bright portraits of the gods they serve over the altars in their personal shrines. These paintings become sites of daily devotion as gods, operating through the portraits, send the mansin inspiration in order to divine, exorcise, heal, and open their clients’ paths to good fortune....

"The paintings must accurately represent the gods who are claiming a particular initiate. Unless they are appropriately portrayed, they will not 'come in', inhabit the shine, and provide a steady flow of inspiration for the mansin’s work...When ordering a painting, the initiate must properly identify the signifying characteristics of the deity she has seen in a dream or vision and have them replicated in the painted image she commissions for her shrine....

"The eyes meet the viewer’s gaze with a bold and penetrating stare, which some find unnerving. A mansin manifesting an imperious god might similarly lock eyes with a client, claiming an unsettling engagement in a place where socially appropriate eye contact is usually oblique...

"Both paintings and mansin bodies may be considered prostheses of otherwise invisible gods whose favor may vary over time."

Source: Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon, "God Pictures in Action: Korean Shaman Paintings and the Work They Do" in Ars Orientalis vol. 50 (2020) pp. 157-176.

Illustration: Tiger gods in Museum of Shamanism, Seoul

Eldorado Kite

 

The great bird lifts from my hand

drawn to the sun

on your breath.

I tug on the string,

trying to drag it down,

forgetting what you taught me:

the falcon longs for the wrist of the King.

 

This strange wind is too strong for me.

I am rising with the bird

above all that is fenced in,

urgent to cut the cord.

My tame self panics.

It wants to hide among limits and shadows

where air does not move like this,

in animate waves of intent.

 

Something falls like a worn-out coat

and your breath blows me as a sail

across oceans of sky

to my home in your heart

where falcon and falconer are one.

- This poem, written for a dying friend in Eldorado, New Mexico, is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robnert Moss. Publsihedn byExcelsuo Editions/State University of New York Press.

A Neuroscientist Praises the Double

 

French neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz is worth reading on the theme of the double and its role in the origin and functioning of consciousness. He bows to the literature of the doppelganger, while acknowledging that neurobiology offers no adequate theory. Our ability to project a double, he says, is central to our ability to plan and the way we dream:

"I see in our ability to construct a virtual body, a double of ourselves the basis for our capacity to deliberate, that is to create virtual scenarios that involve first us, then perhaps others. This mechanism is probably at the root of our ability to change our point of view, to look at the world and especially ourselves from a variety of perspectives. …

"We have two bodies, the physical body and the virtual body. The virtual body ...is the one we perceive when dreaming. It, too, has a phenomenal reality.

"The duality is part of the foundation of consciousness. I think that consciousness appeared in humans at the same time as the two bodies. Consciousness is the act of the 'second me' watching the first one."

- Alain Berthoz. Emotion and reason: the cognitive science of decision making. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006 pp.207-8

Drawing: "Autoscopy" by Robert Moss

On Swan Wings

 

The swan is a symbol of the soul in Indian literature, and a ride for Brahma the creator. In dreams, we read in the Upanishads, the soul flies back and forth from the nest of the body like a "lone swan". Paramahamsa, "Supreme Swan", is a title given to enlightened spiritual teachers. 

The swan features in moving scenes of soul remembering - recollecting other lives and connections with other members of our soul family. When they come at the right time, such memories return (says the poet Kalidasa) like flights of migrating swans. 

There is a beautiful encounter in the Bhagavata Purana between a king who has been reborn as a woman and a friend from his previous life. The friend says, "Don't you remember your old friend? You and I, my dear, were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind, until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman. Our true nature is as two swans."

Photo by Romy Needham