In the Forest of Mirrors

The ancestral spirits the Yanomami of the Amazonian rainforest call xapiripë descend towards the human realm on mirrors. 

Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa explains: 

"The xapiripë descend to us perched on mirrors, which they keep suspended a little bit above the earth, so they never quite touch the ground. These mirrors come from their home in the sky.

"In a shaman’s house of spirits, these mirrors are propped, hung, piled and placed side by side. When the house is big, the mirrors are big. As the number of spirits increases, the mirrors multiply, one on top of the other. The xapiripë don’t mix with each other. They have their own mirrors on the beams of the house: mirrors of warrior spirits, bird of prey spirits, and cicada spirits; mirrors of thunder spirits, lightning spirits, and storm spirits. There are as many mirrors as there are spirits, they are beyond number.

"The xapiripë dance together on huge mirrors which come down from the sky. They are never dull like humans. They are always splendid."

"We live among mirrors. Our forest belongs to the xapiripë and is made from their mirrors. [1] 

Mirrors not only hold and reflect images; they multiply them. Thus an ancestral spirit may reappear in many images: 

"When the name of a xapiripë is spoken, it is not a single spirit we evoke, but a multitude of similar spirits. Each name is unique, but the xapiripë it designates are very numerous. They are like the images in the mirrors I saw in a hotel. I was alone, but at the same time I possessed many images. Thus, there is just one name for the image of the tapir turned into spirit, but the tapir-spirits are very numerous...This is true of all the xapiripë. People think they are unique, but their images are innumerable. They are like me, standing in front of the hotel mirrors. They seem alone, but their images overlap each other as far as infinity." [2]

This makes us reflect on the importance of mirrors in many shamanic traditions. Looking into a reflective surface may reveal a world beyond the world. A shaman's mirror may be a soul catcher, or a shield, or a place in which to see.

We need to dream deep on the mirrors that Davi describes. The night before I wrote this report, a man shared a dream with me in which his departed mother appeared to him, offering sage counsel. He described her as standing on a "glassy river" that went up into the sky. 

Due diligence: in order to see them and interact with the spirits, Yanomami shamans inhale the powder of the yãkõanahi tree, "the food of the spirits", an item I wouldnot recommend for anyone outside their traditional culture.

Communing with the spirits, says Davi, is "our study; it teaches us to dream."

 Someone who is not looked upon by the spirits doesn’t dream. They just lie around in dumb sleep like an abandoned tool on the ground. [3]

 

1. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, "Les ancêtres animaux" in B. Albert and H. Chandes (eds)Yanomami - l'esprit de la forêt (Paris: Fondation Cartier / Actes Sud, 2003) pp.72-3.

2. ibid, p.73.

3. Davi Kopenawa, "Sonhos das origens" in C.A.Ricardo (ed) Povos indígenas no Brasil (1996–2000), (São Paulo: ISA, 2000).

Graphic: digital play by RM

In the forest of mirrors

I've been reading a most interesting narrative by the Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa about relations between humans and the ancestral spirits his people call xapiripë. "The xapiripë dance together on huge mirrors which come down from the sky. They are never dull like humans. They are always splendid."

The xapiripë descend to us perched on mirrors, which they keep suspended a little bit above the earth, so they never quite touch the ground. These mirrors come from their home in the sky.

In a shaman’s house of spirits, these mirrors are propped, hung, piled and placed side by side. When the house is big, the mirrors are big. As the number of spirits increases, the mirrors multiply, one on top of the other. The xapiripë don’t mix with each other. They have their own mirrors on the beams of the house: mirrors of warrior spirits, bird of prey spirits, and cicada spirits; mirrors of thunder spirits, lightning spirits, and storm spirits. There are as many mirrors as there are spirits, they are beyond number.

We live among mirrors. Our forest belongs to the xapiripë and is made from their mirrors. [1]

Mirrors not only hold and reflect images; they multiply them. Thus an ancestral spirit may reappear in many images:

When the name of a xapiripë is spoken, it is not a single spirit we evoke, but a multitude of similar spirits. Each name is unique, but the xapiripë it designates are very numerous. They are like the images in the mirrors I saw in a hotel. I was alone, but at the same time I possessed many images. Thus, there is just one name for the image of the tapir turned into spirit, but the tapir-spirits are very numerous...This is true of all the xapiripë. People think they are unique, but their images are innumerable. They are like me, standing in front of the hotel mirrors. They seem alone, but their images overlap each other as far as infinity. [2]

This makes us reflect on the importance of mirrors in many shamanic traditions. Looking into a reflective surface may reveal a world beyond the world. A shaman's mirror may be a soul catcher, or a shield, or a place in which to see.

We need to dream deep on the mirrors that Davi describes. The night before I posted this report, a man dreamed that his departed mother appeared to him, offering sage counsel. He described her as standing on a "glassy river" that went up into the sky.

Due diligence: in order to see them and interact with the spirits, Yanomami shamans inhale the powder of the yãkõanahi tree, "the food of the spirits", an item I would not recommend for anyone outside their traditional culture.

Communing with the spirits, says Kopenawa, is "our study; it teaches us to dream."

Someone who is not looked upon by the spirits doesn’t dream. They just lie around in dumb sleep like an ax abandoned on the ground. [3]

1. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, "Les ancêtres animaux" in B. Albert and H. Chandes (eds)Yanomami - l'esprit de la forêt Paris: Fondation Cartier / Actes Sud, 2003, pp.72-3.

2. ibid, p.73.

3. Davi Kopenawa, "Sonhos das origens" in C.A.Ricardo (ed) Povos indígenas no Brasil (1996–2000), São Paulo: ISA, 2000.

Image: Davi Kopenawa among Yanomami children. (c) Fiona Watson/Survival International

In the Forest of Mirrors: Wanderings of the Yanomami Dream Image

At the moment of sleep, the body stays on the grid of the physical world, while the dreamer's living image [pei utupë] casts off and travels in the time of dreams (mari tëhë). This happens as it does at the moment of death: the image released from the body, becomes a specter (pore) that wanders the shores of heaven (hutu mosi). During the day, the image is confined in the body, at night, during dreams, it leaves its corporeal base and wanders far and wide, taking solid form, able to take other forms. As a living image, the dreamer can enter contact with other beings that inhabit the cosmos - with ancestors and gods, with animal and nature spirits. During the day, people take care of business. The business of the night is different. Around the close of day, the dream image begins to stir, getting ready for flight. The end of the afternoon is also the time of saudade, bittersweet nostalgia for a home in another world. .

This is a summary of the Yanomami view of dreaming. The Yanomami are a people of the rainforest on the borders of Barzil and Venezuela. For the Yanomami dreaming is what happens when the pei utupë is freed from the body at night. Pei utupë is usually translated as “image” but in a sense different from modern English language usage: the image that travels is like the Greek eidolon rather than a representation. It may be the “free soul” the Swedish school looks for in every aboriginal culture. [1] Hanna Limulja, a Brazilian anthropologist who lived with the Yanomami, makes herself their speaker in writing about these excursions:

By day we live and see what our eyes can see, it’s as if the daylight obscures what is hidden in the density of the body, the forest and the world. At night, the image, freed from the body, can truly see afar. Travelling to places where the body has never been, the pei utupë wanders, always at the risk of getting lost and making the body suffer. One does not dream during the day, because the day is of the living, of bodies, of matter that rots upon death. Night is the world of images, of the dead, of shamans’ helper spirits, the xapiripë. It is in the Yanomami person’s pei utupë, where what really matters is found.

You must be alive to dream, yet you must die a little each night in order to dream deep. The death experienced each night when the "image" goes wandering with the spirits is "the simulacrum and anticipation of the ultimate death that reaches everyone, the definitive death that separates the body from the image, the living from the dead." [2] 

Here is Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa talking about relations between humans and ancestral spirits called xapiripë. "The xapiripë dance together on huge mirrors which come down from the sky. They are never dull like humans. They are always splendid."

 

The xapiripë descend to us perched on mirrors, which they keep suspended a little bit above the earth, so they never quite touch the ground. These mirrors come from their home in the sky.

     In a shaman’s house of spirits, these mirrors are propped, hung, piled and placed side by side. When the house is big, the mirrors are big. As the number of spirits increases, the mirrors multiply, one on top of the other.    The xapiripë don’t mix with each other. They have their own mirrors on the beams of the house: mirrors of warrior spirits, bird of prey spirits, and cicada spirits; mirrors of thunder spirits, lightning spirits, and storm spirits. There are as many mirrors as there are spirits, they are beyond number.

     We live among mirrors. Our forest belongs to the xapiripë and is made from their mirrors. [3] 

Mirrors not only hold and reflect images; they multiply them. Thus an ancestral spirit may reappear in many images:

 

When the name of a xapiripë is spoken, it is not a single spirit we evoke, but a multitude of similar spirits. Each name is unique, but the xapiripë it designates are very numerous. They are like the images in the mirrors I saw in a hotel. I was alone, but at the same time I possessed many images. Thus, there is just one name for the image of the tapir turned into spirit, but the tapir-spirits are very numerous...This is true of all the xapiripë. People think they are unique, but their images are innumerable. They are like me, standing in front of the hotel mirrors. They seem alone, but their images overlap each other as far as infinity. [4] 

This makes us reflect on the importance of mirrors in many shamanic and magical traditions. Looking into a reflective surface may reveal a world beyond the world. A shaman's mirror may be a soul catcher, or a shield, or a place in which to see.
     The night before I read this passage, a man told me he dreamed that his departed mother appeared to him, offering sage counsel. He described her as standing on a "glassy river" that went up into the sky.          
      In order to see and interact with the spirits, Yanomami shamans inhale yakoana, the powder of the yãkõanahi tree, "the food of the spirits".The snuff is prepared from resinof the virola elongata treewhich contains a powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid, dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It is said that by blowing yakoana snuff into a novice's nostrils, the shaman initiating him transmits the xapiri spirits with his "breath of life", wixia. [5] However, the spirit food is taken only during the day. Night is for dreaming, pure and simple. 

Kopenawa says, "When we truly want to know things we people of the forest try to see them in dream. This is our way of studying." There is a basic distinction between the dreaming of the maritima, one who dreams strong, and others. "Someone who is not looked upon by the spirits doesn’t dream. They just lie around in dumb sleep like an ax abandoned on the ground." The dream shaman flies with the spirits. [5]

References

1. Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185; Ake Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953.

2. Hanna Limulja “Notes on the Yanomami's Dreams” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3. (Nov. 2022) p.17

 3. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, "Les ancêtres animaux" in B. Albert and H. Chandes (eds)Yanomami - l'esprit de la forêt Paris: Fondation Cartier / Actes Sud, 2003, pp.72-3.

4. ibid, p.73.

5. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky Words of a Yanomami Shaman Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge Mass and London; Harvard University Belknap Press, 2013, p.492

6. Davi Kopenawa, "Sonhos das origens" in C.A.Ricardo (ed) Povos indígenas no Brasil (1996–2000), São Paulo: ISA, 2000.

Ilustration: RM with NightCafe

 

The science of mirrors

Mirrors are talismans, soul catchers, psychic shields, places of encounter with beings from other worlds, and sometimes portals for crossings between the worlds.
    The great Turkish poet Asaf Halet Çelebi (1907-1958), who was at home in the mirror worlds, gives us a shiverish lesson in how this works. What follows is my own free translation; Çelebi awaits an adequate translator and little of his work is available in any version in English.

Mirror

by Asaf Halet Çelebi.

An image rose before me in a mirror
something other than myself
I don’t know where she came from
this beautiful stranger,
maybe from China or beyond

I asked her, “Who are you?”

and she laughed at me.
“I am the daughter
of the Emperor of China
and I have loved you for a long time.”

I said, “Come, come from the mirror
beautiful thief of my reflection.
I don’t care if I have no image
as long as my hands can touch you
and prove you are real.”

The Emperor’s daughter said,
“I can’t come. But one day
I will swim your image
into the depths of this mirror
and we will vanish together.”

-          - Free translation by Robert Moss

     Ottoman intarsia hand mirror 17th century

Dream mirrors of the Self

One of the most important gifts of our dreams is that they put us in touch with more aspects of ourselves than we have recognized in  what Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.” Among these aspects is the famous Shadow, composed of parts of our selves we have repressed or denied (and tend to project on to others in regular life, till we awaken). But we encounter much more than the Shadow. We encounter a whole family of aspects of ourselves, and as we recognize them and bring them together we become much more than we were.

     We are given the opportunity to claim the imagination and energy of our inner children, the nature-knowing of the ancient shaman within us, the wisdom of the elder, the artist, poet, creator, entrepreneur, hero, dancer, athlete, astronaut inside.

      We also meet our conscience. We are introduced to parts of ourselves that have been broken and are in need of repair. We are given clues to parts of our selves that fled from this body and this life because the pain or shame was too great - or because our dominant personality wimped out on a big dream, settled for a little story and ceased to be any fun for a bright spirit to be around. When we discover such things, we are on the road to healing through soul recovery

       There is more. As we follow these roads, we may rise to a closer acquaintance with the Self beyond all the smaller selves. Call it the Higher Self. Perhaps we are the mirrors in which some part of it is reflected, when our lenses are clear enough.

       I remember a dream that mirrored the relationship between the little self and the Big Self. Here is a brief version:

THE UNFINISHED PORTRAIT OF THE HIGHER SELF

I read in the local paper that an artist is working on a portrait of the Higher Self. Greatly excited, I lead a group to see it. The path spirals up to a studio like an open tower, guarded by magnificent sculpted beasts; great carnelians flash on the back of the stone lion.

     The artist is at work on a tremendous canvas. It rises as high as the tower, perhaps even above the table. At the bottom, he has painted a self-portrait. The figure stands within glowing bands of color. He is as small as a votive candle in proportion to the immensity of the Higher Self that rises above him, visible only as bands of energy that become subtler and subtler as I look up, until there seems to be nothing except a pristine and unblemished expanse of pearly light.

     It seems unlikely that this immense work can ever be finished. But I know, as I merge with the artist and take up the brush, that this is my life's work.

Revenge of Imagination and the Queen of Analepsis

The Bolshevik revolution and the rise of the totalitarian state drove dreams in Russia underground. The safe places to write about dreams – or from them – were now to be found in state-sponsored studies of folklore and folk art, and in science fiction, which can put the reader inside a dream without a frame.

    What happens when the imagination is driven underground?

    A Russian-American writer, Olga Grushin, brilliantly depicts the revolt of the imagination  in her novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov. The protagonist is a promising Surrealist painter who buries his art in order to get a fat paycheck and a big apartment and a chauffeured car as an art bureaucrat. His suppressed imagination comes after him, spawning dreamlike anomalies in his everyday world, until that world – and the false values it instilled in him – falls apart.
     I read The Dream Life of Sukhanov when it was first published in 2005, and read it again this winter for sheer pleasure and also to study the author's mastery of certain techniques. It is chastening to notice that English is her third language, since so many native writers in English have much to learn from her.

     Olga Grushin is the queen of analepsis. That is the literary term for a flashback, but in this novel she raises the art to a new level, beyond either of those terms.
     The novel opens in dreary 1985 Moscow, in the privileged life of the editor of the most influential Soviet art magazine, who gets a chauffeur and a dacha and a big apartment in return for squelching or spitting on any signs of originality or Western "decadence" in the art scene. He was once a promising young Surrealist painter, whose imagination was on fire since he got an illicit look at Chagall's flying violinists and horses, sealed from public view in locked basement at a museum. But then Sukhanov made a Faustian deal, trading his creative soul for a well-paid life, because he thought this was what his beautiful wife (the daughter of an icon of Soviet realism) required. The whole drama of the novel turns on the revenge of the artist's imagination, and its powerful engine is analepsis. In this story, the flashbacks don't delay the action; they drive it.
     The narration of Sukhanov's current life is recorded in the past tense and in the third person, doubly distancing us from it. By contrast, when we slip into his memory stream - which I am inclined to call his state of memorydream - the narration is in the first person, and often in the present tense. We grasp very quickly that these brilliant bursts of memory are taking Sukhanov (and us with him) into a life more vivid and more real than the scripted existence he has been leading. His past is more present and more intimate than his present. The transitions are flawless, though sometimes shocking. The shift may take place in mid-sentence, giving us the vertiginous sensation of hanging over an open elevator shaft - a situation Sukhanov finds himself in, as the structures of his world start to crumple.
     The interplay of dream and memory shakes his default version of reality. The dream world is becoming the real word.

     Pictures come alive and spill into the streets. A figure in a brown coat from Dali paintings turns up as a character in Moscow and at a strange country railroad station, both frustrator and liberator. A face reflected in a window in an early canvas, when Sukhanov was still an artist, turns out to be the face of the woman he will love and marry, unknown when he made the painting.
     I love the rhyming symbols in the book, especially the mirrors. Shards of light and color reflected in a flower seller’s bucket of water. “Multiplying infinities” of images in the facing floor-length mirrors in the grandiose lobby of Sukhanov’s apartment building. The sexy glimpse of a painted nude with a swan, coming alive in a window.
     Grushin is wonderful at crafting simile and metaphor: the corridors of a Soviet art institute are “the color of disease”; a stairwell splits the "gray monstrosity" of a building in half, "laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit".
     Olga Grushin paints with words as a Surrealist paints with a brush: the fantastic is shocking and believable because of the excellence and realism of the depiction. While she transports us to Moscow, in the mid-1980s and in the mid-1950s, she succeeds in carrying us to a country of the mind where the themes are universal, and drives us to wonder what open elevator shafts will yawn before us if we try to suppress our own creative spirits.

Dreaming with Julia and Ulysses S. Grant

 Broken Mirrors and Never Turning Back: Dreaming and Superstition in the Lives of General Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent Grant

Guest blog by Wanda Easter Burch

Julia Dent believed in dreams, coincidence, naming bedposts, fairies and in an entire host of superstitions. Ulysses Grant believed in dreams, coincidence, and a few of his own hard-held superstitions. Julia married Lt. Ulysses Grant in 1848.

     In the years 1843 and 1844 Ulysses had begun an intense courtship that escalated to weekly visits when he was in the area of Julia’s home. He was aware of Julia’s quick wit, and intelligence but also became aware of Julia's attachment to folklore, fairies and her flawless track record of dreaming the future. Ulysses, a lieutenant at that time, left with orders to Louisiana, and Julia, knew he would not be back in his usual barracks.
    Julia consciously set a dream intent. She had a new bed and believed in a popular superstition called naming the bedposts. The “naming” was of the specific intended if you wanted your first dream to be of him or her. Julia named a bedpost Ulysses, and “I did dream of Mr. Grant.  I thought he came at Monday noon and was dressed in civilian clothes. He came in, greeted us all most cordially, and seated himself near me; when I asked him how long he would remain, he said: ‘I am going to try to stay a week.’”
    Julia shared the dream with friends, all of whom said it would come true; but Julia protested that it could not come true because Ulysses was sailing down the Mississippi, “far below the mouth of the Ohio.” Monday morning progressed into the afternoon and Julia’s maid came to her and pointed toward the gate where Lt. Ulysses Grant was seen arriving, uncharacteristically in civilian clothing just as she had seen him in her “bedpost” dream.

   Julia met Ulysses in the drawing room. Certainly aware of a dream coming to fulfillment, she tested its information and asked Ulysses how long he planned to remain. He replied that he would try to stay for a week. “ On inquiring how he happened to be dressed in civilian’s clothes, he told me he was wearing borrowed plumage; that he had plunged into Gravois Creek and was nearly drowned, was of course very wet and had to borrow dry clothing from brother John, who lived some two miles from us.” His men wrote that once he started forward, whether it be on a march or in a battle, or just crossing a creek, he believed it was bad luck to turn around in a journey or on a path and go back. So Ulysses would have never returned to camp and put on his own dry clothing, thus, playing out a crucial element in Julia’s dream. [1]

     Ulysses took heed when intuition or dreams, folklore or fairies guided Julia’s surroundings. Just after her marriage to Ulysses, Julia sobbed with fear when they moved into a new house and found an heirloom mirror broken when she opened the moving box. The mirror had been in her father’s house for fifty years: “The Captain, in place of being impatient with me, tried to soothe me, saying, “It is broken, and tears will not mend it now.” I sobbed out: “It has always been at home, and then it is such a bad sign.” This meant someone would die within the year, a folk belief that dated to the Roman Empire.

     According to Julia's reminiscences, Ulysses knelt gently beside her and suggested that perhaps the breaking of the mirror did not cause misfortune to come. She said, "no," it did not cause the misfortune but foretold misfortune. The astute, now Captain Ulysses S. Grant, carefully suggested that since the broken mirror did not bring the misfortune that Julia had no cause for such grief. He also suggested, even more astutely, that they take each fragment of the broken mirror and have them made into single and separate mirrors, thereby breaking the manifestation of the foretelling of bad fortune. Julia agreed.[2]

     In her reminiscences, Julia described her need to verify and validate dreams, often using events as they unfolded to be the confirmation she needed.

     A significant dream captured a perilous moment in Ulysses’ life after “Colonel” Grant moved to Missouri and then to Cairo, Illinois. He had asked Julia to visit him there and to bring the children, now four in number. Nervous and frustrated, Julia “saw Ulys” a few rods away but only his head and shoulders as though he were on horseback. He also looked at her in what she thought was a reproachful manner. She awoke and called out his name: “Ulys!” Before leaving for the remaining leg of the trip Julia heard about the battle of Belmont. Ulysses met her at the train and she said that she had seen him in a dream on the day of the battle. He asked the hour of the vision, and when she told him the hour, he responded: “Just about that time I was on horseback and in great peril, and I thought of you and the children, and what would become of you if I were lost. I was thinking of you, my dear Julia, and very earnestly too.” [3]

      Julia's intuitive "feelings," equally as important as her night dreams, saved her husband's life when he was invited to accompany President Lincoln to the theater. It was not a rumored and difficult relationship between Mary Lincoln and Julia Grant; it was a strong, abiding intuitive feeling of danger that drove Julia to insist that Ulysses leave an important cabinet meeting immediately upon closing business and take a carriage for a train home rather than leave for the theater. The series of events began unfolding when a strangely dressed young man took a position near the door to her room. The young man said he was sent by Mrs. Lincoln and that she would call for Julia at 8:00 to go to the theater. In an instant flash of presentiment of danger, Julia declined. The young man reminded her that the newspapers had announced that General Grant would be with President Lincoln at the theater.

      Julia sent a note to General Grant telling him she wanted to go home that evening. Ulysses sent word back for her to pack her trunks and that they would leave immediately for Philadelphia. At a late luncheon four men sat near Julia and her luncheon companions. She noticed odd eating behavior, one of them, for example, holding a spoon near his mouth but never eating. The same man rode past the Grant’s carriage later in the evening, glaring through the carriage glass.[4] 

      In one of her last unexplained dreams recorded in her reminiscences, Julia sadly related a vision in Washington in which she “looked down upon a great throng surging up the avenue leading from Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House. In the midst of this throng of moving people was an open carriage drawn by four prancing horses, and seated in this carriage with his pretty wife beside him was one dear to me. The carriage drove on and stopped at the portals of the White House…After that, I gave no more thought to the subject, as I knew General Grant was not to be there, nor was I.” [5]

      These reminiscences shared a strong sense of Julia’s belief in the destiny of Ulysses Grant and of her destiny alongside him as his wife. She envisioned success, warnings of danger, and safe passage through difficult times and onward through a grand hero’s march around the world and back again to dreamed acclaim in the streets of New Orleans and sadly not in the presidential mansion.

References 

[1] John Y. Simon, ed. The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses P. Grant), (Carbondale and Edwardsville:  Southern Illinois University Press), 1975. 49-50 and Footnote 22:  p. 63:  Julia Grant gave a more detailed account of the marriage proposal to a journalist in 1890. Foster Coates, “The Courtship of General Grant,”Ladies’ Home Journal, VII (October, 1890).

2 Ibid., 84.

3 Ibid., 99.

4 Ibid., 155-157, footnote 6: the man trying to overhear the luncheon conversation was also the man who rode up alongside the carriage – John Wilkes Booth. In Philadelphia, Grant received a telegram about Lincoln’s death, sent Julia on to Burlington, and returned.

Julia also enjoyed sharing her children’s precognitive dreams, one of them dreaming their papa would come into the room. When told he would not be there that evening, she pointed to the door. He had just walked in. On another occasion little Nellie announced that someday they would live in a great house like “the picture in my geography of the…Capitol in Washington.” 157.
5 It was unclear whether or not she thought she was dreaming about the possible presidency of her son Frederick. No further notes accompanied this dream.

Text adapted from The Home Voices Speak Louder than the Drums: Dreams and the Imagination in Civil War Letters and Memoirs by Wanda Easter Burch: (McFarland Publishers, 2017)

Black pond, white swan

I am drawn to the black pond and the white swan

Who turns with hieratic grace at the mid-point.

When I walk down to the water’s edge

She glides to me at once, so close I can touch her breast,

Her great wings, folded, make the shape of a heart.

When I try to read her dark and shining eyes

I see the sadness of a lovely woman in white

And in her eyes, mirrors within mirrors,

I find a blazing phoenix fire of many colors

And know this is reflected glory of the heaven bird

Who flies fearless through all the worlds.

“Where is your mate?” I ask the white swan.

Words swim back. How long have you made me wait?

And: How many dreams of me did you forget?

How many signs from me did you refuse?

I can only answer with truth, “I have been a fool,

Silly and forgetful, but I have always loved you.”

We must live into our own time

It's time. I'm moving Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois out of my writing Cave and up to a new library room we've created on the top level of my house. This is shifting the fulcrum of my life in an interesting way. Let me explain.

When I moved to a farm in upstate New York on the edge of Mohawk country in the mid-1980s, I started dreaming of people of an earlier time. I dreamed of a powerful white man, who sometimes appeared in the clothes of a colonial gentleman, or a redcoat general, or in the skins and feathers and fetishes of a native chief. Through the operations of a shelf elf in a used bookstore, I came to know his identity. He was Sir William Johnson (1715-1774), an Anglo-Irishman who came to the province of New York in search of fortune and adventure, and stayed on to rule a vast frontier domain in the style of a tribal king.

I not only dreamed of Johnson; I dreamed of people who were central to his life dramas. I dreamed of a "woman of power" who became Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation, and is known to history as the grandmother of Molly Brant, the only woman who managed to tame Billy Johnson, with his raging appetite for life. I dreamed of a sorcerer who tried to raise ghosts to attack Johnson, and of a white conniver who sabotaged Johnson's efforts to set a curb to the theft of Indian land by westward-teeming settlers and speculators.

I became so immersed in these dramas of an earlier time that I found them playing out around me, in my interaction with contemporary people. I felt driven to learn everything I could about my dream character and his world. I ransacked archives in Ottawa and New York; I walked the scenes of Johnson's childhood in Ireland; I studied Mohawk - which he spoke fluently - with native speakers on native land along the Canadian border. I gathered a personal library of books including the 14 volumes of the Sir William Johnson Papers and the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations, the records of the blackrobe missionaries from North America's first frontier. Night after night, in visionary journeys, I traveled in Johnson's world. I saw, close up, each episode in the Battle of Lake George (1755) in which he led a ragtag force of militia and his Mohawk warriors into victory against French professionals. I saw where and how he bedded his women, an what happened at war feasts where the killing frenzy of bear or wolf and angry ghosts was called into Mohawks who were going into battle.

I knew that my fortunes and those of Johnson were linked, in a way I declined to explain according to any hand-me-down model. But enough is enough. We must live into our own times. So I began to set a boundary between my life and Johnson's by writing my way through. I wrote a narrative told in the wry voice of a fictional kinsman of Johnson's who enters his world, and that of the Mohawk, in the violent era of the Pontiac "rebellion". This was titled Fire Along the Sky, and in the second edition - now available in a handsome trade paperback edition from SUNY Press - the narrator's phallocentric assumptions are balanced by the mocking but also highly intuitive reflections of a brilliant woman, a lover from his later life.

I gave a one-man performance as Johnson and spoke for ninety minutes in front of an audience of 600 in Johnstown, the city he founded, about "my" life, loves and Indian intrigues. This was a grand evening, but a backward step in terms of effecting a separation of identities! I tried to go away and do other things, but my dreams and the play of synchronicity kept calling me back. So I wrote two more books in which my "far memory" (to borrow Joan Grant's phrase) and years of historical research were masked as fiction: The Firekeeper and The Interpreter. Later in Dreamways of the Iroquois, I offered my version of the shamanic dream practices of the First Peoples that Johnson came to know so well, and of the ancient clanmother who seemed to be calling me in my own dreams.

Why was I drawn into Johnson's life? Why (to come at it the other way) was he drawn to me? Proximity and affinity are both relevant. I moved my home to his part of the world. I also acknowledge that, for good and bad, we have some character traits in common, and perhaps even a distant blood connection in Ireland.

We are likely to learn more about the lessons and precedents of a certain "past" life experience when our current life choices and travels bring us closer to the themes of that time.

We are permitted to see more of our counterparts in our soul families as we grow in the ability to understand and integrate these connections without being swamped by them. When I had worked my way through the Johnson connection to a sufficient degree, I had a night vision in which I found myself in a hall of mirrors where I was able to look at 14 different selves - including Johnson and my present self - in 14 different mirrors, arranged around a reflecting pool where I saw what I believe to be the central self of these connected lives.

We must live into our own time and understand that both past and future are created, in a certain sense, in this moment - and can be changed.

Now I'll return to carting books up the stairs. There is room for 2,000 books on the new library shelves; already they are nearly full.

Oh-oh, and just as I gather an armful of books on the Mohawk people, an email comes in from a Mohawk woman inviting me to speak to her community on a reservation near Montreal...

Portrait of William Johnson by John Wollaston (1750) in Albany Institute of History and Art

The Ka of Mau has restored the crown

Ann Arbor, Michigan

The tall cabinet is the kind that is sometimes called a secretary. There is a pull-out writing surface between the drawers below and the glass-fronted bookcase above. There are intriguing objects visible behind the glass - statues, vases, family heirlooms. However, the object that I want to access is on top of the cabinet. To get to it, I will need to climb onto the opened desk part of the secretary. The whole thing is rickety and I doubt that the desk can bear my weight. A friend volunteers to hold everything steady but I don't trust her ability to do this. I don't want to risk breaking the contents of the secretary. They belong - or once belonged - to an extraordinary older woman I regard with great respect and affection.
   So I turn to other things.
   I am startled by the arrival of a whole pack of cats. There are at least six or seven of them. They are long-eared, short-haired, lean and wiry and very supple. They stretch and sport and show themselves off in different postures. All vary Egyptian, I think. Wait a minute. They are Egyptian. I am sure of it.
   A gray cat separated herself from the others. She springs up on my lap and gazes intently at my face. Her eyes are strange. I expect the slit eyes of a regular cat, but these eyes at first seem blank. Their substance - light gray in color, and flecked found the edges - makes me think of a statue. I also think about ancient bronze mirrors.
   I read the cat's fierce intention. She wants me to know that she is my helper, and that she will bring what belongs to me if she has my approval. Absolutely.
   She springs to the top of the secretary with one bound and jumps down with something in her paws that looks like an enormous flower. She brings it to me and places it in my hands. It is so light and beautiful. I recognize the white conical center piece and the high flanking ostrich plumes. This is the atef crown of ancient Egypt.
   A voice in the dream says, "The Ka of Mau has restored the crown."

Feelings on waking: Gratitude, delight, surprise
Reality: I am preparing to open a workshop in Ann Arbor titled "Dreaming Like an Egyptian". Cats were sacred in Egypt, were sometimes mummified, appear in many statues, and were known to have Ka souls that were fed - like those of humans - after death. The atef crown combines the conical white hedjet crown of Upper Egypt with twin ostrich plumes. Osiris wears it. So do Sobek, the crocodile god, and others,

"Mau brings me the atef crown" drawing (c) Robert Moss June 13, 2014

Call of the Mountain Mother

She calls me again
to walk the avenue of sacred lindens
and climb the steep hill
that leaves me breathless
to where light falls
across golden fields and sleeping volcanoes.
She says, terrible and beautiful
in her majesty, "Show me what you can offer."

I unfold my tents in the market
that is already hot and busy.
I proffer dolls that were lost by little girls
and toy soldiers broken by lost boys
and a rocking horse that can fly across the sky
and mirrors where you can see more of yourself
whether you like it or not.
My tents open into each other
making a breezeway that can float you
to the place of the stuffed animals
whose shadows are giant lions and bears
that walk by themselves.

The Lady accepts what I have to give.
She calls me through the tent flaps
to taste the harvest she is stirring in her bowl
and enter her glorious embrace.
With apples and cherries on my tongue
I become a tree on her mountain
streaming with the juice of many fruits
putting roots down and down, deep and wide
able, on her fertile ground, to draw lightning
and hold it without falling, spreading wings of light.

from a journey to Mount Říp, in the heart of the Czech heartland.

Symbol Magnets and Jung’s Fish Tales

 

 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. [1]

    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." [2]

    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.” [3] 

    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" [4] 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." [5] Such powers are magnified when our minds and our environment are charged with the energy of a living symbol. 

   

REFERENCES

1. C.G.Jung, "On Synchronicity". Lecture to the 1951 Eranos conference. Republished in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche translated by R.F.C.Hull [Collected Works vol. 8}, par. 970. Also Jung, "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" in CW8 pars. 826-827.
2. Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology. translated by William H. Kennedy (LaSalle and London: Open Court, 1990) 190.

3. C.G.Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy translated by R.F.C.Hull [CW14] par. 765.

4. Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 816.

5. J.P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe quoted in Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 860.

Illustrations: "Fish Woman on the Bridge". Journal drawing by Robert Moss and detail.