The Boy Who Died and Came Back, page 27
He directed my attention to the huge warriors at the threshold. “They will protect you and will attack those who attack you. They must be fed.” I quickly promised to give them tobacco. The elder made it plain the guardians wanted something more: they wanted meat, raw meat with plenty of blood in it. Best freshly slaughtered, but we could see what we could arrange with the kitchen.
I felt blessed by the presence of the ancient ones. We followed the elder’s directions in the ritual we developed. In the morning, I made an offering to the warriors — a juicy prime sirloin from the kitchen, and tobacco and a little firewater. In the evening, as the earth’s shadow fell across the moon, we formed the shape of a hexagram. We had made its outline on the frosty grass with cornmeal before the light went, and appointed the dancers who would take the points of the hexagram, so we could find our places easily. As the moon’s brightness darkened into burned umber, we danced and sang the same words over and over. Words that honor the Earth as our Mother and help us find our grounding:
Mother I feel you under my feet
Mother I feel your heartbeat
Our breath made steam in front of our faces. We sensed wilding spirits and forces of confusion as the shadow swallowed the moon. They took form as a feral wolf pack. We continued singing. Then, like a shadow of light, the White Wolf appeared, containing and gentling the wildness of the pack.
We danced until the return of the light. The sun’s light, reappearing at the bottom of the moon’s disk, rolled up like a drop of liquid gold over the face of a bronze mirror.
During our gathering the following spring, I became aware of how we were growing a web of vision in our dreaming community. On the Saturday, we playacted scenes from the real Hiawatha story, one of the world’s greatest healing stories, in which a spiritual warrior inspired by the Peacemaker does not kill his enemy, but cleanses his mind and raises him up to sit at the same table. We had bawdy fun with some of this. A vibrant little woman from Toronto, barely five feet tall, had volunteered to play the role of the sorcerer tyrant Tododaho, Hiawatha’s adversary. The sorcerer projects evil thoughts to control or harm others, sending them out like a giant penis snake, a role which a very tall man in our circle was happy to take on.
Now it was 3:00 AM on Sunday morning, and I was awake in my room, as I generally am at that hour, regardless of the time zone. I find the hour between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning an excellent time to be awake and alert, in or out of the body. I am told that more people die and more are born during this hour than at any other hour in the cycle of twenty-four. That would confirm the idea that it is a good time to walk between worlds.
On this particular morning, however, I decided simply to continue my research. On the way to completing a book that was later published as Dreamways of the Iroquois, I was again mining scholarly sources on the ways of Island Woman’s people. My friend William N. Fenton, the doyen of anthropologists of the Iroquois, had recommended the work of Frank Speck, who had the reputation of a swashbuckler among ethnographers in this area, which did not put me off at all. I had with me a copy of a monograph Speck had written describing the rituals he observed during a visit to a Cayuga Iroquois midwinter festival back in the 1930s.
I was struck by the following items in his account, which I noted as follows:
1. Fever Mask. Speck includes a photo of a “Fever Mask” for catching and controlling the fever spirit, and writes about how Indians can handle red-hot coals in an altered state.
2. Fishy Dreams. He discusses dreams that are regarded as “persecution by animals” that have suffered from humans and want redress — specifically, disturbing dreams involving fish that call for shamanic cleansing and healing. If you have a troubling dream about fish, the first thing people should do for you is to splash water on you to reassure the fish that you will honor their element.
3. Containing Whirlwind. He describes the Iroquois belief that disease as well as mayhem is carried by a Whirlwind Mask and has photos of a mask representing the Whirlwind spirit that only a powerful shaman can wear.
When I went down for breakfast that morning, the first members of our group that I encountered shared the following dreams:
1. “I dreamed of a man whose skin was on fire with fever.”
2. “I dreamed that the fish were mad at me. They stripped me to the bones, like a filleted fish. Then men wrapped me in skins and took me out into the water to grow me a new body.”
3. “I dreamed I should make a mask of the Whirlwind and then put it into the fire to contain that power.”
The third dreamer, an artist, proceeded to make an amazing Whirlwind Mask, using fallen birch from the birches around the lodge.
It seemed that my thoughts during the night corresponded to dreams of those around me in the lodge, that we were together in a shared web of dreaming. I was excited by the possibility that a community could consciously develop a web or sphere of vision for healing and creation, as ancient and indigenous people have done.
When we gather round the great fireplace in the meeting lodge on this magic mountain, our assignment for the first group journey is always the same: to reconnect with the animal powers and the spirits of the land. Their presence is palpable even before the drumming begins, a benign wind scented by wood smoke, pine, and spruce.
In the spring of 2011, my assignment for the second journey was to gather tools and resources to deepen our understanding and practice of soul-recovery healing. As I drummed for the group, there was a great stir of activity in my inner sight, and my attention shifted at high velocity between many scenes and sources of guidance.
Then I felt a soft slap on my upper right arm. My eyes remained closed, as I continued to focus on my drumming and pursuing my own visions. The soft slap was repeated. I opened my eyes and glanced at my neighbor, Carol, who has journeyed with me in this way for many years. Was she trying to alert me to something, or has she just lost the sense of body space in the grip of her own visions? I saw that Carol was motionless, a couple of feet away, absorbed in her own journey.
I closed my eyes and again felt that something was gently slapping my upper arm. It felt like… a wing. I could see it now. Then the whole body of the red-tailed hawk rose before me in a glory of feathers, wings outspread. I felt a stir about my shoulders. Once again, a red-tailed hawk was lending me wings. I allowed myself to rise up, in my second body, while my physical body maintained the drumming and part of my awareness remained focused on the group. I was now in a state of triune consciousness. Part of me was with the body, part of me was traveling, part of me played witness to both scenes.
I was carried, at great speed, to a place I knew well, the place where I was called a quarter of a century before, when the hawk brought me to Island Woman and her teachings, in a cabin in the northern woods. Now I entered her presence again and found myself within a blaze of white light. White Wolf was here. To the north, at the source of the light, I saw the radiant form of the Peacemaker. Great antlers rose from his head like a living candelabra.
This became a tremendous experience of soul remembering.
I recollected the teaching of my boyhood guide, that what we most need to know comes through anamnesis, through remembering what belongs to us, on the level of soul and spirit, and was known to us before we came into our present bodies but is easily forgotten in the chaos and hurry of life in the world.
I remembered the teaching of Island Woman’s tradition:
“Tohsa sasa nikon’hren.”
It can be translated as “Do not forget.” Its literal meaning is “Do not let your mind fall.” Do not let your mind fall from the higher world, where the origin and purpose of human life are to be found.
When I flew back, in my second body, over Lake Champlain and the forested peaks of the mountains, it was hard for me to hold back the tears as the truth of this, and the radiance of the Peacemaker, streamed through my mind and my inner senses.
We perform twin rituals at the fire. We cast out what we are ready to release from our lives, old histories, old attachments and addictions, all the heavy stuff that has been holding us back. We ask the spirits of the fire, and of wind and earth and water, to carry the dead energy away and use it for better purposes. Later we send our wishes aloft to the high ones on the smoke, with little offerings. The Iroquois say that spirit rides to the sky on a cloud of tobacco.
In the fall of 2012, I spoke these words to the fire, and the spirits of the mountain, and our family of dreamers:
Aksotahi, Raksotahi,
Grandmothers, Grandfathers,
We remember you, we honor you here
we feed you with tobacco and laughter and tears
we ask your blessing and protection for all our journeys.
Spirit of the Fire, we give you our old skins
you turn our despair and anger into cracklings
you carry our heart’s desires to the high ones.
Dreamer adrift in the shadows:
When you fall through a hole in your world
you can come here to dance a new world into being.
When the moon is eaten out of your sky
by the men with hungry caterpillars in their hair
you can come here to grow it back.
There’ll be days when you have to struggle to get here,
climbing out of flooded subways, plowing through snowbanks.
There’ll be times when you forget the way.
There’ll be nights when you can’t believe this place is real
and you let it fade from your heart like an exhausted dream.
You may lose the mountain, but the mountain will find you,
calling in the voice of the wind, in the color code of fall leaves,
in the taste of rain, in an old song on the radio,
in a poem urgent to be born, in the dream you cannot slay.
Hawk may give you a feathered sign, and wings to follow it.
White Wolf may call you here, into the light of the Peacemaker,
where your soul is healed in the garnet heart of this mountain,
and your inner compass is restored, and you rediscover yourself
in the best of all families, a family stronger than blood,
and the extraordinary is easy because we allow it to come through.
The dream people are always here for you.
EPILOGUE
Ambassador of the Other Side
In December 2012, when I flew to southern France to keep a date as Death, the people on an Air France flight proclaimed that I was un ambassadeur de l’au-delà, an ambassador of the Other Side. In May 2013, when I was in Vilnius on my way to keep a date with the shaman from the Eagle’s Nest, it was made official.
I sat down for lunch at a breezy café table at the edge of the little Vilnele River, just across the bridge from the Old City of Vilnius and the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying on a narrow cobbled street. I was pleased to see a fine statue of a mermaid in a niche in the wall on the other side of the river. My companions included my brilliant Lithuanian translator, a therapist and Zen practitioner named Agne, and a Swedish woman named Lotte who had arrived from Stockholm that morning. Our conversation was lively. We shared dreams. I spoke of my hopes of finding a Baltic Merlin over our weekend of dream archaeology at Kernave. I recounted the episode on the Air France plane.
I paused to swallow a mouthful of an excellent local live (unpasteurized) beer, and a bright-eyed, bearded man with long hair leaped up from a neighboring table. “Your conversation is fascinating,” he declared. “I invite myself to join it. My name is Tomas.”
This was an engaging introduction, but I could not understand what he was saying when he explained that he was foreign minister of the Republic of Oozhooppee, or something that sounded like that. Agne was smiling and nodding, and Lotte exclaimed, “Yes, I read about it in the Stockholm paper this morning. I have the article in my suitcase.”
“Excuse me,” I proceeded cautiously, not wanting to appear ignorant or cause a diplomatic incident. Maybe he was a foreign minister. In this part of the world, there were probably many republics, splinters from the old Soviet empire, whose names were unknown to me. “You are foreign minister of which republic?”
“See for yourself.” Tomas gave me a long card that might have been a list of drinks or lunch specials. It was headed “Constitution of the Republic of Užupis.” So that was the name. The constitution stated such fundamental principles as “a dog has the right to be a dog” and “everyone has the right to be unique.”
I learned that the word Užupis means “on the other side.” It has a double meaning. The republic is on the other side of the river from the Old City of Vilnius. It is basically an artists’ colony, with over one thousand artists living in an area of some 150 acres. This was once a Jewish quarter of Vilnius. Post-Holocaust, it slumped into a seedy and dangerous neighborhood. Then, in 1997, a band of bold spirits declared it an independent republic, a republic of the mind. It has been flourishing ever since.
Then again, Tomas said, “The Other Side is also the Other Side of ordinary reality.”
“I know something about that.”
Tomas asked me to explain my work. “Our work is similar,” he said. “Like you, we are dedicated to bringing the dream world and the ordinary world closer together.”
He introduced me to the president of Užupis and other cabinet members who had been meeting at a trestle table in the café. They invited me to tour their territory, which I did later, enjoying luscious murals, voluptuous goddesses, pagan symbols, and Surrealist provocations that flower everywhere on those narrow cobbled streets.
We had our picture taken, and Tomas informed me that, by his authority as foreign minister, he wished to appoint me dream ambassador for the Republic on the Other Side. I did not hesitate. “Send me my diplomatic credentials, and I will be delighted to be dream ambassador for the Other Side.”
I returned to Užupis after the weekend in Kernave, to admire the goddesses and have lunch at the same café on the river with a view of the mermaid in the wall. I discovered that the republic also has a king, a splendidly fat and self-confident tiger cat who has his private entrance to the restaurant and is well fed and well petted by everyone, including the group at our table. Consulting the constitution of Užupis, I read that “everyone has the right to love and take care of the cat.”
Lotte had found her copy of the Stockholm newspaper. It declared that Užupis is “the coolest republic in the world.”
We were distracted by banging and wailing from the river below us. From the railing, we saw a couple who had lost control of a rented canoe, banging against the rocky bank. Agne sprang into rescue mode. She took fresh strawberries from a bag we had been carrying around and started tossing them to the inexpert boat people, who caught and ate them with gusto, calling up that these were the first strawberries they had tasted this season. However, they had now managed to tilt their craft so it was half-full of water and sinking fast.
Agne rushed down to the river and pulled them up onto the bank. I congratulated her on her efforts and declared that I would use my high station as dream ambassador to recommend that she be appointed commandant of the coast guard of the Republic on the Other Side of the River. I wasted no time in penning the Rules of Riverine Safety in Užupis:
1. Carry strawberries at all times.
2. When a boat is sinking, pelt the occupants with strawberries.
Within the week, it was official. I received my formal credentials as dream ambassador for the Republic on the Other Side. My official obligations, as stated in this document, include the duty to “enjoy life and sustain in people the feeling of life as Brazilian jazz.” I will do my very best.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I give thanks to my family of active dreamers, who have shared my adventures in dream archaeology, from Sydney to Seattle, from Bucharest to Brazil.
I give special thanks to my dream editor, Georgia Hughes, and the wonderful creative community at New World Library.
My greatest debt is to teachers and guides who live and mentor beyond the confines of time and space. This is something all active dreamers will understand.
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION: KISS OF DEATH
Page 4 the term is delog: Robert Moss, The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2005), 3.
Page 8 I am as the center: Dante Alighieri, La vita nuova, chap. 12, my translation (italics in the original).
Page 10 unusual states of mind: Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof, eds., Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1989), 2.
Page 11 there is one direction: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 177.
Page 14 voices of personal experience: Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012), 1.
Page 14 normalize communication: Ibid., 2.
1. DEATH IN A TEACUP
Page 22 a hideous anomaly: Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, Project Gutenberg Australia, last modified January 2013, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00048.html.
3. NEITHER FOLK NOR FAIRY
Page 33 Once the dying person: Raymond A. Moody Jr., Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon — Survival of Bodily Death (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 77.
Page 33 the similarity of so many: Ibid., 137.
Page 34 either folk or fairy: George MacDonald, The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders Commonly Called the Second Sight (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 9 (italics in the original).
