Following the hidden way-working with the dreaming

The Australian Aboriginal tradition describes the world of the imagination as the Dreaming by which they mean a fluid and dynamic experience of life in which the path that is walked is everchanging and responds to intention and attention. In western traditions it is sometimes called the Hidden way or the path beyond the hedge and seen as the prerogative of artists poets witches, wizards and black cats . In ancient Egypt one who followed this way was said to be a servant of the God Apuat-the Opener of the Ways. This archetypal being was depicted as man with the head of a jackal and sometimes just as a jackal. In ancient Egypt the jackal was found on the west side of the Nile; in the place of the setting sun and was said to be a reliable guide through the desert. When lost in the western desert to follow the tracks of the jackal was to be led to water sources and safety. The jackal was seen as having acute senses and able to cross between the world of the living and the dead. The god Apuat/Anpu who arises out of this primal form is in a sense the archetype of the shaman the guide and walker of the hidden ways. In the Book of the Dead Anubis guides the dead soul through the process of moving through the Otherworld into becoming Asar un nefer or myself made perfect- becoming an immortal soul whose place is in and with the stars.

It is this movement from the world of everyday life through the Otherworld and the Land of the Dead into an experience of what the Egyptians called Zep Tepi or the First Time. This is an experience of Genesis described by the ancient Egyptians as the emergence of a great lotus out of the infinite waters which opens to reveal the Sun god Ra who then creates all-or it is seen as rising of the primal hill out of the great waters on which the Great Goose lays an egg which hatches to become the sun who again creates all. The journey to this place however means that we encounter a living landscape peopled by potencies and beings who have to be persuaded, overcome, and challenged as we move more and more inwards towards the source of life. The source of life in many ancient cosmologies is linked to the appearance of life and light out a great watery abyss or deep ocean. In relation to the major Egyptian cosmogony Jeremy naydler reminds us ,

“In the Heliopolitan creation myth the original divine unity is referred to as Nun visualised as a vast and infinite ocean within which every possibility of creation is contained but in a state of potential. Nun is formless and indefinable beyond space, time and beyond even the category of being. Nun is a great abyss or emptiness but it is a fecund emptiness which contains within it the fullness of all existence but in potential. Nun is not exactly a god for it is beyond the gods and yet “father “ of them all. Within Nun is a creative principle, a seed of creativity that as it germinates differentiates itself within Nun. As the life potential activates within Nun something solid appears in the midst of this ocean of life potential and this is Atum. Atum is not other than Nun but is rather a phase in the self revelation of Nun. W hy does not Atum resent content in the ocean of infinit potential that is Nun? It is because Atum yearns for something on which to place his feet.. Atum-the creative seed-yearns to germinate, to bring potentiality into actuality. And so Atum comes into being from the non-being of Nun and in the very act of Atum’s becoming a new principle arises; Kheprer, the Becoming One. The completion of this phase of Nun’s self-manifestation is in the unfolding of light within the infinite waters, imaged as the appearance of a broad-winged “light-bird” settling upon the solid earth that has emerged in the ocean’s midst. The “light-bird”represents a fourth aspect of Nun’s self-unfoldment: Ra . In this manner the One becomes Four. It is from Ra or Atum-Ra that the pantheon of gods issue: Shu and Tefnut: Geb and Nut, Isis and Osiris, Seth and Horus. Ra the principle of light is also the creative principle and the gods who come forth fromhim are likened to his limbs or members. Through their generation the whole universe of stars, of heaven and earth, of time, of death and the overcoming of death takes on existence. In the Heliopolitan cosmology Ra stands at the crossing point between nonbeing and being.”

To encounter and embody this source of life we must keep moving inwards assimilating the powers and potencies that aid and hinder us until we realise our identity with the source of creativity and light personified by Atum Ra. This journey called by the Egyptians the way of the jackal begins by adopting the symbolic stance of the jackal-in a way to be close to the ground to come into our senses and to read the signs that present themselves seeking the hidden road that leads down to the Duat the underworld and step by step finding our way across the inner universe

In addition to coming into our senses , gathering our intention and following the signs of the hidden way we need a structure, mandala or sacred narrative which guides our quest. In ancient societies like Egypt and Rome these narratives were intrinsic to the culture but our situation is different in that the world has been desacralised. This was the situation that Jung addressed at the beginning of his work on the Red book and it is significant that he reached back to Gnostic Alexandria as the source of his work. Alexandria in the beginning of the Christian era was a place of great cultural ferment-the existence of the great library drew scholars from all over the world and the religious tolerance of the Roman Empire meant that many and various religious, spiritual and philosophical groups came into existence. So iconic was the city that it became in its own way an archetypal place of wisdom and learning and remains as such within the collective imagination.

In the early Christian era it was the focus of a new spiritual alignment coming out of the Alexandrian Christian Gnostics, Pagan hermetic practitioners and philosophically inclined Jews such as Philo of Alexandria. This movement was concerned with the finding of Divinity within the human experience and within subjectivity. It arose within the pagan philosophical traditions from Parmenides, Empeocles and the Eleatics and Plato but came to fruition within the Neoplatonic tratiions of Plotinius and Iamblichus on the one hand and on the other from the Judeo Christian tradition in which the Biblical myths and Life of Christ start to be interpreted as archetypal forms within the human soul. In the pagan traditions we see a move away from the ancient Egyptian and Homeric worlds wherein the Gods are seen as autonomous powers and aspects of nature which also manifest within the human psyche as motivators . It was common in the ancient world to say that “ a god/goddess came to me and made me do or say such and such”. The state of mind for when this event occurred was called enthusiasmos- in this state normal consciousness is displaced by the presence of the god and in effect the person is the vehicle or prophet of the god delivering the message of the god. We may postulate an ego state which was more open to the transcendental and in which the personal, world of nature and the magical world were inextricably mixed.

We can see an echo of this in the experience of the child before the ego structure is formed- the sense of the magical interweaving with the personal and of being in a sense the playground of potent creative energies which are fluid and pregnant with meaning and power is very vivid in early childhood . We must be careful with our analogy though for the ancient ego is not child-like and the gods were consulted in all seriousness and the advice of the oracles guided war and peace justice and commerce. In the first Century CE we find a change in this ancient mindset; Plutarch writes a text “On the Decline of the Oracles” in which he asks why the gods are no longer speaking to us; he echoes comments made by Cicero and Strabo a century earlier about the declining power and potency of the oracles. Fifty years after his essay we find Clement of Alexandria saying that the oracles are all dead. Alongside this development in the pagan world we see the nature of the Gods being questioned as philosophical discourse becomes developed and prized.

Rather than the ancient myths being related to as literally true we see them understood as icons which disclose a deeper truth articulated through the philosophers who increasingly speak of an interconnected universe and the Oneness of things. In Alexandria we find a new form of spiritual literature being written called the Hermtic literature. Here the main figure is the sage Hermes Trismegistus who represents the illuminated human being as an embodiment of the Nous or World Mind. In the Hermetica we see him presenting the process of contemplation as a way of focusing on Atum-Ra as representing the Creative Mind of the Universe. We see here the replacement of the concrete image of the external God with the image of the human being who embodies the creativity of the One Mind or Nous. Plotinus the Neo-Platonist shows us a contemplation of this newer style of spiritual practice.

“Bring this vision actually before your sight, so there shall be in your mind the gleaming representation of a sphere , a picture holding all the things of the universe moving or in repose or (as in reality) some in rest, some in motion. Keep this sphere before you and imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of spatial differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter; taking care not merely to attenuate it: call on God the maker of the sphere whose image you now hold and pray Him to enter. And may He come bringing His own Universe with all the gods that dwell in it-He who is the One God and all the gods, where each is all, blending into an unity, distinct in powers but all one god in virtue of that one divine power of many facets. More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for un the coming to be of all those, this, the one, has suffered no diminishing.”

Similarly we see this trend at work within the Judeo-Christian tradition; the Judaic tradition makes a break at a much earlier point with the polytheistic traditions of the Middle east though it is clear that at an early stage the one god was seen as simply the tribal god of the Jews located in time and space first of all in a travelling tent, then at Schechem and finally in the Temple at Jerusalem. Some of his titles however are an indication of this later movement. In exodus there are 2 names associated with this god and revealed to Moses<

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh I will be that which I will be or I Am that which is ever becoming

Yahweh I Am

We see here a focus on the nature of being and an absence of external characteristics and images and a focus on dialogue between God and his prophets. Unlike the earlier enthusiamos when the God overwhelms the person here Yahweh is experienced as the small still voice speaking within the heart of the prophet Elijah. The focus is on the relationship between the Divine and the human and the covenant that is made between them. This introduces an ethical dimension and is a humanising of the nature of divinity so much so that in the book of Job we find God being held to account and asked to explain why God has afflicted him with problems.

This humanising tendency develops through Judiac history reaching its apogee in the appearance of Jesus and the rise of Christianity. Here we have the human being as Divine, as God made manifest, portraying in the most graphic terms the embodiment of divinity. The Christian Gnostic traditions focused on the experience of Christ within the soul of the Gnostic in a similar way to the Hermetic practitioners again emphasising the experience of divinity within the subjective space of the human being. The image of Divinity in Human form on the one hand counterpointed with an abstract formless divinity becomes a feature of the Judeo Christian Islamic tradition. The Christian Gnostic traditions in Alexandria produce a formidable literature based upon working with the Christ myth as an a story that speaks to the soul of the initiate. We also see Philo Judaeus describing the Torah as an archetypal description of processes happening in the soul.

In the oldest mythical traditions we find the Egyptian initiate going out into the stars eating the gods and absorbing their qualities. It is a transcendental vision and exstasis – literally a going out into God. These newer traditions are all addressing the issue of the embodiment of divinity and the development of the archetypal human being. There is a sense of the ego becoming more formed and there is a desacralising of the outer world in that the Divine is one experienced above and beyond the world and in the depths of the human heart. Having found that sense of the divinised heart many Gnostic schools then turned outwards again and addressed themselves to the Anima Mundi or Soul of the world and rediscovered the Divine in nature. These developments are linked to the beginning of alchemy.

Had these schools of thought and praxis remained a dominant force in the development of the west we would likely be living in a very different world from the one that we now live in. Sadly as a result of the adoption of a particular form of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine and the end of the religious pluralism which had been the outstanding characteristic of the older Roman empire the traditions which had held sway in Alexandria become underground spiritual movements.

The humanism which had been developed in Alexandria is then embedded in an authoritarian and dogmatic way of relating to the world and follows an increasingly reductive path which empties the world and human soul out of the direct experience of the numinous and culminates in the Descartian utterance “Cogito ergo sum.”

It is therefore very appropriate that Jung in bringing back the sense of the imaginal and the depths of the human soul reaches back to Alexandria and in the Seven Sermons to the dead brings us a contemporary Gnostic teaching. His later interest in alchemy also picked up on an important Alexandrian tradition which while not abandoning the embodiment of the Divine restores the Soul to nature.

Out of the many strands of Alexandrian traditions there are 2 that we will consider as important for our work. The first is the mandala of the Tree of life and the Garden of Eden. The Tree in both its geometric form and its naturalistic manifestation is a great unifying symbol in a way a symbol of symbols that enables those who work with to unify their inner worlds with outer experience. It is both a system of relationships and a powerful meditative system which can enable us to explore both the soul and the universe. It is container, mirror and sanctuary and a system of praxis which enables us to develop the capacity of the embodied imagination. It begins by contemplating the Fall from the Garden of Eden and the experience of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil- the entrance into the world of separation . In particular the initiate is asked to contemplate Tohu and Bohu the words for Chaos and Desolation . Then the instruction is to contemplate a verse later found in the Sefer Bahir(book of illumination),

“ A king wanted to plant a tree in his garden. He searched the entire garden to find a spring flowing with water that would nourish the tree but he could not find any. He then said,’ I will dig for water and will bring forth a spring to nourish the tree.’ He dug and opened a well flowing with living water . He then planted the tree and it stood bringing forth fruit. It was successfully rooted since it was always watered from the well.”

The establishment of the well and tree is the first step in creating the inner garden or sanctuary- it develops into a personal version of the Garden of Eden- a four square garden with rivers flowing from the well at the root of the Tree to the four directions. It is built up step by step involving all the senses. The garden becomes a representation of your soul; each flower and animal found there has a correspondence both within you and with the wider universe. When there is a strong sense of the Garden you then identify with the Tree feeling your roots going down into the centre of the earth and your trunk and branches extending into space. There is a process of inner alchemy that can be worked with here by drawing up the heat and water from the earth and bringing down the light and fire of the sun and stars. The garden can expand to encompass the whole earth or can be confined to some small part of it. You can meet people in your life in the Garden , your ancestors and even your descendents for the Garden is beyond time. You can enter the tree and find rooms within it that represent the chambers of your soul. It becomes a vehicle for working with the great archetypal energes of life Gods and goddesses angels and demons will meet you here. As you work with this form it deepens and expands the powers of your soul to perceive and create. This work is counterpointed by working with the geometric image of the Tree allowing the analytic and rational faculties to also engage with the work.

The second strand is less a system than a story- the legend of the cup of healing that is both the bowl or container out of which the universe arises and the cup of the last supper which heals all wounds and nourishes all. The Hermetic literature describes a mystical cup or krater which contains the energies of creation and which is sent down to the earth by the Divine Mind and if we immerse ourselves in this cup we are remade in the image of the Nous or Divine Mind. This hermetic alchemical image is combined with the ancient legend of the God King who dies and is resurrected and who transmits the experience of immortality to all who participate in his mystery. This image attaches to the Gnostic Christ myth and the cup of the last supper becoming a numinous archetype and story of wounding and healing. This near eastern mystery story combines with ancient Celtic, arthurian traditions in which the experience of devastation and absence of life and fertility is countered by the finding of the sacred cup which contains the healing and nourishing energies of the Divine mediated to the world through the one who has found the Grail and participated in its mystery.

In the medieval Grail story as recounted by Malory a knight Balin is pursued by an enemy who chases him through a castle and he finds himself in the Chapel of the Hallows-on the altar is the sacred spear that was thrust into the side of Christ. He takes it up to defend himself and throws it at his enemy. He kills his enemy but the spear passes through him and deeply wounds the Grail King who is the Guardian and keeper of the Grail. As a result of the wounding he hovers between life and death and all life and fertility leaves the kingdom. The Grail vanishes and must be found if the King is to healed and the land become fertile again.

This story has fascinated poets and writers thought the generations- we find T S Eliot describing the wasteland thus,

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“Son of man,

The anglo Welsh poet David Jones also addresses it in his poem

Bibliography

Critchlow K The Soul as Sphere and Androgyne

Eliot T s the Wasteland Project Gutenberg 2008

Frwke T and Gandy P The Hermetica Piatkis 1997

Jones, David In parenthesis Faber and Faber 2010

Jones , David The Sleeping Lord Faber and Faber 1974

Kaplan A (Trans) Sefer Bahir Weiser 1979

Malory Morte D’arthur J M Dent 1980

Naydler Jeremy the Future Of the Ancient World Inner traditions 2009