A neurosis is an offended god.

These are both statements that Jung made at different times, and they both mean the same thing. It all depends on your point of view. I hope to show today that there are many ways to heal, all of which work, but none works unfailingly. Whether they work or not, I suspect it again depends on your point of view That people struggle so hard to show that their methods are superior to others, past and present, tells us more about the people than it does about their methods. However, I shall not bore you with statistics. Although statistics never lie, statisticians often do. We tend to use statistics as drunks use lampposts, more for support than illumination. In determining if a certain method works better than another, we must depend on experience; indeed, we cannot know anything without experience, nor can we even be certain of the validity of what we deduce from our experiences, let alone what others have deduced from theirs. Therefore I have deduced from this that nothing is certain; but what guards me from a lifetime of pessimism is the other side of the coin. Experience is not limited to what can be experienced in ordinary states of consciousness at least as defined by Reason. So I have concluded that everything is possible, even though nothing is certain. As Plato said, all knowledge is remembering, so forgotten knowledge can be dredged out of the sea of the collective unconscious through relating what is known to various experiences, even such irrational phenomena as dreams and visions. Non-rational methods have throughout the ages been successfully used in healing.

The problem many of us have is that if non-rational methods work, why don’t they always work? But this is also true with scientific methods. Here again, it may result from the point of view of the healer and also the patient. My problem was at least partially explained by a story of a man who was a firm believer in God, had always led a good life, and so he believed that God would save his life when a massive flood enveloped his home. He had to flee to the roof when his house became flooded and clung to the chimney as a rescue craft came to carry him to safety. He refused to accept the offer on the basis of his certainty that God would preserve him as a reward for his faith and good works. Soon the water was up to his neck when a second boat came by. Still he refused. At the point when it was up to his chin a helicopter came his way offering to carry him to safety. Still he refused and so he drowned. Upon his arrival at the Pearly Gates, he was shown to the Divine Presence and immediately began complaining to God that he certainly did not deserve to be abandoned after a lifetime of faith and service. God was sympathetic and said that He also was surprised to see the man there since He had sent him two boats and a helicopter. This at least partially solved my problem. We cannot depend on one solution only. Healing methods are not opposite but supplementary. Despite the rivalry among various types of medicine; spiritual and material, holistic and allopathic, this opposition is, like all opposites, illusory. Indeed, healing can occur only when the opposition between matter and spirit is transcended. This sounds terribly New Age, but I hope to show you that this has been the accepted method in practicing medicine throughout the world at all times until the gradual growth and domination of allopathic medicine in the West. We shall look at a few of these earlier methods, which have survived, and some recently revived, into the present.

Shamanism is one of the earliest forms of medicine we know of, and it is experiencing a rebirth in the West. The shaman uses a state of consciousness called ecstasy which means “standing outside oneself.” He specializes in a trance during which the soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld. He enters a state of non-ordinary reality, maintaining conscious control over the direction of his travels but not knowing what he will discover. He then brings back his discoveries to build his own knowledge and to help others. The trance is assisted by drumming, rattling,singing, and dancing. In this altered state, the shaman travels with a guardian spirit, or daimon, which helps him, and uses this spirit to help others to recover from illness or injury. Shamans are especially healers, although they also engage in divination and clairvoyance. A shaman may be of either sex depending more on cultural differences than biological ones.In some cultures they use mind-altering substances but in others they do not. In rare instances,both healer and patient partake. These healers work both toward curing the disease and giving the patient the lesson from the disease, a common concept in all traditional medicine. This latter is often cultivated even at the expense of the former. A witch doctor may be either a shaman or a medicine mean or woman. Unlike the shaman, the medicine man or woman does not travel to other realms, but tries to bring the spirits to his/her aid where needed. Mircea Eliade expresses the importance of the shaman in a primitive society.

“It is hard for us to imagine what shamanism can represent for an archaic society. In the first place, it is the assurance that human beings are not alone in a foreign world, surrounded by demons and the ‘forces of evil’. In addition to the gods and supernatural beings to whom prayers and sacrifices are addressed, there are ‘specialists in the sacred’, men able to ‘see’ the spirits, to go up in the sky and meet the gods, to descend to the underworld and fight the demons, sickness and death. The shaman’s essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community depends above all on this: men are sure that one of them is able to help them in the critical circumstances produced by the inhabitants of the invisible world.”

Shamans in tropical areas rely most heavily on plants. When asked the sources of their knowledge they often reply; the plants tell us. The shaman sometimes partakes of hallucinogenic plants, which are believed to guide him in identifying which plants will heal what illnesses. A renowned medicine man in Columbia insisted that his knowledge of the medicinal value of plant was taught to him by the plants themselves through the hallucinations he had experienced. So you see that in ancient cultures as in modern, drug use and physicians go hand in hand.

The circular mirror on this Siberian shaman’s right shoulder assists him in seeing the worlds beyond and in capturing the souls of the dead, reminiscent of the mirror Perseus used in killing the Gorgon Medusa. The pendants and ribbons sewn on the costumes are called ‘tails’ and ‘wings’ indicating the shaman’s ability to fly. These symbols reflect a world view which runs through all cultures to a greater or lesser extent, referred to as the ‘doctrine of correspondences.’ That is that matter is a reflection of spirit and vice versa. They are reflections, indeed manifestations of each other. The mirror and the wheel are symbols of this – the mirror symbolizes this viewpoint relative to 3-dimensional space, and the wheel symbolizes it relative to time and its cycles — linear time is a relatively recent concept. Notice that the mirror here is round like a wheel. This view that physis is a reflection of the unseen is now accepted in the scientific world in the conception that matter and energy are two aspects of the same thing.

Here we see a Navajo sand painting depicting Father Sky, Mother Earth, and Rainbow. Sky and Earth stand side by side joined by a line of yellow pollen, the essence of the sacred maize as a symbol of peace, happiness, and prosperity. They are so depicted in order to bring their role in creation and their powers into the ritual healing ceremony. In this way, events that took place in mythical time become contemporaneous with ritual time. The creative powers of the First Time are made once more accessible to heal injury and restore harmony here and now. This particular ceremony is directed against infection from lightning, snakes, and arrows. It is also used to counteract colds, fevers, rheumatism, paralysis and abdominal pain. NonWestern and ancient peoples in general took a holistic approach, believing that plants were inextricably connected to the world as a whole. It was a plant’s ‘effective energy’ or ‘energetics’ — its ability to connect the patient with the larger whole — that was deemed the cause of the cure, not some inherent physical substance within the plant. This ‘wholism’ also extended to the human body, where there was no anatomy as we know in theWest, but more a ‘systems physiology.’ After various rites were performed over a period of several days, the sand painting is destroyed and with it, the negative power which it now contains.

The image here presents the natural world as a unified system depending on the light, rain, and air of the heavens in conjunction with the soil of the earth for the word of vegetation and animal life as we know it. This unity is symbolized in the marriage of heaven and earth. The rainbow represents this union, providing a bridge between the two realms. Most Westerners believe that the universe is indifferent to human need and we often cite the laws of physics to prove our point. But when Newton formulated the laws of motion, he was offering conceptual schemes that described the universe only as it appears to us in ordinary states of consciousness, not when we are in direct contact with the higher energies that circulate within us and in the cosmos. And it is true that ordinary sense perception presents us with a world that can be described by forces acting laterally or horizontally. From the ancient perspective, however, the concept of forces acting laterally is an abstraction, a narrow perception of the whole. For the ancients, the passage of energies vertically, from heaven to earth and back, is as inexorable and impersonal as the laws of physics, as we can see in astrology. It is not that the cosmos is indifferent to human desire, but that human desire has become indifferent to the cosmos! Thus the ancient Chinese system of medicine understands the human being as a ‘little universe’ containing and harmonizing the entire reach of the two processes, vertical and horizontal, yin and yang, growth and decline, etc. We must bring into harmony all the energies at our disposal. Thus disease is the inevitable result of our unwillingness or inability to attend to all the energies within us. To teach this process to the members of the community was the function of the physician, which explains why, in ancient China, instead of hiring a physician when someone got sick, it was just at this point that they fired him! The successful physician was one who cold discriminate among qualities of energy in the human organism.What we label as ‘magic’ was, among early peoples, a means of relating to certain energies which we today no longer perceive, let alone master, because we no longer look for them — indeed, do not believe that they exist. We are today comfortable only when dealing with those forces which destroy disease organisms, because we must kill anything that threatens. Note the origin of the term ‘antibiotic’. Negotiation is indeed unknown in modern medicine.

Traditional peoples believed that the power of the herbs and mixtures used by the medicine men derived not from their own qualities but from the spirits inherent in them. They did not distinguish in their thinking between the biological action of food and drugs and the spiritual realm of healing. The medicine kept a person alive by pleasing the spirit of the person or displeasing the demon inhabiting him/her. If the spirit does not wish to accept it, the person will not heal, no matter how efficacious the substance is for others. The Western view that the chemical essence or agent in medicinal plants affects the healing is actually not so far from the traditional concept of the spirit within the plant.

The making and ritual use of the sand paintings, even the act of sitting inside them, connects the Navajo to forces that have obvious physical effects. The continuous chanting is based on the same understanding of sound vibration that one finds in every spiritual discipline that we know of, even referred to in the Bible. Indeed, such seemingly endless monotonous chanting should be enough to drive any self-respecting demon into the outer darkness! And then there is the dancing. Perhaps we put the label ‘magic’ on phenomena which we simply do not understand, just as a child or a primitive might regard the results of our own technology. Or as anyone might regard the fact that many times placebos work even better than the drug against which they are tested. Is Dr. Larry Dossey, former physician of internal medicine and Chief of Staff of City of Dallas Hospital, talking about magic when he says that one of the most effective ways to lower the cholesterol count is sitting down 15 minutes a day and doing nothing? This is as potent as any drug yet invented, but is unlikely to be mentioned in circulars sent out by the pharmaceutical industry. He said also that biofeedback became so respectable in his hospital that he was able to get his biofeedback therapist onto the staff of the hospital to do consultations with patients. This therapy is less costly, less invasive, and often more effective than more conventional methods. He said that some doctors used it themselves when faced with high blood pressure and hypertension headaches.

It has now been reported that more people in the US resort to alternative therapies than to the traditional forms of medicine. Traditional allopathic medicine has become so complex that many people feel that they are no longer in control of their own bodies. With specialization increasing so rapidly, the physicians themselves frequently do not understand the situations they are faced with and must resort to the suggestions of the pharmaceutical companies which seem more concerned with profit than with the needs of the patient. Attempts to provide medical care to all only complicates the situation and makes it more difficult than ever for a person not only to spend adequate time with a physician but even to see one. Alternative physicians, on the other hand, generally spend more time with a patient than physicians in a clinic are even allowed. Larry LeShan, a scientist-therapist, states that if an alternative physician gives the same treatment to two patients, he does not know very much about one or both of them. If he gives three the same treatment, it means he has severe tunnel vision or else he is treating them for his own problems and not theirs. This would be standard wisdom for any system of medicine outside of our allopathic system which has been standard only since it overtook homeopathy as the dominant system in the US about a century ago. In classical homeopathy, no two doses of medicine are the same, since no two people, indeed no one person at different times, are the same. LaShan also stated that when a patient is in the last stages of disease, his/her body will not mobilize its resources to protect the patient against pain or feelings of helplessness in order to permit the patient to fulfill the desires or expectations of family members or others, but it will frequently exercise its self-healing and recuperative abilities in order for the patient to fulfill his/her needs for self-expression and, as he put it, “to sing the unique song of his/her own personality.” He said that he does not understand why this is so.

The ancients did not differentiate very clearly between the body and the mind, looking upon the two somewhat as we do today in psychosomatic medicine. The mind was an adjunct of the heart and remains so today in many cultures. Our strict division stems largely from the attempt of scientific medicine to analyze each organ separately as in anatomy rather than using a physiolog-ical approach. However, holistic medicine refuses to separate them. This refusal to be scientific has opened this new-old form to a charge of quackery. But we know that it is effective, but not all the time. Allopathic medicine suffers from the same problem, but rarely do we hear it admitted by its practitioners, even though it is generally known that no drug has yet been discovered which is effective against viruses. Homeopathy is, however, but the pharmaceutical companies do not want that fact to be generally known. Indeed, in 1919 during the world-wide Spanish flu epidemic, in which 20 million people died, including several thousand in the US, it became clear that in the West, almost the only people who died were those who did not resort to homeopaths. This caused the American Medical Assn. to attempt to discredit homeopathy out of fear that this would cause a general abandonment of allopathic medicine. What resulted was that most states declared homeopathic practice illegal and the necessity of bringing to an end the Hahnemann Institute in Philadelphia, the largest center in the US for training of homeopaths. Although it was named after the founder of homeopathy, it was forced to switch over to solely allopathic medical training, although it has recently restored a few homeopathic courses. Homeopathy is still common in Europe. The British royal family still resorts to homeopathy and chiropractic, even for the royal stables, as I found out by being treated by a chiropractor who treated people after noon, and the royal horses in the morning.

I would like to make a point which may explain at least a part of the problem we have been dealing with. Unlike modern scientific medicine, all other forms of medicine do not look upon life, or anything that is normally present in life, as an enemy to life. Disease speaks through the body, or the mind, and thus is not separate from our totality.

1. Cancer cells can reproduce very fast, without any regard for the organs around them.
2. Cancer cells fulfill their own needs at the expense of the organism as a whole.
3. Cancer cells are a part of the body yet behave as if they are completely separate.
4. Cancer cells often end up destroying the very system on which their existence depends.

All of the above is also true of mankind in relation to its environment. Indeed, we and the disease are one. It follows from this that when we destroy the immune system of the planet we can hardly expect our own to be left undamaged. Cancer may very well be a concretization of lovelessness or emptiness in one’s life, just as heart disease maybe connected to chronic anger. Perhaps all forms of medicine are actually psychokinesis guided by a therapeutic mythology. All life seems to be a metaphor. As Joseph Campbell said, “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continual romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd St. and 5th Ave. waiting for the traffic light to change.” I think that light may be changing.

In the development of modern psychology, Freud and Jung and their followers for a time neglected the body for the mind simply because the mind had been overlooked completely in earlier scientific medicine. They wanted to subject the mind to scientific procedures in order to examine it more closely. In this process it became apparent that the human body is an outrageously ingenious demonstration of the power of consciousness to turn energy into matter and matter into energy. However, it soon became apparent that purely scientific methods would not work on anything as abstract as the mind, and now we see many physicians and healers dealing directly with the body in an attempt to influence the mind which is then expected to aid in the healing of the body. It is becoming obvious that the two are really one. What I intend to do here is to show you that there is no essential difference, that the duality that seems to exist is, like all dualities, illusory, just as the ancients believed. This means going back to the myth of Creation in the Gospel of St. John. “In the beginning was the Word.” To use Jungian terminology, the Self speaks to the ego using a language which it used in creating us, so why can it not be useful in re-creating us, that is to say, in healing us? This sounds far out, but it is not. We shall look at four ‘languages’ used by our body-minds in order to communicate to us. I like to use the term ‘daimon’ because that is the only term which for me can describe the various experiences I have had and still keep my sanity. Let us look at these four, starting with the simplest.

Hunches

These are simple intuitions which we frequently use to find out why we are suffering a headache or other mild symptom. We need not go into explanations about them, but they are indeed a language of the body-mind.

Symptoms

A symptom may strike suddenly or not, but symptoms are not necessarily pathological in the sense that they are not to be simply suppressed as you would a child who is making too much noise. They are potentially meaningful and purposeful conditions. Since pain is frequently involved, most people take something to suppress the symptom, thus blocking the ability of the symptom to act as messenger of the body. People use drugs in many forms, from painkillers to alcohol to dull the body’s ability to communicate with us and to substitute pleasure for pain. We would much prefer pleasure as a method for the body to communicate. but rarely do we learn anything from pleasure. We have homework to do, and going outside to play is not going to get it done. If we cure disease with antibiotics and other medicines, we are in danger of creating greater problems in the future, for disease, like other symptoms, is actually a messenger telling us of some imbalance which should be corrected, and is a language of the body-mind which we must learn to interpret.

Dreams

Freud and Jung revived the ancient idea that dreams are a language of the body-mind. The ancients held the view that interpretation of dreams was a major method of therapy for diseases of the body and of the mind between which, as I pointed out earlier, they did not distinguish. There were 320 Asklepions, like the one you see here at Ephesus, identified by archeologists in the ancient world; some of which were in use for close to 5000 years. They were dream centers which are known to have been successful in caring for all sorts of diseases ofd the mind and body. Symptoms are often mirrored in dreams and the reverse is also true. Dreams in some way talk about body conditions. Through proper attention to and interpretation of dreams, one can occasionally relieve and even prevent symptoms from recurring so long as the dreamer follows the suggestions of the dream. Dreams are now regaining their status as the royal road to the unconscious and are actually a Fax from the body-mind.

Visions

Visions have many similarities to dreams although they tend to deal with concerns of the unconscious Self and are more trance-like. They are similar to ‘great’ or archetypal dreams and are frequently initiatory. They are sometimes invoked by active imagination. Visions some-times occur when one is awake and, even when of a religious nature, can be called hallucinations. These can be auditory, visual, or combine various senses. In any case, they bring messages from the unconscious. However, in pathological cases, can be very disruptive to an already damaged ego. If, furthermore, the ego had been suppressed by hallucinogens, an external guide is necessary to prevent serious damage to the person’s psyche.

All of these are part of the language of the unconscious intended to inform us as to what is going on in our body-mind. They are attempts to communicate which we frequently do not understand. We should make it a two-way communication, but the problem arises from the unwillingness or inability to interpret the language properly, frequently by allowing the ego to insert blame into the issue, which never does any good at all. We do know that prayer sometimes works — it is, after all, a holistic method. Experiments have been conducted by praying over plants and finding that the plants that have been prayed over do better than the others. This all goes back again to the Gospel of St. John. Words. Words have always been considered capable of affecting or actualizing matter, since they convey meaning in both the spiritual and material worlds. They can thus transcend either and affect both. In ancient languages word, or logos, was considered creative and the words for breath and spirit were often the same. It is helpful that our unconscious knows our language, but it does not know our circumstances unless we tell it with words. This is what prayer is all about. We can ask for something in prayer and sometimes receive it, but not at all in the form in which we expected, or in the time when we most needed it. Sometimes it actually turns out to be a disaster! It is not God playing tricks, but God, or as I prefer to call it, the daimon, is actually far from being omniscient, and here the teaching of the Church concerning the omniscience of God has served to make prayer of questionable value. The language of dream explains this. What we see in dreams is our circumstances as seen by our unconscious Self. Our unconscious knows our world in space and time about as well as we know its world outside of space-time. If we want to be healed, we must know what our unconscious is telling us in dreams and symptoms so that we can know what it wants us to know. We must then explain to it our circumstances so it can make more clear to us what the problem is as it sees it. This requires recognition. Every living creature requires recognition, and that includes the part of our body which is creating symptoms. This may even be the reason the symptoms are appearing. Many people do not recognize the needs of their own body. Indeed, it has been said that we would never dare to treat another person the way we treat our own body. The ancient Egyptians actually believed that each body part had its own neter or spirit, an idea I at first thought ridiculous. But my own experiences have taught me that this is not such a foolish idea after all. It seems that meditating on a particular part of the body which is in pain can actually reduce or eliminate pain. Welcome the pain as a communication which has succeeded, and it may actually satisfy the need. Symptoms are not a punishment, or an enemy, but a form of communication from the unconscious Self and if we hide the symptom with medicine without discovering the cause, the body will only have to find another symptom, likely a more painful one, to get its message across.

Indeed, it can be aid that every detail of the material world is a kind of projection of a non-physical reality that has chosen to reveal itself in a particular way. Distortion from the original non-physical pattern results from the fact that it is impossible for anything in our world to be a complete replica of anon-physical reality. Also distortion results from our own actions and perceptions, willed or not, which permit us to change the framework somewhat, and thereby participate in the Creation. Thus we, like God, create the world in our own image. And we must remember that one can create new colors only by mixing the colors one already has.

This is an image of Horus the Child, an aspect of Horus as healer. There is a magical inscription on the right. The reptiles and animals held by Horus represent the forces of darkness and of the earth used as talismans by the Egyptians who placed them in houses, gardens, or in the ground to protect them from beings visible and invisible. Although this may appear as pure magic there was in their medical system a considerable amount of empirical knowledge and sound intuition. They sought to heal physical and psychic ills by natural means. These consisted in placing the sick person in a favorable milieu, then in providing natural products to be applied or absorbed.This could be a plant picked at the moment of its optimum vital activity, or it could be an animal product. The recipes found from ancient Egypt recommending the use of goat excrement may seem strange to us, but we must realize that each animal nourishes itself in a manner peculiar to its species. What does it retain for its vital purposes and what does it reject? What it rejects has been concentrated and gone through a process of fermentation within the animal. Only omnivorous creatures like us take nourishment from any edible plant or animal, hence our waste lacks any specific character. In the Coptic monasteries of Egypt, the remains of consecrated bread are still collected and left to mold to “heal the brethren when they are sick.” Penicillin and like substances and ferments have been a part of the medicine of Africa since the beginning. As the Egyptians believed, “All that ferments has the gift of fixing the spirit of its functional principle.” Functional principle was their word for neter (god). This is magic, but magic based on centuries of trial and error. They believed that it was taught them by the gods. On the “Treatise of the Heart” which dates back to the 1st Dynasty (ca. 3500 BC) we read:

“Beginning of the ‘Book of Healing’ to expel the pains which are in all the limbs of a man, such as it was found among the writings of ancient times under the feet of Anubis.”

Why under the feet of Anubis? Anubis was the jackal. As you may know, the jackal was the digester par excellence who keeps his prey until it decomposes before using it as nourishment. This decomposition is a fermentation. It is therefore Anubis the jackal who has been chosen to preside over all that concerns death and resurrection through mummification. So we can see why the Treatise of theHeart was discovered between the feet of Anubis. The physician was also the priest of Sekhmet, the blood-thirsty lioness; he was also a magician. Thoth reconstituted the Eye of Horus which Seth had shattered into 64 fragments, thus Thoth was the protector of oculists as well as scribes. (The number 64 may also remind you of the I Ching.) Each member of the body had its own neter (spirit) as I mentioned earlier whom one could call upon when help for that member was needed. Arnold Mindell, in his book “Working with the Dreaming Body” 3000 years later, reports that he has made discoveries, as I did, that seem directly related to the Egyptian view.

“Just as the mind has its individuation process insofar as one learns about the different parts of oneself, so the body, too, wants to individualize and discover all of its potentials. The body has many centers and points of awareness (which the Egyptians called ‘neters’). Your body uses projections and psychological problems to stimulate discovery o its different parts. Stomach problems raise consciousness of the stomach area, neck difficulties bring your relationship between the head and the body into awareness, and heart problems can frequently make you more aware of your feelings. When it signals to you in the body, we call it a symptom. When it signals to you through a dream, we call it a symbol.”

So you see that even today it is possible for one to view Egyptian myth, magic, and metaphor as valid in many respects. The Egyptians also practiced modern medicine in the form of trepanning, which was opening the skull to release excess fluid which when it builds up in the skull causes hydrocephaly. This was a genetic condition suffered by some of the pharoahs, notably Akhnaton, said to be passed down because of a recessive gene is his family. The Egyptians, of course, were releasing a spiritual substance, an alchemical water, but the result was the same. It is merely looking at the world through a different lens.

A variety of techniques through which magic was applied can be found in ancient Egyptian texts. Central to all magical techniques was the invocation of the First Time, which we found earlier in the Indian sand painting. By this was meant the nontemporal realm in which archetypal events enacted by the gods took place, as when the gods taught mankind skills, rituals, and created the Thousand Things. This is the realm of myth, and hence of spiritual realities more powerful than anything merely physical. One could identify a given terrestrial event with an archetypal First Time event by an act of invocation in which the archetypal reality was brought into the world, suffusing the latter with spiritual power. One could also call this a projection of the mundane world into the archetypal, causing a fusion of the temporal event with a spiritual reality, a linking together of heavenly ad earthly realities. In this process the Word, or Logos, was of the greatest importance. This was frequently used as a medical technique. in myth, Horus is badly wounded by Seth but is restored by his mother Isis. This archetypal pattern could be applied to a patient in a similarly dangerous condition to that of Horus. As the patient’s bandages were removed, the patient inwardly identified with Horus. In the text that follows, the patient invokes the First Time. “Unbound he was, unbound he was by Isis, unbound was Horus by Isis, from all the evil done to him by his brother Seth, when Seth killed his father Osiris.” Then the patient prays to Isis: “Oh Isis, great magician, unbind me; deliver me from evil, harmful and red things; from god’s illness and from a goddess’ illness; from a male death an d from a female death; from male enemies ands female enemies who will come against me.” The prayer is utter as if the patient were Horus addressing his mother. In this way, the aid of the goddess is enlisted. A second example also involves an incident in the life of the god Horus. As an infant, the young god is in serious danger when fire breaks out. His mother, Isis, finding no water to hand, extinguishes the flame with milk from her own breasts. It was thus that the milk of a woman who had given birth to a boy was an essential ingredient in a mixture of substances used for the treatment of burns.

Identification with a god or neter was necessary if one wished to attune oneself wholly to the energy of a particular neter or divine principle. ‘Divine principle’ is a better translation of the Egyptian neter than our term ‘god’, although the idea of identification with such continued down to Roman times in divine worship (I am thou and thou art I). The ancient Egyptians regarded words as the medium of divine powers, whose essential vitality would come to expression in the sounds and images of the hieroglyphs. Hence by assuming the name of a neter or god, or magically endowing another person with that name, it was possible for a person to resonate with the energy of that god. It is as if, by a combination of visualizing a neter or an animal sacred to it, and sinking oneself into the metaphysical and mythical content of a sacred text, one has the possibility of becoming attuned to the specific energy of the neter with whom one wishes to merge. One may detect similarities to this in shamanic healing and native American healing ceremonies to this day. Depending on the circumstances, one might seek to identify now with one neter, now with another; in practice what this means is that the psyche becomes imbued with or possessed by a spiritual force, and thus undergoes a momentary, or perhaps even a lasting, transformation. Today we are only beginning to emerge from a kind of collective amnesia concerning these spiritual forces with which the ancients were so familiar, and which we seem to fear. The modern belief that the contents of consciousness are subjective in the sense of belonging to the subject who experiences them is the outcome of a historical process that has taken place since ancient times. One result of this process is that the idea of freedom can now be applied to the inner life. The notion that we are free to choose how we act and must therefore take responsibility for our actions is an idea first formulated in the 4th c. BC by Aristotle. It is for this reason that Egyptian magic can not be simply appreciated by us today. On the other hand, because our modern consciousness is unfamiliar with the spiritual world of which the Egyptians were so aware, it is important that we guard against the modern tendency to dismiss it as merely idle superstition or fantasy. Rather, the task is to develop the faculties that would enable us, grounded by our modern self-possessed consciousness, to approach the gods once more. If we fail to do this, as Jas. Hillman said, the gods will re-appear as pathologies. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to identifying wholly with an individual god or goddess to accomplish healing, it was also a common practice to identify oneself part by part with a number of different deities. In the Book of the Dead we find the following spell that systematically works down the body identifying each part with a neter, thus imbuing it with the energy of that deity.

“My hair is Nun; my face is Ra; my eyes are Hathor; my ears are Upuat; my lips are Anubis; my molars are Selkit; my incisors are Isis the goddess; my arms are the ram, lord of Mendes; my breast is Neith, lady of Sais; my back is Seth; my phallus is Osiris; my muscles are the lords of Kharaba; my chest is He Who is Greatly Majestic; my belly and my spine are Sekhmet; my buttocks are the Eye of Horus; my thighs and my calves are Nut; my feet are Ptah; my toes are living falcons; there is no member of mine devoid of a neter and Thoth is the protection of all my flesh.”

It is not hard to imagine how in sickness or in health this invocatory sequence of identifications would have an empowering effect on the individual concerned. The ancients would not have understood the peculiarly modern attitude toward illness that views it simply as a result of negative physical causes such as viruses. For them, everything physical was the effect or outward expression of a spiritual agency. If a person became ill, it was a sign that a spiritual event had taken place. Indeed, the illness itself was often regarded as a hostile spirit or the manifestation of a demon had entered into the person. In this case, the only viable treatment was to confront the demon directly and drive it out. The effectiveness of a physician therefore lay less in his remedies than in his ability to tackle demons. Remedies were necessary for the healing of body and soul, which were scarcely differentiated. But crucial to their efficacy was the spiritual power that they carried. The medicines owed much of their virtue to the spells repeated during both their preparation and their administration. The sickness ended only with the departure of the demon who had caused it. The principal action of the physician took place on the spiritual level. He first had to identify the demon that was causing the illness, he then concocted a suitable remedy, instilling it with magical potency through reciting certain incantations. This was to make the body of the patient a most unpleasant habitation for the demon, while building up the strength of the patient. As we saw earlier, they were often of a homeopathic nature. Before administering the remedy, it was necessary for the physician first to engage the demon. If the patient has a serious cold, the physician talks to the cold, quietly at first, He tells it that it has no place in the patient’s body, that it feels ill at ease there. It would far rather be somewhere else. He tells it that it has no power over the patient, it is weak, it is feeble, it has no power at all. He lulls the cold demon into a state of inertia, leading it into a condition if impotence and defenselessness. Suddenly, when the demon is least prepared for it, he shouts out:

“Begone Cold, son of Cold! Who breaks bones, who shatters the skull, who digs into the brain, so that sickness overtakes the seven openings of the head which are the servant of Ra, and the praise-singers of Thoth; see, I have brought the remedy against you!”

The physician then repeat the whole process several times before administering the remedy, first quietly draining away the demon’s self-confidence, then haranguing it aggressively. One might imagine that this relentless bombardment would be enough to make the fiercest demon feel decidedly uncomfortable. It is then that the physician gives the remedy to the patient who is required to say such words of welcome to the remedy as these: “Welcome, remedy, welcome, who destroys the trouble in my heart and in these my limbs. This magic of Horus is victorious in the remedy.” Note that the prayer ends with an expectation of success as modern praying frequently does. In and through the remedy, Horus engages in battle with the demon. Thus the sickness was, in effect, projected as an aspect of Seth into the First Time where its defeat was inevitable. So we can see that these rituals were not merely symbolical; they were part and parcel of the cosmic events; they are mankind’s share in these events. Egyptian life was religion, and the Egyptian religion was magical. Magic implies a consciousness that is participatory, hence withdrawal of human participation in cosmic and natural cycles can be seen as catastrophic for both nature and the gods. This was foreseen by the Egyptian priests who described the closing of this cycle of participation of mankind with nature and the gods to Herodotus in the 5th c. BC. But long before then, the peoples of the western Mediterranean outside of Egypt were borrowing much of the Egyptian methodology and adapting it to their own cultural outlook. Indeed, much of what you will now see has its roots in prehistory just as the Egyptian does.

Here we see one of the most important classical methods of healing which existed side by side, even complementary to what we would call the standard medical system of Hippocrates, Galen, and others. We see the patient in a dream state with the god Asclepius behind whom stands his daughter Hygeia, personifying health (hygiene). For several thousand years until its destruction by Christianity in 400 AD, one of the most important uses of dreaming was a ritual form of healing called incubation by which people suffering from physical, psychological. or spiritual ailments could travel to a healing center, or asklepion, where priest-physicians practicing a combination of physical and spiritual medicine could help them prepare for a healing dream. In earlier times, it might be in a cave. This picture shows what the Asklepion of Ephesus looked like. There were by Roman times 320 of them throughout the empire. Many of those which were not destroyed were later turned into hospitals. On arrival, the patient was first ritually purified and prepared for entry into the abaton. This was a cave or cubicle where the healing would take place. Later, Christians translated it as Hell, because that was where one came into contact with a devil, as only the Christian god could heal. Therefore they had to destroy these places. The seeker was put into a narrow, womblike chamber and waited, for hours or days, for a healing dream or vision in which Asclepius in any of his guises — god, bearded man, boy, snake, or dog — appeared and touched or treated the afflicted part or provided instruction or advice. It was the epiphany, the visit of the god through a dream, that brought about the healing.

The snake is the representative of Mother Earth and of transformation. In all traditions except the Judeo-Christian, the snake has been the carrier of beneficent powers. Asclepius was an advanced practitioner of snake healing, particularly the homeopathic transformation of poisons and identity transformations symbolized by shedding one’s old skin. Asclepius is represented as carrying a staff around which a single great snake winds. The caduceus carried by Hermes, guide of souls, contains two snakes. Some ancient sources say that the bite of one is poisonous, the other healing. Similarly, Asclepius carries blood from the snake-haired gorgon Medusa which he received from Athene, both from the gorgon’s left side and from her right. With the former he slays and from the latter he cures and brings back to life. This points to the ambiguous nature of both the unconscious and the healing process. One can never know whether healing a pathological condition will interfere with the individuation process. It may be that any god or daimon who transmitted it to us might have done so to help us utilize it in bringing us to a higher level of consciousness, and that the traumatic event which brought the condition about might even be considered a sacred event. In my experience, this is not mere speculation. I shall demonstrate:

Spiritually, the two snakes teach a healing lesson. As homeopathic and other therapeutic practit-ioners know, the administration of a small amount of the poison which caused the problem can bring healing. In ancient snake healing practices, snake priests and priestesses allowed themselves to be bitten by their poisonous charges. This practice propelled them into altered states of consciousness while over time allowing them to build up immunity to the poison. Then they were able to utilize the snakes and their poison in healing rituals and treatment. This may also have been the case in Asklepian practices. The healing principle is this: What poisons us can also heal us; what heals us can poison us. The ancient oracle of Apollo declared this same wisdom: “He who wounds also heals.” Hermes has made that clear to me. A ritual participation can bring about a healing or worsening of any condition or dilemma from which we suffer.

Asclepius also had other animal totems. The dog is the animal most loyal and compassionate to humans. They serve as messengers from and intermediaries to the animal world. They were also considered to be guides to the spirit world because of their ability to smell out a path which we can not sense. They were sometimes sacrificed at the death of their owner so they could companion the soul on its journey and be its guide.

Asclepius’ third animal, the cock, was the preferred animal of sacrifice to this particular god and in fact was sacrificed to no other god but him. The cock, and occasionally other animals, was given in thanksgiving for healing, as were reproductions seen here of the body part that had been healed. This tradition is still part of Greek Orthodox practice today. The cock is the animal that straddles yin and yang, dark and light, day and night. It calls calls us to consciousness, crying at the break of dawn to awaken us from dreams. By sounding the clarion call, it brings both the affliction and the encounter with divinity out of the darkness and unconsciousness and into the bright light of awareness. Remember Socrates’ very last words: “Krito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Don’t forget.”

Entering the dream chambers of classical times was both a descent into the unconscious — the dark underground — and into the womb — at once nature’s cocoon, the birth mother’s womb, and Mother Earth’s womb and tomb. To heal our intractable wounds, we must return to the womb of our wound. Asclepius was born out of the womb of his slain mother Koronis. His supplicants had to return to the womb to be reborn out of the place of the original wound, a reference to the First Time. Asclepius had to be raised by his nature teacher, Chiron, the philanthropic centaur. For a full healing, we must descend into nature, the Great Mother’s body, for the energies that can truly bring rebirth. Asclepian healing demonstrates the great challenge and process of transformational healing. The literal Greek meaning of psychotherapist is ‘attendant of the soul’. Through the guidance and intervention of spirit, and with the guidance and attendance of the soul. the supplicant descends into the womb of the wound, the place where the primal wound occurred and has festered. There the supplicant needs to experience awareness, touching, catharsis, and the purification of the original wound, as we saw in the myth of Parzifal where the Grail King required just such treatment. The supplicant also needs a guided descent into the great Mother Earth’s womb where through her incubation, nurturing and touch, often by way of dreams and animal helpers, the supplicant can experience a return of the primal life-giving energies of nature and spirit.

It is possible to view a disease as an expression of the patient’s unconscious, which is actually putting into modern psychological terms what the ancients called the god or more accurately the daimon. There is really no other way to explain what has been discovered in modern psychiatry — that some people who exhibit symptoms of multiple personality may while possessed by one of their personalities have full-blown diabetes but exhibit no signs whatever of the disease at other times. This would seem to indicate that the disease is actually a process of the unconscious self which is related to certain aspects of the person’s psychology, and is part of what is meant when we say that we create our own world. The daimon is the personification of a creative energy which operates not according to natural laws, but by a process of which we are only partly aware. The same can be said concerning the known fact that a stutterer is free from stuttering when he/she sings. We must remind ourselves that the idea of incontrovertible laws of nature did not exist before the scientific revolution. The concept of natural law — that there are certain rules that nature must obey — is a modern idea, and it is symptomatic of our modern relationship to nature. We can talk about laws of nature only because we experience nature as wholly externalized from us and also from itself. The nature that exists for the modern scientific consciousness has no soul. All that occurs in nature must be explained in terms of blind obedience to laws, originally conceived in the 17th c. as commands imposed by God upon the natural world. The spiritual is no longer beheld within the world of sense experience but is felt to occupy a separate sphere. There-fore the connection between the divine and natural realms can only be conceived in terms of the most remote and impersonal kind of relationship.

In the ancient world, the experience of the relationship between nature and deity was otherwise. The sun did not go around the earth in obedience to law, but as an expression of the life of the sun deity; the deity’s process, as it were. The sun was the countenance of the divine. It transmitted into the natural sphere an interior spiritual life, much as people’s life processes transmit some-thing of what goes on in their souls. As for the sun, so for all of nature as the ancients experienced it: nothing in nature was simply an “it” — all was animated and alive. In such a nature there can be no question of ‘laws,’ because human experience of spiritual entities is active within the physical domain. The relationship of sun god to sun could not be that of a lawgiver any more than could that of human soul to bodily processes; the one manifests through the other. The spiritual does not impose laws on the physical, but expresses itself in and through the physical.

This gets to the heart of the matter. If a certain type of phenomenon, such as the diabetic personality mentioned earlier, is inexplicable within a certain set of presuppositions, but explicable within another, then perhaps we should question the adequacy of those presuppositions that fail to provide the groundwork for understanding the phenomenon itself. Theodore Roszak once pointed to an example of the difficulty modern man has in dealing with these phenomena. At a shamanic seance attended by the anthropologist attached to the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918, every member of the Copper Eskimo Tribe saw the shaman Higilak turn into a polar bear as part of the rite. Under the anthropologist’s questioning, each of them insisted on this as an incontestable fact. The anthropologist saw no such thing, and interpreted the event as a ‘collective hallucination.’ Roszak comments wryly,

“Since the empirical consensus was wholly against him (the anthropologist) — and since the Eskimos are surely better authorities on what is and what is not a polar bear — I gather we must conclude that his interpretation is wrong.”

What we experience is dependent upon our mode of consciousness. It must be believed to be seen. Our modern judgment of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real’ is conditioned by our consciousness. Call it what we may — the scientific consciousness, objective consciousness, the observer consciousness — it is characterized by a clear awareness of, and need to distinguish between, what is ‘within’ us and what is ‘outside us.’ The modern psyche defines itself by an act of differentiating what is inner from what is outer, what is subjective from what is objective. In this way we feel we know where we begin and end; we have a definite sense of ‘I’ as opposed to ‘not I.’ In ancient times this mode of consciousness did not exist except in a few philosophers starting in the classical period. This means that for most, the experience of what was ‘real’ and what was ‘not real’ was different from our experience. The outer and inner world were not so strictly partitioned and, as a result, the experience of the physical was much richer, being infused with inner, spiritual qualities that today we prefer to regard as subjective projections. At the same time, the experience of the spiritual was much more concrete, more objective, that is, ‘shared.’ For us, spiritual events are very private; in ancient times they were more collective enabling such experiences to occur quite objectively. Some aspects of the ancient view may still be observed in children.

The anthropologist was unable to experience the shaman turning into a polar bear, and no doubt we would be in a similar position had we been present at that event. Could it be that had we been present at the parting of the Red Sea, we might not have experienced anything at all? For the structures of reality are inseparable from the consciousness that experiences them. This does not mean, of course, that if we wish to bring healing about that we must reject all the advances made by the western ego in recent millenia. But it does, I believe, call for a re-examination by all of us of what we have lost in this process. This may have been what Mark Twain meant when he told the story of the old lady who as at death’s door and asked her doctor if he could do anything for her. He told her that first she would have to give up drinking, smoking, and swearing. She replied that she had never done any of those things. He responded:

“Well then, there you have it; you’re a sinking ship with no ballast to throw overboard, so I’m afraid there is nothing further I can do for you.”

It matters little what you believe so long as you don’t altogether believe it.

Religion is a department of politics.

The purpose of morals is to permit people to inflict suffering with impunity.

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov)

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. (Voltaire)

The trouble with politicians is that the 90% who are corrupt give the rest a bad name.

Do not fear suffering; only fear that you will not learn from it.

The IQ of a mob is equivalent to the IQ of the most intelligent person in the mob divided by the number of people in the mob.

The exploited create the exploiter just as the worshippers create the object of worship. (Krishnamurti)

Inscription on a gravestone in Cumbria:  The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shape of things, their color, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.

The path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams. (Lakota saying)

There are many people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.

God isn’t dead. He just knows better than to get involved.

Death is Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

Love thy neighbor, but don’t get caught.

No one has ever added to the sum total of human knowledge by denying the existence of anything

Our fate is shaped from within ourselves outward, never from without inward.

All living things demand recognition. but to receive it they must first wake you up. When we fail to recognize a god, it soon appears as a pathology. (Hillman)

Sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.

The opposite is also true. (Empedocles)

It is the lens you see through which creates your world.

Religion is unprovable science; science is unacknowledged religion. (Jos. Campbell)

Hope is a great magnifier; that is why it can’t see very far.

There is one barrier that will keep you in complete ignorance — and that is contempt prior to investigation. (Herbert Spencer)

It is an axiom of archetypal psychology that each phenomenon contains within itself the means by which it is to be interpreted.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. (Jung)

When there is an income tax, the just pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income. (Plato, The Republic)

An interesting bit of wisdom issued by the Dept. of Environment of Alberta: Hikers and hunters must be warned of dangers of encountering bears. Carrying such devices as little bells to warn bears withou shocking theminto agression. Also carry pepper spray in the event of an encounter. Be able to detect their presence by differentiating their droppings. Black bear droppings often contain berries and even squirrel fur. Grizzly bear droppings frequently contain little bells and smell of pepper spray.

The spirit needs matter in order to reveal itself.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. (Mark Twain)

In science as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man. (Emily Dickenson)

A mother brought a child to Gandhi saying, “Please tell my son to give up sugar.” Gandhi said, “Come back in a week.” A week later, she returned and Gandhi said to the child, “Give up sugar.” The mother asked, “Couldn’t you have told him that last week?”  Gandhi replied, “No, because last week I hadn’t given up sugar.”

An accident is a rock with a message from the unconscious thrown through the window of your awareness.

People in a hurry cannot feel.

Some people use statistics like a drunkard uses lamp-posts, for support rather than illumination.

In the Oriental tradition, the compassion one feels for the sufferer is not for the suffering itself but rather because the sufferer does not know why he/she is suffering. It has no meaning for the sufferer and therefore is much worse than it would be otherwise.

Every detail of the material world is a kind of projection of a non-physical reality that has chosen to reveal itself in a particular way. Distortion results from the fact that it is impossible for anything in our world to be a complete replica of a non-physical reality Also distortion results from the actions and perceptions of man because of his free will, thus permitting him alone wilfully (or in the case of perceptions unwillingly) to change the framework somewhat, thus participating in the Creation. Thus mankind, like God, creates the world in the image of himself.

Truth varies according to our perspective. There are many gods because there are many ways of understanding the world, and each god is a lens through which we view the world. It is only to those who are prepared to accept that their own view may not be the total truth that the gods will show their face.

If the soul could know God without the world, the world would never have been created (Meister Eckhardt)

A dream is a Fax from the unconscious.

Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion. (Nietzsche)

The cheese in every trap is free, but it is always the second mouse that gets the cheese.

If God had known Himself absolutely, there would have been no need for humans created in His image as mirrors much less any evolutionary necessity to evoke even greater knowing at a conscious level. A “conversation” was needed through the duality of spirit and matter. He created outer reality as a reflection of Himself, therefore reality is not an illusion but a revelation, a manifestation of divinity.

Speaking mythologically, each god is the source of a world that without him remains invisible. . . and through whom it becomes intelligible. (Kerenyi)

William James depicts the brain not as the producer but as the transmitter of consciousness, a physical medium whereby consciousness filters into the natural world. He uses the term “filter” because the brain limits consciousness in its process of transmission. This is parallel to te view that the senses “filter” what is out there into what one can perceive.

A tryant dies and his reign ends; a martyr dies and his reign begins. (Kierkegaard)

Who we think we are dies, but we aren’t who we think we are.

What you do not make conscious comes at you from outside, as if by fate. (Jung)

Enlightenment doesn’t care how you get there. (Zen saying)

Everything is here all the time. It is only because our apereture of awareness is so narrow that we experience things sequentially.

The spirit does not punish. Pain and other problematic situations are not imposed on us to punish, but to redircct.

Beneath the accidental surface effects of this world sit — as of yore — the gods. (Jos. Campbell)

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics . . . When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only later that you understand. (Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek)

The moon is more important than the sun — it gives light at night when we need it.(Nasrudin)

If everything were only One, that One could not become manifest to Itself. The condition of manifestation is that of One being seeking to reveal and experience Itself. We are created to serve as trusted channels for the furtherance of Creation.  (Sufism)

Everyone takes the limits of his own view for the limits of the world. (Schopenhauer)

Pygmalion said it, so did God, and so did the Spirit within all of us:  I was a hidden treasure and yearned to be known, and so I created in order to be known by my creation.

Innocence is like sincerity. Once you’ve learned to fake it, you’ve got it made.

Out beyond our ideas of right and wrong there is a field. I shall meet you there. . . There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. (Rumi)

There is another world and this is it. (Paul Elhuard, surrealist poet)

Nothing transformational can be purchased.

Myth is essential for understanding Truth, for it is the veil which prevents Truth from blinding us.

Spirit always attempts to make matter conscious of its original and ultimate oneness with spirit.
Law and sausages are somethindgs you do not particularly want to see being made (Bismarck)

A book is a friend that will do what no friend does — be silent when we wish to think. (Durant)

Teehnology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.

First people deny a thing; then they belittle it; then they say it was known all along.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.

Beware of the person with delusions of adequacy.

Resentment is just a way of letting someone else use your mind rent-free.

When everything is heading your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

We are the people our parents warned us about.

If you can keep your head when those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you’ve misunderstood the situation.

___________________________________________________________

by OSCAR WILDE

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people by the people and for the people.

Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Some cause happiness whereever they go; others whenever they go.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Human beings are endowed with imagination as a compensation for what they are not, and a sense of humor as a consolation for what they are.

“I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah).

Indeed, in all the earlier books of Hebrew literature, Satan is not mentioned at all. All acts of punishment, revenge, and temptation are performed by Yahweh himself or by his angel at his direct command. The prophet Zechariah speaks of Satan as an angel whose office is to accuse and to demand the punishment of the wicked. In the Book of Job, Satan appears as a malicious servant of God who enjoys performing his function as a tempter, torturer, and avenger. He accuses unjustly and seems to delight in convicting the innocent, while God’s justice and goodness are not called into question. Satan is in the Old Testament an adversary of man, although a servant of God. The Jewish idea of Satan received some additional features from the attributes of the gods of surrounding nstions. Nothing is more common in history than the change of the deities of hostile nations or competing religions into demons of evil. In this way Beelzebub, the Phoenician god, became another name for Satan. There are also many historical connections of Israel’s religion with the mythologies of Assyria and Babylon including reminiscences of the combat between the dragon Tiamat (originallythe Great Goddess) and Marduk, the omnipotent god of the patriarchal Babylonians, still remaining in the Old Testament. Paul Carus, in his History of the Devil quotes the following from an earlier source:

“Nowhere in extant literature is the myth of Yahveh’s combat with the dragon actually narrated. Judaism, the distinctive work of which was the collection of the canon, did not admit myths that savored of heathendom. Nevertheless, the fact that in all the passages that speak of the dragon the myth is not portrayed but simply presupposed, proves that it was very well known and very popular with the people. The absence of the myth in the canon is distinct and conclusive evidence that we possess in our old Testament a fragment only of the old religious literature.”

So you see why people say that the devil is merely in the details. People put the concept of the devil to use in social and political conflicts, claiming that their opponents are influenced by the devil or even willingly support the devil. The devil has also been used to explain why others hold beliefs that are considered to be false and ungodly. In Islam the devil is referred to as Iblis. According to the Koran God created Iblis out of smokeless fire (burning bush) along with all the other jinns, and created mankind out of clay. He has no power other than to cast evil suggestions into the hearts of men and women. He was expelled from the grace of God when he disobeyed God by refusing to pay homage to Adam, the father of mankind. He claimed to be superior to Adam, on the grounds that man was created of earth unlike himself. However, Iblis, adamant in his view that mankind was inferior, even though men, unlike the angels, were given the ability to choose, unlawfully made a choice — to disobey God. So God expelled him, a fact which Iblis blamed on humanity. Initially, the devil was successful in deceiving Adam, but once his intentions became clear, Adam and Eve repented to God and were freed from their misdeeds and forgiven. Therefore there was no need for saviors. God gave them a strong warning about Iblis and the fires of Hell and asked them and their offspring to stay away from the deceptions of their senses caused by the devil. This doctrine can be seen as viable today in the view that Iranians hold toward us. They do not believe that the United States is a country ruled by the devil (as Bush said about them); indeed they have been great admirers of American culture in many respects, but they believe that we are foolish and unable to avoid the temptations of the devil in our felt need to imitate the hubris which they believe is the devil’s great sin. Those Iranians opposed to the theocracy, although they are frequently the most admiring of American culture, have a similar view expressed by Karen Armstrong:

“In Islam the Devil is a trivial little character, stupid and unaware. When the Iranians described America as the Devil, they didn’t mean it was an evil country but a stupid one, the great trivialiser.”

The Koran does not depict Iblis as the enemy of God, as God is supreme over all his creations and Iblis is just one of his creations. Iblis’ single enemy is humanity. He intends to discourage humans from obeying God. Thus humankind is warned to struggle (jihad) against the mischiefs of Satan and the temptations he puts them in. The ones who succeed in this are rewarded with Paradise which is attainable only by righteous conduct. Other creeds than Christianity have dealt with malign gods and spirits, but none other has posited a figure whose name and face represenrs the abstract reality of evil. At one point he was almost the favored son of God before they had a falling out. Are they then essentially the equal and opposite ends of the spectrum, principles of good and evil locked in a csmic battle like Batman and the Joker? Or is the Devil not a free agent? Is he still in some fashion under God’s control? Present-day theology seems to endorse the second viewpoint, although the practice and iconography of the churches down the ages prefer the former. Many have taken the view that the god of Abraham, Yahveh or Jehovah, is consistent in character with the Devil, that he is a divine force that wreaks suffering, death, and destuction and tempts or commands humanity into committing mayhem nd genocide. Even the myth of Abraham and Isaac can be interpreted in that manner, that Yahveh tempted Abraham to kill his own son. To these critics, the biblical god is a demiurge, an evil angel, a cruel, wrathful, warlike tyrant who drove the Hebrews into committing genocide against those who had been inhabitants of the so-called Holy Land. This god is often contrasted with the god of the New Testament who teaches mercy and forgiveness toward one’s enemies, although the use of the word ‘enemies’ gives this teaching a rather ambiguous flavor. But despite all this ambiguity, the Devil seems to be much easier to portray by the artist than is the god of either the New or Old Testament. Like the gods of old, he is easily personified with just a bit of added imagination. This raises the question of the form in which he is personified. Although everyone recognizes his many names, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub etc., his form remains an enigma. Is he an angel or an animal; the serpent who tempts Eve in the Garden, the flying pig who was banished from a church by Pope Gregory the Great, or a strange-looking human whose face with its hooked nose can be seen protruding from the facade of many cathedrals and is perhaps visible even in our garden? Perhaps it is the three-headed colossus encased in ice in Dante’s Inferno weeping tears of bitter frustration. He seems to have many diguises. What are taken as his tell-tale signs — the horns, the cloven hoof, the tail, the sulfurous breath — are just several of his many masks. He coulc be anybody or nobody. That is what beguiles us. Or is he all in the mind? There are signs that he is retiring from the stage and no longer running things to the extent that he used to, but merely being satisfied with such political positions as a recent US President for Vice (sometimes euphemistically called vice-president). Actually, he has ‘retired’ from the consciousness of most people today. Many Christian churchmen, especially in the mainstream Catholic and Protestant denominations, speak little of him, although they admit that the Devil stil lurks on the fundamentalist and superstitious margins. He still lives, however, in the heart of Christianity — even Pope John Paul II himself issued a catechism in 1994 making explicit reference to Satan’s continuing role and he exorcised a young woman in theVatican, the first pontiff in modern times to perform the rite. At the present time, the most common references to the Devil lie in the tendency to demonize. This process was carried on by the Romans against the early Christians and then adapted to terrifying effect by the Church itself. The Nazis built on centuries of demonization of the Jews to carry out the Holocaust that claimed 6 million lives. President Bush specifically demonized Iraq, Iran, and No. Korea and then questioned why, after we overthrew the diabolical government of Iraq, the Iranians and No. Koreans think they need atomic weapons. Iraq didn’t have them, wasn’t trying to get them even though Bush said they were, so there seems to be little question that since he didn’t attack No. Korea, it must be because they already had the weapon. No wonder Iran believes that only the atomic bomb will protect them from going the way of Iraq.

The Greeks personified characteristics which they believed to be important, and Até, which means judicial blindness sent by the gods, specifically misbelief (erroneous belief) was an important goddess, closely equivalent to the Christian devil, although te Greeks, like other polytheists, did not look at the devil the way we do, She acted very much like Mephistopheles  did in Faust when he said he was the spirit who intends evil but does good, for in Oedipus Rex Sophocles stated that Oedipus’ fall came in the following order: shame, lamentation, Até, death. This implies that Oedipus’ death resulted from the action of Até. What I am about to say applies to both Até and our devil. In order to increase the consciousness (a good thing) of the subject, she placed an obstacle (seen by the subject to be evil) in the path of the subject which would, if dealt with without fear or blame, increase the consciousness of the subject. This was the plague in Thebes. If the subject, usually through fear, refused to believe that this obstacle had anything to do with him or her, someone else would have to be blamed, relieving the subject of responsibility. This would invite disaster. Accepting responsibility and dealing with the matter would bring an increase of consciousness. Oedipus had repressed into his unconscios the memory of killing Laius, so he was afraid to admit any possibility of his own guilt. Likewise, if we refuse to believe that we are likely to be caught if we should commit a crime, our level of consciousness will only be increased if we are caught. The erroneous belief, which refuses to deal with the obstacle, is the work of Até. So you see, although she intends evil, she may ultimately bring about good if one does not let fear stand in one’s way.She is thus the mother of Mephistopheles.

Despite the growing ability of science to explain the occurrence of things that we have always called evil, there is still a large gap that we often call on the Devil to fill. There are still many natural and moral occurrences which are referred to as evil — from violent crime, child abuse, and rape to acts of terrorism and the development of nuclear weapons. In the modern mind it is located within each individual — what Jung called our ‘shadow’. Historically, our tendency was to place it outside — on the Devil who was exploiting a weakness in the human makeup. This imposes a greater responsibility on the human individual. The traditional view — that of emphasizing that God gave each individual free will — the capacity to choose right or wrong — did have the bonus of off-loading some of the burden onto an external force. That is why the Devil still attracts a following. He represents the easy option when we are confronted with evil. Ancient civilizations tended to see good and evil as two sides of the same coin. In Egypt, for instance, Seth and Horus were viewed as brothers and frequently depicted together, the generally benign sky god and the usually malevolent god of the desert. Osiris and Seth were also often shown as one. The key to a good life was to achieve harmony — or ma’at — between these conflicting forces. The deities of Egypt, Canaan, and the various peoples of Mesopotamia were monist — where only one overall divine principle encompassed within its pantheon both good and bad. A different model came with Zoroaster, who is thought to have lived in what is now Iran in the 7th c.BC. His good god — Ahura Mazda — was in direct conflict with Ahriman, the god of war. This was dualism in its purest form. Only the Parsees (Persians), mostly in western India, still hold to this religion.  Judaism took the monist approach. Yahweh was the all-powerful one for good and bad events, as David quoted earlier, even at one stage egging Moses on to rape and pillage. This monism began to be ended in the Book of Job, certainly as eloquent a statement of the dilemmas and doubts affecting human-kind as one could expect to find anywhere. There Satan appears as a kind of chief prosecutor with Yahweh as judge, at odds with his master over the human capacity to resist evil. It was about the time of the birth of Christ, the beginning of the Piscean Age, incidentally, that the Jews had to deal with many social, political, and religious upheavals and found themselves unable to understand why their God could have apparently abandond them, and they came to accept Satan as the reason. All that appeareed evil or negative in this world was ascribed to this angel of darkness with all those angels who had accompanied him in his fall from grace. This imagery surrounds the Devil in the New Testament and later in the mainstream of Christian thought. The problem then came to integrate two apparently contradictory ideas — God who was omnipotent and omniscient and allowed humanity to suffer, and a God who was supposed to be all-loving. Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote of this:

“Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

It is a circle the Christian churches have been trying to square for centuries. The cosmic battle between God and the Devil has continued to rage, often with official encouragement. During the witch craze of the medieval period, there was backing at the highest level for the view that the world offered a choice between the two polar opposites. Those unfortunates who were burned at the stake had made a pact with the Devil and chosen the wrong option. In pursuing Cathars, Albigensians, witches and magicians, the Inquisition reinforced the picture. Literature and the arts gave their support while popes made their own contribution by promoting saints whose lives were one long battle with Satan as the Church’s heroes and heroines. The Devil became an essential part of the Christian fabric, an eternal and convenient scapegoat. When the Reformatiion came along, both sides were quick to see the Devil’s hand manipulating their rivals. Luther saw Rome as a hellish city full of demons parading around in the scarlet robes of cardinals while he was often depicted as listening attentively as the Devil whispered in his ear. Soon the Devil became synonymous with the deities of any rival creed to Christianity. The Crusades were seen as defeating the infidel and winning back the Holy Land from the powers of darkness. The deities encountered as Christianity spread into northern Europe were seen as devils and witches. The Devil was essential in putting a face to evil. He was also useful in the Church’s attempts to outlaw practices it objected to on moral grounds. Following the 5th c. writings of Augustine, the Church enforced a strict code of sexual morality. Those who broke it — and particularly those women who were seen by clerics as following in the footsteps of Eve by seducing men into wrongdoing — ran the risk of being tainted by the Devil. His copulating demons – incubi and succubi – were always on the lookout for a willing and wanton harridan to lead astray. Documents like the Malleus Malificarum, the 15th c. witch-hunters’ bible, actually suggested that women were genetically more predisposed to do the Devil’s deeds than men were. More recently the churches have tried a variety of approaches from the folksy wisdom of evangelicals who tell you cheerfully that “everything God has made has a crack in it,” to more scholarly attempts to recast the whole theological treatment of evil without the looming presence of Satan. It was a Jewish writer, Martin Buber in Good and Evil who came up with one of the more enduring definitions of evil as “the yeast in the dough,” the ferment placed in the soul by God to allow it to grow and be tested, a definition closer to my own view. It is not a new idea but rather a recasting of an approach that has been around for centuries. As Milton believed, evil was there to stretch humanity to the limits. As Peter Stanford wrote in The Devil,

“Few educated people today believe in the Devil as a reality. Yet, those who deny the existence of evil altogether remain a minority. The rest inhabit various staging posts on the way from one position to the other — that there are evil actions but not evil individuals, or that people can be evil but that evil is within them. Such formulas can seem thin and inadequate when faced by daily news reports of terrible and terrifying acts of cruelty and barbarity around the world. Can the hatred that created Auschwitz be found only within humanity or is there a greater force of evil out there? The fundamental question of evil remains — and with it the Devil.”

Jung was faced with this problem especially living only a short distance from Germany during the Nazi period, and although he preferred the theory that evil is merely a privatio boni, an absence of good, he still had to live with the idea that this was inadequate — there had to be more to it than that. And if there is, could it be Satan? In the Gospel of John it states three times that Satan is “prince of this world.” St. Paul even calls him “god of this world.” In the Apocalypse it is written:

“And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world. And he was cast unto the earth: and his angels were thrown down with him.”

Earth and world become here the embodiment and symbol of the moral remoteness from God to which the evil spirits descended from heaven, through willful aversion from God. The darkness, inertiia, and heaviness that we call earth and matter become the tangible image of this otherwise so unfathomable tragedy that has been enacted in the realm of the spirit. This has given to mankind the right to do as it wills to reshape the earth into its own image, believing that we are free to work our own will onto something that is so completely removed from God. Myth is essential for understanding the truth, for it is the veil that prevents Truth from blinding us.
As you must know, the reason you are reading this, is that you accept the possibility that Myth is Metaphor. I believe metaphorically a myth of Satan which is both very ancient and also modern. The only written source I have ever seen, and which fascinated me because I did not know that it had ever been enclosed within a novel, lies in a novel written in 1895 and no doubt now out of print by Marie Corelli called The Sorrows of Satan. It also gave me more insight as well as further confirmed many of my beliefs as to the nature of Hermes, even though he is not a character in the book. Here is the myth as best I remember it, since I have never seen it in writing in toto. It includes elements of Sufi, Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christianity, although it is not canonical.

“Lucifer, an archangel, was created by God as the ‘bearer of light’. This light is the light of consciousness, which when fully achieved will bestow Free Will upon its bearer, but can only be achieved through fully experiencing God’s creation. This consciousness was not even granted to the angels. It had not even been granted to the Creator of the world, who was not the supreme God, but a demiurge. But God intended it to be granted to humanity, although it could not be achieved without the support of Lucifer. Indeed, the Creator so much wanted to be known that he created mankind in order that he might become known by his Creation, and this knowledge required consciousness. And furthermore, being known by his Creation, he hoped thereby the better to know Himself. One requires two to fully become One. That is the essence of relationship. So the Creator, knowing this, placed man and woman in the Garden and sent Lucifer down to instruct them. Lucifer knew that, as Jung pointed out some time later, that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious, Therefore he told them to eat of the fruit of knowledge of both good and evil, and they obeyed. He then forced them out of the Garden so they could experience these opposites and they and their descendants have been experiencing them ever since. All that is required for one to acquire the consciousness inherent in these experiences is to take responsibility for them instead of blaming the devil, unless one sees him as Lucifer bringing light and not the devil bringing darkness upon one. Lucifer does not punish. Such problems as pain, accidents, and other misfortunes are not puinishment but exist solely to redirect. Even war results from one’s disbelief that those forces exist within oneself. The Buddha was right when he said that all beings are born enlightened, but it takes a lifetime to discover this. But because the Creator himself was not yet fully conscious he consigned Lucifer to hell for disobedience from which Lucifer, now Satan, longs to return supported only by his memory of his Master’s voice saying, “Begone!” He was, however, able to increase the consciousness of the Creator by encouraging Judas to sacrifice himself by betraying Christ so that Christ could then make the ultimate sacrifice and show the Creator the suffering that mankind is capable of. Since then, as we know, the New Testament depicts a much more merciful God, whereas previously He had himself appeared Satanic. This was an indirect gift of Lucifer to mankind, even though he had hoped that it might bring about his own forgiveness and perhaps readmission to God’s presence. His failure to realize his hope for forgiveness caused Lucifer to provide, as Rumi wrote, “a secret medicine to those who hurt so bad they can’t hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.” That is why the hopers say that hope came from the Devil.”

This myth I believe is more appropriate today to the way Satan is viewed, though metaphor-ically. Even Voltaire, the great founder of the rationalist school spoke familiarly of Satan when, on his deathbed, a priest offered him extreme unction (France has always been Catholic at least ritually) telling him that he must renounce Satan. Voltaire replied, “This is no time to be making enemies.” Also much more can be added to it in the descriptions of how Satan constantly places obstacles in our path which if we do not blame others for them can be added to our stock of experiences for the increase of consciousness and the knowledge of the nature of God and His universe. All of these obstacles are, as Mephistopheles said in Goethe’s Faust, examples of deeds concerning which he stated, “I am the spirit that intends evil but does good.” Thus Lucifer brings light into the darkness if one but seeks it out. If it were given freely, we would never learn from it. After all, we learn much more from suffering than from blessings. As Hermes once spoke to me out loud as if from the radio, “How can I bring you sorrow if you accept it as blessing?” It is his satanic duty to bring me sorrow so that I may deal with it, thus learning more about the nature of God and His world. So my conclusion is that the Devil is a Daimon. And the only daimon I know personally is Hermes, so I probably should relate to you something of the myth of Hermes which might explain this. This will also give you an example of myth explaining the nature of life. Remember, if you wish to learn the Origin of the Specious, you must become Myth Informed!

Hermes was to the Greeks the patron god of merchants, bankers, and thieves — which as you know have at least one thing in common (probably much more as well) — transvaluation of value.The value of what they deal with generally increases by their taking it on a journey. It must go from one place to another to then be dealt with according to its nature. This also applies to human beings. Their value develops according as their values change with their experiences in their life’s journey. This is different from the role of Hephaestus (Vulcan), who dealt with the increase in value through changes in form (which we now call manufacturing, Latin for making by hand). So the daimon deals in providing experiences on life’s journey. What does that have to do with the Devil? This goes back to the myth of the infancy of Hermes. Almost immediately after his birth as the little brother of Apollo, he started his life as a Trickster. He got out of his crib and stole his brother’s cattle, making them walk backwards so that their footprints would lead in the opposite direction back to where they came from. As soon as Apollo found his cattle, he took Hermes to Zeus hoping that Zeus would punish him. Instead, Zeus took a liking to the child, admiring his cleverness, and since he was the child’s father, he decided to make Hermes what amounted to the patron of consciousness-transformation. However, he knew that as Trickster, Hermes would be susceptible to lying, which was forbidden to all the gods. Any god who lied was to be punished by being put to sleep for 900 years, so Zeus told Hermes that he was now a member of the “Olympic Club” and therefore must not lie. Hermes’ retort was the key to all this, O Clever One: Quote–“Of course I shall not lie, Father, but that does not mean I have to tell the whole truth.” That, I have found personally, is the basis for the way the daimon operates – it speaks in metaphors which can be interpreted in various ways but there is always an element of truth which one sometimes has to dig for. Each instruction also has a literal meaning which, after being obeyed or disobeyed, one will encounter pursuant difficulties which should be transformative.  And as Socrates said, his daimon tells him what not to do. It does not tell him what to do, since if he did it and things went wrong, the daimon could be blamed. But it tells him what action to avoid. That leaves one with free will. We can always make choices about what to do, and so it will be our decision which brought about the results, and so growth can occur if we don’t blame someone else for any negative results. And of course, the daimon puts obstacles on our path, and even more commonly, puts them in our way when we get off our path. This means that until we find our path, we run into a great many obstacles. That is called ‘growth.’ So you can see that the daimon can often be called the Devil, but actually I believe that the spirit is One, but we simply have many perspectives on it. Of course this is complicated by the question of evil. I think we can dismiss the accusation of blame against the devil in the case of storms and earthquakes, etc., although the daimon can make use of them in the creation of obstacles, although it might be interesting to speculate if perhaps the daimon requests either the devil or God to create some in order to give the daimon a few obstacles to use, as in The Book of Job. But moral evils, in my view, cannot be blamed on the devil, but on the human ego. We think we can sneak out of blame by directing it against spirit, when it is we who are to blame. We are in this case thoughtlessly or purposefully placing obstacles, sometimes fatal, in the way of others’ lives. We are in such a case unconsciously playing the role of daimon ourselves, although adopting the excuse of moral rectitude and using it against others. We all do this, frequently without realizing it. As George Bernard Shaw said:

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent toward them; that is the essence of inhumanity.”

And that is frequently done unconsciously. All living creatures require recognition, Some would say that even objects of nature do, such as mountains and forests. You do not have to be a tree-hugger to feel that tug of nature. But we must admit that it is difficult to blame the Devil whenever a society commits evils. As Shaw also wrote:

“The degree of tlolerance obtainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion. Under the strain of invasion the French government in 1792 stuck off 4000 heads, mostly on grounds that would not in times of settled peace have provoked any Government to chloroform a dog.”

Although we sometimes can see the operation of the Devil in society as a whole, he seems to operate more clearly within the individual. As Jung said:

“The individual alone makes history. That individual unit upon whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.”

Often the Christ is referred to as both the Son of God and the Son of Man, thus underscoring the idea that the god within can only be brought to birth through human consciousness and made manifest through the lives of individual human beings. This is true of Spirit in general.  Spirit, in my view, is not concerned with good and evil, which are human conceptions, rather it is concerned with the growth of consciousness. Frequently this requires what we are pleased to call evil, but that is not the concern of spirit. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote:

“This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that he should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.”

Was Aquinas here quoting Mephistopheles or was Goethe quoting Aquinas when he put those words in Mefisto’s mouth about desiring evil but doing good? This could apply to both natural evils and moral sin. This is also the daimon speaking. Placing obstacles in our way with which we must acquire consciousness by overcoming or to nudge us back onto our Path. In all cases we still have choice, which, incidentally, the angels do not. We are only following Socrates’ injunction that the daimon tells us what not to do. This idea is supported by our definition of what is good. I believe that one must learn to deal with evil if one is to expand one’s consciousness, just as it is wrong to hide ‘bad things’ away from children, for they never gain the ability to recognize evil when they come across it. Strangely enough, pleasure can play a similar role. We seek pleasure and find it good, although one often discovers that there is little fulfillment in it. Those who continually seek wealth, for instance, often find it, but, as Joseph Campbell said, midlife frequently finds us at the top of the ladder, at which point we discover that it is against the wrong wall. And we may find that we have created much evil in the process, not only to others but to ouselves. The pursuit of pleasure rarely brings fulfillment, although the achievement of fulfillment may very well bring pleasure. Just what is the function of the Devil in our time?  In modern society, it seems that the function of the Devil is to create fear. We must fear the Devil and his works, which include the pursuit of pleasure. This pursuit, as we are assured, will bring sickness, pain, and death. Even our parents can personify the Devil when they teach us as children to refrain from the pursuit of pleasure. Such avoidance, as I pointed out earlier, can make us more susceptible to the Devil’s wiles through our failure to recognize evil when we are faced with it. As you may know by now, the Devil works most effectively when he conviinces us that he does not exist. If the Devil’s chief function is to spread fear, in order to avoid his wiles we must certainly avoid all newspapers and other media, lock up all news reporters and most politicians. And that is just the beginning. In earlier times the Devil worked mostly through the Church, for the fear inspired by the Inquisitiion and the crusades against its own people such as the Albigensian Crusades directed against the Cathars of southern France. All authority is by its very nature enforced through fear, so if you accept the idea that the Devil functions through inspiring fear, you would have to be an anarchist to oppose him. After all, fear is our reaction. We created it. Just because we did not create the world, does not mean that each of us does not create our own world. And some of us live in a world of fear. Because of our fear, we go to the physician or support the dictator. Most of us fear disease, and, as you know, our religious leaders have told us that disease is a gift o f the Devil. They are right. Disease is provided to sufferers so they will have something to blame for their suffering. The devil wants us to have something to blame so that we will not assume responsibility for our own problems which would assist us in developing higher consciousness. So you see that these religious leaders are right — disease is a gift of the Devil so the religious leaders themselves have someone to blame. All of these ideas are thoroughly confusing and so my only conclusion can be the following: good and evil are abstract conceptions which have no reality of their own. It is entirely a matter of point of view. What is good to the anarchist is evil to the dictator. A dictator prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy any day. Likewise, what is good to the physician is evil to the patient, for as you know, a physician diagnoses a disease by both the patiient’s pulse and his purse. How else is the physician to make a living? How else, as a matter of fact, is the dictator to remain in power if he and his supporters do not believe that power is good — even necessary for the safety of the nation? In both cases, they are operating through instilling fear. Many say that our constitutional rights are constantly under attack by the Devil. However, fear of death is actually: the basis of all fear. That means that without the fear of death, there would be no fear. Does that mean that without the fear of death there would be no life? After all, death and birth may be opposites, but both are aspects of life, which is itself immortal. Is the physician and the dictator, both of whom operate by means of instilling fear, on the side of life? Which one is doing God’s work and which one the Devil’s? Tell me and I may change my religion!

To put this in spiritual terms, the devil is the greatest ally of God. His conversion would be a cosmic catastrophe. The fusiion into an undifferentiated One would place us, without further ado, into a world of total boredom. And what worse cosmic catastrophe could there be than boredom? Hermes makes a good daimon since he is not only Guide of Souls on their journey, but patron of travelers, who of course are also on a journey, and of merchants, bankers, and thieves, who have in common not only that they deal with matter that increases in value through making a journey, but they also have a similar moral sense, as I believe you would agree. So he deals with anything that journeys. This is as opposed to Hephaestus (Vulcan) who increases the value of matter by bringing about changes in form. In our life’s journey we need thieves in order to have someone to get caught other than ourselves. It is little wonder that our culture embraces the Christian religion so fundamentally, espousing as it does a theology that sanctifies having someone else, Christ, doing the crucial task for us — dying for our sins. This permits the alchemical work to abort before its completion, thus preventing the deepest transformation. Hermes would have nothing to do with such a situation, nor would any daimon. Therefore when one requests a spiritual being for help, one is asking that it become an advocate against itself. For this reason alone the devil is a more effective teacher than God, since the function of the Spirit is to increase one’s consciousness which requires learning how to deal with the opposites but has no necessaary function in either survival or adaptation to the environment. So there is no use in asking for help there.

The function of the ego as perceived by most people is to control that aspect of the environment which one perceives, or, according to others, is to control how we perceive our environment. Our senses do not enable us to perceive the environment so much as to limit our perceptions. The view that the function of the ego is to control one’s environment is, in my view, the cause of fear, since few if any of us are capable of such control. This results often in anger and is therefore the cause of most violence, even of wars. It is important, in my view, that we learn to view the function of the ego simply as the means of controlling how we perceive our environment. Thus by relaxing the requirements of logic somewhat, one can provide reality to the imagination. One might call this poetical thinking; thus one might discover a bit of reality below the surface of things. Not only do our senses limit what we perceive but also how we perceive it. This too can be the cause of much fear and anger, especially when we do not realize that our perceptions or ourselves might be limited. This causes serious problems as in our view that the Iranians hate us when actually they believe that we are foolish and unable to view reality as they do.

I think I shall identify with the devil and oppose St. Augustine. I do not agree with him that evil is an important driving force in human behavior. Rather, I subscribe to the Hindu belief that fear and desire are the primary motivating factors. As Goethe’s Mephistopheles identified himself, “I am the spirit that intends evil but does good.” His evil actions brought about much self-knowledge to Faust, and the myth is still used today as a transformative lesson. Much good can derive from evil intent. Witness our foreign policy! Often lying, generally considered evil, is necessary for self-preservation. This is learned very early. A 3 year old child will often respond with clear logic to a parental warning, “I’ll get you for that!” He learns very early that logic is the weapon that fear uses, often successfully, to defy fate. He may not learn obedience, the intent of the parent, but I discovered in 25 years of teaching that youngsters learned much in the classroom, but rarely what I intended to teach. And by the time children reach high school age, their use of logic has become highly refined. They have gotten “it” but it” is not exactly what the teacher or parent had intended. But much greater evils than lying can result from the best intentions. People can die in the act of rescue. Our government intended to rescue the Iraqi people from an evil dictator and unintentionally brought about a much greater evil. No more need be said on that issue. This has been called the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences. Evil intent can result in good, and good intent can result in evil. Either result can be blamed on the Devil. The evil result, in most cases, is derived from a single cause: the belief that one can know what is right or good for someone else. Our government believes that a government like ours is right for all nations, and that we have a right to impose it on them for their own good. Many individuals believe they know, for instance, that a friend should exercize more, or eat less. Or that a certain medicine will surely answer his/her problems. To say that it worked for me and therefore should for you is to make some terrific assumptions about identity. But good and evil are really side issues. Fear brings about conditions which spawn evil and is used by advertisers and other propagandists. It is necessary to control people’s desires. On the other hand, desire can reduce and even eliminate fears, especially noticeable in the young. These are the two aspects of Maya and drive the world of manifestation. I don’t believe it is possible to find any action or condition, good or evil, which does not involve these opposites in one way or another. In order to show most clearly my own belief about the place of evil in the world, and to show you that the Devil can appear in many forms, male or female, here is a story of what might be called the archetypal fairy tale written by P.L. Travers called The Thirteenth Wise Woman. Every child and every adult should be told it. It provides an excellent example of the necessary place evil holds which when combined with consciousness is capable of developing into good. Remember Mephistopheles’ statement, “I am the spirit who intends evil but does good.”

“To celebrate the birth of his daughter, the Sultan prepared a christening feast to which he invited his kinsmen, friends, and since he had only 12 gold plates, 12 of the 13 Wise Women who lived in the kingdom. The day they arrived, each of the 12 invited fairies presented her gifts. Dressed in robes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue or indigo, they endowed her with beauty, health, a kind heart, sweet temper, joy, the love of animals, freedom from fear, and contentment. Before the 12th invited fairy had time to present her gift, there was a tumult in the outer hall. As though struck by an unseen fist, the Sultan staggered backwards. A clap of thunder rocked the hall — or was it perhaps the sound of cannon? — and a thick grey mist swept through the door. The lute strings broke with a twanging cry, the wineglasses shattered on their trays. The guests shrieked, the servants shouted. the Princess wailed.
‘We are besieged!’ the Sultan bellowed. ‘Visier, call the soldiers in! Station the guards at every point! This is a ruse of our enemies! They are now at our very gates!’
‘One enemy alone, Prince, and that no mortal foe!’ A vibrant voice rang through the hall, the wreathing mist cleared away and there, standing in the air, her violet robes flowing about her, was the 13th of the Wise Women. Her naked silverhead flashed as she turned from one point to another wrathfully eyeing the scene. The Sultan’s face was as pale as marble.
‘Bring me my sword!’ he said nervously, as the Wise Woman strode through the air toward him. She laughed mockingly.
‘No sword can save you, foolish mortal! Only a word can do that. Speak it — if you can. Tell me, you little earthly lord, why all my earthly sisters are gathered here, all invited to your daughter’s christening — and I alone left out?’ Step by step she crossed the hall, thrusting the Sultan backwards. ‘Well?’ she demanded ominously.
The Sultan collapsed upon the throne, rocking himself backwards and forwards, racking his brain for an answer. ‘Most noble fairy, I beg forgiveness. It was not intentional, I assure you — simply a matter of dishes. 13 Wise Women in the land and only 12 gold plates! I should have sent an apology. But with all the christening arrangements, I was busy and I just forgot.’
‘Forgot!’ The Wise Woman spat the word at him. ‘And did you also fail to remember that one thing leads to another? Every stick has two ends, Prince. You forgot! And because of that, I am called to remember. Because of that, I — as long as your story lives — must play the part of the Wicked Fairy. Children will turn aside at my name and men call curses on my head. You cannot alter the law, Prince. In my world there is no forgetting. And he who forgets in your world must take the consequences.’
‘Yes,’ said the Sultan, miserably. ‘You must punish me as you think best. I will do whatever you wish.’
‘You will do nothing, mortal man. You will simply accept my gift.’
The Sultan stared in astonishment. Was there to be no retribution? ‘Well, that’s very handsome of you,’ he blustered. ‘Letting bygones be bygones.’
The Wise Woman smiled a curious smile. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘what is done is done. It is no use crying over spilt milk.’ As she spoke she moved toward the child., taking her place at the foot of the cradle. The Sultan preened and stroked his beard. He could hardly contain his impatience. At last, perhaps he would get what he hoped for. ‘Now,’ said the Wise Woman, as she laid her hand upon the child and fixed the Sultan with her eye, ‘Here is the gift I give you daughter:
She’ll have her beauty, peace, and joy for fifteen years without alloy.
But that’s the end. A spindle dart will pierce her finger, and your heart.
Oh, red the blood and white the bed, and there’s your darling daughter — DEAD!’
And in a laugh that shook the pillars of the chamber and chilled the marrow of all who heard it, she swept her violet robes about her, raised her silver hand in salute and disappeared through the ceiling.”

The appearance of this lady at the christening is the great moment of this tale, the hook from which everything hangs. Properly to understand why this is so we must turn to Wise Women in general and their role in the world of men. To begin with they are not mortal women. They are sisters, rather, of the Sirens, kin to the Fates and the Gt. Mother. As such, as creatures of another dimension, myth and legend have been at pains to embody them in other than human shape — the winged female figures of Homer, the bird-headed women of Irish tales, powerful Babayaga, the witch of Russia, and the wisplike Jinn of the Middle East who were not allowed grosser forms than those of fire and smoke. For it should be remembered that no Wise Woman or fairy is in herself either good or bad; rather she takes on one aspect or other according to the laws of the story and the necessity of events. The powers of these ladies are equivocal. They change withchanging circumstances; they are as swift to take umbrage as they are to bestow a boon; they curse and bless with equal gusto. Each Wise Woman is, in fact, an aspect of the Hindu goddess Kali, who carries in her multiple hands the powers of good and evil. It is clear, therefore, that the 13th Wise Woman becomes the Wicked Fairy solely for the purposes of one particular story. It was by chance that she received no invitation; it might just as well have been one of her sisters. So, thrust by circumstances into her role, she acts according to law. Up she rises, ostensibly to avenge an insult but in reality to thrust the story forward and keepthe drama moving. She becomes the necessary antagonist, placed there to show that whatever is “other,” opposite and fearful, is as indispensable an instrument of creation as any force for good. The pulling of the Devas and Asuras in opposite directions churns the ocean of life in the Hindu myth, and the interaction of the good and the bad Fairies produces the fairy tale, and, metaphorically speaking. our life also. The 13th Wise Woman stands as a guardian of the threshold, the paradoxical adversary without whose presence no threshold may be passed. This is the role played in so many stories by the Wicked Stepmother. The true mother, by her vary nature, is bound to preserve, protect, and comfort; this is why she so often is disposed of before the story begins. It is the stepmother, her cold heart unwittingly cooperating with the hero’s need, who thrusts the child from the warm hearth, out from the sheltering walls of home to find his own true way. That is the opening to the hero journey in myth, and symbolically the journey of all our lives. Here we return to where we started, our friend the Devil. Powers such as these, at once demonic and divine, are not to be taken lightly. They give a name to evil, free it, and bring it into the light. For evil will out, they sharply warn us, no matter how deeply buried. Down in its shadowy dungeon it plots and plans, waiting, like an unloved child, the day of its revenge. What it needs, like an unloved child, is to be recognized, not disclaimed; given its place and proper birthright and allowed to contact and cooperate with its sister beneficent forces. Only the integration of good and evil and the stern acceptance of opposites will change the situation and bring about the condition that is known in story as Happily Ever After. This bringing of evil into the light leads to the last point i wish to make. Eastern philosophy states that the sole evil is ignorance, which Krishnamurti points out is the lack of consciousness of evil. This can certainly be seen in the attitude of those who call someone a freedom fighter or a terrorist solely depending upon whom that someone is fighting against. That is only one example. We also know that the evil of the concentration camps could possibly have been avoided if they had not been kept secret. In fact, that is why they were kept secret. As Krishnamurti said, evil is the unawareness of evil. Denial also makes evil more likely, but that is because denial is intended to prevent awareness.  This is the mortal condition, and hence is universal. Unless someone has some idea as to what we can do about it, we shall simply have to keep in mind that reality is basically a crutch, and that we, afer all, are the very people our parents warned us about. To paraphrase one of our great poets, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you’ve misunderstood the situation.

Why does this look like a real peacock when the picture in The Union from which it was copied was faded and lacked almost all color? How could the scanner + the computer restore reality? How can I use the word “restore” when there was much less reality to the original picture than after the “restoration”? How can I use the word “reality” when I did not even see the peacock shown on the picture? Where does the reality lie? Is or was there any reality to begin with?   Faded picture almost without color. If this is a restoration, actually what has been restored? Etc. etc.

In her excellent book Jung and Tarot, Sallie Nichols points out a question raised in Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle which raises the questions alluded to in our title.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has destroyed many fixed boundaries with which man formerly marked out various aspects of reality, and the uncertainty is reflected in the language of science in an astonishing way. Since it is now accepted that subatomic particles cannot be accurately defined in time and space, physicists today speak of them as having a “tendency to exist.” Following this through to its logical conclusion has brought with it the horrifying realization that we, too, have only a “tendency to exist.” The minute particles which constitute our bodies are in constant interaction with those which comprise the people and objects of our environment. Just as we interact constantly with our environment through breathing, perspiration,  and elimination, so also are our  seemingly solid bodies in constant interaction with everything around us. Our existence as individual entities has become, at best, merely a statistical probablity.

Is the psyche then, the only thing that is real? But it is not a “thing.” Even the psyche can be known only through its effects, and these may vary from individual to individual. Those events  and objects not ascertainable by the five senses, we must speak of in an “as if” manner if we do not wish to be considered at best naive. This leads to my belief that most, if not all, of our problems stem from the fact that each of us views reality differently. Does it follow then, that everyone actually does live in a different world? Perhaps Heisenberg’s Principle does indicate that such might be so. Such a scientific principle might be applied in politics if one of our leaders asked Osama bin Laden, “What is it that you have against us? Why do you hate us?” We might learn something about who we are as a nation as seen from a quite different viewpoint – - just how our seemingly solid bodies constantly interact with everything around us.  How, as in religion, some see the devil simply as God as perceived by the wicked.

Likewise in medicine. We test drugs as if everyone will react the same to a given drug. Supposedly the most scientific method of testing on humans is the double-blind method. This method, however, we discredited a long time ago, since it is based on the theory (once a fact) that if you didn’t know you were taking a placebo you won’t have any reaction to it. We now know that the body may produce a reaction based on belief alone, thus negating the value of the double-blind experiment. A drug company was just exposed to suit for several million dollars in February, helping to bring the stock market down further, because it had failed to discover that the drug it produced was worthless since the reactions of those taking it was exactly the same as the placebo. They went ahead and marketed it since they had demonstrated that it was harmless, but they overlooked the fact that the placebo was just as effective and a lot cheaper.  Pharmaceutical companies frequently suppress results unfavorable to their potential sales and publish only the favorable results.

Perhaps we need a hierarchy of realities. Those objects on whose existence the vast majority can agree based on all or most of our five senses such as mountains, weather phenomena and the like can be called real. Concepts, however,such as war and peace which have generally been considered opposites by all but now only by some, would be lower on the hierarchy like heat and cold. Those objects or events which can only be observed by only a few senses or only a few people may frequently be questioned but could be viewed “as if” and more in the realm of the psyche.  Mme. Blavatsky said that matter is spirit at its lowest vibration. But we know so little. pointed out that we know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases. When I was “standing” without a body, the dogs having carried it off, (see Conversations with the Daimon in this Blog)  I said to Hermes, “I don’t know where I am.” His reply was not an answer but a koan. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. Who are you? Think about that.” I have since not been able to stop thinking about that, and this blog is a partial result. Perhaps, following the Uncertainty Principle, it was not necessary for “me” to be there at all, since that whole process may have occurred during a moment of  non-existence. All perceived events then would be occurring in broken sequences. Or alternatively perhaps everything is here all the time. It may onlybe that our aperture of awareness is so narrow that we experience events sequentially. Is there any way to know? Scientists were, we thought, going to answer these questions, but it seems that they have deprived us of the few answers we had. I assume that is why people like Pauli looked outside the field of science to find the answers he sought. He joined with Jung to find them in the psyche. But how one finds the answers in the psyche, even though it is primarily responsible for all the historical changes wrought by humanity on the face of this planet, must remain an insoluble puzzle, since we are looking at it from within. This requires a completely different approach which has not yet been taken by science , for it  requires a step which many have feared to take. We have only nibbled at the edges. Some, such as Rumi, believed they had found it.

There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so much they can’t hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. (pause) He said also: Out beyond our ideas of right and wrong there is a field. I shall meet you there.

But there are so many who have claimed to find the answers, and so many different opposing answers that one can be disillusioned if one continues to seek them outside oneself. As Goethe said, with knowledge doubt increases. That is true in the field of spirit also. And yet people demand certainty, not only from scientists but from those in all walks of life. In affairs of the spirit, this creates problems just as it does in science. The Uncertainty Principle seems to be, therefore,  truly revolutionary. It sounds like the statement made by the Buddha:

All beings are born enlightened, but it takes a lifetime to discover this.

So where, then,  is the certainty? How can we know what is real? Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that we have always sought reality in the physical world, and not in the realm of psychology. Jung believed that we have an irresistible tendency to account for reality solely on physical grounds which springs from the horizontal development of consciousness in the last four centuries, springing as a reaction to the exclusively vertical perspective of the Gothic Age.. We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about physcs than about metaphysics, and so we overestimate physical causation and believe that it alone provides a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. Ultimately we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equlibrium. We can not deny that there is a close connection, however, between psychic happenings and the physiological structure of the brain and the body in general. Jung explains:

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this directiion, for they show that the non-psychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.

Apparently the psyche has roots in the material realm, and in the background of the psyche are to be found non-psychic factors of consequence which through matter can communicate to us knowledge of who we are. The archetype is something more than psychological, that is, as Jung referred to it as ‘psychoid’ brings us to Wolfgang Pauli. He was very supportive of  Jung’s efforts to understand synchronicity and the complications it introduces into our world-view. In fact, Jung credited Pauli for the suggestion to begin publishing on synchronicity in the first place. Pauli was in turn much affected by Jung;s inquiry into this field. The role of matter in symbols induced Jung to ask with Pauli’s help, “What is the archetype?” The role of symbols in matter similarly induced Pauli to ask, with Jung’s help, “What is matter?”

The problem for the materialist lies in the fact that these processes have the qualities of consciousness. If there were no consciousness, we could not speak of the psyche at all — indeed, we would have nothing to say about anything. Consciousness is, therefore, the sine qua non  of psychic life. Psychologies without the psyche, such as behavorism, ignore the existence of unconscious psychic life — their textbooks read like texts on physiology. Jung said that no one today would venture to found a scientific psychology upon the postulate of an independent psyche that is not determined by the body. The idea of spirit in and for itself which is the only adequate postulate for the belief in autonomous, individual souls, is extremely unpopular in our culture. Maybe that is because many people are unaware that we are living in a world of metaphors. For example, ‘soul’  derives from the Germanic ‘Seele’. The adjective ‘seelig’ translates literally as ‘soul-like.’  ‘Seelig’ is where our word ‘silly’ comes from. A silly person is ‘soul-like’. He is a fool. He lives in a different world. He sees the world differently. It is the world which is a metaphor to him. Reality lies in the spirit — the world is but a metaphor.

Certainly we would call such a person a fool. He is ‘seelig.’ It seems that in all or most languages the word for spirit also means ‘breath of air’ or ‘wind.’ Which is the metaphor?  Spirit or wind? If you believe that the world is a metaphor for the spiritual, or that the spiritual is a metaphor for the world determines whether you are a fool or not. Therefore reality is a metaphor, no matter which way you look at it.  if one sees the world in only one perspective,  that is, sees the world as simply a  metaphor, then what happens to one’s body does not matter. Hence the fool, who believes the material world is a metaphor, does not fear death. Does this change our attitude toward the fool? Perhaps thatt depends solely on our definition of reality.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that reality is created through metaphor. I shall attempt to demonstrate that myth, as an example of metaphor, in itself creates reality. The myth of the savior, examined last time, is obvious but by taking a lesser example, we can capture my meaning in more detail. Take the myth of Adonis. It actually describes a society in transition from matriarchy to patriarchy – an actual situation in the Middle East three or four thousand years ago. The divinities here have their Greek names, even though the tale is set in the Middle East. It was not written down until classical times.

One day the queen foolishly boasted that her daughter Smyrna was more beautiful even than Aphrodite The goddess avenged this insult by making Smyrna fall in love with her father and climb into his bed after her nurse had made him too drunk to realize what he was doing. Later, he discovered that he was both the father and grandfather of Smyrna’s unborn child and, wild with wrath, seized a sword and chased her from the palace. He overtook her on the brow of a hill, but Aphrodite hurriedly changed Smyrna into a myrrh tree, which the descending sword split in two, out of which tumbled the infant  Adonis. Aphrodite, repenting of the mischief she had made, concealed Adonis in a chest which she entrusted to Persephone asking her to stow it away in a dark place. Persephone had the curiosity to open the chest and found Adonis inside. He was so lovely that she lifted him out and brought him up in her own palace. The news eventually reached Aphrodite, who at once visited Tartarus to claim Adonis; and when Persephone would not assent, having by now made him her lover, she appealed to Zeus, who, well aware that Aphrodite also wanted to lie with Adonis, refused to judge so unsavory a dispute, and transferred it to a lower court, presided over by the Muse Calliope. Calliope’s verdict was that Persephone and Aphrodite had equal claims on Adonis (reminiscent of Solomon’s famous judgment) – Aphrodite for arranging his birth, Persephone for rescuing him from the chest – but , unlike Solomon, she  decreed that he be allowed a brief annual holiday from the amorous demands of both these insatiable goddesses. She therefore divided t he year into three equal parts, of which he was to spend one with Persephone, one with Aphrodite, and the third by himself (he no doubt needed a rest by then. Note the divisions of the year which we shall look at later) Aphrodite did not, however, play fair: by wearing her magic girdle all the time, she persuaded Adonis to give her his own share of the year, grudge the share due to Persephone, and disobey the court order. She ignored the fact that Persephone is the goddess of the dead. Persephone, justly aggrieved, told Ares that Aphrodite now preferred Adonis to himself (remember, Aphrodite and Ares were lovers – love and war, you know) “A mere mortal,”  she cried, “and effeminate at that!” Ares grew jealous and, disguised as a wild boar, rushed at Adonis who was out hunting on Mt. Lebanon, and gored him to death before Aphrodite’s eyes. Anemones sprang from his blood, and his soul descended to Tartarus. Aphrodite went tearfully to Zeus and pleaded that Adonis should not have to spend more than the gloomier half of the year with Persephone, but might be her companion for the summer months. This Zeus magnanimously granted.

The opening part of this myth describes a period in history when the sacred king in a matrilineal society decided to prolong his reign beyond the customary length. He did so by celebrating a marriage with the young priestess, nominally his daughter, who was to be queen for the next term, intead of letting another princeling marry his daughter and take away his kingdom. Earlier, the sacred king who had only a religious role, important thought it was, would be sacrificed after a certain term and be replaced. Adonis (Phoenician  adon, Hebrew adonai, ‘lord’) is a Greek version of the Syrian demigod Tammuz, the spirit of annual vegetation. In Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, the goddess’s sacred year was at one time dividedaccording to Calliope’s judgment into three parts, ruled by the Lion, Goat, and Serpent. The Goat, emblem of the second part, was Aphrodite’s; the Serpent, emblem of the last part, was Perseph-one’s, the Lion, emblem of the first part, was sacred to the Birth-goddess, here named Smyrna, who had no claim on Adonis. In Greece, this calendar gave place to a two-season year, bisected either by the equinoxes in the eastern style, as at Sparta and Delphi, or by the solstices in the northern style, as at Athens and Thebes, which explains the respective verdicts of Calliope, a mountain goddess, and Zeus.Both Tammuz and Adonis were killed by a boar as were many similar mythical characters including even the Irish hero Diarmuid. The boar seems once to have been a sow with crescent-shaped tusks, the goddess herself as Persephone; but when the year was bisected, the bright half ruled by the sacred king, and the dark half ruled by his tanist, or rival, this rival came in wild-boar disguise – like Finn mac Cool when he killed Diarmuid. Tammuz’s and Adonis’ blood is allegorical of the anemones that redden the slopes of Mt. Lebanon after the winter rains. A mourning festival called the Adonia was held at Byblos every spring. Adonis’ birth from a myrrh tree – myrrh being a well-known aphrodisiac – shows the orgiastic nature of the rites (this may also apply to Twelfth Night, when the three kings brought the Christ child three gifts; gold, frankincense and myrrh) The drops of gum that the myrrh tree shed were supposed to be tears shed for him. Another mythic demonstration of this transition lies in the myth of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. He was a youth with woman’s breasts and long hair. Like the androgyne, or bearded woman, as we see in a few woman pharoahs, the hermaphrodite as a religious concept originated in the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. Hermaphroditus was the sacred king deputizing for the queen and wearing artificial breasts. A queen, called Androgyne, was the  mother of a pre-Hellenic clan which had avoided being patriarchalized. In order to keep her magistral powers or to ennoble children born to her from a slave-father, she assumed a false beard, as was the custom at Argos. Bearded goddesses like the Cyprian Aphrodite, and effeminate gods like Dionysus correspond with these transitional social stages. You see this also in ancient Egypt.  So you can see that one can more easily look into the realities of the past by seeing into the metaphors contained in myth. For this reason I like to call history the myth of the present. At the present time, we look at a past time only through our own myth. That myth tells us what is real today, not what was real in the past. For instance, I used to tell my history students that they should be careful when they read the textbook, for in there it says that Columbus discovered America, but isn’t it more likely that the Indians discovered Columbus on the beach? The text-book version of the discovery of America is the myth of the present, even now becoming the myth of the recent past, for as you know there have been modifications to this so-called fact. George Orwell was aware of this also, for he wrote that whoever controls the past controls the future. Carl Rove knows this very well, for in all his  public statements he attempts to change our myth of what has happened in the recent past to fit in with his own views of guilt and innocence. he knows very well that innocence is like sincerity. If you can fake it, you’ve got it made.

Perhaps experience can be said to be real. But then, perhaps it is merely projection. Everyone experiences a particular event differently, and those differences can very likely be accounted for by  projection.  But isn’t the event real? How do we know, when everyone experiences it differently?   These differences can be eliminated through the scientific method, but now that we have gotten to the point where we can say that something absolutely is just as it is perceived through scientific examination, suddenly we find that we can not even be certain that it exists! Perhaps we can find reality in the psyche. This each can experience for himself, not having to base our experience on what others have found. Many consider this type of research too obscure and uncanny, and even the methods employed seem a shocking misuse of mankind’s intellectual attainments. As Jung points out:

What can we expect an astronomer to say when he is told that at least a thousand horoscopes are drawn for every one 300 years ago? What will the educator and advocate of the Enlightenment say to the fact that the world has not been freed of one single superstition since Greek antiquity? Freud himself, the founder of psychoanalysis, has thrown a glaring light upon the dirt, darkness and evil of the psychic hinterland, and has presented these things as so much refuse and slag; he has thus taken the utmost pains to discourage people from seeking anything behind them. He did not succeed, and his warning has even brought about the very thing he wished to prevent: it has awakened in many people an admiration for all this filth. We are tempted to call this sheer perversity; and we can hardly explain it save on the ground that it is not a love of dirt, but the fascination of the psyche, which draws these people.  There can be no doubt that from the beginning of the 19th century — from the memorable  years of the French Revolution onward — man has given a more and more prominent place to the psyche, his increasing attentiveness to it being the measure of its growing attractiveness to him. The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance to the Western world – -rather like the hewing down of Wotan’s oak by the Christian missionaries. For then, as at the Revolution, no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down. It is certainly more than an amusing coin-cidence that just at that time a Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron, was living in India, and in the early 1800’s brought back with him a translation of 50  Upanishads, which gave the Western world its first deep insight into the baffling mind of the East. To the historian this is mere chance without any factors of cause and effect. But in view of my medical experience I cannot take it as accident. It seems to me rather to satisfy a psychological law whose validity in personal life, at least, is complete. For every  piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value – so runs the law – there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world, for our psychic processes have a quantitative aspect also. No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. This is a rule which finds its pragmatic sanction in the daily practice of the psychotherapist; it is repeatedly verified and never fails. Now the doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. A people, in the doctor’s eyes, presents only a somewhat more complex picture of psychic life than the individual. Moreover, taking it the other way round, has not a poet spoken of the “nations” of his soul? And quite correctly, as it seems to me, for in one of its aspects the psyche is not individual, but is derived from the nation, from collectivity, or from humanity even. In some way or other, we are part of an all-embracing psychic life, of a single “greatest” man, to quote Swedenborg.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction–a psychic law which applies in the physical world also.

So psyche influences consciousness and the unconscious, and it does this through its influence onmatter. Matter and psyche acting together create experience. Without experience we have no indication that either matter or psyche is real.  As Jung further points out. the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus was not based on any external observations of atomic fission, but on a mythological conception of smallest particles, the soul-atoms, which are known even to the still paleolithic inhabitants of central Australia. We are indeed incapable of saying how the world is constituted in itself, since we are obliged to convert physical events into psychic processes whenever we want to say anything about knowledge. Drawing from Jung:

But who can guarantee that this conversion produces anything like an adequate “objective” picture of the world? That could only be if the physical event were also a psychic one. But a great distances still seems to separate us from such an assertion. Till then, we must for better or worse content ourselves with the assumption that the psyche supplies those images and forms which alone make knowledge of objects possible. But where did Democritus first hear of atoms? This notion had its origin in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were never reflections of physical events but are spontaneous products of the psychic factor. Despite the materialistic tendency to understand the psyche as a mere reflection or imprint of physical and chemical processes, there is not a single proof of this hypothesis. Quite the contrary, innumerable facts prove that the psyche translates physical processes into sequences of images which have hardly any recognizable connection with the objective process. The materialistic hypothesis is much too bold and flies in the face of experience with almost metaphysical presumption. The only thing that can be established with certainty in the present state of our knowledge is our ignorance of the psyche.There is thus no ground at all for regarding the psyche as something secondary or as an epiphenomenon; on the contrary, there is every reason to regard it, at least hypothetically, as a factor sui generis and to go on doing so until it has been sufficiently proved that psychic proceses can be fabricated in a retort. We have laughed at the claims of the alchemists to be able to manufacture a lapis philosophorum consisting of a body, soul, and spirit, as impossible, hence we shold stop dragging along with us the logical consequence of this medieval assumption, namely the materialistic prejudice regarding the psyche as though it were a proven fact.

Jung concludes from this that the psyche is real, although enigmatic, since it appears essentially different from physical processes. We do not know what it is in substance, although this is true also of physical objects and matter in general. However, he does posit an objective psyche,  called the unconscious, from which emanate determining influences which guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even sameness of experience, and also the way this experience is represented in one’s imagination. A proof of this is the almost universal parallelism beween mythological motifs which he calls archetypes. Therefore, one could say that reality, in Jung’s view, stems from the unconscious and is revealed through archetypes. There actually seems to be a universal truth, which Jung called the archetype, that speaks to us out of a myth, no matter what time or place its source. What we notice,  however, is its manifestation. It is very difficult to isolate a pure archetype or to see it when we have it. It is like the invisible man in the old science fiction movie who who could only be seen when he was wrapped up in bandages or dressed in a hat and coat. The archetye can only be “seen” when it is enveloped in the bandages that each cultural manifestation puts on it. Or it is like a doll that you dress in different moral values. But the story itself, the essential archetype, has no moral values; it is just a narrative, an image of what happens. It is up tothe interpreter to ask why it happens. The archetype, however, lets us “see” the myth that is built around it, just as the hole in the doughnut lets us see that the doughnut is a doughnut. Jung himself acknowledges the transparency of the archetype:

The archetypes are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. There are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible.

Archetypes are necessarily transmitted by manifestations. One might define an archetypal myth as what a story would be like if no one told it; but we cannot hear such a story, any more than we can perceive an unmanifested archetype. An archetype is a vacuum into which meaning keeps falling, which meaning-lessness abhors. Like their archetypes myths do not, strictly speaking, have meanings; they provide contexts in which meaning occurs. A myth is not so much a true story as a story in which truth is based, a story which people may infuse with their truth. As Mark Twain said, “Only fiction must deal with facts; truth doesn’t have to.” As the shaman replied to the anthropologist who persisted in asking him, “What do the myths mean?”  “The myths signify — nothing. They mean themselves.” Myths perform what has been called “a mating dance with meaning.” So where does the reality lie?  In the archetype, which in itself cannot be perceived? Or in the manifestation via experience or mythical expression of the experience as perceived through various cultural dress? Or in the meanings derived from interpretations of the experience? Although as the Buddha said, all of us are born enlightened, it just takes a lifetime to discover this. So enlightenment may be what is real, it just takes a lifetime to realize it. According to the Upanishads, the gods do not want us to realize it. Likewise in  the Genesis myth. Lucifer did not want mankind to perceive reality. He refused to kneel before mankind and provided him with the power to perceive light unhindered by the senses provided him by God. Therefore our senses retain their function of preventing us from perceiving reality. For this, Lucifer (light-bearer) was exiled from heaven but still retains the ability to prevent us from full perception. It was only when I was outside of my body that I perceived full perception of light, and even got a glimpse of the goddess. I have deduced that this is true of all our senses. We cannot hear the “music of the spheres” but hear single musical tones, which if properly combined harmonically can be listened to under certain conditions. When one gets older, or after these organs of hearing are injured by loud sounds, one can hear what the Bushmen called “the stars hunting.” This indicates to me that they believed that tinnitus is a kind of super-hearing since stars make no sound when they hunt since making a sound when you hunt will eliminate the possibility of success. So what may be annoying to us actually may be the beginnings of what we would call an inkling of the “music of the spheres.” This is of course all my deduction, and as you know, deduction is drawing particular conclusions from generalities. But since I did once experience the light of Lucifer, perhaps I am using induction, drawing a generality from single facts. The best example of the art of induction I know is the time a man jumped off the Empire State Building. When he had reached the 50th floor, he remarked, “Well, so far so good.” But then, logic does have its difficulties. So since the gods do not want us to be enlightened with unimpeded perception, they must have a good reason.

Whoever among gods, sages, or men becomes enlightened becomes the very self of the gods, and the gods have no power to prevent him. But whoever worships a divinity other than himself is like a sacrificial animal for the gods, and such a person is of use to the gods just as many animals would be of use to a man. Therefore it is not pleasing to those gods that men should be enlightened.

Therefore we are more useful to the gods when we worship them as Other, and they can then draw energy from us.  Let us follow through on this point by looking at a mythical representation of a single archetype – that of Sacrifice. The similarity to the myth of Dionysus provided a useful metaphor for the early Christians when they created a myth about the origin of the ritual of the Euch-arist. They needed a myth to describe what was to them a truth, and although the myth of Dionysus described an archetypal truth, it did not go far enough. The Christian myth tells of someone who realized he was part of a myth, one that others did not at first recognize or accept. In its retelling, when Jesus at the Last Supper ate of the Passover Lamb and then instructed his disciples to drink his blood in the form of wine, he knew, though the others did not, that he was to become that lamb whose blood was to be painted on the doorposts so that death would pass over us. In the Gospels, Jesus predicted that he would become such a god; in the myth, he knew that his own myth and ritual were taking place for the first time, which is the function and purpose of ritual – to restore the ambiance and repeat the actions of the First Time as it had been taught by the god. Jesus is depicted as having established the ritual of his own myth when he taught his worshipers to drink his blood and eat his flesh. He reestablished the old ritual so that people would remember the new myth: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Jesus is depicted as speaking with th vision of one who realizes that he is living the myth of one who is sacrificed in hate – crucified; but from that frame he sees the inner myth, the old myth of a god who sacrifices himself in love. He was to be the surrogate for the lamb, which much earlier had been the surrogate in the sacrifice of a human being. Within the Hebrew Bible, there is solid evidence of the sacrifice of the firstborn human child. Most famous of all, of course, is the story of Abraham and Isaac. The usual situation, which Isaac refers to in all innocence, is the sacrifice of  lamb (”Behold the fire and the wood,” he says to his father, “but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”) Such an animal usually stands as a surrogate for the human sacrificer himself, who had been saved by the sacrifice of the lamb at Passover. Isaac is to be substituted for this substitute – until another lamb appears in the thicket as a substitute for this human substitute for the basic surrogate lamb. This is the already labyrinthine house of mirrors into which the New Testament introduces its own mirror to end all mirrors; for surely John and Paul (like so many Christians after them, including Kierkegaard) had Isaac in mind as the human lamb who was to be saved by the sacrifice of Jesus. There is a midrash on the story of Abraham and Isaac that argues from the point of view of Hebrew grammar that since the verb going up the mountain is plural whreas the verb going down the mountain is singular therefore Abraham really did kill I saac, who was subsequently resurrected. This strengthens the Christian argument that Christ’s sacrifice was to be the last.  Since the archetype is universal, and not limited to particular time and place, it follows that we live the myths of other peoples as well as our own. An example is a myth told to Laurens van der Post when he was a child by his nanny who was a Bushman housemaid and enriched his life as a child.  This story enabled me to reach the conclusion I have reached up to now on the nature of reality.

Before she would marry him his wife had made him promise her that he would never lift the lid of the basket and look inside until she gave him permission to do so. If he did, a great disaster might overtake them both. But as the months went by, the man began to forget his promise. He became steadily more curious, seeing the basket so near day after day, with the lid always firmly shut. One day when he was alone, he went into his wife’s hut, saw the basket standing in the shadows, and could bear it no longer. Snatching off the lid, he looked inside. For a moment he stood there unbelieving,  then burst out laughing. When his wife came back in the evening, she knew at once what had happened. She put her hand to her heart, and looking at him with tears in her eyes, she said, “You’ve looked in the basket.” He admitted it with a laugh, saying “You silly woman. You silly, silly creature. Why have you made such a fuss about this basket? There’s nothing in it at all.”   “Nothing?” she said, hardly finding the strength to speak. “Yes, nothing,”  he answered emphatically. At that she turned her back on him, walked straight into the sunset and vanished. She was never seen on earth again.

Van der Post said in telling the story that to this day he could hear the old black servant woman who told him the story as a child sayng to him “And do you know why she went away, my little master? Not because he had broken his promise, but because, looking into the basket, he had found it empty. She went because the basket was not empty; it was full of beautiful things of the sky she had stored for them both; and because he could not see them and just laughed, there was no use for her on earth any more and she vanished.”  This helped me to draw the conclusion that the function of perception is to conceal reality from the unenlightened. Indeed, it seems likely that our sense perceptors were deliberately designed to conceal reality from us, a conclusion I reached after seeing the light of the Spirit only until I received my “sight” back, after which I had to squint until the light diminished. Although we do not know what reality is, if we should ever become enlightened, our perceptors will no longer be able to conceal reality from us.  Only then will we be able properly to answer Hermes’ koan, “Who are you?” And then we can say that reality is but one aspect of the truth. And do not ask me what that is!

As P.L.Travers believed, truth can be conveyed by myth. Before the invention of writing, sacred matter, that is, Truth, was conveyed by means of poetry sung or chanted by bards or priests. It was sometimes preserved for future use by pictures (hieroglyphs) or signs by being carved in stone or clay tablets. This material can be designated as myth, since priestly chanting was regarded as derived from spiritual sources, and bardic chanting was regarded as derived from bardic ancestors who had supposedly witnessed or heard of these events from witnesses. These stories, for example from Homer, were considered didactic as well as entertaining, but were considered no doubt as true only in the didactic sense. They were informative as to what consequences could be expected from certain types of behavior, and what types of behavior could be expected to bring about divine responses, helpful or harmful. Myths, especially about gods or heroes, differed widely, depending on what region the bard came from, or the particular point the bard wished to make. Certain vague parallels to today’s attitude toward Santa Claus as told to children may be seen, although Homer was not at the time directed at children. In other words, this was myth. It was useful as such and had religious connotations when it concerned the gods.

A useful example for our purposes is Dionysus. When Dionysus was an infant, he was torn to pieces by Titans who consumed him, all but his heart, which was saved by his grandmother Rhea when she discovered what was going on. This heart was implanted in Zeus’ thigh (incidentally, a term used in such instances meaning ‘sexual parts.’) Having been borne thus by Zeus, he is thenceforth a god. The heart, in ancient times, was considered the center of the mind as well as feeling, the brain being viewed much as we view a switchboard and not even considered by the Egyptians as worthy of being stored with the four organs, each in its canopic jar. The myths connected with Dionysus are many and varied, but I mention this one merely as an example of the meaning I wish to demonstrate, largely because I do not like to make statements unsupported by evidence.

At the beginning of the Age of Pisces (ca. 1st century AD) the attitude toward myth changed with the rise of Christianity. When the religion was spreading among the people, a newly con-verted Christian might want to tell a friend about this new faith by relating the story of Christ’s immortality through rebirth, which at that time was the most important ‘myth’ surrounding Christ. Easter was for centuries much more important than Christmas and still is in the Orthodox Church. The friend might respond that this was very much like Dionysus. Such as statement could stop a Christian cold in his attempt to convert anyone, since the attitude “What’s the difference?” puts the two myths on the basis of equality, especially since in any polytheistic society new gods are always welcome as a demonstration of the sacredness of all things. But Christians need a basis for exclusivity to prevent the “chaos of the gods” and to bring about the unity of belief necessary to prevent the breakup of the Empire which was threatening everyone. They had the necessary answer. It actually happened! It is a historical fact! It is not a myth! All you need to achieve salvation is not by learning from myth and trying to keep a good relationship with the gods through propitiating them, but simply by believing that it happened. Believe in the immortality of Jesus as the Christ and that he will return and take up to Heaven all the believers and leave behind in Hell all those who don’t, and you too will be one of the saved. The Age of Faith had arrived and the Piscean Age had begun. One must now cling to one of the opposites and fear and despise its opposite, those who do not have this faith. Myth disappears, at least until recently, as the Piscean Age is about to depart.

There are, of course, many examples of the effects of this attitude. In the 11th and 12th centuries Crusades were held which seriously weakened the Christian Byzantine Empire so it was later unable to resist the Turks. The Crusaders wanted to use these Eastern Christians as a base against the expanding Moslems but when they were welcomed into Constantinople on their way, they looted and killed as if the Eastern Christians were the enemy. Needless to say, they were not welcomed later, but often met resistance when they tried to cross Byzantine territory. It is reminiscent of recent events in the Middle East.

You may wonder what I meant when I stated earlier that I have evidence of the truth of the Dionysus myth. I need to make clear that myth is not fact, but truth in a certain sense – perhaps psychological or spiritual, but not in a historical or material sense. As Joseph Campbell often said, “Myth is not what happened in the past, but it is going on all the time – inside you.” The destruction of the infant Dionysus and his being born again through his heart in the thigh of Zeus has parallels in a vision I had when I was torn apart by dogs and was then outside the body while it was presumably being consumed; but the skeleton, now immaculate, was then returned with a beating heart within the rib cage. Demeter, Rhea’s daughter, later reconstituted my body with light. It was not reconstituted in Zeus’ thigh, perhaps because that would have bestowed divinity. I do not know for sure, and I did not ask.

There are instances, however, in which faith is not opposed to myth, but rather to skepticism. At the Asklepion, the patient was often visited by the god Asklepios, after which the patient was healed. The patient believed that it was the vistation of the god which had healed him/her. The skeptic might say that it was the belief that did the healing and not the god; a psychological rather than a religious accomplishment. A believer would not be able to deny this; indeed some mystics have pointed out that prayers are most commonly answered if the person praying concludes the prayer with the assurance that the prayer has already been answered. Here faith and myth, psychology and religion, can reinforce each other.

Today it is the fundamentalists who insist upon the historicity of that which is in the sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments, even though the old Testament is not a Christian text. Most of the Old Testament was written in prose, as was all of the New. In ancient times, truth was expressed in poetry, and fact in prose. Much of the Old Testament simply chronicles those aspects of Hebrew history which the priestly authorities wanted to preserve as fact, but no religious authorities claimed it as divine dogma except for certain parts which were, indeed, like the Ten Commandments, intended as truth and were therefore written in verse. The New Testament was written as fact, but no one then expected that fact would one day hold the meaning of divine dispensation. To accept it as onewould myth would mean that all of us were living the life of Christ and would therefore be sons and daughters of God regardless of whether we believed inJesus as the Christ. That is heresy! The fundamentalists deny the existence of religious myth and say that all religions describe fact or they are lies. Perhaps P.L. Travers was an early herald of the Age of Aquarius, when myth can exist as a balance between truth and fact.

“(The) world soul affects each individual thing, whether natural or human made. You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under that tree.”

Almost all people who would call themselves religious would agree that each person has a soul. Some would agree that animals also do, and perhaps they might agree that under certain conditions they would have to admit that even those objects which can not be distinguished from their surroundings except for their form, such as mountains, might arouse certain almost instinctual feelings of soul when viewed under certain conditions. However, we are now faced with the invasion of electronic equipment, primarily computers. I have been faced with the problem directly when occasionally my computer, which (whom) I have accepted warily, attacks me with the statement that I may not deal with the current material because it is currently being modified by Jack Meier. Doesn’t this damn thing even recognize me? How can it, if it does not have a soul? It must have one or it could not be refusing to cooperate with me. Phenomena such as this must really be putting skeptics on hold! But such electronic devices as robots seem to be challenging skeptics more than computers do. They have charmed adults as well as children (who have not yet learned to suppress soul) largely because of their infinite potential to communicate as well as serve human wishes. As we have seen, for example in film, they can arouse fear, the opposite of desire, and the soul must always deal with opposites.

But what about mechanical devices which have primarily a single function like an automobile? They are very much a part of American culture, and were highly desirable as a symbol of freedom to my generation, enabling us when young to escape the confines of parental domination and build up our egos and expand our horizons. But could such an object really have a soul? It seems here that the term projection must enter in. If it had a soul of its own, could an automobile belonging to the father of the family, when driven by the son, have but one soul? A soul implies ability to respond. This can be projected.

For instance, I had when I left graduate school a Kaiser sedan of which I was fond, and projected a name onto it, calling her Maude. A friend and I put all our belongings into it and moved from Iowa City to the Bay Area. Although it was a large car, it was so heavily loaded it kept hitting bottom. I discovered later that this was not good for the clutch. But it got us there without mishap, driving night and day, since we could not afford a motel. One slept, the other drove. Maude got no sleep. I was very proud of her – she obviously had a soul. Months later she had a blowout. It was when she was going 15 miles per hour, pulling into my driveway. The clutch shortly after finally gave out, leaving her powerless; but while still coasting, I saw an auto mechanic’s shop right ahead and had just enough inertia to get into the station. I simply left the car with the mechanic and when he tried to drive it into his repair space, it started but he could not get it to move. He asked how in the world I got to the station, and I simply replied, “I don’t have the slightest idea.” Both instances to me demonstrated soul. It seemed that the car was doing its best to show loyalty to someone who cared for it. But of course, such thinking is crazy! If these were the only examples in my life, I might think that the skeptics are right. But such thinking makes me feel better as long as I don’t tell anyone. So I have a formula for leading a crazy life. Simply live your life “as if” things have soul, but don’t try to convince the world of it. Perhaps things don’t, but we can be awfully good at projecting. Thomas Moore can try to convince others, but it takes a whole lifetime and several books and a firm belief that the whole thing is worth it. And I don’t have that much energy.

Dreams, like fantasy, are passive imagination, and are useful only when brought into consciousness. The great advantage that active imagination has over dreams and visions is that the ego can intervene and generally control the process. In it, one can personify this daimon as inner companion as well as other aspects of the Self and deal with them. In my own experience, the daimon revealed himself as Hermes.

Much of our problem today lies in the low esteem held by modern society concerning the imagination. Actually, imagination is the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception-something which we experience all the time in dreams. Parmenides’ goddess said that if you can think it, it is. If this is so, we must accept that the deformation of these images in one’s imagination are real. Hermes once told me when I asked why my prayers were often answered in disasters, that since he lives in my unconscious, my world is distorted in his eyes just as his world is in mine. Therefore I must make clear to him in words what and why I seek. Only if one can accept that deformation which we see in dreams as reality, can one then accept the reality of the imagination. It follows, then, that the revelation of the gods comes not only from the outside and above, but also from within the perspective of the observer-from within the psyche itself. This is the link to the transcendent. Kabir Helminski says in Soul Loss and Soul Making:

“We have lost our ability to perceive through the Active Imagination which operates in an intermediate world, an interworld between the senses and the world of ideas. . . . This imagination does not construct something unreal, it unveils the hidden reality. It helps to return the facts of this world to their spiritual significance, to see beyond the apparent and to manifest the hidden.”

I have incorporated psychological polytheism into Active Imagination with considerable success, with the help of Hermes as daimon. All paths are misleading, since none get you there without many obstacles. There is no direct path. Those who follow gurus who seek to ride about in gold Cadillacs are being misled. But that is their path. The only thing wrong is that they often take others with them, but as the myth of Parzifal points out, each must enter his path alone. Sooner or later these misled ones may discover that and be the wiser for it. Each must find one’s own Truth. Someone once told me he had had a visit from Hermes who told him many interesting things, but since he knew Hermes was a Trickster, he didn’t believe any of it and dismissed it without consideration. That, I believe, was a serious mistake. Certainly Hermes may have misled him, but how much richer his life might have been if he had followed his advice, stumbled many times as a result, but what he could have learned in the process! I have found no author who views the Trickster function in this constructive manner. You shall see, however, how experience has driven me to this conclusion: Spirit lives in you as you.

There are two birds in a tree. One eats of the fruit of the tree. The other watches. As William Irwin Thompson wrote,

“Mystics know that there is a part of our being that is projected into time in the form of an ego that is going to die, but there is another part of our being that never incarnates. Heraclitus wrote: With our eyes open, we share the same world but with our eyes closed each of us enters our own world.”

But Heraclitus also said, “How many things are lost through disbelief!” He said that 2500 years ago, when the forgetting had hardly gotten underway. Indeed, it has been said that the world is the reality of the spirit in a state of trance. Actually, life is anything we choose it to be since there is absolutely nothing to compare it to. Ibn Arabi saw the world as the luminous shadow of God. That is certainly one way of looking at it. Everything that we see is a shadow of what we don’t see.

We must first of all remember that the images we deal with in these altered states are not mere images. Standing behind them are the eternal archetypes of the collective unconscious, which are in communication with you through the archetype of the Self, which presents itself in greater or lesser disguise through all the images of our dreams. It is useful to keep in mind that all the events and words in dream are directed by the Self, and the same goes for every one of those images in active imagination. which are not your ego speaking and acting.

In that sense, the Self is Other, and here we call it the daimon as Socrates does. It must be objectified if we wish to deal with it and discover its nature which is ours. Just remember that otherness is a necessary illusion. To get you into the mindset, let us look it at the way the Sufi does. Just keep in mind that the Self is usually imaged as the same sex as the person, which sometimes misleads people into thinking that the Sufi mystics were sometimes homosexual. Ibn Arabi speaks of the Self as the Beloved and the Seeker as the Lover:

“The Beloved is all in all, the Lover only veils him. The Beloved was stealthily apparent, and I unaware. He was hidden in my breast, and I unaware. To the exclusion of all the world, I sought him openly. He was the whole world, and I was unaware. . . The eyes which are prevented from beholding the Beloved, and yet are desirous of looking upon him, cannot be fit for that vision without first weeping.”

The weeping comes from the frustration of being unable to achieve oneness with the Beloved in life. It is after all the impact of eternity breaking into the field of time which causes the splitting into opposites, in this case the spirit and the flesh, and therefore it is useless and even dangerous to both to try to unite them in time.

The daimon is most likely to make contact with your consciousness when you have not necessarily lost hope, but when you see no rational way out of an impossible situation. My first contact with a daimon was with one of its feminine aspects (the daimon has many forms, since form is what enables it to become apparent to us). This was in a class on active imagination led by Mary Watkins who studied with Jane Roberts & the channeled entity Seth.

After a descent into an underground cavern, I contacted an aspect of the Self whom I recognized as Medea. I had first seen the painting of Medea by Delacroix in a class in Art History in college and was so taken with it that when I went to France in 1971 I traveled to Lille where it hung in the museum. In this active imagination, I recognized her as she was seated at a table in a small cave looking into a crystal ball. She asked me in and immediately started to berate me about the way I had been treating her, and asked me why I kept her in this miserable cave! It had never occurred to me, of course, that I could determine the living conditions of figures in my imagination. She accused me of ignoring the feminine and downgrading her in my life. This encounter left me with a three-day headache. Von Franz points out that the first encounter with the Self can be hostile and even dangerous, and must be contained by the presence of an experienced guide.

My next encounter with the gods occurred in the summer of 1982, a year before my retirement, when I ran across a book, The Homeric Gods by Walter Otto. While reading the chapter on Hermes on a bright sunny day, I became fascinated by this extraordinary god. I felt him as a kind of inner identity-apparently the ideal Self. While reading stretched out on a sofa with my shoes off, a philodendron house plant, which was hanging over my feet, began to sweat profusely. My reading became distracted only when my socks became soaked with moisture. I immediately recognized this as a paranormal phenomenon and gave it the full sensate test-tasting the water running down the leaves, smelling it, letting it drip onto my hands-the only sense I omitted was that of hearing, because the whole experience was completely silent. There was absolutely no way I could have considered this as a mere coincidence and realized it was most likely a visitation from the spirit about whom I was reading at the time. It is interesting that many pictures of the Annunciation depict Mary reading a book at the appearance of the angel. Since then Hermes has been an inner companion.

At first I avoided active imagination because I didn’t want any more three-day headaches. However, when Hermes wanted me to recognize him, he generally appeared in dreams and visions as depicted in ancient Greek sculpture.

In 1983 I took a long trip to Europe with a friend. We bought a car and traveled around at our leisure, off-season. This is where Hermes became distinctly active in my life. David had seen the evidence of the weeping philodendron, but I did not talk about Hermes a great deal because I didn’t want David to feel uncomfortable traveling with someone seemingly on the verge of insanity. As we were wandering around the 6th c. BC Greek temples at Paestum in Italy (the best preserved Greek temples in Europe) on a warm December day with no one around, I had a strong intuitive feeling that Hermes was in the vicinity, even though I knew he had no temples of his own. I mentioned this feeling to David who told me to turn around
so that I could see the marble foundation I had not noticed before. On it was inscribed the name of Hermes with an inscription noting that the statue which had been on this pedestal, Hermes at Rest (as you see on the right) was now in the museum in nearby Naples, which we then went to see.

Later that month, while we were staying at an apartment lent to us by friends at Lerici, at the southern end of the Italian Riviera, I decided to see what would happen if I tried active imagination while in bed. I could not do it seated without getting seasick, a problem which von Franz had said was not uncommon. Since it should work as long as the spine is straight, I simply closed my eyes, the room was dark, and I imagined I was leaving the earth at night, flying to a forest where there was a small clearing with a spring in its center. Both the spring and the clearing were circular but at the edge of the clearing was a stone wall about four feet high. Seated on the wall was Hermes with one leg dangling and leaning against an abutment, obviously relaxed and waiting. He did not have his cap of invisibility.

Here is a portion of our first conversation. It foreshadowed some extraordinary adventures connected with the automobile David and I had bought on our arrival in Europe.

Hermes: I am ready if you are.

(I, knowing he was Guide of Souls to the Underworld, assumed he meant he was ready to take me into the Underworld.)

Me: But I am not. I want some time in my new home.

Hermes: I see no problem with that. As you know, no one can remain here longer than the Fates have decreed, although anyone, man or god, can shorten one’s time on earth. I do not yet know what time the Fates have set for you, and I do not care to know for I couldn’t tell you if I did, but I will let you know when the time comes. I always try to warn people ahead of time, but that is difficult with unbelievers, especially when they are young and healthy.

Me: Could I make better contact with you or any of the other gods if we went to Greece or the Greek islands?

Hermes: Do not seek me or any of the gods in Greece. I shall be where you are and can make any contacts you need. There are still places sacred to the gods on a few places like Ibiza (we were about to leave for Ibiza to see friends, even sooner than we then expected as it turned out). It is close to the Hesperides and still relatively unspoiled. If you obey Poseidon you will find me there.

Me: What do you mean, obey Poseidon?

Hermes then set down his caduceus and picked up a trident and pointed it at me playfully. I felt an electric shock. He raised it to the vertical and spoke in a commanding voice, apparently to show it was a message from a high god and he was carrying out his role as messenger of the gods.

Hermes: If you wish to arrive on any island, you must drive on the mainland. On the islands, it does not matter.

Me: What does that mean?

Hermes: How am I supposed to know? I am only the messenger.

As if to imprint the importance of this beginning relationship on my soul, he set down the trident, picked up the caduceus, and stepped behind me. He placed his hand on my shoulder and I experienced an extraordinary wave of joy, then immediately fell off to sleep.

The literal meaning of the message soon became apparent. I could not bring myself to tell David about the conversation, which in the cold light of day seemed unreal. Therefore I also couldn’t tell him that Poseidon had forbidden him to drive until we got to the islands, about a week thence. I assumed this would be too difficult for David to believe. So I disobeyed Poseidon and shared the driving.

I was soon to discover a lesson in this: these instructions from the Self are also metaphorical. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were meant to disobey in order for their level of consciousness to be raised. To disobey the literal is often necessary for the increase of consciousness, even though the results may be painful. This constitutes freedom as Adam and Eve learned in being forced out of the unconscious Paradise of Eden.

The second part of the instruction, concerning driving on the islands, is also metaphorical. The ego must rule our conscious life, but not necessarily our inner life. Man must retain his freedom. Act not as Abraham, who insisted on obeying even to the extent of sacrificing his only son, but as Job, who retained his faith in and loyalty to his god, but insisted on his right to defy him when he believed God was being unjust. Spirit either resides in or is identical to the unconscious, and wills to become conscious, but can only accomplish this through mankind, through mankind’s exercise of the freedom to disobey, as in the Garden of Eden. But the doctrine of correspondences is also active-as above, so below-the happy fault brings its own consequences. The first time David took the wheel, I felt no problem arising and thought perhaps the whole thing was the result of an overactive imagination. That night we stayed in a hotel in Cannes on the French Riviera, fortunately off-season, as we could not leave for three days. I was sicker than I had been for years with a case of flu such as I had never experienced before. This was the first of several times that Hermes used flu as a symptom to keep me on the path. We then left, heading toward Spain, though I still told David nothing. We soon got into Spain and David got sick. We gave up all attempts to see Spain and left immediately for Ibiza where we had friends with me driving as he was unable. Along the way I told him what happened and was surprised at his readiness to accept my story. Of course, he was in no position to argue.

As soon as we got to Ibiza we rented an apartment, and I determined to find out what was going on. At that point I was not yet ready for the final lesson, that the expulsion from Eden was the gift of the gods-higher consciousness, which can be said of all misfortunes, so I naturally felt accursed. Of course, one might say that we might have gotten sick anyway. Even that the tree might have wept anyway; after all, miracles and disasters do occur. But in every case we must look at the context. In Ulysses, Penelope weaves the metaphoric shroud protecting us from the brilliant light of the spirit, and it contains a complex pattern of events. We cannot readily see through it to the light. Outer events and incidents alone do not contain synchronicities. Only when woven together with inner events and knit into a pattern do they have meaning and they should not be ignored. Since I was not yet ready for this insight, I was taught the ritual of sacrifice. Rituals are necessary for those in a state of worship who have not attained identity.

My next conversation with Hermes presented me with a challenge.

Hermes: Well, you got here, but only with difficulties. You see, you ignored Poseidon’s warning. You should do something to make up for that misdeed.

Me: What do you suggest? All the old rituals for dealing with the gods have been suppressed and forgotten.

Hermes: You must give him something that has been yours for some time. Remember, he is a great collector. The sea floor is strewn with the results of his collecting over the ages. Perhaps your blue ring.

This refers to a ring of which I was fond, having bought it at a Romanesque cathedral in southern France in 1971 which had the coat-of-arms of its bishop enameled on it in blue. Though it had cost only 5 francs, it was quite lovely.

I went to the shore and walked very far out on a series of flat stones like a walkway. These stones were quite flat and just a few inches above the surface. The Mediterranean is like a lake when the weather is calm so there were no visible waves. I went as far as I could and threw the ring far into the sea and stood there. In the distance appeared a wave about a foot high coming toward me, and I knew my sandaled feet would be soaked, but I figured it was to be expected. As it approached it reduced in size so that when it reached me it merely splashed against the rock and my feet remained dry. I took this as a response indicating that Poseidon had accepted my sacrifice.

This was followed by another conversation with Hermes.

Hermes: So you did it.

Me: Yes, and I believe I got a response. But before doing it, I wanted to invoke Poseidon with a little prayer, but all I could think of was a praise of his power. That seems to be the only form of worship before the Christian era. A kind of fear. Was love never a factor between man and the gods? (Implicit in this question was a desire to know how close I could get to Hermes in this relationship.)

Hermes: Well, after all, Zeus loved Europa and Leda, and there were priestesses who loved their god and we sometimes went in to them if we found them attractive.

Me: Hermes, physical desire is not what I mean.

Hermes: Well, if by love you mean a striving for oneness and identity, you had better be careful. You must remember that the relation between man and the gods is a symbiotic one. Gods need man to verify their connection to the material aspect of the world and man needs the gods to verify his connection to the spiritual aspect. If the balance is tipped too far in the direction of the spirit, one dies to the material. It also works the other way. Prometheus suffered terribly for his love for and identification with mankind. On the other hand, your anchorites and ascetics must die to the flesh once they establish their identity with their god. You also find this when people become unwittingly identified with the gods. Apollo’s young lovers always ended up being killed by Apollo himself, much to his sorrow. Also people who are adored as gods by humans as Psyche was must die. You have seen it with Gandhi, Lincoln, and Kennedy. Between man and the gods there must be no vulgar intimacy. (At a later date, Hermes continued in this connection) Separation is the will of the beloved else how would you perceive me as Other? It is my will that we be separated. For the soul separated from its original state of unity by its fall from the material world, the path of return necessitates the death of the conscious self or ego-annihilation. This is only attained in life when the individual becomes a passive vessel, emptied of self, to be used for the expression of the Divine Will. This is unity. This the ego fears, and so the Seeker may only pray: Not my will, but Thine be done.

After this we began having regular talks.

Me: Hermes, why did you appear to my mother in that particular form?

(I was referring to a story my mother had told me about a man dressed in long robes with a pointed hat who came to warn her of her impending death. From her description I identified him with Hermes Trismegistus.)

Hermes: I always appear to the person in the form in which I will be the most credible. In the Middle Ages I appeared as a skeleton wrapped in a black cape.

Me: You actually appeared in that form?

Hermes: Certainly!

Me: Good God!

Hermes: That may well be the case, but such goodness really has nothing to do with this situation. (He pranced as a child might when it had gotten the best of someone in a word game) During the time of the Greeks, I appeared as you see me now (image of a Greek runner). Earlier (vainly), I had a full beard.

Me: Yes, and before that you were a pile of rocks (referring to rocks piled where 3 roads meet as places sacred to Hermes.)

I foolishly thought I could play games too, but at this I felt like my head exploded. I saw all kinds of lights and thought I was blinded. It was like an electric shock. This was only momentary however.

Hermes: You better smile when you say that.

In other words, I was to understand that with the shadows of the ancient gods there can be no vulgar intimacy.

And, from yet another conversation:

Me: You are the Guide of Souls to the Underworld. Tell me something about the afterlife.”

Hermes: You must know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden-how they were driven from Paradise because they began eating of the fruits of various kinds of knowledge. One of the primary functions of all the gods is to prevent mankind from finding out whence he came and whither he will go. Yahveh’s prohibition.

Me: Do you mean to tell me that the story you taught the Greeks about the Underworld is a lie?

Hermes: Not a lie but a metaphor. How could man accomplish his purposes here on earth if he did not fear death? Why even gather food if he did not fear starvation? All man’s accomplishments are based on the fear of death, and the more he fears it, the more he accomplishes. What the Greeks had to fear was nothing to the hellfire feared by the Puritans, and they created the basis for the greatest technological civilization the world has ever seen.

Me: But it was you, Hermes, who taught me that death is not to be feared.

Hermes: (Seriously) Odysseus was given his glimpse of the Underworld only after he left Troy on his way home. Only after the ripples have cleared on the surface can one see into the depths.

Me: But he had not really finished fighting. He had one more serious battle to fight.

Hermes: Now we have arrived at the point. This is a struggle which many do not make but everyone should. This is the struggle to be reunited with one’s own soul which one had to abandon in youth in order to fight battles in the world. Unlike the Trojan War, which involved men against men, and gods against gods, in this struggle one can have the help of any god one calls upon. That is why I am here, to help you in this attempt if you wish to make it. I have not come to take you across the line but to help you reclaim your soul, which like Penelope has been waiting all these years. You must first eliminate the suitors.

Me: That raises a question which has been bothering me. Even while teaching I never really realized who the suitors were. What do they actually represent?

Hermes: Look at what they were doing. They were eating, drinking, and whoring, and most importantly, were wasting the substance of Odysseus. They represent the excesses which one indulges in youth, and the physical strength and aggression which one needs to fight the battles of youth, but which prevent you from becoming one with yourself (as Odysseus with Penelope). Those who are old without having made the struggle with the suitors become imperious and ego-ridden, fighting the battles of youth with weapons which have become shadows, becoming ridiculous and even contemptible. It is only by eliminating those characteristics that one achieves the wisdom and serenity which ought to be associated with age.

At this, Hermes slowly walked away, leaving me in tears.

I was to learn more from him about the after life through an archetypal dream. I was concerned about his not being able to accompany me through the bardo after death, for I let him know that although I was not afraid of death, I was afraid of being lost, wandering around in semi-consciousness not knowing where I was. So in a dream he met me and led me to the opening of a great cave which was faced with a great wrought iron gate, closed. In front of it stood a young man dressed in Greek style like Hermes, but he was dark more like Dionysus is usually pictured. Hermes left me in his company and this person told me that he was the one who would take me through this gate, but that when the time came I would first have to remove my garments (you must shed the ego and the persona which cannot be taken with you). I felt embarrassed at the idea not realizing that he was speaking metaphorically (seems to be true of all my dreams and visions). He then said: I too shall remove my garments and you will then know me for who I am.” At that the dream ended.

We shall now turn to the last conversation in Ibiza where he tells me I should go home. He appeared without being called, and sat on a log, motioning me to sit down. Then he put down his caduceus.

Hermes: I am the guide of souls and I must teach you a lesson which is of the utmost importance for the rest of your life. I as guide am like you as teacher, and the highest and best function of both is to make the personal presence unnecessary in life. It has been quite apparent that both of you have realized the spiritual nature of your journey, that it is a transition to the next stage of life as well as a closer knitting of your relationship. If you think about it you will realize that that purpose has now been achieved. You have sought my guidance, received it, and, up to now, profited from it. It is now necessary, in this stage, to acquire the wisdom which ought to go with age. Many do not, but it is absolutely essential for you if you wish to lead a fulfilled long life from this point on. You already have the tools, but you must still learn to perceive the patterns in seemingly unrelated events and processes within and around you. Synchronous events are not only relationships between external events, but events which demonstrate the unity of all processes and events both internal and external. True wisdom is the ability to perceive the unity of the pattern of all events and processes in the world. Of course, no human can perceive it in its entirety, but it is a goal worth striving for, and you must also act on this knowledge. This may seem rather abstract, but I can give you an example. I have already mentioned the fact that you have made the transition and have now entered a new stage. You will now see a new series of events patterning themselves which will continue to increase unless you attend to them, and if you do attend to them, may diminish and be replaced by another pattern. You both have residual colds and coughs. Just yesterday you received a letter, an external event, mentioning the serious illness of people whom you know. This reinforces the internal events. Soon you will experience other events which will reinforce the pattern still further. You see, the gods speak to you all the time, not just as I am now, but their voices can be heard in the overall patterning of events and processes, internal and external. Listen to them. It is apparent (he picks up his caduceus) that the pattern you are entering is one concerning health (hence the caduceus). You previously asked for some time in your new home. I implied in my answer that it is up to you as much as to the gods. This unfolding pattern may be taken as a warning. Since the journey has now accomplished its prime purpose, and this unfolding pattern is making itself known, you better hie yourself back to your medical friends in California without wasting too much time.

Here he refers to synchronous events, which were weaving together the internal and external events and processes in my life. I found a doctor who healed a long time back problem and a therapist who healed my relationship with Medea. She is now living, not in a dank cave, but in a charming country house and has become much more supportive.

Hermes spoke of the body and illness (his symbol, the caduceus, is still used today as a medical symbol) and, from that point on, he used words less and medical symptoms more in communicating with me. I had to learn that the body is actually a metaphor for the spirit. I learned this when in an initiatory vision, during which I was torn into four pieces by four dogs, each seizing one quarter of my body and carrying it off. I was left with no body at all, so when I complained to Hermes that I didn’t know where I was, he replied:

Hermes: If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. Who are you? Think about that!

I have been thinking about that ever since. I cannot tell you that I was standing in one place without a body because what was it that was standing there? Am I a metaphor? If I still existed without a body, what was it that existed? As the goddess said, if you can conceive of it, it exists.

Discovering I had colon cancer I had decided to retire. Six months later the cancer was gone. It was the decision to change my life style that apparently brought about the cure, or else the caduceus was already active. Thus, I had been able to go to Europe without concern.

Shortly after moving into my new home the conversations began again:

Me: It’s been a long time.

Hermes: For you, perhaps.

Me: As Hermes Trismegistus, you have spoken of reincarnation. Would you tell me what aspect, if any, of the ego survives the death of the body?

Hermes: The ego is important for the development of conscious awareness of one’s identity as separate from the world, but for little else. Just as the physical body reaches its greatest individuality of form at early maturity and then loses it gradually (except for the face) in later life, so does one’s need for the ego’s gift of individuality increase and then decline. The awareness of oneself as a unique individual and one’s success in dealing with the environment as a separate identity are an important phase in psychological and spiritual development, but later one comes to realize that by enriching the ego, the individual, one has enriched the Whole, and that there is no distinction between the two. At this point, the need for the ego falls away. But this invariably takes many lifetimes. The ego each time is new, but that does not mean we must start over at each birth. Each person is enriched by the progress made in previous stages.

Me: Well, if the ego dies, what about those children who show their parents where they lived in a previous life?

Hermes: That occurs only with the deaths of children who reincarnated so rapidly that they have not drunk of the Well of Lethe. There are also highly developed people who can go deeply into the personal unconscious and remember previous lives. There are also those who have done this in altered states of consciousness (although perhaps not remembering it later). This in itself demonstrates that nothing important is lost simply because it is not known to the ego. Consciousness is not well understood. As you know, many psychologists even deny its existence. Personal consciousness is related to the ego and dies with it, yet as I said a moment ago, progress made is not lost simply because one is endowed with a new but embryonic ego at birth. As you have recently been reading (Rupert Sheldrake), once a step is taken, it is easier for others to take. The implications of this are only now becoming known. It is true that consciousness is not energy in the way that magnetism and heat are, but it is analogous; the more people who have learned how to do something, the easier it is for others to learn it, even though there is no discernible connection between them. Objects can be moved and phenomena created by will or intention; it soon becomes more common. UFO’s are an example of this. You will soon hear of a formation on the surface of the planet Mars which baffles many scientists since it appears to be man-made. With centuries of human projections onto the Earth’s nearest neighbor as a likely home for intelligent life, it is only natural that it should come to appear so.

Later I wanted to thank Hermes for a very successful slide lecture series on “Myth As Metaphor” that I had started in my home. I followed the early ritual and went to the forest glade. I found him prancing about with a self-satisfied grin. Is he also my inner child?

Hermes: You had a great success, didn’t you?

Me: Yes, but I wanted to thank you. (He continued prancing and it became a kind of dance. I took his hands and we danced about in an active dance. This was the first time I had moved to touch him).

Hermes: If you’re thirsty have some water.

(I went to the pool wondering whether to fill my hands and drink or dip my face in the pool and get my head wet, which would be OK. He stood by the pool, arms akimbo, watching me as I bent down to drink. To my great surprise I saw that my reflection was beardless, and although vague, was similar to my face in youth.)

Hermes: Did you get tired dancing?

Me: Of course not. I wasn’t using my body.

Hermes: When you danced in your youth, you didn’t get tired either, but your present body does. So you need another body to continue the dance. — That is why I am here. That is why you are here!

I ended that conversation with goose pimples.

Some of you may feel that this phenomenon I have been describing is similar in some respects to channeling. Perhaps it is, and this raises the question as its validity. Why do channeled entities differ so widely? Is it because the spirits being channeled are individual, and therefore their messages will differ? What is revealed in active imagination, as opposed to channeling, will be shaped by one’s ego because the ego is active, whereas in channeling it is completely passive and the spirit will then form the message without the ego’s influence, and the message will be comparatively impersonal as a result. Where then does the truth lie? What is true for each individual is often simply that which facilitates self-expression, self-fulfillment, and discovering authenticity, and that may vary greatly from person to person. Therefore I make no claims to universality, but am simply attempting to give examples of how enriching to the soul such techniques can be.

I would like to conclude with a bit about what my communications with Hermes have been like recently so that you can know that things like this never remain the same for long.

First of all, Hermes discovered through experiences I brought up earlier, that he could communicate his messages most readily through the body-that is, with symptoms. I found myself getting flu frequently, something I had never had before. In a dream, I found out that Hermes was becoming frustrated by my ability to simply turn them off with homeopathy. This apparently annoyed Hermes as I found out on a Thursday night when I awoke with full flu symptoms and decided to go to my homeopath the next day. I then fell asleep and Hermes came in a dream and asked me how I got over the flu so easily. I told him it only works if I get sick between Wed. and Saturday as that is when the doctor is available. He immediately said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to arrange something” and left. Little did I know that this was the Trickster in action, for I thought, “Great, he’s going to heal me himself.” The next morning, Friday, all symptoms were gone, and I thought, “Hermes has done it! He cured my flu!” Saturday afternoon, when when my doctor wouldn’t be available for four days, I came down with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had. I then knew the meaning of the word Trickster. But, because I had learned so much about Hermes in this exchange, I actually looked upon the experience as positive.

I realized that when I was working on my path, I was relatively symptom-free. If I lazed off, I got sick. In this way, I did not feel symptoms were negative. It was then I heard a voice sound over the radio, which was not turned on. It said very clearly,

“How can I bring you sorrow, if you accept it as blessing?”

Since then, I have not had the flu, although I get minor chronic ailments, seemingly associated with age (82), but they still become less difficult when I pay attention to him.

The last point has to do with an extraordinary message I received which has been verified several times, once with a scientific work. That was an interruption to a dream in which Hermes suddenly appeared standing next to a woman and said clearly,

“You don’t have to know, all you need to do is ask.”

Immediately they disappeared and the previous dream resumed. From this point on, all kinds of things have happened to verify this statement. I was told of a book which verifies this for anyone who wishes to practice it: Power vs. Force by David Hawkins. The first attempt I made to bring Hermes’ statement into practice occurred when I told him I wanted to find out how the ancients thought; not what they thought, but how. A few days later, a friend showed up at my door, unannounced, with a set of books on that very subject.

Books, however, are not always necessary, as a dream showed during this process. In my dream I was a professor of history at a college where I was showing one of my students how to use the library for research. We went into the library which seemed old and little used. The shelves were only partially filled and the books were old, their pages flaking, and some were unreadable. I took from the shelf a book, which I had found very useful in college, to show the student (I still have a copy) and, although it was in relatively good condition, the covers were bent like a soft cover. I then left him and went downstairs where I believed more useful books could be found. The staircase was very wide, but the steps were narrow so one could not get an entire foot on them. I descended many flights to get well below the surface of the earth, and entered a large room at the bottom with almost no furniture and only a few books. But this was, I knew, where true knowledge could be obtained. I believe I was being told that books were useful for me to obtain factual material and basic data, but one had to go deeper than that for actual knowledge. Active Imagination has been, for me, the way to go deeper.