Fish Eye Mask

Dream: I am trying to find a way to get my daughter on a plane at the end of term. There is a bus which connects the schools to the airport, and it runs on a day which is marked in the calendar as “Removals Day”. I decide she should go on this bus. Then I feel bad for shunting her off and decide I should go myself. I will visit my mother in Spain. After that, I am in a cut off place, alone. There is a packet with some chalky material in it and I know somehow that this is a sort of face paint for pretending that one is dead. People do this, I realise, because they want to know what it’s like to be dead. I ask myself, my dream self, that is, if this is what it’s like to be dead. And if so, will I still be able to speak to my friends, who are like shades, gathered around me but untouchable.

There are various personal interpretations for this dream. But the purpose of this project to is write about things from a shamanic perspective. The dream was accompanied by a feeling of disembodiment and guilt. It is a traditional shamanic activity, to journey to the land of the dead. I can accept that this curiosity is part of my desire to work shamanically. I trust the feeling as being the terrible tension that is generated between the body and the soul as the soul explores its relations with death. I have experienced it already in deep trance states.

Later, I got up and went to the sea. It seemed terrifying to me, and I began to interpret everything in terms of my imminent, personal death. Part of me was aware that the sea was coming alive for me in a strictly symbolic sense: that it was fully embodying its terrifying, deadening aspects, the loss of land, of ground under one’s feet, the loss of the dead in the land, in the soil, in the earth itself. The loss of place. I reminded myself, as I stepped into the waves, that this was Mare Nostrum: the Mediterranean, and yet the sea of alchemical tradition: a psychological sea, but one with its own spirit, not limited to human subjectivity.

This didn’t help. I didn’t really expect it to. I formulated an intent. It had to be simple. There wasn’t much left of my ego functioning in the wake of that dream. I was consumed with regret and guilt. So my intent was: to swim out to the artifical reefs (about 200 yards out, on a fairly windy day, with white horses) and to see if there are any fish for me.

The journey: I swam, and I had brought my goggles. Every time I dipped my head under the water, I felt more split between two worlds. I am a very experienced swimmer and usually feel very peaceful and at home in the sea. Today was quite disturbing, by contrast. There was a small black fish hiding behind a rock, but mostly the bottom was sand, grasslike weeds, small rocks, black spiky sea-urchins and stuff that looks like the fungus Jew’s ear, but silvery beige, not black. I kept swimming, feeling as if the water was somehow resisting my body. Usually I feel that I cut through it easily, silk and oil on my skin. I got to the gap in the reef and looked down. Nothing. I swam a few more strokes, and washed the steam off the inside of my goggles. A brief glimpse of two grey fish with a black bar near the cloaca that I hadn’t seen before. Gone again. Rinsed goggles again. Trod water. Waves were coming in from passing power boats. I stuck my head down again and spotted some small fish with a hunchback look and fins like the tails of house-martins. They approached me. I took more breath, swam a few feet to keep a healthy distance from the reef, and ducked under again. They completely surrounded my body. Whichever way I swam, they followed. They approached my toes when I wasn’t looking and then darted coyly away. If I stuck my toe out towards them, they would be able to feel the wave of pressure that my movement produced, and swim out of the way effortlessly. Indeed, they were almost pushed away by it. I felt their lack of guilt, and realised that the dead are sometimes referred to as food for fish. I realised that we also feed on the fish and also the dead. I thanked the fish and swam back.

Chinese spirit money

Looking back on the experience, I feel that perhaps the imaginal world keeps its perfect distance from the thrusting mind that tries to grasp it. I could grasp some of my guilt, but I thought of all the mothers who had died young in both my materal and paternal lines, leaving their children too young. I formulated a ritual of burning Chinese spirit money for those maternal dead, as I rode home on my bike, remembering a recent dream in which my ancestor stick was floating in the sea, and I had to go and pick it out of the water and plant it in the ground.

Geordie's Wood Clackmannanshire, where you can dedicate trees to the dead or the living

The act of ancestor rituals puts the dead in their place and the living in theirs, and ensures that we carry the burden which is proper to us. This shared burden means that the unborn, the future, can come into being.

It is my belief that the dead appreciate being taken care of in this way. A dream I had about a year ago went thus:

I am looking for the grave of my grandmother (father’s mother) Angelici. I know it is in a Catholic churchyard or cemetery in North London. In the dream I am cycling down the road to JF’s house and see a church and wonder if that is where her grave is. So I stop on the left hand side of the road and ask my father, who looks strangely changed, like Adolph Menjou but with ginger moustache and eyebrows. He shows me that he has been sending flowers to her grave every week, and has kept a careful ledger of all the expenditure; money paid out, the name of the florist, the cemetery location and even the plot number. He says she is buried in Sauchiecarnoustie (or some weird Scottish name). It is a very bright sunny day and there are daffodils and fresh flowers in fields beside the road.

This dream followed about two years of regular burnings of Chinese spirit money for my father and other ancestors.

The Christian tradition made a radical move in taking the dead out of the tomb, and enabling Christians to cast their burdens on Christ, who is oppositionally crucified on the sort of pain I would be asking the dead to share with me, to make room for my daughter, for all the daughters. These are very different positions theologically, but psychologically they do the same job. They ground shadow, stick it in the earth, honour and feed love, and transform the future.

Robert Harrison makes the point that the Christian tradition is eminently portable; it partakes of a universal spirit, freed from the close physical ties to the tomb, which doesn’t tie people to one village, to their dead, or the making of a name as a warrior. Modern paganism, in my view, is built on this legacy, and consists of a compensatory ‘growing down’ at the roots, and a search for the light within the earth. I don’t see how we can reconstruct the same relationships with the land and the dead that pagans long ago had. We can’t keep still long enough. But we can construct relationships nonetheless, using our intent, and we can adopt lands, and ancestors, too, and weave them into our contemporary lives, and stories.

Post script: I have since discovered that two women drowned in the sea in separate incidents a few miles further up the coast from where I made this journey, probably on the same day. I have also read a review of Kathryn Wood Madden’s book about the Dark Light of the Soul.

In it, she writes that the soul yearns to return to a

“psychoid, archetypal layer of the collective unconscious as a deep layer of existence in which a breakthrough experience of the numinous points to a pre-differentiated reality” (2008, p. 241).

Her reviewer in the journal Quadrant, Pacifica Graduate Institute professor, Denis Patrick Slattery, also points out that she links this experience of the abyss to Sophia. As do I. As I link my sea journey above to Jung’s explorations of the pleroma. And as the whale image in my recent dream links me to all of these.