Once upon a timeless time, on an island called Crete in the Mediterranean Sea, there lived a woman named Ariadne. One day she fell in love with a guy named Theseus and gave him a skein of string. Her idea was to have him unspool the string as he wound his way through a labyrinth to kill a monster at the center, after which he would turn around and follow the string back out to safety. Theseus was all for it even though concocting the scheme would have been far beyond his mental powers. Alas, when the deed was done, his valiant but scanty brain cells forgot to take Ariadne with him when he sailed back home to Athens.

Ariadne was standing on the beach, watching the ship disappear and wondering how she had fallen for such an outrageous airhead, when a gleaming chariot swooped down from the sky drawn by a pair of panthers. Holding the reins was no mere pin-up boy, preoccupied with flexing his mortal thews, but instead it was a god. It was Dionysus, one of the twelve great shining ones of the mighty Greek pantheon, and he was thrilled to find Ariadne. He leaped from the chariot, took her hands in both of his, and spoke in a voice that made her bones tingle. Come with me to Olympus, love. That’s where you belong. She replied, Are those panthers?? He gave her a wink and said, They’ll carry us to heaven if you’re willing. She cast one last glance over the empty ocean, turned back to the glory of Dionysus, and then she said, Yes.

He kissed her hands and off they went. As a wedding present he gave her a fabulous crown which he later turned into stars. As the story goes, they loved each other ever after. You heard that right. Dionysus was the only one of the Greek gods who was able to handle commitment. What’s more, there are those who believe that in earlier times, Ariadne was a powerful goddess in her own right. If that’s the case, the story shows Dionysus raising the diminished goddess back to her rightful status. He’s also the god who gave us the gift of wine. So when you swirl a pinot noir in the belly of a wine glass, you’re swirling more than just a beverage. You’re swirling the spirit of Dionysus.

Who exactly is this swirling spirit? Well, Dionysus relishes life. He’s fun and he’s intense, with a spontaneity and exuberance that the other gods lack. He’s playful, faithful, raucous, ebullient. And remember, he’s immortal, so all his traits have divine proportions and nothing about him is bounded by time. We’re talking about spontaneity so powerful that it’s a religious experience, exuberance so profound as to become holy, and playfulness so deep as to render the passage of hours irrelevant. Dionysus can lift our moribund moods with his sacred zest, the way he lifted Ariadne.

Wine, however, like Dionysus, is strong, and it’s complex. It’s not a beverage for quenching thirst. It’s an elixir that demands respect. The right amount is an infusion of joy, but too much is a plunge into oblivion and regret. Wine can heighten celebration, stimulate conversation, and deepen friendship, but it can also deaden feelings, darken depression, and damage relationships. Remember the panthers who drew the chariot? Harnessed, they speed the journey of the soul. Unchecked, they can kill. Dionysus demonstrates the knack of harnessing.

A glass of wine is a living thing, in the literal, biological sense, animated by the microorganisms that fermented the juice. It’s also a living thing in the senses of the imagination, exactly the way Dionysus is, so it doesn’t matter whether you actually drink wine or not. The idea alone honors his spirit and makes it easy to imagine partaking of life with the same enthusiasm as the shining one who cherishes and champions the goddess.

So whether the glass in your hand is literal, imaginal, or maybe even both at once, look into those jeweled tones. Inhale the bouquet. Swirl the wine until it’s dizzy, but most of all, listen. Can you hear the sacred question posed, to you and you alone? Can you hear the invitation? If you’re willing, if you say Yes, then lift the glass. Sip that spirit into yourself and savor the liquid epiphany, because the true gift of Dionysus is that he can take us all to heaven anytime we let him.

From The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight, by Robert D. Pelton:

The trickster speaks — and embodies — a vivid and subtle religious language, through which he links animality and ritual transformation, shapes culture by means of sex and laughter, ties cosmic process to personal history, empowers divination to change boundaries into horizons, and reveals passages to the sacred embedded in daily life.

From Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, by Marie-Louise von Franz:

Psychologically here, there is what the alchemists call the union of the cosmic world, which means getting beyond the microcosm of the human being and being open to life itself, in itself — to be related to the whole of life through watching the process of synchronicity.

From Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, by Maya Deren:

In Voudoun the cosmic drama of man consists not of a dualism, a conflict of the irreconcilable down-pull of flesh and the up-pull of spirit; it is, rather, an almost organic dynamic, a process by which all that which characterizes divinity — intelligence, power, energy, authority, wisdom — evolves out of the flesh itself.

Overhead in the dining hall, early in the week:
“Unicorns are in now, didn’t you know?”

Text message from Michaelle during lecture break:
“What’s name for creature that evokes lust? ;;) not a succubus… Not Dionysus follower… Must be something like that”

Jeffrey Kripal, on a semiotic approach to the paranormal:
“Anomalies mean something. They’re messages. If you believe them, you’re in trouble. If you explain them, you’re in trouble. If you listen to them, you’re on the right track.”

A student talking on her cell phone, smiling:
“Love is always more fun.”

A neuroscientist named Tulving, quoted on a PowerPoint slide:
“The imagination of the future can override stories of the past.”

In the dining hall, Thursday afternoon:
Amber: Persephone’s a little ditzy.
Rachel: Uh, I don’t think so!!
Olivia: Well becoming the Queen of the Underworld kind of negates the ditziness.
Rachel: Excuse me, were you guys not listening?? She didn’t BECOME the Queen of the Underworld, she always WAS. Chris was very clear on that!
Olivia: Oh, I have a bone to pick with that.
Rachel: Ok I did my fucking paper on fucking Persephone and there’s a whole book on how Persephone was ALWAYS the Queen of the fucking UNDERWORLD!!

I’ve been encountering the color Blue with some frequency lately, especially in dreams, and something happened when I was in California for class last weekend that changed the way I relate to Blue. I’ve always loved Blue, but until last weekend, I would have said, “I’ve always loved blue.” Feel the difference? I’ll try to explain.

Last Saturday I attended a lecture about dream work by Stephen Aizenstat. Dr. Aizenstat is a psychologist for whom not only the waking world is animated by soul (i.e. a tree is a being with soul, a house is a being with soul, a rock is a being with soul), but the dreaming world also is populated by soulful beings. For him, dream images exist as entities in their own right, fully as much manifestations of the natural world as you or I, and fully as much ensouled. His dream work is less about analysis and interpretation than about establishing and tending relationships with the images in dreams.

The lecture was in one of the school’s classrooms, with maybe twenty people attending. Early on, Dr. Aizenstat asked if anyone had a dream image they’d like to talk about, and I raised my hand and asked what it meant if a color recurred in dreams. He asked a few follow-up questions. I told him the color was blue, and that I loved it. He asked about my childhood associations with it, and I said the sky, birds, a blue crayon. He asked what it felt like in the dreams, and I said there was a sense of vastness and spaciousness. Then he asked if I wanted to work this image, to help him demonstrate his method of dream work to the group. Not knowing what I was in for, I said sure. He had me go up to the front of the room and sit in a chair beside him. Our chairs were situated at angles, directly facing neither the audience nor each other. In spite of that, he locked onto a tractor-beam eye contact with me that he only broke a few times to turn to the audience and say something like, “See what just happened?”

My memory of the conversation isn’t linear or temporal, not in the way of clocks and calendars. It’s more oceanic and dreamlike, but I think he asked me to imagine what blue felt like in my body. I described it as an invisible sparkle in my torso. He brought up the vastness and spaciousness again, and he mentioned the title of the Joseph Campbell book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. I said I loved that. He said Why? I said, Because it reminds me of the spiral, which is my favorite symbol, the way it shows the path to the infinity within and the infinity without, all the way out into the universe. It goes forever in both directions. It’s my map to the eternal.

At some point during all this I began to feel the presence of blue not just in my body but in the room. It was a palpable field all around but strongest from the floor up, about to the level of my waist, and Dr. Aizenstat was speaking a language of shamanistic wisdom: Meet blue in the way of blue, and Blue moves things, it has a life of its own, and Water turns all things to soul. I was in a wide-eyed and multi-layered mode of consciousness — tingling, vibrant, but calm, too. He asked me what I could offer to blue, what I could give it. Without thinking or planning, I heard myself say, “I would give it everything.” The presence of blue grew stronger, more tactile, more blue. I was awash in it, and I was staring into Dr. Aizenstat’s eyes, and he was staring into mine, and he said, “Wow.” Everything held still except for blue breathing its blue breath. I said, “Do you feel that buoyancy?” He said, “Yes.” That was the moment when blue became Blue.

If you’ve ever read this blog before, I hope you know about my love of the imaginal realm, and how deeply I value the invisible dimension of experience. But I’m telling you, this was altogether different, this mutual imagining, soul to soul, and sharing the experience with the souls of other people. It was intimate. It was erotic, by which I mean Eros burst in and emptied his quiver into my open heart. There was no way to keep from falling in love, with Blue and Dr. Aizenstat and everyone in the room.

Afterwards, one of my first “normal” thoughts was, “What the hell did that mean, I’d give Blue everything?” I think I was afraid Blue would want my car, or my house, or God forbid, my stash of notebooks. But on the way home — during a long layover at the San Francisco airport, in fact — I realized Blue isn’t interested in that kind of everything. Blue wants to imbue. It wants to touch and tint all the magic that always happens: play, desire, pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, love. Blue’s everything is life itself, and I strongly suspect that whatever it’s given becomes a reciprocal gift, poured back and forth and back and forth, a thousand times a thousand times, in a thousand luminous shades of Blue.

One of my current school assignments is to “engage creatively” with one of my own dream images. I chose a dream I had a few years ago, which I remembered like this:

I’m walking down a glass corridor — glass floor, walls, and ceiling, but it’s dark outside. At the end, the hallway opens out onto a vast, starry field. Right in front of me is a huge transparent fetus, outlined in pale blue against the darker background.

Ok, first of all, we’re not talking about a literal pregnancy. Dreams happen in the realm of soul, so this is a soul baby. It’s new life in the world of the psyche, i.e. the inner world, i.e. the invisible world. So the image suggests things like growth, development, and imminence. The vast dimensions of the baby mean that all those associations take on a certain vastness as well. That fits with an excerpt from the first freewrite I did about the dream, imagining a conversation between the fetus and me:

Child: It’s about love. It’s about bigger love than you ever thought possible, given and received.
Joanna: How does one prepare for that?
Child: By loving, and by letting yourself be loved. I’m the child of the universe. And you’re part of the universe. Everyone is. That means I’m the child of everyone. All of you. Are you ready?

Are we ready? Hm. Lots to think about there. But then it occurred to me that I should go back to my journal and find the original dream. It was on September 16, 2010:

a long dim tunnel, at the end clear glass above, on both sides & straight ahead with a view into a huge dark blue space that is apparently a womb with placenta & fetus transparent but outlined in light light blue, not quite white. Tom Brokaw had died of a heart attack and so was doing public service announcements sitting in a chair wearing a dark blue fleece jacket covered with travel patches saying that the best way to avoid a heart attack is to love and be loved.

The details changed in my memory, and I’d forgotten about the ghost of Tom Brokaw. He’s an image of a wise old man, a voice trusted by millions, a figure who’s been all over the world and learned a thing or two, a representative of an older generation (older way of being) which is now ending and making way for the new. And he said nearly the same thing as the child in the writing exercise. All that love stuff is coming through loud and clear, yeah? I’m thinking the fetus is an image of vast new life and vast new love — love’s great capacity and potential on both the visible and invisible wavelengths.

And isn’t it marvelous how dreams weave the visible and invisible together? The visible alone is flat and inert, and the invisible alone is, well, invisible. But dreams use images derived from the waking world to create pictures of what’s going on below the surface, where normal instruments of measurement and analysis break down every time.

This semester one of my classes is called “Dreams, Visions, Myths,” and at our last class we learned about how dreams were “incubated,” or induced, in ancient Greece in temples of Asclepius, the god of healing. People visited these temples hoping to be cured of various ailments. After a ritual bath and sacrifice, they were led into the temple to a stone slab where they would sleep that night. The hope was to receive a healing dream and leave the temple cured the following morning. An inscription at an Asclepieium in Africa reads, “Go in good, come out better.” (See Healing Dream and Ritual by C.A. Meier for more.)

So I was sitting there in class, taking notes as fast as I could because it was all so fantastic, and next thing I knew the teacher said, “We’re going to incubate some dreams now and see what happens.” She had us push back all the chairs, and we each got a blanket to spread out on the floor, just like in kindergarten. Then she turned out the lights, and led us — single-file and silent — out the room by one door, around the building, and back into the room by another door. We lay down, each on our own blanket, and she talked us through a guided meditation where we were to imagine we were on stone slabs in a temple. Then she stopped talking, and the room was quiet for half an hour.

I lay there thinking, This is fun, but come on, are we really supposed to dream? In half an hour? Lying on a hardwood floor somewhere in California? And so on and so forth, and next thing I knew, right over the mental chatter, something happened. I don’t know whether to call it dream or vision or imagination, but it was definitely visual, it occurred in the realm of the inner eye, and it wasn’t consciously willed. Here’s how I scribbled it into my notebook right afterwards:

I’m in a dark area. Behind me someone reaches forward and hands me something. Without turning around I reach back and take it, like a baton in a relay race. But it’s not a baton, it’s a stoppered vial. I open it and a pale blue mist rushes up and takes the shape of a beautiful woman. She smiles at me, leans down, cradles my jaw with both hands, and kisses my lips. Then she envelops me, the mist is all around my body, then it flows in through my skin. I exhale into the vial, exhaling the pale blue mist. I put the stopper back on the vial, and hand it forward, to another hand, this one reaching back toward me out of the darkness.

In my memory, the mist tingled inside my body, and the blue woman was really happy to see me. It felt fantastic, and it was clear that it was to be shared. So, here you go. Yours can be the hand that receives the vial next, if you’re so inclined.

From The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell:

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other–different as life and death, as day and night. … Nevertheless–and here is a great key to understanding myth and symbol–the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

Oh yes. This is precisely why “realism” feels so flat to me: it willfully persists in forgetting about the sublime. Or worse, it pretends no such thing exists. Yuck. That’s no way to live.

From How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, by Luc Brisson, trans. by Catherine Tihanyi:

Love, as any philosopher knew, is the principle that enables the cohesion of the elements with each other so as to form the universe.

That’s my favorite sentence in the whole book. Maybe my favorite sentence ever.

From Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, by Heinrich Zimmer:

When the divine life substance is about to put forth the universe, the cosmic waters grow a thousand-petaled lotus of pure gold, radiant as the sun. This is the door or gate, the opening or mouth, of the womb of the universe.

Now there’s a creation image with a sense of aesthetics! And vitality! And friendliness toward the feminine! I feel refreshed.

From The Upanishads: The Wisdom of the Hindu Mystics, trans. Prabhavananda & Manchester:

This moon is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this moon. The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of this moon, and the intelligent, immortal being, the soul in the individual being–each is honey to the other.

Do you think my teachers will mind if all my papers are about how much I love every single thing we read? By the way, that honey moon will be full on Tuesday, August 20. You can get details at this handy-dandy US Naval Observatory page.