I dreamt of Hermes again. When shows up in disguise in a dream, his eyes give him away — they drift and look in different directions. Not “lazy eye” — there’s nothing lazy about his gaze in any direction. But no matter what mortal form he takes, his drift of vision always lets me spot him.
Not so difficult this time. He was sitting across the bar from me; long topcoat and rumpled red hair, scruffy — kind of like how Thom Yorke looks in The Smile’s latest video.
He made it clear in a previous dream that his constant dropping crises in my lap, year after year, was for my own benefit. I don’t like doing this to you over and over he said. But you don’t move on and grow unless I do. Too often you stay in a bad situation out of misplaced loyalty or hope or because you are afraid that what security you have will go. Funny. It does anyway. You know that now.
So it’s to keep me from staying where I won’t thrive, I said.
Where you won’t survive, he said. I’ve got a mandate, a reason, to make sure you keep vital and excited and walking this path. And I have to push you to do it so you don’t die on the vine in spirit, and also so you literally don’t die. And you know what and who I am talking about.
In the dream, I trace my finger around the rim of my shotglass. But why? Why me?
He was quiet; both eyes eventually came together away from whatever worlds he was seeing into at the same time and he looked directly at me. Because your ancestors prayed to me to make sure you do endure, survive, move forward, thrive. They asked; they made sure I heard them. So I have.
I froze. That someone, possibly centuries ago, could think in terms of making sure I stayed forever hungry for knowledge, gnosis, and mystery, enough to make some sacrifice to this scruffy god of the ways sitting having a shot with me… It was almost too much to absorb…
I awoke, again seeing as clearly as I did my first post-surgery day, the stars Castor and Pollux out my window. If I’m meant to look into both worlds like the psychopomp Hermes, I need to clearly see in this one…
The Ouroboros is a ubiquitous symbol in Western Occultism, and is a common symbol seen in other cultural traditions of the world. It’s more than the serpent eating its tail. Serpents, as they grow, shed their skin; it quite literally no longer fits them and can no longer contain them the way they were before. The encircling serpent is the visual lesson of this growing, shedding, growing, shedding as constant, lifelong, eternal. There is no just one point of being born again, when everything changes and then you get to sit in your newfound status for the rest of your existence. You are constantly growing, changing, forced to transform, pushed out of your skin, over and over — because if you don’t, you’ll die. The serpent grabs its own tail and hangs on so it can anticipate and bear witness to its own transformation, and push forward with the next one. It simultaneously looks back and looks forward. What it doesn’t do is stop. The lesson of the process put in symbolic message as the Ouroboros is this: it will change. It can’t stay the same. You can’t stay the same. You can’t stop and drop out if you tried. If you try to, you’ll be forced out of your skin. You’ll be forced to confront your own change and growth, and the truth that nothing in life is stable. You will move forward and grab your own tail… or you will cease to be.
I’m in a group of women who are exploring the spiritual meaning of our changing bodies; we are all menopausal or thereabouts. And while none of us is anywhere near croning, we are digging deep into our experiences to determine what this time can mean and what power it contains, rather than believe what the medical industry or the marketplace says it should.
This round we have been journaling about moments in our past that literally blew us off course that caused us suffering on our way to womanhood; essentially, we are cleaning out our spiritual closets.
And it has been hard. For all of us.
My journaling has forced me to contend with the damaging legacy of my mother. She died in 2009 of a self-inflicted prescription drug overdose, after years of doping herself through the remainder of her life, rather than find meaning in it outside of what she was told to believe.
Our relationship was terrible, without dwelling too much on specifics. She was poorly treated for a number of emotional illnesses, abusive, and she deceived doctors into letting her self-medicate rather than try to find any meaning or growth in her pain. Crises dropped in her lap in the form of medical emergencies, financial nightmares, anger at everyone around her, and she remained devoted out of habit to a God that no longer gave her comfort. She pushed everyone away with her own bitterness, and she drugged herself out of trying to make sense of it all, and of feeling it. She hated her marriage, but believed she couldn’t leave; she couldn’t stand us, her children, and the problematic adults we became (in my and my sister’s case, educated; in my brother’s, disabled). She believed her pain and depression were punishments she didn’t deserve and understand. She felt no freedom coming from the changes inevitably making up her life. She had no purpose. All she did have was a worldview, pummeled into her head, symbolized by a corpse on a cross, that this world and life was to suffer through — things will get better after you die, and then you don’t have to come back. She accepted that, took too many pills, and died in her sleep.
While I’m writing as part of the contemplation on the next meaningful phase in my life — one my mother chose not to embrace or experience — I’m forced to make peace with that. And it hits me in the writing that it’s this life of a Pagan witch, a magician, an occultist, and a spiritual boundary-pusher that, while it has cost me dearly in a lot of ways over the years, it has also provided me with the revelations, the catharses, the never-ending hunger for more understanding, and the celebration of change and so much precious meaning. It has provided me with fellowship and tribe. It’s also kept me alive.
The tragic thing about the sort of Christianity that suffused my mother’s life is that there is within it a story of death and rebirth, of profound transformation, and of that process giving you the power to change, heal, and move on. Too many canonical Christians believe that only Christ was capable of that, and that they are stuck in a damaged world until they die physically, and only then are they allowed to move past their pain and lack of purpose.
Esoteric Christianity, instead, provides the interpretation that anyone can be a Christ, and that Jesus was but an avatar, an example, of what they can strive to become while alive.
But, well, that’s Occultism. Against the rules. And it’s just too much for some folks to absorb when all you want is for the pain to stop.
Paganism provides the theatre of the seasons, the lessons of nature, the cycles of perpetual change that we are all part of. The Ouroboros provides the example of the perpetual inner change that we are also a part of, and no restrictions made on what the circle of existence presents for us. It never ends. And what a blessing.
I have suffered too. Part of this journaling process is coming to terms with the big moments in life that broadsided me. But there also comes a point where I can accept that my traumas and shocks are part of who I am, too — the demons I have for tea– and that, just like shedding my skin, I will not be imprisoned in that forever. The skin will come off– it must.
And yes, it means for a while you’re vulnerable and raw to the world — but the new skin is more protection than a shell for the life we are meant to live. To move between worlds, your boundaries have to be permeable. The minute you harden up, you start to die.
I’m sure biting your own tail hurts. But hang on. You’ll move through it. And the next time it happens you’ll have learned and know you can withstand it. It will keep granting you joy and meaning. And you will not just be given the strength to push forward, but a new set of eyes to see, excitement about the new self you are, and a new way of being in the world.
May she be elevated: Michele Marie Chekouras Pizza – may she know rebirth.
Hail Hermes, god of the ways, of change, of messages and of crossroads. I’ll never doubt you again.
Rose in the Retort 