ARCHONTIC

The myth of the Dream

It is now impossible to understand Gnosticism as a continuation of the Egyptian mysteries. Whenever people read the Gnostic gospels, they automatically assume, that it is simply an earlier version of their familiar biblical tales, one that is historically interesting to some, odd and confusing to others. They cannot see that these stories were stood on their head, so that an older and more intrinsic understanding of the cosmos would be revealed.

No one seems to understand that the rulers are terrifying animal headed powers, and that the image of such terrible gods is as old as Egypt herself. The ancient rulers were hardly beneficent, and it was up to the priests to enact the rights by which such forces could be dealt with by man.

And so it is as it has always been, that through the mastery of the terrible dark, arrives the knowledge bright. It is so in every tradition that ever breathed. The awesome untamed power is the visceral path to understanding.

The visionary state transcends both wakefulness and dreams. Underneath its irresistible force the visionary is helpless in all but one way-to allow the vision, or to reduce its power. Under such circumstances the predictions of Steiner, about an injection to cut off the spirit are laughable. The black hope of transhumanists wax absurd. There is no control of the lower order that has the slightest effect upon the higher. As the ancients said, the lower order is weak, and what it takes credit for was never its own.

The nature of vision is often beyond the ability of the visionary to describe in words, music and sculpture, painting and drawing always come closer to the real thing, unbound as they are by the need for linearity.

And even language itself becomes a division between what is real, and what is true, a choice subject to the realm of myth, or the tyranny of lower comprehension.

It is no surprise that in this late hour it is tyranny that ushers in the greatest interest.

The dream that is even an image is a story, should one explore it enough to tell it. Myth works well with dreaming, because dreaming is given all at once, and the best way to describe eternity has always been mythically.

This the why behind the power of the Rune to work with the higher resonance, and the reason why the Rune opens itself in dreams far more strongly than with the waking mind.

The mythic thought that accompanies each Rune is privy to this dark domain, it is open and it leads through a visionary path that includes the grandest cosmic, and the quiet and intensely personal. The Rune reveals that there is no division between body and spirit, for those who dwell within that power.

Yet this material world is jealous of grace. It distrusts that which is not tactile to hold. It is this thought that makes this place so susceptible to deception, so completely cut off from finer forms and the blinding glare of spiritual light.

This is a place crowded with words, yet missing sentences. It’s the horrible feast, where the more one eats, the hungrier one grows, until the howling demands of the black hole rule the soul.

Yet even as I write this there are pioneers who seek to return to a place where dreaming regains its mythic vibe. They seek to restore the lost capacity to find purpose in dreams. Theirs is not the only one, it is work, and as such it has hardly begun to tap the mystic possibility.