Sunday, May 8, 2016

Spiral path


The spiral turns up in many ways, from the double helix of DNA, to Celtic patterns on a magical dress, to a rickety old wooden spiral staircase in a dream that may become a golden road to the sky.
    One of my favorite ways of embarking on a journey to the Upper World is to picture moving up a spiral staircase. When I returned from a trip to Ireland some thirty years ago, it was the pattern of the double spiral that I had seen on a guardian stone at Newgrange that was the portal for the big night journey that took me to the ancient healer of indigenous American tradition that I call Island Woman.
    The intercoiling serpents of the caduceus are a double spiral; the single serpent coiled around the staff of Asklepios is a single spiral. Surely Jacob's ladder, in the great night vision of Bethel, was a spiral.   
    The spiral turns on the ceiling and walls of the Hypogeum of Malta and spins on great stone screens from the Goddess temple of Taxien.
   
"The spiral is the supreme symbol of evolution. Combining cycle and line, it epitomizes entrainment plus change, it replicates an old movement yet drives somewhere new," writes Katya Walter in The Tao of Chaos. "The spiral spins the cosmos together and knits us into being."
     I wrote a poem in which the double spiral as the Eyes of the Goddess, holding the codes of birth and death, creation and dissolution. I wrote it after returning in a visionary journey to the great temple-tomb of Newgrange:


The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape
And shows me the map in the gateway stone:
Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;
Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;
A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.
I am here to practice the art of rebirthing. 

     I painted a double spiral on the drum I use to power journeys between the worlds. 
     In our life journeys, it is desirable to put ourselves on the spiral path, so that when life loops back - as it seems to do - to familiar crossroads and challenges - we are not bound to the dumb wheel of repetition, but are able to view a situation we have encountered before from a higher level of awareness, and so make better choices.


The full text of "Eyes of the Goddess" is in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Exclesior Editions/SUNY Press.

Photo: Spiral way in Latvia by RM.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sr Robert Moss, seu texto me lembou uma uma viagem consciente que fiz, onde tive ajuda de uma pessoa com experiência em hipnose, eu me vi na forma de espirais de DNA. Essa espiral vinha do Criador (Deus) até as moléculas do meu corpo. Foi muito rica aquela vivência. obrigada por me recordar isso.

Mr Robert Moss, These text reminded a conscious trip, where I had, and I had help of a person with experience in hypnosis, I found myself, in the form of spirals of DNA. That spiral from the Creator (God) until the molecules of my body. It was a very rich experience. Thank you for reminding me.

Russian son said...

I feel the spiral as a magnetic force. It makes me want to ask a question 'how far down the rabbit hole you wish to go?' it feels like an attractor of what i wish to attract in my life or a circumstance is attracting me. And a certain investment in a situation.