I have been working on this book on the Soul for twenty years and am putting the first part of it (three chapters) onto the website today (April 2nd, 2007).

The Dream of the Water:
A Quest for the Soul
©Anne Baring

Robin Baring - Return to the Source

CHAPTER ONE

My Quest Begins

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; It freely chooses the men and women in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.    
                                                                                                                              C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Each life is a pilgrimage, a quest and a journey of discovery. My journey, my quest, began with something that happened to me in 1942 when I was eleven years old. It was a hot summer day and I had been told to take a rest after lunch. Lying on my bed, drowsy with the heat, expecting nothing except sleep, I suddenly saw an intense purple light suffuse the whole room. Then, abruptly and without warning I was expelled from my body. I felt my eyes close in surrender to an irresistible power, and the bed beneath me open as if it were cut by a knife. I was pushed down through the opening and the bed closed over me. In terror I struggled to shout for help, to move my arms and legs, to open my eyes but my body refused to respond. A rushing and roaring like a waterfall pressed on my ears and all about me. I shot through a tight channel and was spewed out, as if from a catapult, into a vast and silent darkness. I waited for what might come next, terrified and bewildered by the shock of losing touch with the only life I knew. As I waited in that dark immensity, I heard two words: “I AM.” I don’t know, shall never know, if more words were to follow. Overcome with terror at being alone in space with this disembodied voice, I found myself re-entering the channel and was plunged once more into that roaring, deafening vortex of sound, emerging from it to find myself lying in my bed, alive in a familiar world. How often have I wished that I had had the courage to stay in that silent place and listen.
          Unsurprisingly perhaps, this inner experience was the prima materia that initiated a lifelong quest. I had to know why I had left my body for that mysterious encounter so many years ago. I had to discover the meaning of that experience. Haltingly, understanding very little to begin with, I could only follow the path of discovery, integrating what was revealed to me stage by stage. Soon after that experience, my mother told me about the channelled messages she had received while meeting with her sister, sister-in-law and a friend in New York, where we were living at the time.
           Their messages began in February 1943, at the height of the Second World War, on a winter afternoon when they had met to talk about their fears and hopes for the future. Suddenly, although the sky was clear and blue, the window of the room they were in was blown open by a powerful blast of wind, accompanied by a roar of thunder. My mother and the others cried out in terror and fell on their knees, awed by the feeling of a tremendous presence in the room. A voice spoke to them and told them to write down what they heard.
           Filled with grief over the slaughter taking place in Europe, my mother found the courage to ask what they could do to help the world. They were told to follow their hearts. Only through listening to and honouring what was trying to reach them from spiritual guides in another dimension of reality could they come to a deeper understanding of how they could most effectively help the world. One of these guides identified himself as St. Francis.
          These channeled messages continued for my mother and one of her friends for some twenty years. They warned of a future catastrophe for the Earth and humanity and said that this warning should be passed on to anyone who was willing to listen. If enough people could become aware of the danger and respond to the guidance trying to reach them, the full force of the catastrophe could be mitigated or even averted. The messages told them to study the history of early Christianity, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Reformation and, in particular, to study how the teaching of Christ had been distorted by the Church established in His name. Repeatedly they urged them to follow the thread that would lead them to something they called the “Dream of the Water," and to find their way to the Holy Mountain. They also told them to look for a mysterious Stone “buried at the foot of the Tree”.
          At first my mother and her friend (her sister-in-law was tragically killed in 1945 and her sister moved to another country) took these images literally and looked for a place of refuge from the impending catastrophe, even spending many years searching for a Holy Mountain and a tree under which a special stone might be buried. Gradually it dawned on them that these images were not to be understood literally but were metaphors for a state of being or state of consciousness which they needed to develop within themselves.
          I discovered as I grew up that there was no cultural recognition of this kind of experience, and so, not wishing to seem ‘different’ from my school friends, I found it best never to speak of it. I lived in two worlds: the world of everyday life to which I gradually adapted, and another world which carried a powerful attraction for me, although it frightened me because it evoked a feeling of strangeness and the danger of not being acceptable to others. Like the ugly duckling, I felt that I did not fit into the life and concerns of my contemporaries nor did I know how to relate to that other dimension which had so abruptly drawn me into it. That early experience, so shocking and unexpected, cast a long shadow over my life. For years, I swung between trying to live in the everyday world of school, university and career, and trying to understand the experience which had shattered "normal" reality and set my feet on the path of a quest.
          To begin with, in the 1940’s and 50’s there was almost no one with whom to share this quest, leaving me with a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Within my own family, my American mother was the bridge to the unseen 'other' world. With my English father I could never speak of these 'secret' things. My parents’ marriage suffered from this lack of communication between them and their inability to share what was of deepest significance to my mother. My mother was a poet and an artist; my father was a soldier – one of a long line of men who had served their country - and a rationalist. Yet beneath his rigidly controlled--and controlling--surface, he was a deeply sensitive, gifted and vulnerable man. Unfortunately, he could not understand what my mother was talking about and built a defensive wall against her which was expressed as an unconscious compulsion to destroy her trust in herself. Through ridicule, criticism and a tyrannical control over her life, he tried to ensure that her entire attention was focused on himself. Unsurprisingly, our home was an unhappy place in which to grow up.
           Years later, I came to understand that because he had lost his own mother when he was a small boy, having total control over my mother was the only way he could feel emotionally secure. He therefore lived a tragic existence. Anything which hinted at the non-rational was a threat to his security and his need for control. My mother surrendered to this tyranny because her generation had no insight into the psychological roots of human behaviour and was unable to make a choice between happiness and duty. Lacking any qualifications which would have helped them to earn their living, women of her background and upbringing were conditioned to stay in unhappy marriages, to tolerate and submit to their husbands’ need for total control and to devote their lives to the care and well-being of others in the belief that this sacrificial life would somehow find favour with God. All negative feelings were denied and repressed for fear of divine punishment and social disapproval. I think it was witnessing my mother’s deep suffering that helped me later on to feel empathy with all women who were similarly suffering and unable to free themselves from oppression.
          Just before the outbreak of the Second World War my brother and I were sent on a visit to my grandmother who lived in New York. With the outbreak of the war in September 1939, she suggested to my parents that we should stay with her and go to school in New York. My grandmother was an American matriarch – powerful and authoritarian. She was also a talented artist who had lived for many years in Paris and the South of France.
          In New York, far from the war in Europe, my grandmother took me to museums and concerts. Thanks to her, I grew up aware of beauty and responsive to music and art. Although I was young – eight years old - she made sure that I knew every detail of the war in Europe: the slaughter, the hunger, the destitution and suffering of refugees and, finally, the shocking revelation of the concentration camps. Although I hated listening to her reading to me from the newspapers, I am grateful to her now because she made me aware of human suffering and human cruelty, almost a witness to them. I used to write poems asking God to end the war so I could see my mother again and return to my home in England. My mother was, in fact, able to join us in New York in 1942 but our joy at the reunion of the family was short-lived because my brother, sister and I all developed bovine tuberculosis. My younger sister was desperately ill and only just survived two major operations to remove tubercular growths from her intestines. My brother and I were sent to a sanitorium to recover, a place that was like a prison. We only saw our mother occasionally and could not understand why we had been banished to this dreadful place. Nothing encourages contemplation more than spending months in hospital. During those months I read the Bible from cover to cover with little understanding of what I was reading, yet feeling that there was something important for me to know.
        Despite the hiatus of the months in hospital, I had a wonderful education in American schools, given mainly by teachers who had escaped persecution in Europe. They introduced me to Greek and Norse mythology, literature, history, poetry, mathematics. Through their enthusiasm for their subjects they awakened in me a passionate love of learning. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
          At the end of the war, the family returned to England. The next years were disrupted by the destructive and never resolved relationship between my parents and by the suffering I endured at the hands of my new classmates. No one is more cruel than children to those whom they sense to be “different.” In those years I turned to God for help but found no comfort in the church services I was made to attend as part of the school activities. I hated the damp smell of church, the freezing cold, the heavy sense of sin and guilt, the dreary hymns, the sermons that were so condemnatory, so lacking in joy and communion with the divine. Often I felt so sick and faint that I had to leave the church. It all felt so wrong, but I didn’t know why.
          Before the war I used to be spend the holiday months in the South of France with my grandmother. After several years of exile, I longed to return to that sun-baked earth, the clear luminosity of that landscape, the star-filled sky, the rhythmic sound of the crickets and the frogs’ croaking at night, the strong, rich perfume of thyme, lavender, pine and cypress. Now,once again, it was possible to revisit this childhood paradise.
          My grandmother’s house in the South of France stood on a hilltop on the site of an ancient temple to a goddess. It was called Malbosquet, meaning “evil little wood” – named, no doubt, because the local people felt it was a place full of “spirits” and therefore to be avoided. It was a place of incredible beauty, a Garden of Eden, filled with the beauty of pink and white oleander bushes, tall dark cypress that exuded a delicious scent after rain, a fountain in which grew huge pink lotus flowers, orange trees that filled the air with the exquisite perfume of their blossoms in early spring, a rich red earth planted with vines  yielding sweet grapes and, everywhere, flowers. I remembered particularly the anemones that carpeted the earth in spring. The cloistered courtyard was filled with large brown pots that held camellias and masses of scarlet geraniums. In the distance to the West were range after range of violet hills, to the East the snow-capped mountains of the Alps. To the South, far below me and glittering distantly in the sun over a vast forest of pine and olive trees, was the Mediterranean.          
          The whole land felt alive, numinous, inhabited by unseen presences. I would wake up at dawn, inhaling the fresh smell of dew-laden grass, bursting with love of the new day. Sometimes, I would walk on the wet grass, just to feel the coolness of the dew under my bare feet. Later, I would go and sit in a grove of olive trees overlooking a deep shady gorge that plunged down to the roaring, fast-flowing river far below. At night, when there was a full moon and everything was flooded with its soft radiance, the whole place came magically alive with invisible presences. What was so wonderful about these childhood memories was that there was time simply to be and to wonder. It was here that I fell in love with the beauty of the natural world.
         The trees of that olive grove seemed to bear witness to the secrets of centuries, to the great civilizations that had flourished around the Mediterranean – Egyptian, Phoenician, Cretan, Greek, Etruscan, Roman. For millennia, owls had built their nests in the hollow spaces of the gnarled and crinkled trunks of those trees. I used to sit for hours, happy to be there among them, watching the changing light as the sun filtered through the silvery leaves. A special olive tree grew at the centre of this grove, its leaves always stirring slightly in the breeze. Although the war had separated me for six years from this much loved place, I had returned to it again and again in my imagination and now I could once again visit my favourite places. It was the country of my soul.
          In the late 1940’s it became possible once again to travel. The continent of Europe was again accessible, a place of sun and light I could escape to from the grim austerity of England. In 1947, when I was fifteen, my grandmother took me to Spain, driving down the east coast full of almond trees in blossom, to Granada and Cordoba, then blessedly free of tourists. In the great mosque at Cordoba I had my first glimpse of Moorish culture and in the silence of dawn and dusk I was able to sit alone, absorbed in the exquisite grace of the courtyards of the Alhambra, writing down a description of the beauty of the sculpted stone that entranced me.
          Later, in Italy, I gazed dumbfounded at the marvel of the Baptistery in Florence, the Duomo, and Giotto’s lily-like tower; the paintings in the Lower Church at Assisi; the Sienese Madonnas; Botticelli’s Primavera and the Birth of Venus – all in my memory like the glory of sunrise to one who sees it for the first time. Sometimes a small child gasps with delight at the sight of a new toy. I traveled through Italy on that indrawn breath of wonder. Because our travel allowance was very limited at that time, my mother and I explored Tuscany and Umbria by bus, with the local people, delighted by their lively, laughing chatter, their caged, squawking chickens, and their mountainous bundles of provisions. Each destination became a pilgrimage. Piero della Francesca’s painting of the Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro burst upon my consciousness as the startling vision of an awakened and enlightened man.
          I fell passionately in love with the painters of the early Renaissance – above all Sassetta and Fra Angelico, and all those to whom rock and earth and sky and man and angel were epiphanies of a divine ground which sustained and transfused the physical world. I felt that painting as a praising, a loving, a longing, is communication with and a method of discovering God. I was also attracted to the figure of St. Francis, for many of my mother's channeled messages had come from him and I had taken him as my spiritual mentor. I encountered him in the many paintings of his contemporaries, along with the great red angel who appeared to him and seemed to hover still in the Umbrian skies. I prayed to him for divine guidance in the little hermitage near Assisi where Christ had spoken to him from the cross, telling him to rebuild His church.
          In Italy I became aware for the first time of another kind of Christianity, one deeply rooted in people’s sense of connection with the land and with the towns and hermitages where saints had lived and taught. I responded to the incredible beauty of the landscape of Italy that had been so loved and celebrated by the ancient poets, Virgil and Horace, and felt the strong continuity between the present and the past. I absorbed the perfect proportions of the buildings and the climate of revelation that the very air of Italy seemed to breathe. I stood in awe before the genius of the architects, sculptors and masons who, working together, had been able to imagine and bring into being marvels like the Duomo at Orvieto, rising like a vision from the plain.
          When I was seventeen, another journey, further to the south, took me to an older culture that had once thrived in central Italy - to the massive walls of the city of Cortona and the Etruscan tombs with their joyous celebration of death.
          On this journey I traveled to a strong, apocalyptic wilderness on the south-east coast of southern Italy and climbed a hill on a starlit morning to attend mass and receive the blessing given to pilgrims by the Italian friar, Padre Pio (at that time disapproved of by the Catholic Church). I smelt the strong scent of violets emanating from his presence. Afterwards, as I was about to return to Rome, the taxi-driver driving me to the station insisted that I should visit the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Monte Gargano nearby, where crusaders had knelt to be blessed before embarking on their sea-journey to the Holy Land. With bowed head and holding his hat in his gnarled hands, he led me down a flight of broad stone steps into the bowels of the earth and the black, glistening walls of the shrine. Over the entrance to the cave were the words: "This is the abode of God, the Gateway to Heaven". I knew that St. Francis had hesitated to enter this cave, saying “Lord, I am not worthy to enter thy shrine.” There was no-one else there except an old woman sweeping the floor. As I knelt to pray, I burst into tears, suddenly overwhelmed by the sorrow and suffering of the world and asked the Archangel Michael for help for humanity.
          My mother was determined that I should go to university since she herself had not been able to. Oxford laid the foundation for the future – giving me the opportunity to develop my mind and extend my knowledge. I chose to study medieval history and also learned Italian in order to study the Italian Renaissance and deepen my connection to art. Many students were interested in politics but I preferred to devote all my energy to my work. The current fashion in philosophy at that time (early 50’s) was Logical Positivism. Here I had my first encounter with a purely secular “rational” approach to life and it made no sense to me. I vowed then that one day I would find the answer to the questions that perplexed me, questions that modern philosophy could not answer and did not even ask: What is the meaning and purpose of human existence? What is God? What is the source of evil?.
          Just at the end of my time at Oxford (1951), I met a man who fell in love with me and asked me to marry him. I believed myself to be in love and told my startled parents that we were going to get engaged. But a few weeks later, the dream was shattered by the shock of him telling me that he and a friend of his were accused of molesting some boy scouts near his home and that he was to be prosecuted and sent to trial for this alleged act. Like many young women at that time, I was sexually innocent and completely unaware of the fact that some men were homosexual and some bi-sexual. I certainly had no experience in recognizing the difference between a bisexual and a heterosexual man. My fiancé was charming, intelligent and very interested in the arts. I thought I had found the ideal husband.
          Homosexuality was something that was not discussed in those days and the whole subject was socially taboo until the details of the court case erupted in the media. I remember being sent to a psychiatrist who gently tried to explain to me that bisexual men did not change their habits when they married and that my fiancé would not and could not be faithful. But I was loyal to him and clung blindly to my belief in his innocence. My fiancé went to prison for a year and I was persuaded by my worried parents to go to New York during that time, to escape the publicity of the case. (Within a few years, the furore the case aroused in the general public and the sympathy for the two accused men, led to a change in the law. For the first time homosexuals could publicly acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of imprisonment).
          The whole experience profoundly affected my life because, just at the point when I was emerging into the wider world from the rather cloistered life of university, my trust in myself was totally destroyed. I withdrew into an inner world, not wanting to risk another deception. I broke off the engagement and found a job in New York working for an Austrian psychiatrist called Manfred Sakel who had developed a method of treating schizophrenia with insulin shock treatment and was looking for someone to edit the book he had written about it. That winter of 1951-2 was the truly a dark night of my soul, working day after day editing that book in a freezing cold garret at the back of his wife's dress shop. It was my first encounter with psychology and mental illness and I fell into a deep depression, unable to help myself or to ask for help, not knowing who to turn to, least of all my employer. I forgot the words of the messages and the images of the Dream of the Water; the Stone at the foot of the Tree of Life faded from memory.
         I returned to England at the end of the year and took various jobs as a secretary, none of which seemed to lead anywhere. But in 1956 and 1957, my life unexpectedly opened out in a new direction when I made two journeys to India and the Far East. To pay for my passage to India on the first journey, I trained as an air-hostess and managed to secure a temporary job with an airline (Skyways) carrying troops to Singapore in a huge Hercules aircraft. The journey itself was thrilling. When I first caught sight of the great chain of the Himalaya gleaming far above the great plain of northern India I felt like Columbus discovering America. There was no time for fear because I was ecstatically involved in the discovery of a new world, a new experience. Every moment required the focused attention of mind, heart and senses.
          India seemed to be a symbol of truth to be discovered. To me it was the symbol of the destination of all explorers - an unknown, mysterious, fabulous land. As, when a child, I believed in fairy-tales and the memory of that world of legend lingered as I grew up, so now I believed in India. It seemed as if each line of poetry that had stirred the reeds of longing, each image of beauty and fragment of what seemed to be truth, had led me to this land which held such promise of new discoveries. Therefore the decision to go to India was no sudden choice made after a night of reflection. It felt as if it had always been with me, awaiting the moment of recognition. That journey changed the course of my life.
          In India I discovered the staggering size and beauty of a landscape utterly different from anything I had seen or imagined, but also the beauty of art, sculpture, architecture and the ravishing grace of men and women in their turbans and saris, dyed a dazzling yellow, lime-green, magenta and pink. Everywhere I went I felt the weight of a very ancient civilization and the extraordinary range of the human imagination in art and architecture, in poetry, literature, music and the creation of every kind of beauty, from the fantastic sculptures on the temple walls to the exquisite designs stamped on the saris displayed in the markets. It was an intoxicating time. I had no ties, no responsibilities, no fears. I could follow the longing of my heart which was to discover the soul of India. My sandaled feet reverently touched the dust of that distant soil, connecting with the people of that mysterious land. Traveling alone before the age of the hippies, I sought a richer, deeper, more vibrant experience of life than I could find in my own country. I knew I had to return.
          On my second visit, through contacts in Rome, I had secured a job collecting photographs of art from museums in India and the Far East for an Italian encyclopaedia of art. I traveled from country to country, visiting the sacred sites and the museums of India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia. In the dark recesses of a great cavern in Taiwan where half of the Imperial Treasure taken from Beijing by Chiang Kai Chek had been stored for safety, I had my first glimpse of the Daoist paintings of the Sung dynasty and my first real encounter with Chinese art. I was struck by its utter difference from the art of India and the West, a different quality of soul. With the help of an Indian friend who was the cultural attaché of the Indian Embassy in Rome, I had obtained a visa for China. However, my uncle, who was then ambassador in Thailand, summoned me to his office and said that he was horrified to find that piece of paper arriving on his desk. Under no circumstances could I visit China. Naïve and politically ignorant, I had not considered the diplomatic ramifications of wandering into a country that did not, at the time, have good relations with the West. It did not occur to me that I could have been used as a hostage and caused an "incident" nor did I realise that visiting Taiwan would make me persona non grata in China.
          This extraordinary job took me into the heart of each culture. In order to be able to choose the photographs with the help of the museum curators, I had not only rapidly to assimilate the history of each culture, but to assimilate its spirit as expressed in its art. My ability to recognize supreme artistic genius developed as I came into contact with the varied expressions of it that I encountered in each country. As I traveled to places like Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Java, as well as to many sites in India, Thailand and Burma, and the museums in the capital cities, I tried to enter into the heart of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture, deeply awed by the sculptors’ power to evoke in stone the immanent presence of spirit. In India, I saw that the gods and goddesses were still alive in the imagination of the people. Here was a multi-faceted image of deity, utterly different from the monotheistic image of God I had absorbed through Christianity. And here were people who were really living their religion in their daily lives, living it in their deep sense of connection with the mountains and rivers they had continued to worship as if they were living beings.
          Although I was a young woman travelling alone (in 1957), I was never molested or robbed and was welcomed everywhere with curiosity and warmth. It was before the era of drugs and hippies. I was often lonely but never afraid. With the innocence of youth, it did not occur to me that there could be danger or risk, since I was totally absorbed in the excitement of discovery. So many people helped me, so many kindly passed me on to friends in other countries or contacts in other museums. The only place I encountered difficulty was Japan where the fact that I was a woman temporarily barred me the access I needed to select my photographs from the museum archives. Tokyo was a huge and frightening city and no-one spoke English. The museum authorities could not believe (and seemed insulted) that a young woman had been entrusted with this job. However, in the end, I got my photographs.
          In Japan, what particularly struck me was the incredible beauty and fine craftsmanship of everyday objects – even a bowl of rice in a workman’s café in Tokyo; I can still see the exquisite design on the china bowl and taste and smell the steaming savour of the rice it held. Again, I was so deeply moved by one particular painting by the artist Sesshu exhibited in a department store in Tokyo that I burst into tears.
          The strong attraction to Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism was first kindled by the sheer splendour of the art of India and Asia, only later was it deepened and extended through the sacred texts I studied. In the course of these journeys, I came across sculpture after sculpture of Mount Sumeru, the Holy Mountain of Hindu mythology. Later, in Cambodia, I discovered that the temples of Angkor, half-buried in the jungle, evoked this same image, for every single temple symbolized the Holy Mountain, the sacred heart of the universe as well as the divine ground or spirit hidden in the heart of every human being. So here at last, I had found the living image of the Holy Mountain, some sixteen years after I had first heard of it in the messages. I felt incredibly moved by this encounter, as if I had found my true spiritual home.
          In southern India, at Tiruvannamalai, I visited the ashram of the great Indian sage, Sri Ramana, shortly after his death and walked the nine miles around Arunachala, the sacred mountain close by which symbolized this same heart of the universe. It was here that I encountered his teaching of repeatedly asking myself the question “Who am I?” This question urged me to go further, to look deeper. Since the focus of my attention had been the external world, I had never thought about this inner dimension of myself.
          From the beginning of these journeys to the East I was attracted to Hinduism and Buddhism and moved by the incredible beauty and magnificence of the land and the beauty and grace of the people as I traveled from country to country. The sheer richness and colour of India – the teeming numbers of people, the wide variety of beauty, the breadth and depth of its culture – was overwhelming. The poverty I saw everywhere disturbed me deeply because it seemed to reveal a centuries-long situation that could never be alleviated, yet these people who were poor beyond any European conception of poverty, had an immense dignity. These journeys gave me a perspective on life which could only be acquired by physically traveling to far distant places. The discovery of Hinduism, Buddhism and later, Daoism, brought release from the prison of a Christianity that I had experienced as claustrophobic, oppressive and forbidding.
          When I returned to England I put everything that had entranced my eye and evoked a response from my heart into my first book – The One Work; a Journey Towards the Self - an account of these two journeys to the East in 1956 and 1957, my quest to understand the quintessential message of Hinduism and Buddhism and my desire to relate this to a deeper understanding of Christianity - focused beyong dogma to the quintessence of Christ's teaching. The main focus of the book was the discovery of a totally different concept of spirit - a concept of deity that was both male and female as well as omnipresent and intimately connected with the landscape. Once again, as in childhood where it had been awakened by the messages, I felt drawn to follow the path of a spiritual quest which had become more conscious and developed as I traveled. The abbot of a monastery in Thailand invited me to stay and experience the Buddhist approach to reality but I felt unable to accept his invitation, not yet ready to leave the ties of family and my life in the West. Yet I reveled in the expansion of my understanding of a different purpose to life. For the first time I encountered concepts such as the law of karma, the belief that the effects of one's actions bear long-term results in future lives as well as in this one, - and the idea that we reincarnate countless times in many different bodies, gradually growing in spiritual insight and moving closer to reunion with the divine ground. At last my life encompassed a meaning beyond that of living on the surface of life and responding blindly to events as they happened.
          I saw that in all these different times and places a rich and potent humus had been created by countless human beings over countless millennia: artists, poets, mystics, astronomers, musicians, architects, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and a few wise and enlightened rulers like the Moghul ruler, Akbar, whose patronage fertilised the deep sub-soil of culture. But there was also the moving vista of millions of people weaving, dyeing, stamping brilliantly-coloured cloth with ancient designs, carving wood and sculpting stone, honing and transmitting their skills to their children over generations, creating incredible beauty with their hands, reverently bringing to life the gods and goddesses worshipped for millennia in the great temples of India and Asia.
          During these travels, I was drawn to piece together an approach to reality that seemed to be unknown to the Christian West. At first I was led by an attraction to certain cultures, certain individuals, certain myths and works of art, certain poems, texts or philosophical ideas. Then I was drawn to traveling more extensively to see and discover more about the cultures that produced these things. Finally; I was compelled to undertake a more detailed study of the artistic heritage and the religious texts of the great civilizations of India, China and Japan. I began to sense the difference between the Indian and the Chinese soul as it was reflected in their philosophy and their art. Looking back, I can see how my journey of discovery, guided by the power of interest and a love of beauty, unfolded for me stage by stage. It took many years of travel and study for me to reach the depth of understanding needed to see the whole picture and to bring back this ancient knowledge into my own culture.
          In spite of the pleasure and satisfaction I received from writing my book about my wanderings, returning to England brought me down to earth with a thump. At this time, unless one had trained for a medical or scientific career, there were only three options open to women: a secretary, an academic or teacher, or nurse. The alternative to these was marriage and motherhood. The immense panorama of life I had glimpsed made it difficult for me to accept such severe constrictions. Since the teachings of the Hindu and Buddhist sages had taught me that too great a focus on the concerns of the world was an impediment to the goal of spiritual enlightenment, it was extremely difficult for me to get a steady job, marry and settle down to the routine of domestic life. The call of the spirit and the life of the body seemed to oppose each other across an abyss. Since I was largely unconscious about this dissociation within myself, I could find no way of building a bridge across it.
          However, when I was working on the book about my travels, a friend introduced me to a man whom I felt I could trust, an artist whose work I admired. My family was delighted, having almost given up hope of my finding the “right” man - at that time twenty-eight was considered "late" for marriage,- and even more delighted that he was an artist because both my mother and grandmother were artists. With some hesitation, because we were both nervous of commitment, we married in 1960. A new phase of my life began, a phase of initiation into the experience of a close relationship with another human being who became a true friend and companion, someone with whom I could share my intense love of art and beauty. But first I had to learn to cook and clean a house - skills which I had neglected to develop before I married because, with the arrogance of someone immersed in spiritual and intellectual concerns, I did not consider them to be important, let alone vital to a harmonious married life.
          After two miscarriages, we had a daughter whom I dearly loved but hadn’t the slightest instinctive knowledge of how to look after. Having lived life mainly through the intellect, with scant regard for the body, I had received no preparation whatsoever on how to look after a baby. I was terrified and this terror was made worse by the fact that she was a pyloric baby, – that is, – the milk I fed her was immediately ejected by projectile vomiting to the other side of the room (caused by the fact that the pyloric muscle would not open). At three weeks, she was losing weight rapidly and had to have an immediate operation. In those days, mothers were not allowed to stay with their children in hospital. I was deeply upset by the separation from her, particularly as I wasn’t even allowed to see her for twenty-four hours. After three days she was able to come home, but I fell into post-natal depression (unrecognized at the time as a common mental state that could follow childbirth) and was totally unable to cope.
          The years of tension and unhappiness watching my mother being destroyed by my father, and my complete inability to protect her, had led (from the age of twelve) to my falling into suicidal depressions for days and sometimes months at a time. This condition was never medically diagnosed or treated because in those days depression was not recognized as an illness. In fact, it was considered shameful even to admit to such a condition. Growing up, I managed to get through these bouts of despair with the help of my mother’s support. Although I came close to suicide as an adolescent and young adult, I had never actually attempted it. But now that I was married, I soon realized that I had to do something about it. If not, I feared it would destroy my relationship with my husband the way my father’s depression had destroyed his relationship with my mother, and that would have a negative effect upon the life and happiness of our daughter. My husband was immensely supportive and understanding but was perplexed by my violent outbursts of rage and by my perpetual unhappiness and lethargy. My ongoing post-natal state of depression increased the pressure on me to take some action. By chance I met a woman who had experienced a nervous breakdown and she gave me the name of a psychiatrist who was also a Jungian analyst. So began my introduction to psychotherapy and to Jung, and to my becoming aware of a mysterious and (to me) unknown aspect of the psyche called the unconscious.
          Trust in this man gradually established trust in myself and led to the eruption of a deep longing within me to create beauty, the same longing that had been awakened by the colours and designs of the saris I had seen in India. These drew me to a sensory delight in the appearance and feel of beautiful materials and a desire to design clothes. I took a correspondence course in dressmaking. Suddenly the idea occurred to me that I could make evening dresses to sell – I could use beautiful fabrics and design the dresses myself. In those days, women from my background living in London wore long dresses to the theatre and opera and when they entertained friends at home or went out to a dinner party.
          I found to my amazement and delight that I could design dresses that women wanted to buy because they made them look and feel beautiful. Soon I had too many dresses to keep in the house and, in 1964, I realized I needed a shop. A friend suggested Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge (London) and I found a tiny shop to rent there. My sister-in-law suggested the name Troubadour. I liked the romantic associations to the word. On the first day I sold three dresses, which covered the week’s expenses and from then on, week by week and year by year, my business grew until I found that I was making a great deal of money. I had two brilliant cutters to help me, one a remarkable Polish woman who had survived years in a concentration camp in Poland; the other a Spanish woman who had worked in Madrid with the great designer Balenciaga. By a stroke of incredible luck, I inherited a whole workshop of Polish seamstresses from a business that was closing down in a nearby building and these women made the dresses I designed. Twice a year I retired to bed with swatches of the finest silks, velvets, chiffons and organzas as well as materials from India spread out all over it, to design the evening dresses I so loved, inspired by paintings of women by my favourite Flemish and Italian artists. Once a year, in November, I traveled to the great annual trade fair in Frankfort where I bought many of the materials, embroideries and trimmings I needed. This experience grounded me in everyday life, helped me to earn my living well and taught me how to manage a business and keep the people who worked for me happy and productive.
          Meanwhile, through the Jungian analysis, I was learning the importance of paying attention to my dreams, keeping a careful record of them. In those years I dreamed of great warehouses filled from floor to ceiling with materials of unimaginable fineness and beauty; of dresses far beyond my capacity to invent or make; of rails filled with clothes that were a marvel of design and magnificence. These dreams inspired me to make ever more beautiful dresses in an attempt to come close to the ones seen in my dreams. But my own designs could never match these either in the complexity of the design or in the fineness and splendour of the material. Who, I began to wonder, was the dress designer of my dreams, who was the weaver of these incredibly fine fabrics? I knew that the unconscious was sending me these images so far removed from my own capacity to create but who and what and where was the unconscious?
          Once, I remember, I had a dream of a tiny woman with the head of a greyhound presiding over a room filled with about 100 seamstresses seated at sewing machines that filled the room with a steady hum. Each woman was busily engaged in sewing the top part of a dress to the bottom part. The meaning of that dream only occurred to me years later when I came across the work of women who were writing and speaking about the feminine principle, connecting the historically known to the hitherto unknown, the conscious to the unconscious, the visible to the invisible, the top to the bottom.
          After twelve years, at the height of a major recession and inflation in the 1970’s, I felt the time had come to close the shop. Oil prices, wages and the cost of materials seemed to have spiraled overnight and long evening dresses were suddenly out of fashion owing to the impact of the French designer, Courrèges. I could have gone on but felt that this phase of my life had come to an end.
          My analysis had continued during this time but at this point, my analyst suggested that I should apply to train as an analyst myself. He had heard that Dr. Gerhard Adler, one of the two editors of Jung’s Collected Works, was considering applications for training. I applied for an interview and while I was waiting for a reply, I had the following dream:

I am traveling in a rocket to the moon and on landing there, see that a huge rusty iron construction shaped like the Eiffel Tower has been built on it, so huge that it rises high above its surface. The moon itself is a dead planet, all vegetation has dried up and wasted away. There are no human beings anywhere and no animals, - no life at all. I travel across the moon’s surface in a train, staring out of the window at this desolate landscape that looks as if it has been blasted by a nuclear bomb or shriveled by a terrible drought. The dream ends with my being abruptly dropped into a swimming pool.

           I discussed the dream with my analyst but he could not fathom its meaning. When I went for the interview with Gerhard Adler, he asked if I had had a dream recently and I told him about it, saying that I did not understand it. He said he thought the dream was drawing attention to the neglected state of the feminine principle or archetype - the moon being one of the primary images of that archetype. He suggested that the dream was showing me the plight of the feminine, both in relation to my own life and to the wider culture as a whole. The iron structure was, in both cases, something that had been imposed on the deeper levels of the psyche by the rigid control of the conscious mind or ego. The water of the swimming pool suggested the water of the soul, the water of the feminine in which I needed to immerse myself. Tactfully, he suggested that more analysis was needed before I could be accepted for training. I needed to dismantle that iron structure and regenerate the surface of the moon. Despite the years of analysis I had already experienced which had helped me to save my marriage, earn my living in the world and open a channel for my longing to create beauty, the dream suggested that I needed now to go deeper into the psyche. So I began to work with another analyst, a woman who had worked with Jung’s wife, Emma and who was able to initiate me into a deeper understanding of the feminine principle. After a few years of analysis with her, I was invited to embark on the five years’ training to become an analyst myself.
          I had found my way to depth psychology because of a crippling depression. Through my analysis I learned that depression can signify not only the presence of repressed childhood memories but also a call from the unknown depths of the psyche - the unconscious - to create a relationship with those depths. The opportunity of responding to that call was the second factor that changed the course of my life (the first being my journeys to the East) because it gave me insight into the fact that so much suffering and illness arises from ignorance of our own nature. Quite apart from the development of insight, the experience of depth psychology, as Jungian psychology was then called, gradually freed my ability to write and gave me fascinating subjects to write about. It widened my knowledge of history, psychology, philosophy and religion and gave me a new perspective from which to view them.
          While science had been making extraordinary discoveries in the fields of physics, cosmology and biology, I discovered that depth psychology had been exploring the vast and unknown dimension of the soul. Jung's discoveries about the nature of consciousness went far beyond Freud's because they granted a transcendent and spiritual dimension to the psyche, yet they were ridiculed and rejected as "mystical" by mainstream secular culture. As I learned more, I realized that they were making as significant a contribution to our understanding of life as main-stream science.
          I knew by then that science believes that consciousness originates with and depends upon the physical brain. It was an immense relief, almost a delight, to find that the important discoveries made by Jung’s researches into the psyche suggested that what we call consciousness rests on an immense matrix or psychic field of the immemorial experience of our species that he called the Collective Unconscious. I learned that through his study of alchemy, Jung had recognized a process of development in the psyche that he called individuation, which could be activated or set in motion. With practice, experience and insight into the meaning and symbolism of dreams, he found that a relationship could be established with this vast field of consciousness, and that this relationship could radically transform our understanding of life, granting it a deeper meaning and purpose. So, at last, those questions that I had asked at Oxford and found no answer to, could begin to be answered.
          During the years of exploring the psyche and training to become an analyst, I continued to travel, mainly to Greece and the Greek islands, for the great civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world held an overwhelming fascination for me. On one such visit, I have a vivid memory of going with my husband into a Greek Orthodox Church in the Peloponnese and being shown around it by an artist who was re-painting the frescoes on its walls. He finally beckoned my husband to follow him into the sanctuary behind the screen. When I naturally followed them, he stopped me with his hand saying, “Women are not allowed in here.” I was too astonished to remonstrate, particularly as inside the sanctuary I could just catch sight of a magnificent fresco of the Virgin Mary. Why would I be barred from the contemplation of the sacred image of my sex? Why would the most holy place in the church, sanctified by the image of the Mother of God, be forbidden territory for woman and not for man? The implication was that I, as a woman, would somehow defile the sanctuary. What historical processes underlay the Christian attitude toward woman that was reflected in this artist’s gesture of rejection? Once again, as in the church services of my childhood, I was made aware that something was deeply wrong with Christianity.
          I was often haunted by the words of a poem by Walter de la Mare that I had discovered while I was at Oxford, in a book by Helen Waddell called The Wandering Scholars:
                                                                
                                                                Oh no man knows
                                                        Through what wild centuries
                                                              Roves back the rose
          
           The image of the rose and the verse above kindled such a burning passion to know more, such a longing to reach back through those wild centuries to some discovery dimly apprehended as waiting for me at the roots of time, that the memory of the day I came across those lines of poetry lingers still, across the space of fifty years. Then, I knew nothing about the Goddess, the feminine archetype, or the soul, nothing about the symbolism of the rose in Sufi mysticism or its connection with the lost tradition of Divine Wisdom. Yet the image, even the scent of the rose was overwhelmingly numinous to me and I planted many roses in the garden of our home, fascinated by the their ancient names, names such as Belle de Crécy, Fantin-Latour, Isphahan.
          Galvanised by my experience in the church in Greece, I began a new phase of my journey of discovery – one that was to lead me into a deeper understanding of the soul on the one hand and an exploration of the roots of civilization and the loss of the feminine image of the divine on the other.
          I found myself drawn to return to the earliest beginnings of the growth of culture - to the time when the image of the Great Mother presided over the life of mankind. It is to this ancient time, so distant from our own in every respect, that we may look for the genesis of ideas and symbols which eventually developed into religious systems and all the different ways in which we have attempted to define and relate to a reality that transcends our power of understanding yet which draws us, ineluctably, to itself.

©Anne Baring

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CHAPTER TWO

The Awakening Dream

Everywhere at all times in all cultures and races of which we have record, when the greatest meaning, the highest value of life man called gods or God needed renewal and increase, the process of renewal began through a dream.     C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1)

I reflected often on the dream of the huge phallic iron tower on the surface of the moon. The Talmud says that a dream not interpreted is like a letter not read. The best we can do is to read the message coming from the depths of the psyche and ponder its meaning. Over many years of pondering, I realized that this dream was a wake-up call from my soul. Not only that, it seemed to hold a warning of what could happen to our planet – that it could be rendered as barren and lifeless as the moon. I remembered that one of the early chaneled messages received by my mother had warned that our planet could become ‘another orphan wandering in space’ if humanity didn’t change its course. My dream invited me to explore the imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles in Western civilization and how this imbalance has affected the life of every one of us. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that the phallic iron structure was an image of what human technology has imposed on nature: it reflected the hubris of the modern mind which believes it can control and exploit nature for its own ends. It showed the effects of what can happen as human consciousness becomes cut off from the matrix or depths from which it has emerged – depths symbolized by the desiccated and barren moon. I began to see how losing touch with these depths affects our values and how we educate our children; our science, medicine and psychology; how we conduct politics; the formulation of our aims and goals; and all our relationships with a wider world. Most important of all, the loss of connection with the depths influences our view of reality and the way we respond to and live life in a personal sense. I began to understand that many of the problems we now face were created by beliefs that were formed centuries, even millennia, ago, whose influence has never really been recognized and addressed. I needed to find out what historical influences had led to the erection of that iron tower – why it had come into being. I had no idea where to start but, fortunately, my dreams gave me my direction.
         During the course of my second analysis, I had three powerful dreams which became the foundation of the second half of my life. In the first dream, I returned to the landscape of my grandmother’s house in the South of France:

I go to the edge of the deep gorge and stand looking down into it and at the stream rushing through it from the mountains to the sea. Rising out of the shadowy depths of the gorge I see the shape of an enormous cobra-like serpent with seven heads. It continues to rise until these heads, spread out like a great hood, are level with the ledge on which I am standing. I am so terrified of it that I tremble and cover my eyes.  When I dare to look again I see that the serpent wants to communicate with me. I signal to it that I am listening. It offers me the choice of staying where I am or climbing a ladder which I now become aware is behind me. With a deep bow of reverence and awe, I indicate that I choose to climb the ladder.

         From my travels in the East, I recognized this seven-headed serpent as an image of the great serpent Mucalinda that had formed a canopy over the Buddha on the night of his awakening. In the many sculptures I had seen in Thailand and elsewhere, he was often shown seated on the gigantic coils of a serpent whose seven heads fan out behind him in a magnificent gesture of protection and blessing.
         I took this dream as a call to climb the ladder of consciousness, to increase my understanding of the psyche and become aware of the power of instinct as a guide to this work, for it was apparent to me that this great serpent was an image of instinct. I had never before had such a clear image of the great creative powers of life as a living presence in nature, present as well as in the deepest, most archaic aspect of my own psyche. I could have studied the Jungian literature on the unconscious for years and never understood the reality of this primal energy if I had not had this dream which offered all that I needed to know in an image of overwhelming power. Nor would I have been able to identify Jung's concept of the unconscious with this image of the primordial wisdom of nature. Without actually seeing this gigantic archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would have understood the instinct as something so powerfully and overwhelmingly real. It was not an abstract idea that we could investigate at arm’s length, but an awesome, numinous and living Presence, exactly as the sculptors of India and Thailand had portrayed it.
         In a second dream a few years later:

I approach a tower surrounded by a narrow water-filled moat. I cross the bridge and enter the tower. I find its circular interior filled from floor to ceiling with wonderful books in white and  brown vellum with gold or red lettering. The tower has two floors. Hesitantly, I go up to the second by a spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest colleagues and friends is standing, extending her hands to me in welcome.
         
          I understood the tower as an image of the soul. Its treasures were being offered to me by someone who had been a close colleague of Jung's and had written many books on the feminine principle - books that in the course of my analyses and training, I had read and treasured. I remembered a poem by Rilke which seemed to offer a commentary on this dream:

                           I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
                           And I have been circling for a thousand years,
                           And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
                           Or a great song. (trans. Robert Bly)
          
          The third dream was the most awesome dream of my life, the true awakener of my soul:
         
I dream that I come round the side of a huge dolmen and enter another world, an utterly strange and barren landscape. It is lit by the brilliant radiance of the full moon. I am searching for someone I love and my longing for him is so great that I have embarked on a journey in search of him. The landscape is transformed from a desert into field after field of brilliant green corn. The moonlight is so bright that it is like daylight and the corn is the colour of an emerald. I float over this emerald sea, my bare feet skimming the surface of the corn for many miles until I come to the brow of a low hill and hesitate, wondering if I should go further. I decide to go on and come down into a valley on the other side.
          Suddenly, I find that two enormous men have caught me in a gigantic fishing net and are drawing me into the presence of something tremendously powerful and numinous. I am very frightened, yet at the same time fascinated. I lie flat on my back on the ground, helplessly enmeshed in the net and look up, half in terror, half in awe. I see the figure of a woman towering above me, filling the entire space between earth and sky. She is naked, with white skin and golden hair and is very beautiful, like Aphrodite. Yet she is not young, but ageless. In the centre of her  abdomen is an immense revolving wheel that is also a rose and a labyrinth, like the one I had seen inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. Awestruck, I gaze up at her, then down at my own body which is exactly like hers, only tiny in relation to it. I too have a revolving wheel but mine is not centred; it is too far to the left. She does not speak but indicates that I am to centre my wheel, like hers.

          Visionary dreams like this one cannot be interpreted according to any known system of belief. They have to be held close to the heart and allowed to live so that, over many years, they can act as leaven in the soul. In another, earlier culture I would have worshipped this image as a goddess and perhaps built a temple or shrine to her, but in today’s world, belief and worship did not satisfy me. I needed to know why I had been given this vision, as well as its meaning and purpose. I felt it best not to speak of this dream to anyone, not even to my husband. But I did tell my analyst, thinking that she would be able to give me an interpretation of it. To my surprise she said she did not want to comment on it but to let it be, explaining that the danger with such dreams is identification with an archetype and a huge inflation. I might think that the goddess had singled me out as someone special.          
          For years I wondered who she was. Was she Aphrodite? Demeter? Isis? Was she an angelic being of some kind? Was this the kind of vision that people in times more open to visionary experience would have had? I knew that in Hellenistic times, in the second century AD, an Egyptian man called Apuleius had had a vision of the goddess Isis, and that he had recorded the words she spoke to him. (2) I knew of the famous vision of the philosopher Boethius (480-524) to whom the figure of Divine Wisdom (Sophia) had appeared to comfort and enlighten him as he awaited death on the orders of the barbarian Emperor Theodoric. (3)
         Naked and beautiful, neither young nor old, the goddess who had appeared to me was too pagan a figure for the Christian Mary, yet she was not like Aphrodite or any of the Greek goddesses with whom I was familiar. Finally, I began to wonder whether she could be a manifestation of the Neo-Platonic image of the Anima Mundi - the Soul of the World, first mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus. Again and again I returned to wondering about her and how I was to centre my wheel. What did she want of me by sending me such a vision? Why was my wheel too far to the left and how could I centre it ? Inspired by her numinous image, I began to explore the images of the goddess and to develop my thoughts about the feminine principle in general. As for the net, I knew that in Indian mythology such a net was connected with the god Indra and I thought it might signify material reality in which I was caught like a fish in a net. And the two immense male figures holding it might, I thought, represent the power that was drawing me to the goddess or, alternatively, the powerful controlling influence the male psyche exercised over the world. Whatever they were, they forced me to look upwards, to the heavens.
          Several years later, when I had embarked on training to become a Jungian analyst, I made friends with Jules Cashford, a woman who was one of our group of trainees. Instinctively, I felt drawn to her and, on an impulse one evening, I invited her to come to supper with me. Initially, she seemed doubtful that she could come, but she had a dream about a ruined garden that needed to be restored and in the dream was told to go and see me. She told me about this dream when we met and we began to discuss the ruined garden as an image of the garden of the soul and of the feminine archetype, neglected by our culture. This led on to the possibility of writing a book together about the goddess – originally the Greek goddesses. But as we worked on the outline of the book, we realized that we needed to go right back to the earliest sacred images of the feminine, to the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic era, if we were to discover the foundation of the later Egyptian and Greek goddesses - or even the Virgin Mary. The research for the book drew us further and further into the origins of the divine feminine, opening avenues we had been unable to envisage at the beginning.
          We were deeply influenced not only by Erich Neumann’s book, The Great Mother  (4),   but also by a book called Saving the Appearances by an English philosopher called Owen Barfield. His book divided the evolution of human consciousness into three phases – (1) Original Participation, (2) Separation and (3) Final Participation. (5) This gave us the tripartite framework for our book. We felt drawn to the earliest beginnings of culture in order to find the genesis of ideas and symbols which eventually developed into all the different myths and images through which people described a numinous reality that transcended their ‘normal’ range of experience. As Jules and I worked together, we realized that not only were we exploring the history of gods and goddesss, we were also exploring the evolution of human consciousness through these divine images. With this new understanding, the larger theme of our book began to clarify.
         We found a remarkable book called The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack that opened our eyes to the importance of the moon in Palaeolithic culture and described the earliest lunar notations in Africa dating to 40,000 BC. (6) When we studied the mythology and history of earlier Mediterranean and Near-Eastern cultures we found that there was a noticeable shift from lunar to solar imagery in Egypt and Mesopotamia c. 2000 BC and, some 1500 years later, in Greece. This change of emphasis in mythology was accompanied by a shift of emphasis from feminine to masculine deities which finally resulted in the primacy of a single male deity – the Father God of Judaism and, later, of Christianity and Islam. We realized that this shift had profound repercussions for the development of Western civilization and that it marked a specific phase in the evolution of consciousness - Owen Barfield's Phase of Separation. We discovered that the imagery of the divine feminine had been repressed or excluded by the three patriarchal religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - over a period of some 4000 years and that this repression was clearly predicated on the shift of emphasis in the image of deity from a Great Mother to a Great Father.
         Gradually, as with the unfolding of the petals of a rose, Jules and I discovered that behind the image of the rose stood the figure of Mary, and behind her that of Sophia or Hokhmah, the Holy Spirit of Wisdom who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs and also in the Book of Ben Sirach in the Biblical Apocrypha. We read the Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and the ground-breaking book written by the American theologian Elaine Pagels which described the feminine imagery of God that was obviously alive and flourishing in the Gnostic groups of early Christianity. But, we wondered, did the imagery and mythology associated with the divine feminine appear out of nowhere or did they rest on the older images of the Bronze Age goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia - and, even further back, on the Great Mother of the Neolithic era?
         For many years we felt like archaeologists excavating a long-buried mosaic, gathering together fragments of an image and a mythology hidden beneath the cultural deposits of thousands of years and many different cultures. At first we couldn’t see the picture clearly. We simply felt attracted to different images and ideas. The researches of Jung and Erich Neumann already had brought together many of the lost images of the feminine archetype. However, the extraordinary research of the archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, whose earliest book was published in 1974, identified many new images of the goddess from an unknown European civilization that she called the Civilization of Old Europe and dated to the seventh millennium BC. (7)  We were drawn as well to the magisterial work of the mythologist Joseph Campbell which enlarged our understanding of mythology and its influence on the formation and growth of civilization. As the pieces of this mosaic began to come together, a theme of great beauty and complexity slowly revealed itself to us, but also a story of the loss, repression and distortion of a priceless legacy from the past.
          We wanted to find the earliest images which were of supreme importance to humanity.When we found the image of the Palaeolithic Great Mother scattered across an immense territory stretching from the Pyrenees in the West to Lake Baikal in the East, we knew we had found our beginning. As we traced the evolution and many transformations of this image from 25,000 BC to the present day, we began to understand that the figure of the goddess stood for a totally different perspective on life that has been lost. In the course of our research, we discovered such surprising similarities and parallels in the goddess myths of apparently unrelated eras and cultures that we concluded that there had been a continuous transmission of images throughout history. This continuity was so striking that we felt entitled to talk of 'the myth of the goddess', since the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of goddess images was constant: the vision of the whole of life as a living cosmic unity. More specifically, we realised that the image of the Mother Goddess inspired and focused a perception of the universe as an organic, sacred and indivisible whole in which humanity, the Earth and all life on Earth participated as 'her children'. Everything was woven together in one cosmic web, where all orders of manifest and unmanifest life were related, because all shared in the sanctity of the original source. In a modern secular culture, this mythic image of the unity of Earth and cosmos had vanished from sight.
         We wanted to know what had happened to the image of the goddess, how and when it began to disappear, and to understand the implications of this loss. Since mythic images implicitly govern a culture, what did this tell us about a particular culture - such as our modern Western one - that either did not have, or did not acknowledge a mythic image of the divine feminine? It began to seem no coincidence that our secular modern culture is one that has, above all others, desacralized and exploited nature. Generally speaking, the Earth is no longer instinctively experienced as a living being as in earlier times. And, we realized, now is also the time when the whole body of the Earth is threatened by one species - our own - in a way unique to the history of the planet.
          Consequently, the second aim of our book became to explore the way in which the goddess myth was lost; when, where and how the images of the 'god' arose, and how goddess and god related to each other in earlier cultures and times. It soon became clear that, from Babylonian mythology onwards (c. 2000 BC), the goddess became almost exclusively associated with nature as a chaotic force to be mastered, whereas the god assumed the role of conquering or ordering nature from his counterpole of transcendent spirit. Since this opposition between male and female deities had not previously existed, we felt it needed to be placed within the context of the evolution of human consciousness. One way of understanding this process was to view it in terms of a progressive withdrawal from our participation with nature. While this has resulted in an increasing autonomy for human consciousness, at the same time it has involved a separation from the natural world and a gradual and ever-strengthening conviction that we can control and master nature.
         As our collaboration deepened, Jules and I became ‘one mind with two outlets’ as I once jokingly referred to our relationship. Often we telephoned each other to report on a significant detail we had found, only to discover that the other had come across that very same idea or piece of evidence at almost the same time on the same day. One particular instance stood out: on the same day we had each found out that the Greeks had a beautiful image to describe how the individual soul which they called bios hangs from the great necklace of Being which they called zoë. Almost simultaneously, we tried to dial each other to communicate our discovery. What we discovered through our researches was a revelation to us – the continuity of the image and mythology of the goddess through many centuries and civilizations. We felt we were re-assembling the pieces of a dismembered corpse that could be brought back to life, rather as Isis, in the great Bronze Age Egyptian myth, had gathered the scattered fragments of the body of Osiris and restored him back to life. What the goddess had done for the masculine archetype, we were doing for the feminine. We realised that the goddess personified a certain vision of life that had been lost – the vision of the cosmos as an organic, living and sacred entity in whose life all living creatures participated.
         As we worked, we felt supported by something – almost by Someone - beyond either of us. Like other women who were discovering what had been lost, we felt the urgency of the need to tell the story of the neglected goddess and to explain why she had been allowed so little place in patriarchal culture. We wanted to know why the feminine dimension of the divine had been excluded from the Christian image of God, why deity had been formulated in the image of a Father rather than a Mother and a Father, why the Holy Spirit had been defined solely in male imagery. We felt it was imperative to redress the balance, to discover the reasons why something so important to women and to the balance of culture as a whole had been lost. Most important of all, we felt that the image of the goddess carried a vision of reality that needed to be recovered, a vision that had been neglected or overridden for centuries, but that had once connected us intimately not only to the life of the Earth but to the life of the cosmos.
         Why did we feel that this quest for the lost feminine dimension of the divine was so important? Because we felt that it might offer an explanation of how our present culture had come to regard nature as something that could be exploited and manipulated to the advantage of our human species without any awareness of the effect this attitude had on the balance of life on the planet. It would also help us to understand the roots of woman’s long subjugation, why her voice had been effectively written out of the history of Western and indeed, world civilization, why she had suffered so much oppression in patriarchal culture for so many centuries. We had absolutely no idea when we started of the chain of misogynistic ideas which had evolved from the description of Eve’s role in the Biblical myth of the Fall and from the influential legacy of the writings of Plato and Aristotle and the early Christian Fathers.
         Ten years of research and exploration led ultimately to the publication, in 1991, of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. The book had taken us so long to write because we were at first training to be, then working as analysts and had little time or energy to spare. It led to the creation of a deep and lasting friendship between us, as if we had been drawn to each other to do this work which neither one of us could have accomplished on our own. We were determined that our book should include the images of the goddesses as well as her many stories and gathered 450 illustrations, insisting that they should be placed in the context of the specific text that described them.
         The Myth of the Goddess tells the story of how, over a period of some 20,000 years, the image of the deity gradually changed from goddess to god, and how the god came to be identified with spirit and mind, and the goddess with nature, matter and body. The image of the goddess was feared and rejected and with it women and every aspect of life that had been identified with the feminine, including, most importantly, the soul and matter. As the goddess came to be rejected or downgraded in relation to the god, so spirit and nature were sundered. Mind and soul, the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature, became divorced and polarized in human consciousness, leading ultimately to the spiritual, political and ecological crisis of the present time.
        We felt that our book had a message for our time because it showed how the loss of the feminine dimension of the divine had led to the triple loss of respect for nature, matter and woman, and how the ecological crisis of our times could be directly related to the denigration of the feminine in the philosophy, theology and mythology of the last four millennia. In the third section of the book, we focused on the image of the sacred marriage of spirit and nature – asking that what had been sundered over the course of the last four thousand years be reunited.
        While we had been working on our book, other women in America and Canada were following similar lines of research, publishing the fruits of their quest to discover what had happened to the goddess, what the cultures over which she presided were like and what meaning and significance her image held for modern woman. Many books began to appear, the most important perhaps being Elaine Pagel's book on the Gnostic Gospels (8) and Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. While Pagel's book recovered the lost Christian images of the Feminine that had been honoured in the early gnostic communities and miraculously restored through the discoveries made at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Eisler's book, published shortly before ours, was a formidable indictment of patriarchal culture and the need for a change in consciousness. (9) Some of the writers, like Pagels, were theologians. Others were Jungian analysts like Jean Shonoda Bolen and Marion Woodman. The image of the Black Madonna held a numinous meaning for some of them, in particular for Marion Woodman, working as an analyst in Toronto (10) and for China Galland who, in her book Longing for Darkness, described her journey to visit the places where the Black Madonna had long been worshipped. (11) While I mention here the books of a few individual women, there were many other books that I read with a sense of deep gratitude because each in its own way, strengthened and confirmed my own quest for a deeper understanding of the Feminine. Sylvia Brinton Perera's Descent to the Goddess, published in 1981, stressed the need for modern woman to make the descent into the underworld of the soul, there to encounter, experience and redeem the powerful instinctual feelings that had been denied and repressed in a patriarchal culture. In the introduction to her book she wrote:

The return to the goddess, for renewal in a feminine source-ground and spirit, is a vitally important aspect of modern woman's quest for wholeness. We women who have succeeded in the world are usually "daughters of the father" - that is, well adapted to a masculine-oriented society - and have repudiated our own full feminine instincts and energy patterns, just as the culture has maimed or derogated most of them. We need to return to and redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat and called terrible mother, dragon, or witch...This inner connection is an initiation essential for most modern women in the Western world; without it we are not whole. This process requires both a sacrifice of our identity as spiritual daughters of the patrarchy and a descent into the spirit of the goddess, because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld - in exile for five thousand years. (12) (9)e     

        While I felt this inner aspect of the rediscovery of the goddess was very important in analytical work, events in my life drew me in a different direction - to awareness of the suffering of people caught up in the conflict developing in Eastern Europe in 1992 and to the plight of the planet, threatened with devastation by weapons and war. After the publication of The Myth of the Goddess, by a strange series of encounters and coincidences, I came across Andrew Harvey’s book, Hidden Journey, telling the story of his meeting with a young Indian woman called Mother Meera. (13) I went to listen to a talk given by him in a London bookshop. On an impulse, some months before, I had sent him The Myth of the Goddess via his publisher. He had read it and welcomed me with great enthusiasm when we met after the talk. There was an immediate rapport between us. Inspired by that meeting and his friendship and encouragement, and deeply disturbed by the events in Bosnia that were then unfolding in all their horror, I wrote a book for children, basing it on the theme of The Conference of the Birds, a poetic Sufi text by the twelfth century Persian mystic, Farid ud-Din Attar, who had written it as an allegory of the soul’s journey to God. I had always loved this story and, although the original was written for those who were treading a spiritual path, it seemed possible to retell it for modern children and to place it in the context of the need for a fundamental change in our understanding if we were ever to grow beyond the tribal conflicts that were devastating so many people’s lives, and to become aware of ourselves as inhabitants of the planet, rather than a particular national, religious or ethnic group. The book was published in 1993 with the title The Birds Who Flew beyond Time, with illustrations by the batik artist, Thetis Blacker, who was a close friend.
           Through my continuing friendship with Andrew Harvey, we were commissioned by an English publisher (Godsfield Press) to write two books together – The Mystic Vision (1995) and The Divine Feminine (1996). Once again, gathering sayings for The Mystic Vision, I found myself immersed in material I had known and loved many years ago, returning to the mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Sufism, entering the atmosphere of the sacred which I had first encountered on my two journeys to the East. With Andrew’s help, I gathered together the writings of the great Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist and Sufi mystics, including in our final choice some of the sayings of the First or Primal Peoples, like the American Indians or the Kogis of South America.
         I steeped myself in these writings, my own thoughts clarifying as I struggled to articulate the essence of what the mystics have tried to communicate to us that, I felt, could be summed up in these words:

The mystics and sages of all times and cultures have tried to reveal to us what they have discovered: that we are in the Divine Ground like a fish in the sea, or a bird in the air, and have tried to help us dissolve the illusion of our separate existence so that we would experience ourselves here and now, in this dimension, as what we truly are – Divine Being.

         The second book (The Divine Feminine) took me deep into the sacred literature and imagery of the feminine aspect of the divine in different religious traditions. Although I had learned a great deal in the research for The Myth of the Goddess, it seemed as if I was now asked to broaden my research to include other cultures. I began to understand the feminine archetype or principle in a deeper sense, no longer as the goddess but as what the goddess personified – an immense matrix of hidden relationships through which spirit and nature, the invisible and the visible dimensions of the life of the cosmos interacted with each other. I began to see that something absolutely vital had been lost in religious teaching – the concept of the cosmic dimension of soul as an unrecognised order of reality which binds together all aspects of life, both visible and invisible. I also saw that this loss in the religious sphere had been transmitted to science which did not see the unity and interconnectedness of the aspects of life it was exploring.
           In 1995, while researching material for the Divine Feminine and, at the same time, reading a book about the soul called Daemonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, (14) I had another dream which at first seemed unremarkable::

 I am driving in a car to a College in Oxford University to hear a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. On the back seat of the car there is a battered old-fashioned brown leather suitcase – the kind that years ago used to be called a “revelation suitcase” because it could expand to a greater capacity than was at first apparent.

         Although I wrote it down, I didn’t think much about this premonitory dream until shortly afterwards, while writing a chapter on the image of the Shekinah in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, I suddenly understood in a flash of insight who the goddess of my vision might be. She was what the kabbalists had named the feminine face of God, the wisdom and glory and radiant immanence of the divine concealed beneath and within the forms of life. The Shekinah literally means the “Presence of God in the world”. Then I remembered the dream about the battered “revelation” suitcase on the back seat of my car. Although I had written about the Shekinah in The Myth of the Goddess, drawing on the writings of the great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, I had not really grasped the full implications of what she stood for. Now I realised in a flash of illumination that the Shekinah offers one of the most complete images of the feminine aspect of spirit to have survived from the ancient past. She restores the missing connective cosmology of the soul that the three major patriarchal religions, in their repudiation of a feminine dimension of the divine, had lost. I began to sense that the feminine being who had revealed herself to me in such powerful imagery personified the Soul as a cosmic entity and as an invisible dimension of reality. I experienced this realization as a revelation; it was like discovering water in the desert. So many fragments of knowledge, so many sacred texts from many cultures, began to fall into place and, in spite of all the research I had done for The Myth of the Goddess, I began to look much more deeply into the relationship between the image of the goddess and the idea of cosmic soul.
          Suddenly, the wider, cosmic meaning of the word ‘soul’ became intensely real, intensely alive. With a sense of shock, I understood why life is utterly sacred. I realised that the image of the Shekinah personifies the gossamer-fine web of interconnected relationships that is the ground of all that we call life. Science may study the different aspects of this web of life under different headings such as cosmology, biology and physics but an image like the Shekinah unifies this diversity and, above all, invites relationship with it. While the image of the Virgin Mary has to some extent played this role for millions of Catholic and Orthodox Christians over the centuries, she was not an aspect of the god-head and could never, therefore, represent the innate divinity and interconnectedness of life, nor could she represent the great web of life or the sacredness of nature. Now I understood why the great Indian sage, Sri Aurobindo, had written in his masterwork, The Life Divine: "If it be true, that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth". (15)
          Then I remembered a beautiful passage from a Hasidic rabbi, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, that I had found while compiling The Mystic Vision: "As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full. And he who can draw it  away from before his eyes as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds". (16)
         I knew now that the goddess of my vision had led me to the discovery of the unrecognised divinity of life on this planet, as well as to the existence of an invisible world in which all life participated, a cosmos of relationships, a magnificent, awe-inspiring web of life.
         The discovery of the image of the Shekinah was a tremendous revelation because here, clear as crystal, was the lost feminine imagery of God as well as that of the Holy Spirit. Because the tradition of Kabbalah makes the association between the feminine aspect of the god-head and the Holy Spirit, it showed me how Christianity, in its definition of the Holy Spirit in wholly male imagery, had lost the ancient and connective mythology of spirit as a great web of life and, most importantly, the recognition that the divine was present in every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies, in fact that it was every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies.
         I felt as if I was being given a glimpse of the great shining of the inner worlds, worlds normally veiled from our sight. I knew I was rediscovering something that seemed familiar to me, something intensely exciting which offered the metaphysical counterpart of the most advanced scientific discoveries of our time. In the form of this immensely powerful and numinous image, I was given an explanation of why, in Blake’s words, "Everything That Lives Is Holy." I understood that the mystical tradition of Kabbalah offers one of the major missing links between the participatory experience of the great cultures of the Bronze Age and our own age. What we have lost and what this tradition has preserved for us is the image of a sacred earth and an unseen web of relationships connecting the life of our planet with the life of the cosmos. It was clear to me that our own souls, our own consciousness, belongs to this greater life as child to parent - son to father or daughter to mother. My image of the soul spun one hundred and eighty degrees as I realised that the soul is not in us. We are in the soul. But more than this: we are of the nature and substance of soul, the nature and substance of spirit. Spirit and soul are not really different in kind but two names, one masculine, one feminine, for the same invisible dimension that is the ground or root or source of the physical world. They are not only innate in every atom of our being but we participate in their life, however unconscious of this fact we may be. Suddenly, the soul became intensely real, intensely alive to me. I experienced the feminine being I had seen in my dream as a living reality with whom I could communicate, to whom I could relate. Lying at her feet, gazing up at her, I realized that I was microcosm in relation to her as Macrocosm.
         I understood then that the tremendous being of my vision was indeed she whom Plato and Plotinus in their concept of psyche tou cosmou and Anima Mundi – had named the soul of the world. It was she who had appeared in Hellenistic times to Apuleius in Egypt as the goddess Isis, and in later Christian times as Sophia or Divine Wisdom to the philosopher Boethius, as I had described it in The Myth of the Goddess. (pages 634-5) Awaiting his death, he had written his famous Consolation of Philosophy, immortalising the words she had spoken to him, words that, centuries later, had inspired Charlemagne. (17) This same figure of the World or Cosmic Soul could also be identified with the image of Divine Wisdom, who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs and the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament as well as in the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. I wondered if it was this feminine cosmic presence “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army of banners” who speaks in The Song of Songs saying, “I am black but beautiful O ye daughters of Jerusalem…I am the rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valleys”. (Song of Songs 2:1) To me, the imagery of the Shekinah offered a startlingly complete description of the matrix of invisible spirit in whose being we all live - the Soul of the Cosmos.
          Synchronistically, as if to confirm these intuitive associations, I came across this Ode from the Apocryphal New Testament from the first century BC:

                   I rested on the spirit of the Lord,
                  And she raised me on high;
                  And she made me stand on my feet on the Lord’s heights,
                  Before his perfection and his glory,
                  While I was praising him in the composition of his psalms.
                  She bore me before the face of the Lord…(18)

Notes:
1. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, page 347, par.488
2. Apuleius, The Golden Ass
3. Boethius, T