Sleep, Sex & Serpents
Dream Oracles from The Queens of Heaven and Earth: Sarah Janes
The Queen Came First
It seems likely that the practice of dream incubation as a ritual — began in a distant past when it was usual to worship a female deity as creatrix of the universe. The dreams sought by her supplicants offered them oracles, wise counsel, contact with the ancestors, divine inspiration and perhaps even a sort of miracle-working in an Otherworld. Before human language for example, dreams would have had a distinctly different character. Modern dreams contain thought-forms and imagery created by language. Dreams evolve within the cultural landscape.
We know little of the thoughts that produced the types of female figurines known as ‘Venus’ — the earliest found examples of which are attributed to the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic. Certainly there is a clear continuity of culturally significant female forms that persist throughout early human culture and are intrinsic to the development of spiritual ideas and the formation of the earliest philosophies. The Venus of Willendorf for example was found with pieces of Moldavite — a tektite produced by the Ries asteroid impact in Central Europe 15 million years ago. Perhaps this hints at the fact that the sculpture is more than just a figurative representation and was, in the mind of her creator, connected somehow with the Heavens. Moldavite would I’m sure have been recognised as having a celestial origin, and meteor impacts would have been woven into the mythological landscapes of ancient people all over the world.
Much is of course missing from the archaeological record — due at least in part to the rigorous efforts to obliterate it by the prevailing monotheistic, patrilineal political and economic systems that supplanted pantheistic, nature and ancestor worship and matrilineal kinship systems.
Wresting control of the sexual, magical, religious, healing and oracular culture from female guardianship was vital to ensure political power to the new Abrahamic religions as they emerged and sought complete dominance.
In the pantheistic, nature-worshipping religions of the ancient Near East, Egypt and Greece, we see traces of textual evidence for a much more ancient practice of dream invocation of the Goddess — for revelatory and divine healing purposes. We see feminine powers of prophecy and the wisdom of oracular serpents. The ancients beheld a universe of lightness and darkness, a recognition of one requiring and being essential to the other. The pursuit of this natural balance is as evident in the patterns of nature as it is in the principles of Ma’at — order and natural harmony as personified by the ancient Egyptian goddess.
The Queen of Heaven - as the Mesopotamian Inanna, descends into the Underworld, just as we descend into the realm of dreaming or death. This is the necessary journey towards integration. We have a dual nature and a dual existence.
The Sleeping Lady and Our Lady of Tarxien
The Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni and the temples at Tarxien are Neolithic temple complexes in Malta that are believed to be contemporaneous with Early Dynastic Egypt, the Uruk Period of Mesopotamia and Prepalatial Minoa. Evidence in Malta indicates an influx of people arriving on the island around 7000 years ago. The country now boasts an impressive number of temples and very rich, well-preserved archaeological sites.
The Western Temple at Tarxien houses the so-called ‘Fat Lady’, a very early piece of monumental sculpture which was unfortunately quarried away over time, so that only her lower half remains. The figure stands on a platform decorated with motifs (see pic) and brings to my mind the Venus figures previously mentioned and the Bactrian-Margiana ‘Princesses’ (dated 2400–1600 BC) from the Archaeological Complex in modern day Afghanistan. Many smaller female forms have also been found, many headless.
The remains of more than 7,000 people have been recorded at the Hypogeum — a densely packed underground maze of burial niches, corridors and ritual spaces. The figure of the ‘Sleeping Lady’ was found in the Hypogeum and taking into consideration other architectural features — is thought by many to provide evidence for dream incubation at the site.
Dreaming with the Dead
One of the names given to creatrix figures of the past is that of ‘Divine Ancestress or Grandmother’ and I suspect the Hypogeum may have been a place to come and make contact with the deceased in dreams. Deceased loved ones (and enemies) appearing in dreams would no-doubt have been a meaningful feature of the dreaming experience, it remains an emotive feature of dreaming to this day. It is unsurprising that ancient people all over the world believed that dreams offered an opportunity to communicate with the dead.
This phenomenon would also foster ideas about life beyond death — either in another world or by re-incarnation. The fantastic and non-linear and hyper-realistic nature of dreams would certainly have spawned many myths and religious ideas.
It is my belief that dreams conceived the so-called ‘death cults’ and alongside nature observance, were the primary inspiration for religious and spiritual thought. I am reminded of the effect dreaming has on children and the very strong reality feeling that dreams produce, especially when lucid. It seems possible to me that in ancient times lucid dreaming was a more prevalent ability and is deeply interwoven with the evolution and complexity of memory development.
Dreaming and Superior Memory
I was recently talking with my friend Rebecca Sharrock who has HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) and she was describing how all of her dreams are perfectly lucid, as she always remembers who she is. When she was a child, she truly believed she was being taken away from her bed every night and was of course terrified of going to sleep. Could some of our ancestors have had something like HSAM?
Sex and Fertility
There is evidence to suggest that some Neolithic peoples did not necessarily make the connection between sexual intercourse and conception. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski discovered during World War I that Trobriand Islanders had established no causal relationship between sexual activity and pregnancy (although there are also some interesting contraceptive side-effects of their traditional diet of yams). They believed that ancestral spirit children travelled to the island to choose their future mothers. Entering their womb whilst the woman bathed in the sea.
It is possible that this was at least one of the reasons for so many early societies having a system of matrilineal descent with land-rights and economic systems more favourable to women and their children — paternity was not a consideration. Perhaps as people settled into agriculture and relinquished their nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyles — it even remained a female secret for some time.
Early incubation rites may also have had a fertility dimension — as this is clearly a preoccupation in later incubatory practices in Egypt, chiefly with the male gods — Imhotep and Bes, and Asklepios in Hellenic Greece — (for which we have much solid documentary evidence).
Could it be that the earliest temples were conceived as a sort of earth womb — whereby a body was returned to the earth to seed future generations, planting the dead to engender the next generation? Could the ancestral memory function, the dreams of fertility and incubation be linked in this way? The ancient Maltese temple builders have left no textual evidence, so all we can do is look for contemporaneous continuity in the cultures that perpetuated alongside them — and perhaps seek divine inspiration in our own dreams.
Snake Symbolism at Göbekli Tepe
One of the most fantastic discoveries of modern archaeology has been the uncovering of the huge archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, first properly scientifically studied in the 1990s. This site has been dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period and has altered the timeline of cultural development significantly, it is believed to be around 12,000 years old. So far only a fraction of the site has been explored and it is likely to yield much more evidence about the people that built it.
The most striking feature of the site is an arrangement of huge, T-shaped limestone pillars decorated with mostly animal imagery. Figures representing male and female potency have also been discovered. Of the creatures depicted on the pillars and elsewhere, snakes in groups appear most frequently and the carvings are believed to represent a highly venomous species Macrovipera lebetina which also fits with the interpretation of the animals as being purposefully fierce and in attack mode. The foxes bare their teeth and leap, the aurochs lower their heads and present their horns, there are over-sized scorpions.
One of the many theories put forward is that these groups of snakes are symbolic of death and rebirth. Early hunters may have witnessed communal snake shelters or caves, where large groups of snakes aestivate (go through a period of dormancy during dry seasons) to emerge in more favourable conditions from the underworld — alive, vigorous and vital. This and the well-know nature of the snake to shed its skin and emerge new and healed must have inspired the symbology of the snake as an immortal and supranatural creature cross-culturally.
The Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük
The Potnia Theron — or Mistress of Animals is a widespread motif found throughout the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East. One of the earliest examples discovered is the ‘seated woman’ — found at the large Neolithic settlement at Catalhöyük in Turkey.
There appears to have been gender equality in this society, with men and women enjoying the same benefits and suffering the same hardships. They ate the same diet and had the same kind of burials. There are no tombs in the region and the deceased were buried underneath the domiciles of the living. Many headless bodies have also been found, suggesting that the living often took the head of their ancestors with them, providing evidence of a skull cult.
It is believed about 10,000 people lived at the settlement at its peak, with homes created in a sort of honeycomb cluster without streets — residents walking over the rooftops to access their living quarters through a hole in the ceiling.
The ‘Mother Goddess’ or ‘Grand Mother’ figure is represented as a huge, voluptuous woman (perhaps pregnant and/or giving birth) seated on a throne, the armrests of which are the heads of big cats, probably leopards. This association of the feminine with the feline and the throne is the central theme of many Potnia Theron images and filters through into the conception of the Egyptian Goddess Auset or Isis (whose name is Throne). With her bare full breasts and huge belly, this figure is the epitome of fecundity and overflowing abundance.
The Goddess as great ancestress represents the container of life and death, celestial and terrestrial, she governs a never-ending and reflective cyclical time-space of birth, life, death and regeneration. This perception of time as cyclical — with access to the timeless spirit realms of the ancestors, would hugely influence the consciousness of the day. Perception of reality is augmented by perception of time.
The religious ritual symbols featured at Catalhöyük also included sacred bulls, skulls, leopards, anthropomorphic bears, vultures, lions, aurochs, cultic hunting scenes, phallic and feminine figures. This demonstrates the evolution of religious iconography expressed earlier at Göbekli Tepe, Catalhöyük shows the development of religious practice in a domestic environment.
The skull cult is especially interesting here as it appears to be deeply interwoven with Goddess worship and suggests that this figure is more of an ancestral mother figure rather than what scholars had previously lumped in with fertility goddesses. Examples of more explicit fertility goddess figures have been found in grain bins. There also seems to be mythology involving the removal of the head by sacred vultures — where they might then be carried off into the sky, many of these ritual figures have detachable heads. Plastered and decorated skulls — made to look living — have also been found in burials as grave goods and provide a continuity with artefacts such as the Jericho Skull (seen below).
Bone, shell and clay, 15.2 x 16.7 x 22 cm
BSAJ excavations (Kathleen Kenyon)
Old Women of Hatti
The Hatti people of Anatolia worshipped the Earth as a female form, they honoured this ancestral mother goddess as Kattahha (or Hannahanna). In Hattian mythology the mother Goddess, the great Ancestress Kattahha gave birth to the storm God Taru (represented by a bull). The goddess of the sun was Furušemu or Wurunšemu (later Arinna) and she was sometimes represented as a leopard.
In Hattian culture ‘Old Women’ were the oracles and the ‘word of the old woman’ was sought out when one wanted to know the future. This tradition perpetuated into the Hittite culture that later subsumed Hatti and established a patriarchal, military-orientated society whilst retaining some of the old gods and installing their own kings. The ‘Old Women’ apparently came from all over Anatolia and were diviners and ritual practitioners of great import. They would be called in to resolve everything from domestic squabbles, military campaign decisions, issues with sorcery and even royal succession. They have been described reciting spells in five different languages, some may have had scribal skills.
The Old Woman had the power to invoke the Sun Goddess so that she would return to Earth and revitalise the plants and animals. She also operated bird and snake oracles which were constructed from the creatures movements within a demarcated space and their proximity to certain symbols. They also were masters of the obscure KIN or ‘lot’ oracles in which divination was practiced using a game board and tokens of some sort. Dreams also functioned as very important unsolicited omens and oracles. Supplicants could visit the temple of Ishtar in Hittite times to receive dreams and visions.
In a surviving Hittite text from an Old Woman ritual to stop nightmares (nightmares were believed to shorten your life) we can see echoes of the symbology displayed at Göbekli Tepe and Catalhöyük:
They will place the large dish on the ritual patron’s lap, while he / she
will tie ropes to his left and his right hand.
The Old Woman libates one pitcher of wine for El-Kunirsha and
says: O El-Kunir]sha, Lord of the Dream / Sleep, son of the Dark Earth,
husband / brother of the Sun-goddess of the Earth, deliverer! If the Sun-
goddess of the Earth were for some reason angry with the ritual patron
and she called upon you for him and she called the innocent and the
pure . . . for him, either, whether he had made the Sun-God [of Heaven?] angry,
Or whether she was taking revenge(?) on him [ for ] his [ ] and
she called upon you, O El-Kunirsa for him. [And you], O El Kunirsha, Lord of the Dream /Sleep, evil dreams, evil shortened years, shortened months, shortened days [in a . . . ] of lead
[ ] . . . will hold in front of him. Or if forth [to him] the
[gre]en(?) and the dark munduwanda. . . . . . the wolf, the fox, the snake and the scorpion you will hold out for him.
If however you hold forth the plague and . . .isha ra-sickness
that he / she may perform an invocation-ritual for
me and then . . . shortened years, shortened months shortened days
………..the wolf, the fox, the snake [and the scorpion]
The Solar Goddess and Snake Seers of Crete
Like the Hattis — the early inhabitants of Crete worshipped a solar goddess and a sacred bull god of the Earth (or in some opinions the Moon). Young women and men partook of an extraordinary ritual of extremely athletic naked bull-leaping. Perhaps this was a re-enactment of the dance of the sun and earth (or moon) — a form of sympathetic magic to ensure prosperity for the land and people that depended upon it.
The ‘Horns of Consecration’ are a frequent motif throughout Minoan iconography. Some scholars have asserted that they may not be exclusively bull horns but could also be an iconographic representation of twin peaks — not dissimilar to the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘mountain’ — ‘djew’. That this could have had a double meaning of ‘place where the sun rises’ and bull’s horns is quite likely I think and even strengthens the argument for the bull-leaping contest to be of a ritual magic nature.
Many of the central palaces of Crete were orientated in consideration of the rising sun, with Eastern palaces orientated towards the rising moon. The heliacal rising of the binary star Spica was also of importance and relates to myths of the maiden. Spica is the ‘ear of wheat’ that the constellation Virgo holds in her hand, and relates to the myths of Demeter and Persephone. It is possible that the mother goddess of Minoa was already called Demeter by the Minoans. Da-ma-te in Linear A. Minoan festivals of death and regeneration were the precursor of the Eleusian mysteries which were later to be of great religious significance on mainland Greece.
Minoans also orientated their graves towards the East. There are more female than male deities in the Minoan pantheon and like their contemporaries in Mesopotamia, they hint at personifications of celestial bodies — such as Venus, who may be correlated with the Minoan Goddess — Asasara as with the Mesopotamian Innana/Ishtar. Minoans were fantastic seafarers and merchants, and their trade routes brought influence in from all over the Mediterranean, Egypt, Near East and perhaps even the Indus Valley (with whom they share some incredibly well designed hydro-technologies).
The primary Goddess of the Minoans was a solar goddess and one of the most enigmatic and mysterious artefacts of the island of Crete has been the Phaistos Disk — a circular, spiral disk of hieroglyphs which remained undeciphered, perhaps until recently. Computer Scientist Peter Revesz from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, believes he has identified the language on the disk as having a relationship with the proto-Ugric and proto-Hungarian languages (from which Turkish derives) and offers the translation of the hieroglyphs as a sun hymn.
Chief god of all, our ruler.
Chief god, you protect all of us.
Come light’s spring, shine again Shine warm and glorious rays.
Light up strong, our ruler.
Shine warm and glorious rays.
For our hot cover, to rise we pray.
Sunlight, our dear ancestor mother,
Help our ships sailing on the seas
And all of us.
Of great importance in Cretan symbolism is the snake and the dove. These two elemental creatures represent the chthonic and celestial aspects of their world view. The Poppy Goddess represents a unification of these elements and may be the archetypal Demeter of the Mysteries — Da-ma-te. As a gardener watches the sun turn the heads of her flowers, so too did the ancient people of Crete see themselves as a continuation of divine plant life, part of the fabric of nature. They orientated their lives around the machinations of the life-giving orb of light and other heavenly bodies.
Opium was used in rituals to commune with the gods and in sleep medicine. It is also believed by some, that priestesses used the mind-altering effects of snake venom to receive revelations from the goddess. I believe the snakes used in Minoan temples were more related to chthonic powers of regeneration and insight, providing their oracles by ‘licking clean the ears’ of the priestesses and enabling them to hear their secrets. Many Greek myths held that people would acquire second hearing and second sight if their ears or eyes were licked by a snake. This relationship with serpents morphed into the non-venous snakes employed later in the dream healing sleep temples of the God Asklepios — institutions which were deeply interwoven with the oracular tradition and the initiation rituals of the Mysteries.
Mnemosyne and the Water of Memory
At the Oracle of Trophonius, the Titaness Mnemosyne - personification of memory, remembrance, sense-making and eloquence, held an important function for those visiting the so-called ‘Dark Oracle’. The Cave of Trophonious appears to be a Last Chance Saloon type of oracle. It involved the quite terrifying ordeal of being lowered head first into a dark crevice filled with snakes (you would take honey cakes as offerings to these serpents). After an unspecified period of time — it might be days — you would be pulled out, having hopefully had a revelatory experience, but most descriptions relate that you would be scared out of your wits and waffle incoherently for a period before being sent to the oracle’s hostel to compose yourself.
Before being lowered into the hole and after making the appropriate sacrifices to the appropriate gods, the oracle seeker would drink from the river of Lethe (personification of forgetting and also Mnemosyne’s counterpart/sister) to forget everything that has gone before. Then you would drink from the river of Mnemosyne (remembrance) so that you would remember everything that is about to be revealed to you by the oracle. Once brought out of the oracular hole, the supplicant was sat on the chair of Mnemosyne and from their wild ravings, the attendants constructed an oracle.
Mnemosyne’s role was not dissimilar in the sleep temples of Asklepios where she was the final goddess evoked in a ritual to ensure remembrance of the ‘divine dream’ in which a patient anticipated meeting with the dream healer god Asklepios. She was also something of a psychopomp in the death-practicing rites of the Orphic religion in Greece.
Mnemosyne guides the dead through the Underworld. She is the Mother of the Muses and the soul of inspiration. She is the daughter of Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Heaven) she really is the personification of human consciousness. She reminds the terrestrial of their celestial origin. Interestingly when the Romans tried to reconfigure her into their pantheon of Gods, she was reworked as Moneta (Latin: remind/instruct/debt — the root of Money).
Remembering The Great Mother
The archetypal Great Mother, The Ancestress is still with us today and can deliver divine inspiration through dreams. Sleep in a cave, drink the water from a local spring, plant a sycamore tree, seek out your local goddess temple. Recognise the divine in nature and yourself. We exist within the fabric of nature and history. Time is not linear, make an offering to the goddess today, recast her image in the clay of your land.
There is likely to be a site sacred to a Goddess near you, where the elements converge - these are natural sites for Goddess worship. Find the places near you where a Goddess has been worshipped — I was just reading about the temple of Isis in South London and the worship of Sulis-Minerva at Bath, where I am sure incubation would have occured. SHE is everywhere. Seek her out.
