Good dream: In Hades' house
This morning I had what might have been the best dream I've ever had. I was staying with Hades, Persephone, and Their young daughter in Their home, which was located on a nice suburban street much like many of the ones located all over Southern California when I was a child. It was afternoon, perhaps around 7 or so on a Summer day in the Northern Hemisphere in early July, the Sun westering but not close to the horizon yet. A mild breeze, not cold, just right, blew across the grass* of the back yard, where the daughter was hanging clothes on a clothesline of a sort that many had back in the day (and, I'm sure, many have now, where it's practical; air-dried clothes smell so good, and while hanging them up is a something of a chore, it certainly isn't that bad, so why not?). Their daughter was around 13, and tall and leggy for Her age; She had olive skin and long, dark hair, like Her dad in that way; and wore a simple all-white sun-dress, the hem just above her knees, the cloth of which it was made Summer-weight, very cool and light. It was a sleeveless dress, with white straps each about 1.5" wide over Her shoulders, the sort of thing girls in many parts of the world wear in the Summer. She might have had on a simple gold necklace, but nothing fancy. And there were leather sandals on Her feet, thick ones of the sort that don't wear out quickly, and are more than ample protection for the feet. She was attractive, but not trying to be, with a coltish grace and lissome frame. Like Her parents, She seemed Mediterranean, the sort of girl you might see with Her brothers on a jetty along the Mediterranean Ocean in Greece, helping to bring in fish and check the crab-pots.
Her parents were in the house. It was a modest house, one story in height, at least above ground (more about that below), strong and sturdy. Made of wood, it had a low, peaked or sloped roof, and its siding, inside and out, was made of a medium-dark brown wood that had been polished until it was the color of dark honey, rich and golden and full of warmth. It faced east, and sat on a wide lot surrounded on three sides by a neat fence of vertical wooden planks set side by side, about 3.5-4 feet tall (the front side, facing the street, wasn't fenced), so that the houses to the north and south were a good distance away. The lots across the street were similar to it, each surrounded on three sides by wooden fencing of their own; the properties there weren't all built up, so it's likely that the properties on either side of Hades and Persephones' weren't, either. In that way, the area was like many parts of Whittier, Arcadia, San Bernardino, and other places in Southern California back in the 1940s, before the developers got their dirty greasy hands on everything and covered it all up with cheap developments, ripping out all the wild grass and mustard plants.
On the southern end of the house was the kitchen, not very big, but holding everything needed by a good cook, with plenty of room to get through to the laundry room on the west side of the kitchen. In turn, on the west side of the laundry room was a door that opened on the back yard. Both the kitchen and the laundry room had wide, south-facing windows that let in plenty of light.
On its northern side, the kitchen opened into the living-room via a wide, doorless passage. The living-room had one large east-facing window, and the front door, between the kitchen and that window, opened on a wide, spacious front lawn covered with thick, long, green grass that looked as if it was watered every day. There was a passage on the north side of the living-room that opened on the rest of the house (and there might have been a door or passage on the western side of the house, as well), and a sense that whatever rooms and passages were back there go on for a long, long way. But from the outside the house didn't look big, so the rooms on the house's north (and, perhaps, west) side must have been accessed via a higher-dimensional passage and/or been underground.
The house wasn't by any means a palace, but it was neat and clean, and had beautiful wooden furniture which, like the paneling on the interior and exterior walls, gleamed richly the way that wood that is cherished and polished frequently with polishing solutions does. There were throw-rugs and carpets on the beautifully polished and swept wooden floors, bright and cheerful or comfortable rather than ostentatious, cushioning the air against intrusive noioses. And the drapes on the windows were lovely, the kitchen drapes in bright yellow cotton printed with white paisleys, the living-room drapes thick and rich in color and pattern, drawn to either side of the big living-room window. The house wasn't a mansion, but rather the home of beings Who truly loved it, and took great care of it and its furnishings, keeping its occupants happy, comfortable, and protected from all weathers. The thing is, Hades and Persephone could have changed the house into anything They wanted by thinking about it -- i.e., by Magick, but with no need for rituals, just pure creativity powered by pure thought -- but They didn't want to change it. They were happy with it just as it was.
I asked if I could try using Magick in the back yard to make something, and Hades, smiling, said yes. I went out there, and tried to Magick a much larger yard, one with long, sweeping lawns, topiary, and other things typical of rich estates, perhaps low walls made of red-and-black bricks or something else that would accord with what I thought of as Hadean. The daughter looked at me disapprovingly as She worked away on the roof of a low outbuilding in the northwestern corner of the yard, so I gave up, and everything went back to the way it was. Then I realized how peaceful everything was, no loud noises anywhere. The neighborhood behind the yard was like the one in front, not fully built up, some nice, low houses, all different from one another, on large, grassy lots like this one. No loud, distracting noise, just the normal afternoon sounds of a suburban Southern California neighborhood back in the late 1940s, warm Sun, cool breeze, a few bird-calls here and there, the sound of the wind rustling through the trees and the lush grass. The trees themselves were tall and slender, with long branches covered with small green leaves -- come to think of it, some of them, with trailing branches, were probably willows, while others were likely elms and similar trees, tall, slender, not too bushy, and all in their Summer foliage. The sky above was a gorgeous, rain-washed cerulean that seemed to go on forever in every direction; there were a few sparkling-white cumuli floating in it, but otherwise it was empty of everything but the Sun and, as described below, a couple of unexpected phenomena.
It was peaceful. So blessedly peaceful. It was a lovely little place, and didn't need to be anything other than it was. Hades, Persephone, and Their daughter -- I never learned Her name (but see below) -- were happy there, and I can see why.
Up on the roof of that outbuilding, Their daughter was doing something odd. I could see big, bright-white stars in the sky above the roof of the building -- five-pointed jobs, the sort that children cut out and paste up on things, not real stars. I asked Her if that was the case, if those stars weren't real, and She said yes, She had cut them out of paper and pasted them up there. I asked Her, "Is the Moon real, then?" She said yes, pointing slightly east of north to clear a large white dome, also on that roof, that looked just like the domes of observatories. In fact, there was a crescent opening in it that was probably for a telescope and would be opened wide later, after it got dark. Past the dome, partly obscured by it, in the direction She pointed, was the Full Moon, for real. That put it more or less due north, which would have had the property and the neighborhood around it in the Southern Hemisphere. Which seems odd; but the Babylonians believed that the Underworld, where the souls of the dead went after death, was located to the south, so not so odd, save for one little detail: the Sun, still fairly high in the sky and not close to the western horizon, was slightly south of the celestial equator. Even stranger, though, was the fact that the Full Moon shared the sky with the Sun, and that the Moon must have risen no more than two or three hours after the Sun -- when the Moon is Full, it is 180° away from the Sun in the sky, rising just when the Sun sets, 12 hours after the Sun has risen. So here the daytime sky also contained the Full Moon, the symbol of the conscious mind respectively conjoined with that of the unconscious mind, perhaps indicating conscious awareness of the things normally only accessible to the unconscious mind or even the Collective Unconscious. I wonder if yesterday's solar eclipse had anything to do with that.
Back in the house, from time to time someone or a small group of people came out of the passage on the northern side of the living-room to talk with Hades. These were souls and their escorts (the latter perhaps representing Hermes, the Psychopompos and guide of the soul on its journeys between the Underworld and the waking world, either after death or just before reincarnation, or between the waking world and tranced states in which initiates of various schools of Magick conduct ritual Magick or Magickal meditation). The souls were petitioning for things, such as reincarnation, or a change in the part of the Underworld to which Hades had assigned them. Sometimes Hades granted their petitions, sometimes not. He wasn't vindictive, just judicious. One group of three people dressed for an archeological dig in some warm part of the world -- white shirts, khaki trousers, bush-ranger hats, all slightly dusty, with some spots of dirt -- wanted to be reincarnated. Their eyes, light, slightly greenish blue in color, seemed glassy, as if they were very ill, though they were smiling broadly. Hades sent them back to wherever they were, telling them no, it wasn't time for them to reincarnate yet. After they left He told me, "Those three are idiots. The three of them caught tuberculosis and died of it, and they almost infected a whole town full of people with it before they were buried. I think they need to think it all over and get some common sense before being loosed on the world," He told me, laughing a little.
Another soul was a young man I knew, someone who'd recently died (that is, in the dream; he did seem familiar, but if so, it was somebody I'd last known back in my days living in Isla Vista, California, in my late 20s or early 30s, decades ago); we exchanged greetings, but otherwise didn't have much to do with each other in the dream. I didn't know the rest. They came and went in orderly fashion, without any sign that they were being kept in torment or anything like that, each with his or her own time to leave and go back to the world, whenever that should be. There were no truly bad souls that appeared in the dream, though they must have been there, somewhere, perhaps down in the deep levels of the Underworld, where they couldn't harm anyone.
As to appearances, Hades was tall, and like His daughter, had dark hair and olive skin. His hair wasn't long, but not ultra-short, either; He had a cowlick in front, not quite as long as Elvis's, but definitely there. He had a short, slightly curly, well-trimmed beard and a mustache. His voice was powerful, a deep baritone, and pleasant, the way the voices of very healthy men can be. He was buff and strong, muscular the way men who do real work rather than just working out in the gym are. Sometimes He seemed to be wearing an all-black, knee-length toga kept in place with one large, ornamental pin of solid gold in the form of a circle that pinned the part of the cloth that came over the shoulder to that worn around the hips. At others, He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans with motorcycle clips at the cuffs, and black, knee-length boots. He might have had pierced ears, with a small hoop of gold in each ear, but he wasn't big on jewelry.
Persephone was lovely, with fair skin and brown eyes; she had long hair which, resembling that of Her husband and daughter, it was of a rich, dark color. At times She seemed to be dressed in a longer version of the same sort of dress Her daughter wore, sandals, and, perhaps, simple gold jewelry; at others, She appeared to be dressed in a white jacket, dark pants with motorcycle clips on the cuffs, and good, knee-length boots of dark, well-kept leather (I think She and Hades liked to go riding around on Their Harleys** a lot). Her voice was rich and vital. Sometimes Her hair was gathered up and kept in place with gold pins; at others, it was worn loose, spilling over Her shoulders in a dark tide of beauty. She smiled frequently, and Her laughter was rich and lovely.
It was so peaceful there -- that's what struck me. So lovely and peaceful. There was no sense of anything threatening, and because the yard in front and back was so uncluttered, and the house unpretentious and modest, there was nothing between me and the reality of the place, no serious distractions to take my mind away from the peace and loveliness of it all. It was in some ways like being part of a Chinese landscape painting, in which the spaces between things are the most important parts of the view, framed by everything else the way a Western painting is set off by whatever sort of frame it has. It was absolutely perfect. I don't think I've ever had so lovely and pleasant a dream. This was paradise, this was heaven, if anything is, for heaven is the place where love lives, and love informed every bit of it.
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*Some researchers believe now that green plants evolved from a symbiotic association between a fungus and a blue-green alga. While lichens, which represent the marriage of Hades and Persephone, are also symbiotic associations of fungi and algae, in their case the fungus is the dominant member of the pair. In the case of plants, the alga is dominant; the upper parts of the plants are mostly expressions of the photosynthesizing alga, while the roots are mostly expressions of the fungus (like the roots of plants, fungi don't photosynthesize, can't use carbon dioxide, and do need oxygen -- fungi get oxygen from the air, while roots of plants get theirs from oxygen in the soil, and will die if there isn't enough oxygen in the soil for them). So green plants, like lichens, also represent the marriage of Hades and Persephone, and perhaps Their children. Classically, Aphrodite and Venus represent green plants, so one interpretation is that Venus/Aphrodite is the daughter of Hades and Persephone. Perhaps Their daughter in the dream was Aphrodite as a young girl.
**My impression of their motorcycles is that they are among Harley-Davidson's finest, big, powerful machines in primo condition, dark in color but with sheens of metallic blue and red here and there. They like riding out in Seattle, Washington, DC, and anyplace else ruled by Scorpio.
********************************************************************************************************************
And for those who need to know:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgcoBKWTW14)
Puggsley Speedbump Pickula and PuggsleyOne Thorsson already know. For which, thank you, Grandfather. :-)
Her parents were in the house. It was a modest house, one story in height, at least above ground (more about that below), strong and sturdy. Made of wood, it had a low, peaked or sloped roof, and its siding, inside and out, was made of a medium-dark brown wood that had been polished until it was the color of dark honey, rich and golden and full of warmth. It faced east, and sat on a wide lot surrounded on three sides by a neat fence of vertical wooden planks set side by side, about 3.5-4 feet tall (the front side, facing the street, wasn't fenced), so that the houses to the north and south were a good distance away. The lots across the street were similar to it, each surrounded on three sides by wooden fencing of their own; the properties there weren't all built up, so it's likely that the properties on either side of Hades and Persephones' weren't, either. In that way, the area was like many parts of Whittier, Arcadia, San Bernardino, and other places in Southern California back in the 1940s, before the developers got their dirty greasy hands on everything and covered it all up with cheap developments, ripping out all the wild grass and mustard plants.
On the southern end of the house was the kitchen, not very big, but holding everything needed by a good cook, with plenty of room to get through to the laundry room on the west side of the kitchen. In turn, on the west side of the laundry room was a door that opened on the back yard. Both the kitchen and the laundry room had wide, south-facing windows that let in plenty of light.
On its northern side, the kitchen opened into the living-room via a wide, doorless passage. The living-room had one large east-facing window, and the front door, between the kitchen and that window, opened on a wide, spacious front lawn covered with thick, long, green grass that looked as if it was watered every day. There was a passage on the north side of the living-room that opened on the rest of the house (and there might have been a door or passage on the western side of the house, as well), and a sense that whatever rooms and passages were back there go on for a long, long way. But from the outside the house didn't look big, so the rooms on the house's north (and, perhaps, west) side must have been accessed via a higher-dimensional passage and/or been underground.
The house wasn't by any means a palace, but it was neat and clean, and had beautiful wooden furniture which, like the paneling on the interior and exterior walls, gleamed richly the way that wood that is cherished and polished frequently with polishing solutions does. There were throw-rugs and carpets on the beautifully polished and swept wooden floors, bright and cheerful or comfortable rather than ostentatious, cushioning the air against intrusive noioses. And the drapes on the windows were lovely, the kitchen drapes in bright yellow cotton printed with white paisleys, the living-room drapes thick and rich in color and pattern, drawn to either side of the big living-room window. The house wasn't a mansion, but rather the home of beings Who truly loved it, and took great care of it and its furnishings, keeping its occupants happy, comfortable, and protected from all weathers. The thing is, Hades and Persephone could have changed the house into anything They wanted by thinking about it -- i.e., by Magick, but with no need for rituals, just pure creativity powered by pure thought -- but They didn't want to change it. They were happy with it just as it was.
I asked if I could try using Magick in the back yard to make something, and Hades, smiling, said yes. I went out there, and tried to Magick a much larger yard, one with long, sweeping lawns, topiary, and other things typical of rich estates, perhaps low walls made of red-and-black bricks or something else that would accord with what I thought of as Hadean. The daughter looked at me disapprovingly as She worked away on the roof of a low outbuilding in the northwestern corner of the yard, so I gave up, and everything went back to the way it was. Then I realized how peaceful everything was, no loud noises anywhere. The neighborhood behind the yard was like the one in front, not fully built up, some nice, low houses, all different from one another, on large, grassy lots like this one. No loud, distracting noise, just the normal afternoon sounds of a suburban Southern California neighborhood back in the late 1940s, warm Sun, cool breeze, a few bird-calls here and there, the sound of the wind rustling through the trees and the lush grass. The trees themselves were tall and slender, with long branches covered with small green leaves -- come to think of it, some of them, with trailing branches, were probably willows, while others were likely elms and similar trees, tall, slender, not too bushy, and all in their Summer foliage. The sky above was a gorgeous, rain-washed cerulean that seemed to go on forever in every direction; there were a few sparkling-white cumuli floating in it, but otherwise it was empty of everything but the Sun and, as described below, a couple of unexpected phenomena.
It was peaceful. So blessedly peaceful. It was a lovely little place, and didn't need to be anything other than it was. Hades, Persephone, and Their daughter -- I never learned Her name (but see below) -- were happy there, and I can see why.
Up on the roof of that outbuilding, Their daughter was doing something odd. I could see big, bright-white stars in the sky above the roof of the building -- five-pointed jobs, the sort that children cut out and paste up on things, not real stars. I asked Her if that was the case, if those stars weren't real, and She said yes, She had cut them out of paper and pasted them up there. I asked Her, "Is the Moon real, then?" She said yes, pointing slightly east of north to clear a large white dome, also on that roof, that looked just like the domes of observatories. In fact, there was a crescent opening in it that was probably for a telescope and would be opened wide later, after it got dark. Past the dome, partly obscured by it, in the direction She pointed, was the Full Moon, for real. That put it more or less due north, which would have had the property and the neighborhood around it in the Southern Hemisphere. Which seems odd; but the Babylonians believed that the Underworld, where the souls of the dead went after death, was located to the south, so not so odd, save for one little detail: the Sun, still fairly high in the sky and not close to the western horizon, was slightly south of the celestial equator. Even stranger, though, was the fact that the Full Moon shared the sky with the Sun, and that the Moon must have risen no more than two or three hours after the Sun -- when the Moon is Full, it is 180° away from the Sun in the sky, rising just when the Sun sets, 12 hours after the Sun has risen. So here the daytime sky also contained the Full Moon, the symbol of the conscious mind respectively conjoined with that of the unconscious mind, perhaps indicating conscious awareness of the things normally only accessible to the unconscious mind or even the Collective Unconscious. I wonder if yesterday's solar eclipse had anything to do with that.
Back in the house, from time to time someone or a small group of people came out of the passage on the northern side of the living-room to talk with Hades. These were souls and their escorts (the latter perhaps representing Hermes, the Psychopompos and guide of the soul on its journeys between the Underworld and the waking world, either after death or just before reincarnation, or between the waking world and tranced states in which initiates of various schools of Magick conduct ritual Magick or Magickal meditation). The souls were petitioning for things, such as reincarnation, or a change in the part of the Underworld to which Hades had assigned them. Sometimes Hades granted their petitions, sometimes not. He wasn't vindictive, just judicious. One group of three people dressed for an archeological dig in some warm part of the world -- white shirts, khaki trousers, bush-ranger hats, all slightly dusty, with some spots of dirt -- wanted to be reincarnated. Their eyes, light, slightly greenish blue in color, seemed glassy, as if they were very ill, though they were smiling broadly. Hades sent them back to wherever they were, telling them no, it wasn't time for them to reincarnate yet. After they left He told me, "Those three are idiots. The three of them caught tuberculosis and died of it, and they almost infected a whole town full of people with it before they were buried. I think they need to think it all over and get some common sense before being loosed on the world," He told me, laughing a little.
Another soul was a young man I knew, someone who'd recently died (that is, in the dream; he did seem familiar, but if so, it was somebody I'd last known back in my days living in Isla Vista, California, in my late 20s or early 30s, decades ago); we exchanged greetings, but otherwise didn't have much to do with each other in the dream. I didn't know the rest. They came and went in orderly fashion, without any sign that they were being kept in torment or anything like that, each with his or her own time to leave and go back to the world, whenever that should be. There were no truly bad souls that appeared in the dream, though they must have been there, somewhere, perhaps down in the deep levels of the Underworld, where they couldn't harm anyone.
As to appearances, Hades was tall, and like His daughter, had dark hair and olive skin. His hair wasn't long, but not ultra-short, either; He had a cowlick in front, not quite as long as Elvis's, but definitely there. He had a short, slightly curly, well-trimmed beard and a mustache. His voice was powerful, a deep baritone, and pleasant, the way the voices of very healthy men can be. He was buff and strong, muscular the way men who do real work rather than just working out in the gym are. Sometimes He seemed to be wearing an all-black, knee-length toga kept in place with one large, ornamental pin of solid gold in the form of a circle that pinned the part of the cloth that came over the shoulder to that worn around the hips. At others, He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans with motorcycle clips at the cuffs, and black, knee-length boots. He might have had pierced ears, with a small hoop of gold in each ear, but he wasn't big on jewelry.
Persephone was lovely, with fair skin and brown eyes; she had long hair which, resembling that of Her husband and daughter, it was of a rich, dark color. At times She seemed to be dressed in a longer version of the same sort of dress Her daughter wore, sandals, and, perhaps, simple gold jewelry; at others, She appeared to be dressed in a white jacket, dark pants with motorcycle clips on the cuffs, and good, knee-length boots of dark, well-kept leather (I think She and Hades liked to go riding around on Their Harleys** a lot). Her voice was rich and vital. Sometimes Her hair was gathered up and kept in place with gold pins; at others, it was worn loose, spilling over Her shoulders in a dark tide of beauty. She smiled frequently, and Her laughter was rich and lovely.
It was so peaceful there -- that's what struck me. So lovely and peaceful. There was no sense of anything threatening, and because the yard in front and back was so uncluttered, and the house unpretentious and modest, there was nothing between me and the reality of the place, no serious distractions to take my mind away from the peace and loveliness of it all. It was in some ways like being part of a Chinese landscape painting, in which the spaces between things are the most important parts of the view, framed by everything else the way a Western painting is set off by whatever sort of frame it has. It was absolutely perfect. I don't think I've ever had so lovely and pleasant a dream. This was paradise, this was heaven, if anything is, for heaven is the place where love lives, and love informed every bit of it.
**************************************************************************************************************
*Some researchers believe now that green plants evolved from a symbiotic association between a fungus and a blue-green alga. While lichens, which represent the marriage of Hades and Persephone, are also symbiotic associations of fungi and algae, in their case the fungus is the dominant member of the pair. In the case of plants, the alga is dominant; the upper parts of the plants are mostly expressions of the photosynthesizing alga, while the roots are mostly expressions of the fungus (like the roots of plants, fungi don't photosynthesize, can't use carbon dioxide, and do need oxygen -- fungi get oxygen from the air, while roots of plants get theirs from oxygen in the soil, and will die if there isn't enough oxygen in the soil for them). So green plants, like lichens, also represent the marriage of Hades and Persephone, and perhaps Their children. Classically, Aphrodite and Venus represent green plants, so one interpretation is that Venus/Aphrodite is the daughter of Hades and Persephone. Perhaps Their daughter in the dream was Aphrodite as a young girl.
**My impression of their motorcycles is that they are among Harley-Davidson's finest, big, powerful machines in primo condition, dark in color but with sheens of metallic blue and red here and there. They like riding out in Seattle, Washington, DC, and anyplace else ruled by Scorpio.
********************************************************************************************************************
And for those who need to know:
Click to view(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgcoBKWTW14)
Puggsley Speedbump Pickula and PuggsleyOne Thorsson already know. For which, thank you, Grandfather. :-)