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"It fell upon a Midsummer's Eve ....How Cormac Art went to Faerie - retold by Anne Maria Clarke

6/21/2016

Adapted and performed by Anne Maria Clarke with music composed and performed by David Johnson

How Cormac Mac Art went to Faery is an Irish tale of magic and wonder in which Cormac Mac Art, High King of Ireland is lured into the otherworld by Manannan Mac Lir, the Celtic Sea God and there - whilst searching for his lost Queen and heirs - he comes to understand much that will enable him to more justly serve his people.

much love

anne maria clarke

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More myths, legends and fairy- stories by Anne Maria Clarke at
www.archivepublishing.co.uk

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The Healing Power of the Imaginal - Anne Maria Clarke

6/3/2016

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'Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.' Chuang Chou

It seems that healing: the sort that can bring about deep & lasting change often takes place beyond the everyday – behind the scenes of what appears so solid – in the realm of the imaginal – this mysterious dimension - far and yet ever near - known through the ages to shamans, story-makers, healers and dreamers the world over - where things closer to the source of our dis-ease can be observed and possibly interacted with.

The promise is that hitherto unconscious content – discovered here – can – once brought to awareness - be re-framed, re-configured so to speak, so that our subsequent experience of the ordinary, everyday past, present and future is changed.

The American Jungian Robert Bosnak has devoted much of his life to exploring these subtle realms, collecting dream accounts from people from all over the world, the majority of whom relate,

I was somewhere and something happened.

It is a real place, he asserts - with it's own unique ontology and symbolic language that he calls the embodied imagination, a place not only frequented in dreams – as indicated - yet Bosnak suggests that the dream is infact the purest form of embodied imagination – and that by working with images derived from this domain – one might effect changes not only in one's emotional and spiritual life but changes that can filter through to one's actual bodily manifestation. Bosnak himself tells of his own massive reduction of symptoms from a chronic illness after beginning to work with images derived from his dreams.

The Dream Temples of Asclepius

The ancient Greek temples of Asclepius were certainly based upon this type of idea. Christine Downing, in her lecture - Only the Wounded Healer Heals – reminds us that much of our contemporary healing vocabulary is infact derived from Ancient Greek. The word medicine she explains comes from Media, ancient goddess of healing – yet of particular interest to us here is the word clince (from which the words clinic and client are derived) and which was the name of the flat stone slab in the dream temple where those in search of healing slept during their nights of incubation.

The Asclepian Temple was open to all and Asclepius himself was said to dwell amongst the people and not on Olympus as you might expect. His story is one of rebellion against Zeus himself whom he infuriated by bringing certain popular heros back from the dead. Only the gods were immortal and as a terrible punishment for the violation of this key boundary, Zeus struck Asclepius with his thunderbolts and sent him to Hades – the first and only God in Greek mythology to experience such a death. His time in the underworld was brief – as was fitting for a god - yet as a result Asclepius came to understand the mortal condition like no other before him and therafter became known as The Wounded Healer, beloved of all the people.

Now those who made their way to the Temple of Asclepius at Euripedes were often those whom local physicians had failed to assist. The process began with three days of ritual fasting and prayers, often offered to Memory, mother of the muses, for the source of all disease was held to be of a spiritual nature - a seperation from God - a dis-membering or forgetfulness that needed to be made good, needed to be re-membered in order for health to return.
After these preparations the person would be led to an enclosed chamber containing only the flat stone clince mentioned above. The hope was that Asclepius himself would visit them in their dreams, elucidating the underlying causes of their malaise and offerring ways forward back to health – but always – and this feels so significant and worthy of mention – that any healing – physical or otherwise that followed as a result of these ' visitations' was not intended to prolong life indefinitely - but merely to provide additional time for the afflicted to deepen their spiritual practice.
When subjects awoke – they were encouraged to share their dreams with the priest or priestess of the temple – who were called the therapuetes - meaning those who attended the gods - and this telling – simple as it may seem - together with being empathically heard - was then and has remained at the very core of the psychotherapeutic modality.
So crucial are these two components that, as was pointed out to me recently - it only takes one empathic adult to really hear a child’s hints of abuse - & for that adult to let the child know that what is happening to them is wrong – for the entire course of that child’s future to be radically changed. There ia a quality to this listening which lies at the heart of good therapy - a way of becoming deeply immersed into the field of the other - so that every subtlety and nuance is attended to. When done well - as I have witnessed as an observer several times - it can be quite breath-taking.

The importance of this telling and being heard is pre-figured in myth too - where - in order to achieve completion - the hero or herione must return from the imaginal realm to the everyday world with the treasures/insights from their adventures and somehow set them down for the benefit of the collective.

In the Quest for the Holy Grail for example - Sir Bors returns to Camelot with stories of the great quest. In the Lord of the Rings we see first Bilbo Bagins then Frodo - setting down the tales of their adventures in the chronicle - There and Back Again.

Ancient traditions all - reflecting the universal patterns of the healing process that flourished for thousands of years - before the great split in the development of Western thought - before the ideas of Aristotle sur-planted those of neo-Platonism & the church later secured its dominion over all revelatory experience. From then on in all otherworldy experience was mediated by the priesthood, with anything falling outside being very likely deemed heretical.

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"It fell upon a Midsummer's Eve ....How Cormac Art went to Faerie - retold by Anne Maria Clarke

The Healing Power of the Imaginal - Anne Maria Clarke

'Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.' Chuang Chou

The Dream Temples of Asclepius

Anne Maria Clarke is a storyteller, writer, & teacher of myths, legends & fairy - stories.

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