| The shamanic elements present here mostly involve the fact that the king accepted food from the fairy world, and once you eat the food from the fairy world, a great distance of time occurs between the time you think it is and the time it really is. While you were having fun, dancing and singing and playing in the fairy world, a lot of time passed, and you didn’t realize it. This is itself, an effect of having fun, as we all know, but to the person who has experienced a psychedelic “trip,” this time distortion can be extensive and tremendously confusing and disorienting. This becomes the most apparent when someone is at a concert and their friend says to them, “I’m going to the bathroom,” or “I’m going to get a drink, I’ll be right back.” If you are high on mushrooms or LSD, that trip there and back may seem like an hour, although it was fifteen minutes, or to the person having fun dancing, the person who left may have only been gone three minutes. In this case, for King Herla, it was a mere two hundred years. As the wolf was the companion to the shaman, the dog, such as the deity Anubis, the Jackal, is a friend and travel companion in the “otherworld,” just like the pack of hounds who accompany Hecate in the underworld. (8) What are horses always doing in these stories? Horses are the mares, the night-mares, or dreams that transport the person from one world to the other. When we dream, we are said to be changing from one reality and moving into another. The astral world filled with archetypal imagery, which is then imbedded with geometric matrices and encoded, somehow accesses our most primal nature and center of cosmic being, and it is from this space that we bring back, (possibly on horse carriages filled with baggage), all our transcending imagery that allows us to function in this physical reality to our highest potential. Many people throughout the ages have consulted the dream oracle, as we read previously, and dreams are thought to bestow divine visions on humans. One of my most profound visions occurred to me, not through a dream, but immediately upon waking and returning from the dream world, and since I use cannabis quite often, my dream memory is not very sharp. The vision may have been bestowed in a dream for all I know, but either way, the worlds in between states of consciousness are as important as the dream state and the waking state. In other words, the journey sometimes is just as important as the destination, and that is part of what these kind of shamanic fairy tales are telling us. Rip Van Winkle In 1820, Washington Irving wrote the story of Rip Van Winkle which borrowed heavily from King Herla. Rip’s character is comical as the story begins, he sounds like a modern-day hippie, but more like the kind of hippie our parents warned us not to become: “The great error in Rip's composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be for want of assiduity or |
perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar's lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.” “Rip Van Winkle, however, was one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well–oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away, in perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family.” Rip’s marital problems grew worse though at home and he would spend his time listening to public lectures or wandering around the countrywide with his dog Wolf. One day while out squirrel hunting with Wolf, he was about to descend down an embankment when he heard someone calling his name. Then he saw a man carrying something on his back, in this rather, empty neck of the woods. Thinking it was a neighbor in need of assistance, Rip joined him. A short fellow with a grizzled beard appeared carrying what looked like some liquor on his back and motioned him to help him with the load. When they arrived at an amphitheater area there were all sorts of strange folks carrying on. When they approached with the liquor, the whole group stopped silent and stared at them. Rip was scared and confused but sat there as the company joined them and drank and went back to their game they were playing: “By degrees, Rip's awe and apprehension subsided. He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage which he found had much of the flavor of excellent Hollands. He was naturally a thirsty soul and was soon tempted to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another; and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often, that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.” Upon waking, “he looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean well–oiled fowling–piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel encrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm–eaten.” When he approached the town where he lived nobody recognized him and he realized his own beard had grown a foot long. Normally all the dogs recognized him but now they were all barking at him like he was a stranger. (8) Hidden World, p. 186 |