St. Porcine

Ok so I had an interesting string of Pig conicidences during and after my Dream Teacher Training week in Seattle that wanted to form into this little squealing story. I had just started dating a much younger woman who happened to also be born in the Chinese year of the pig 12 years after me and we were joking about it after we got together as two pigs on a blanket listening to a free jazz concert under a sky full of pink piglet clouds. She came over that night and we had some fun foreplay when I sang her a pig song and we played with a big pink squishy stuffed animal pig that I had. The next week I was in Seattle at Mosswood Hollow retreat center in the foothills of the Cascades for the second week of my dream teacher training. It was one condensed waking dream with lots of bleed between dreams and reality especially in relation to my cabin mate Jerry. On the third day, Jerry and I were sharing our dreams over breakfast and it turned out that our dreams were very similar, both involved fishing and pigs. I had dreamed that I was with several guys who wanted to go out fishing but I was bored by that and I went off on my own and walked out on the water. That right there should have been a lucidity clue but I was only rational enough to believe that I had to walk really fast to keep from sinking. So as I’m racing across the top of water, I see two white pigs swimming towards me and I walk around them because I’m afraid they will try to bite me. Jerry’s dream starts with him fishing with a deceased father in law who was an alcoholic and who he had a difficult relationship with. He walks back through some long grass and discovers a litter of baby pigs. The sow is across a road and he is afraid some carless drunken fisherman will accidentally squish the piglets so he goes to his car and gets out a bag of limestone chips and puts them around the pigs to make a path, a circle of protection.
When we joined the main circle, Robert Moss asked us if we had any shared images from the previous evening’s dreaming and so Jerry and I shared our overlapping dreams. Robert, always the compendium of ancient mysteries, explained that in Biblical times and in the Eleusinian mystery school in Greece, there was a cleansing ritual where demonic spirits were put into pigs. People would jump off of a cliff into the sea with a pig in their arms and the demon soaked pig would then be released to drown in the sea, taking the offending demons into the deep with it. We did a dream theater reenactment of Jerry’s dream that morning and got more information. The fisherman theme took on a Christian savior element and the pigs took on a sacrificial element with an Egyptian tinge after the person playing the limestone chips spoke and told about Egyptian coffins being carved from limestone.
I had been having another weird thread of dreams and coincidences for the first two days around the Egyptian black cat faced Goddess Bast that was coming to a head that day as well. It began with an actual black cat on the property that I first met after I had a vision of her in our first shamanic journey getting into a blue lake of healing and healing her wounded right leg. Right after that journey, I went off toward my cabin and a sweet little black female cat jumped up on the trunk of a red car in front of me, demanding and then reveling in my petting. Of course she had a nasty open wound on her right leg. The next day I was picked by another dreamer to play Bast in her dream theater and I brought through messages from the Black Cat Goddess. Slowly this theme had developed into a sense of a negative energetic connection to a ancient Egyptian/desert djin spirit. The theme that week was about psychic boundaries and energetic protection and cleansing, so Jerry and I did some ritual energy cleansing and chord severing and decided to finish off with a visit to a nearby blue lake of healing to re-enact the Eleusinian Pig Mystery in a playful imaginary way. Jerry had changed into a T-shirt with an Orca on it which sparked me to share with him on the drive to the lake a dream from last year’s dream teacher training involving an Orca whale. I was in the pool that I used to swim in on swim team and I was feeling great sorrow as I held the dead carcass of my childhood dog , a chocolate lab named Penny, in my arms. Then an Orca swam by and devoured her remains and then the pool wall fell down leaving a big opening to the bright sunshine outside. Of course, when I had shared that dream Robert Moss he launched into a story about the Orca shamans of the Pacific Northwest and how their specialty was helping the spirits of the dead cross over.
I had been at this lake 3 years earlier, when I was at a weekend workshop on Dream Healing through the Energy Centers with Robert . I stayed an extra day and walked all the way over to and around the lake and halfway around a black dog with no tags came walking up to me and then followed me the rest of the way around the lake and then down to this public beach and then left. Robert Moss had just shared some stories the previous day about how he used to have a big black lab and how friendly black dogs often showed up in his life as good omens. So I had us return to that same beach for our ritual that that cosmic Anubis dog had led me to. Jerry and I held our imaginal demon filled pigs and ran into the clear cool blue water to release those old energies. Right after we got in, a male chocolate lab with no tags came bounding over the hill and jumped into the water to swim with us. We played fetch with him with a stick for a while and several times he seemed to be seeing something in the water and biting at it as if he was guarding us, keeping those dark energies we’d put in the water from trying to get free.
Robert had explained earlier that the dream healing temples of Asclepius which were connected to the Eleusinian mysteries were full of dogs. People would go there and sleep in the temples until they had a healing dream which involved a dog or a snake. That night I had a dream where I was involved in a ceremony. A man was wheeled in on a hospital gurney with a white cloth over it. Another man came around to the head of the table and then turned into a giant snake and appeared to devour the man on the gurney. But I could see it was a simple magic trick and the man was really down below behind the curtain. I commented to the woman standing next to me what a poorly executed trick this was. We could see the sheet flapping from the clumsy transfer. Then I walked down this hallway and was briefly transfixed by a painting on the wall full of Egyptian black cat headed goddesses and pyramids and ankhs. At the end of the hall was a kitchen, and the wife of the man who was just “devoured” came up to me franticly asking what had happened to her husband. I told her in a booming theatrical voice that “Matter can be neither created or destroyed, only changed in form. So your husband is out there somewhere! We can’t give up hope, it’s all that we have!” After she left somewhat placated, the woman who was next to me and who knew the truth started laughing at my dramatic overacting. We ended up rolling on the floor laughing at the bad roles we had to play to get by, sort of like we were starving actors living on the margins trying to eek out a Hollywood existence. I titled that dream “Bad Actor” and it encapsulated the dark energy I had shed in that healing blue lake. That part of me that would use spiritual energy for manipulation and control of others rather than for healing.
The next chapter happened after I returned home to Madison. I was at this outdoor concert with my Pig sweetie and we fell into an intimate conversation. She was sharing a recurring fatiguing illness that she had been dealing with for six years and I told her the story of the Celtic shamans who were weak and ill while they were taken by the faeries for seven years. This was an initiatory sickness that familiarized them with the world of spirit and prepared them to be healers, bridges between this world and the next. I also told her about this past life memory I had had glimpses of for a while of a lifetime in India where my wife and three kids died of Cholera. After burning them all on a pyre by the Ganges I went up into the Himalayas and spent the rest of that lifetime meditating in a cave and making some progress toward enlightenment. I was beginning to think that she was that past life wife. Later, we went to her place and I noticed a quote on the wall that I liked. She went and got the book that it was from Cool Mind Warm Heart by Steve Roberts, and I did a quick bibliomancy, opening it and random and reading the first passage my eyes alighted on. Imagine my delight when the first sentence was about how every seven years the cells in your body were replaced. The gist of the paragraph was about seeing illness as a gift and it even used the phrase “joyfully cremated in the fire of love” to describe what was necessary to live in this spirit of eternal gratitude. Of course to me this was a big GOD inspired underlining of the importance of our conversation earlier that night.
She lent me the book and I read it right away the next day and imagine my squeal of delight when I got to the chapter titled St. Porcine (St. Pig) which bore a striking similarity to the dark heart of my Egyptian cat tale. The author describes a recurring past life memory where he was an abbot who learned how to do an energy trick to make a bowl constantly fill with fruit. This miraculous slight of hand has everyone worshiping him. He has become addicted to this adulation, even though he knows it is based on trickery and manipulation. He lives in secret shame of his lack of godliness. Then a 13 year old shows up at his monastery who is the embodiment of the pure saintly devotion he is lacking. He is deathly afraid that if this radiant teenager stays around for long he will be exposed for the hollow charlatan that he is and his gig will end. So he keeps setting up the rules so that the forgetful, blissed out William gets in trouble. He disciplines him in progressively harsher ways hoping that he will run away. Eventually, he banishes William to the outdoors in the middle of a snowstorm and he freezes to death. The abbot breathes a sign of relief, but then William starts appearing to all the other monks in their dreams, spreading love and healing. The abbot becomes terrified afraid again that his treachery will be unmasked. So he resorts to an inquisitional ritual that was said to trap a soul in astral limbo for 1000 years. He cuts Williams’ body into pieces and feeds them to their pigs. Then he worries again what will happen if the monks eat the pigs, so he has all the pigs sold to an itinerant butcher. Of course, it isn’t long before he begins hearing tales of miraculous healings that are taking place all across the land and he is hired to look into it. He realizes that all of the people who are experiencing these healings have eaten pig meat from that itinerant butcher, and then ends up getting credit for the miracles because the pigs all came from his monastery. But fear and shame still haunt him and eventually he uses his psychic powers to give himself a terminal illness so he can die before his reputation is tarnished.
The book was written by a recovering alcoholic and its theme of letting go and blessing everything resonated deeply with me. Unfortunately, that whole story was preparing me for the next day when the pink cloud dissolved and I was informed that my blossoming PIG lover was moving on. Luckily, we managed to avoid any demonic drama so that no actual pigs were sacrificed in the crafting of this story. In fact, we have remained close friends, and if you happen to be walking along a certain astral blue lake of healing in your dreams, you just might see our shiny white demon free pig spirits swimming happily beneath your fast moving feet.