Book
I am finishing a book about my study of the trance poses of Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. From time to time I will be posting excerpts. Here is an excerpt from a chapter about the trance pose you see at left, the Giving Way Pose.
Giving Way
Crete, September 11, 2004
I’m sitting on a wall outside the entrance to the archaeological site of Lato, a town in the countryside of eastern Crete settled 2,700 years ago and abandoned 500 years later. I’m watching powerful gusts of wind suck up dry gray soil into tiny dust typhoons that are spitting grit into my eyes and mouth. I haven’t been on Crete at this time of year for a long time, and now I remember the vow I took years ago never to be here in late summer and early autumn when these winds can blow in like an invisible ice storm that instantly paralyzes everyday life.
Local people have had names for the various subtleties of the winds on Crete for a long time. At the Bronze Age temple dwelling of Knossos, a tablet was found that mentions a priestess whose specialty was dealing with the winds. Today’s wind is called meltemi. It’s a wind that “...has the devil inside,” a Greek fisherman once said to me, “a wind that can make you so crazy you might kill somebody.”
When I moved to Crete in the winter of 1975, I was told that even if I did commit a crime while a meltemi was blowing, no jury on Crete would convict me because they would understand that the wind had made me do it.
Everyone in our group today is resting beneath the high stone steps that lead to the remains of Lato’s town center. But before we climb them, we all pull lunch items from our daypacks and prepare a communal picnic—pungent goat cheese made by a local shepherdess, twice baked barley rusks, a variety of olives, fresh tomatoes, almond cookies.
Above us to the east, the dark gray ruins of Lato’s walls outline the contours of a mountain ridge. Behind us to the west across a deep valley is Crete's second highest mountain range that peaks at 2,148 meters.
It was 1997 when I first came to Lato to perform trance poses with a group from the USA, Europe and Crete. As far as I knew, 3,000 years had passed since anyone had performed Crete’s 7,800-year-old trance ritual technique.
Today, our group will perform the Giving Way Pose. When the 1997 group experienced this pose, the themes of its ritual purpose were expressed clearly through people’s visions, but I was so new to all this—too close to it—to see the implications.
After years of listening to the visions people usually experience through this pose, I began to identify some of the sensations and spiritual principles that are especially difficult for us in contemporary cultures to discern and integrate: the art of letting go and experiencing generosity and intimate connection with all beings.
Later today, our group climbs to what remains of ancient Lato’s town center to enjoy the view from an elegant stone staircase that served both as a passageway from one part of the town to another and as occasional amphitheatre seating. Above the staircase once stood two towers that lent a sense of theatrical space for ceremonies performed in the former town center below us.
One of our group members is archaeologist Christine Morris, an authority on Bronze Age religions, who arrived on Crete last night from Ireland. As we gaze into the surrounding mountain passes, Christine tells us that people who lived at Lato during the Iron Age didn’t separate political, spiritual, social and economic aspects of daily existence.
Christine invites us to have a look at what remains of the town’s main shrine, water cistern and marketplace: “You’ll notice that these buildings were all together in the center of town, just as the functions of these buildings were integrated in the lives of the people who began living here approximately 400 years after the end of the culture known as Minoan.”
As she is talking, I am thinking about the ritual that the Giving Way Pose embodies: a timeless opportunity to pause consciously, as the earth’s energy does in late summer/early autumn, and inventory our resources before plunging into winter’s stark immobility.
We pause to discern what we have gathered (over a lifetime and over the past year) and what our community needs from us—no more, no less—for everyone to be nourished at the deepest level in order to survive the spiritual and physical challenges of wintertime.
The Giving Way Pose also reminds us to take time to assess what in our individual lives must come to an end, be cut away and be left as compost before we give way to the yearly descent into a period of unconsciousness in the spiritual depths of the Lower World. There, the transformative fires of the Universal Feminine will shape us into a new Self who will be reborn in the light of spring.
Kenosis is an Ancient Greek word that describes the process of emptying oneself in preparation for ritual. In Modern Greek, the broader meaning of kenosis is to evacuate an area ahead of a natural disaster. I like the notion of ritual emptying—which may be experienced through the Giving Way Pose—to minimize the effects of possible spiritual disasters.
Usually, these experiences arrive when the bottom is falling out of some part of life, or when overwhelming loss sweeps us out of ordinary consciousness and into sensations of confusion, fear and feeling ungrounded. Practicing this pose often heightens awareness of the spiritual aspects of giving way to shock and struggle and loss, so that when these occur in ordinary reality, they may be a little easier to deal with.
Sometimes, a person experiences the effects of the Giving Way Pose as having nothing to do with shock and struggle, but rather as the opening of a gentle process that reveals and releases habits, patterns and life energies that have kept someone stuck.
As I look around at the physical setting where our trance ritual is about to begin, beneath where two towers once stood, I am mindful that today is the 11th of September. I feel sad that our European American culture has not taught us well how to let go and give way to life’s constantly changing spiritual, sensual and natural events.
In fact, the propaganda of the USA subliminally commands that we must resist this process at all costs, and the costs are mounting. Many of us have become experts at never giving way to anyone or anything that appears to threaten our delusions of control.
Some of us are lavishly rewarded for routinely depriving ourselves of adequate sleep, time for daydreaming and the experience of ecstatic states of awareness. We are rewarded for depriving ourselves of these states because otherwise we would be constantly re-minding ourselves of our personal spiritual purpose. Remembering it is correctly perceived as a threat, because it might inspire us to make sure that the earth’s natural resources are distributed fairly.
The events of September 11, 2001 offered the USA a profound opportunity to experience a national Giving Way ritual that could have turned the country in another direction, but our consciousness was too fixed and rigid to recognize that invitation.
Did the people of prehistoric Crete perform the Giving Way Pose for the reasons I’ve outlined—in order to give way to greater truths and restore balance to their consciousness? I have no idea.
Whenever I wonder about this, I think about the hundreds of people I’ve known on Crete for 30 years and their acts of outrageous generosity and spontaneous hospitality. I puzzle about how the people of Crete have held onto their language and customs and cuisine, all the while accepting and enjoying life on its own terms, when their ancestors were occupied by a dozen violent regimes for thousands of years.
I ponder how the people of Crete held onto their moral and ecological sanity, their funeral customs, and their personal and cultural integrity. I marvel that they continue to rank among the top three healthiest populations on the planet in terms of heart disease, cancer and mental illness.
Does the trance consciousness that was widespread throughout Neolithic and Bronze Age linger in the Minoans’ descendants now living on Crete, whose dialect is so similar to that of the Minoans that the two cultures could easily converse today? Is that why the Minoans and the people of Crete adamantly resisted anything that smacks of exclusion, political violence and hierarchy?
As our group forms a circle and we begin our Giving Way ritual at Lato, I send out the hope that some of Crete’s legendary magic will help to revive the archaic spiritual consciousness of our European American group members. I bring my full attention to the sounds of my rattle as everyone slips into trance.