The psychologist Karl Jung wrote of myth in developing his psychology. He said he found myths and dreams excellent tools for gaining some knowledge of the contents of our unconsciousness. Rather like the palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin who saw matter itself as naturally evolving from unconsciousness to consciousness. Jung saw each of us as containing an ocean of unconscious knowledge which we are in the process of turning into conscious knowledge.

He said a myth can better express the inner personal meaning of truth than can an objective scientific "fact" - for personal truth cannot be defined, limited or be purely rational. Carl Jung - rather like the Beguine Porete, held that the more our critical reason dominates our lives, the more impoverished our lives become. He wrote that our lives become richer the more we make conscious our myths and our unconsciousness. 302 He held that each of us possess "the almighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years". This he called the "collective unconsciousness", (P105) seeing it as combined 'the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death" p41ft. Myth. For me it is the precious resource that we have at our disposal - and yes, it does cross gender lines as Jung suggested. Ultimately we need to find a unity beyond gender.

He said when in his eighties: "My life is the story of the self-realisation of the unconscious.. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestations and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious state and to experience itself as a whole... what we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my 83rd year to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only "tell stories". Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth." P3

In these thoughts of Jung, myth plays a different role to that it played in my own life. It seemed to me, the myth I lived was not made by me, but I was made for it. The myth seemed to come into my life through the active agency of another rather than from my unconscious world.

Yet although Jung defined: "Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition," in his later years he also described myths did not fit this definition but which were bridges between our conscious thoughts and another imperishable world that lay outside us and beyond the laws of time and space. This was closer to my own experience. He said his dreams and visions gave him knowledge of this world and concluded:

"In the end the only events in my life worth telling are when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences among which I include my dreams and visions. They for the basis of my scientific work."p4. "Myths are the earliest forms of science. When I speak of things after death, I am speaking out of inner promptings and can go no farther than to tell you dreams and myths." 304

It seems that myths can enter our lives from this other world. Perhaps I came aware of them because I had wedded this imperishable world? Perhaps the wedding of our personal will to the Creating Spirit of these inner myths, as an act of love, of self-giving, helps free the eyes and heart to see with imagination, helps frees the spirit to live the myth that lives in the divine imaginings about us? Perhaps myths are in our lives because we were not formed in a vacuum but in a world of myths that have much to teach us?

Jung believed that myths arrived in his life from this other world. The night before his mother died he had a dream in which a wolf tore past him as if on a hunt. He immediately recognised this beast as being part of the Wild Hunt that seeks the souls of the dying, an ancient myth of his German people. When he later learnt of his mother's death, he saw this dream was a pre-cognition of her death. At first this the savagery of this vision dismayed him. But on reflection he saw an inner meaning that pleased him. She was being taken..."beyond Christian morality , taken into that wholeness of spirit and of nature in which conflicts are resolved" Later on he wondered why he was not beset with grief when he thought of her death, but then realised that whenever he thought of her: "I continually heard gay dance music, laughter and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated." It was perhaps as if his mother was celebrating her mystic marriage. p311, 313-4

Jung looked to life after death to give a purpose to our lifetime work of making conscious what we possess in our unconsciousness. He theorised that the more we make conscious, the more we can take with us into the next world. "The maximum awareness which has been attained forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of death that is so important. Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together , can the general level of consciousness be raised." Jung 311.

I am not so sure that this is right. Why should our unconsciousness not come with us into this other world? Why should we not be able to continue to explore its contents? What happens if we are reincarnated, as many believe?

We can learn much from the patterns that appear in our lives when we follow our instincts. They can reveal to us the dreams that underlay our creation and helped shape us - and something of the Divine Energy that sustains us. If we do have a Creating Parent, it seems that She may also "dream" a destiny for us.

I learnt of this possibility when I discovered to my surprise that some of the most important events of my life were seemingly woven into a pattern that related to the ancestral myths of my people. This gave my life a structure and meaning that I did not intend.

Was it by chance that the two key events in my gender transition happened on two of the four major ancient feasts of my ancestors - and in each case, happened on very appropriate feastdays, revealing a deeper meaning in what was happening to me?

By seeming chance, not then knowing the significance of the date, I took my first female hormone pill on August 1st, the feast of Llamas, a harvest festival when we celebrate the death of the corn king, a death needed that we might live. This was the day I too killed the willing male so that I, Jani, the daughter of God, might live. The pill contained hormones taken from a pregnant mare. In a way, she thus gave birth to me. A white mare in ancient times signified the goddess.

Next a hospital assigned me a date for the operation that would enable me to make love as a woman. They picked seemingly at random May 1st, the great feast of Beltaine, when is celebrated the new life of Spring, a time traditionally for much love-making. It was then too that I later first made love with a man.

Then I was gravely assaulted at midnight on the great feast of Samhain or Halloween. Was it by chance that this attack, the only such attack in my life, happened at a time when traditionally the veil between the worlds of the dead and living is said to be at its thinnest? It took me to the borderlands of death to listen to the God and Goddess. Through this assault I came to put my anciently chosen sacred role at the centre of my life.

Finally, was it chance that my final initiation in the Craft was on the remaining feast? I celebrated what is called the Great Rite, the mystic marriage, on the Celtic feast of Imbulc, the feast when ewes begin to have milk, serpents emerge from hibernation, when light is overcoming the winter's dark and when is celebrated the feast of the ancient Goddess. True I chose this day - but then I was unaware of the greater pattern in my life.

This pattern suggested to me that some spirit, ancestor or deity, with knowledge of the ancient myths of my ancestral lands, had helped to weave my story for me. This spirit had dreamt me a life that gained meaning from these ancient myths. Perhaps these myths too had their origins in ancient dreamings. This would not have surprised Aboriginal Elders. They were used to the spirits of their lands shaping for them their own lives.

There are so many signs, so many myths, within which I find myself dancing. My very travelling way of life now is so much that of the Gallae, the priestesses of Cybelle, but I did not chose this way to mimic them. It came naturally. The Gallae apparently believed, as Jackie and I did when our children were young, that owning property was an obstacle to spiritual progress. Ref. 108b of b. They travelled in caravans and took from one place to another a small shrine of the Goddess. If a Gallae had a true home, it would be the mountain forests considered sacred to Cybele. Such places are my home. They ate meat believing, as I do, that all food was alive and died that we might live, therefore that all food is sacred. They preferred food gathered directly from nature.

According to the ancients, a person who became a Gallae, a transgendered priestess or shaman, was fulfilling a destiny ordained before birth and revealed by dreams or by the stars, a destiny controlled by the Goddess. Ref. B of B, p 111. Such was the belief of many an ancient people. In this world, we all have a destiny. We are free yet each one of us was brought into being for a specific purpose. This purpose is set in the dreaming that began the process aeons ago that resulted in us now materialising in this life as a human of this planet.