The Dragon’s Purifying Fire

Gabriel Hartley • Fiskars, Finland • 11 October 2019

It has been a few years since I last posted in this blog—in fact, I had taken it offline for quite some time—but now feels like the right time to get back into the swing of things. As I have mentioned on the Facebook page for this adventure, I had a stroke in early August 2017, healed significantly but nevertheless was led to retire from my job as Professor of English at Ohio University, and at the end of May 2019 moved with my family to Finland, where we now live in the thriving little artists’ village of Fiskars.

I won’t dwell too long on these details other than to mention that my stroke was in many ways an example of the ways in which the Dragon’s purifying fire manifests itself in order to bring about necessary changes, confrontations, and growth. This another way of talking about what the queer Chicana shaman-poet Gloria Anzaldúa refers to as the Coatlicue State, which I have written about at length elsewhere. It involves deep and sometimes extremely disruptive Shadow Work—and not only in accordance with one’s own conscious will. The entire planet is currently undergoing such Shadow integration, and it shows.

Nevertheless, the outcome is always “positive” in the sense of contributing to personal and collective soul evolution. In my case, I “lost” my job—which in this particular case had involved twenty years of my life as a teacher and academic—only to find myself now free to pursue my true spirit avocation outside of such institutional boundaries and limiting assumptions about what passes for knowledge, wisdom, intuition, and creativity. I “lost” my relative geographical proximity to my older children, but am now creating a life that will not only benefit me and my wife and our youngest child but also create a space for all of my family within a culture and society that is far more humane and responsive to personal needs than is currently true in general in the United States.

That Dragon

So this morning my wife, Anna, and I were doing our yoga and meditation together in our new home when I was visited by my High Self, who currently goes by the name of Samuel in their work with me. With a fire roaring in the fireplace (one of five wood burning spaces in our house) I was led into a deeper appreciation of why Samuel might have chosen that name for dealing with me in my personal development. While the Biblical figure of that name is someone in constant touch with various spirit entities and to that extent exemplary, he also is yet another Biblical figure prone to murderous outbursts.

I will be exploring the significance of Samuel’s example in more detail in the future, but one point brought to my attention this morning was the benefit of reading his story as one would read, for example, a tantric tale from Tibetan Buddhism. Samuel’s violence on a literal level is horrific, but if one reads this text as spiritual allegory, then we have a moment of someone playing avatar to the Hebrew equivalent of the devouring demons of Tibet. (I plan to pursue my understanding of and frequent difficulties with the complicated and often dangerous outcomes of spiritual allegory—more on that later.)

I am not suggesting that Samuel confronts such a devouring demon; rather, I mean that Samuel himself IS that demon. He is the sin eater who will purify us by cutting away at that which diverts us from the path forward. And one of the primary things he has to swallow is the distasteful transition in Jewish society from the leadership of the Judges to the rule of Kings, whether the bumbling Saul or the psychopathic David (I will also explore this theme in more depth in the future).

But the key to my meditation instruction, specifically, was the purifying nature of the Dragon’s fire. St. George never understood the Dragon’s true nature as the bridging figure embodying both the heavens and the earth, the creature who flies through the skies before returning to its underground lair. And the treasure it guards is our own inner secret, which we will only ever obtain once we engage with our Shadow Self and strip away all illusions and resistances to the fulfillment of our inner being. This is what the Dragon’s fire makes possible for us and, by extension, for the planet-cosmos unity in which we participate and which we express.

The Dragon is thus the key to our soul evolution. This Dragon energy flows constantly through our Heart Chakra—the chakra that mediates our “higher” and “lower” chakras and brings them into functional unity. This Baptism of Fire is our moment of clarification and release. It is by means of this chakra that we prepare ourselves as Avatars of Divine Expression—microsocmic versions of supercosmic intent, and carry out that intent in our very being in the world.