Traditional Greeks prayed every night before sleep to the god Hermes/Mercury, asking that Mercury guide them into the other world, the world of dreams, the Night-Cycle, rather than Hades/Pluto. The belief was that Mercury knew how to travel into the darkness and back into the light; Hades knew only how to travel into the darkness. If the soul traveled into the Dream-Time with Hades, they would not wake up in the morning.
I would argue that in my role as a writer in this period of world-transformation is also, in part, the role of a psychopomp, attempting to help present in imagery the path of the global transition from the Day-Cycle expiration (2001) into the Night-Cycle expansion (to run through 2019).
Laura Strong defines the psycho-pomp personality thus:
Psychopomps are generally:
• adept at guiding others through such transformative experiences as death
• compassionate, nonjudgmental, and friendly
• experienced border crossers and walkers between the worlds
• tricksters who will do whatever is required to achieve their goals
• shapeshifters who can change their appearance to match the setting and the times
• arbiters of change for individuals and the culture
• magical beings who can facilitate healing in unexpected ways.
In the year 2008/2009, I experienced a breakdown of my world after retirement, with a resulting sense of dread of the future. The global economy had just imploded from a surfeit of debt and speculative greed. My wife and I were preparing to leave America.
In 2009, while living in Hanoi, I was given a vision of the 36-year Time Cycle – a coherent mandala – which helped me to make sense of the ‘new’ world I had just entered. In the Time-Wheel I subsequently developed (with significant help from my muse or my guardian angel or daemon) the Soul, in the year 2009, was in the House of Virgo, descending down from the apex of the Day-Cycle (2001) toward Mem, the Water (2010) – Mem is also connected to memory, remembrance, reflection, remembering the Past (the Sun at night reflects in the Moon) – which house (Virgo, the Virgin Mary) is governed by Mercury.
††Note the I-Ching hexagram-image connected with 2007-2010, Virgo/Mercury, is Heaven over the Mountain, with the instruction to: Retreat.
Blavatsky concludes her picture of Michael the Archangel, who, like Moses, appears to be the King of the Deep, the Leviathan – see this web page for a wonderful gnostic treatment of the Judaic mysticism of the letters Mem (the Sea) and Nun (the fish, the savior, the Messiah, Leviathan):
In the Talmud, Mikael (Michael) is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the seven Spirits, for the same reason that his prototype (among many others) Sanat-Sujata, – the chief of the Kumaras – is called Ambhamsi, “Waters” – according to the commentary on Vishnu Purana.
Why? Because the “Waters” is another name of the “Great Deep,” the primordial Waters of space or Chaos, and also means “Mother,” Amba, meaning Aditi and Akasa, the Celestial Virgin-Mother of the visible universe.
Furthermore, the “Waters of the flood” are also called “the GREAT DRAGON,” or Ophis, Ophio-Morphos.
‘The Waters‘, of course, are the Night-Cycle dissolution of the material forms – which we are witnessing today as the global economy and the 1983-2001 world-creation is dissolved by the Flood Waters of inflation.
In his wonderful painting ‘The Last Judgment’, Rogier van de Weyden makes a similar revelation, that Michael and Jesus Christ are one, showing both personalities (the First and the Last), together in the central panel of his painting, Michael below Jesus, Michael with the scales of judgment (Libra) and Jesus, now, with the sword in heaven, the symbol of condemnation, and harvesting a dying world.
Jesus is Michael on Earth; and Michael is Jesus in Heaven. Or, put another way, Michael is Jesus in his new reborn body, in his Eternal Youth; and Jesus is an older version of Michael, wearier, darker, filled with wisdom and emptied out of daylight physical energy directed toward New World Creation.
Michael uses his sword as a physical force to conquer the darkness in the newly-born Spring World (see the Book of Revelations for the story of this); and Jesus uses his sword as a metaphysical, spiritual force to conquer the darkness he finds in the inner Autumn World as he descends into the Underworld, the World of the Dead.