Ivory

Something precious or beautiful, such as an insight or personal quality, which has grown out of the push and shove of life experience. Black ivory is the unconscious aspects of the soul or personality. Can also represent purity of purpose.

Because it comes from an elephant, and is the power of a tusk, it can represent the great power of the elephant – the remover of all life obstacles.

Homer in the Odyssey says – Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: one gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gates are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them.

 Example: I am staying in a relatives house. He has all these scrapbooks and knickknacks of his daughter who died. I want to steal an ivory piece of erotica (a woman opening her legs to reveal her snatch). I put it in the pocket of my blue smoking jacket.

Example: I am at a museum in some dry place like Australia. It has the most beautiful ‘natural’ exhibits I have ever seen. The most beautiful exhibit is of something that is like an upside down ivory tree, its roots sticking up in the air, with figures of people – angels – naturally formed in the small, fine roots.

Example: In 544 BC, the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, dreamed her bed was transported by four kings to a high Himalayan peak, where four queens adorned her with jewels and brought her to a golden palace. A white elephant with six shining ivory tusks appeared and painlessly pierced her side with a thrust of its tusk. She awoke to the song of a blue bird and realised that she had immaculately conceived.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

What do I feel in connection with the ivory?

Do I have any associations with ivory?

Is it something I have wanted to own?

See Associations Working WithSumming UpAllowing the Spontaneous

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