Dream Deities: Morpheus and the Brood of Night

 [This is the second article in a series examining gods associated with dreaming and oneiromancy in the ancient world, following the Mesopotamian dream deities: Mamu, Zaqīqu, and Anzagar. Despite the extensive lists you can find online, there were surprisingly few gods with direct rulership over dreams. Most of these either had recorded appearances in dreams (oneirophanies), were evoked through oneiromantic rituals, or had dream incubation as part of their cultic practice. Others are only tangentially related to dreaming due to being deities of related domains such as Sleep and Night. Finally there are a number of gods who there is too little information or contradictory information to be able to justify calling dream deities.] 

The most well-known dream god is the Roman Morpheus (whose name translates as ‘Fashioner’), who has became so popular in the modern world that he appears as the King of Dreams in comics like Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, and is name-dropped for his oracular power in movies like The Matrix (1999), and is liberally called on or evoked in a number of modern oneiromantic texts. Given this prestige, what role did Morpheus play in the Greco-Roman world? Surprisingly, Morpheus is mentioned only once in classical texts, in the Latin poet Ovid’s cosmogonic epic, The Metamorphosis, where he is not described as the ruler of dreams, but as a minor daimon, one of the “thronging thousand sons” summoned by the god of sleep Somnus. Morpheus in particular is the dream “who in skill excelled to imitate the human form… none can present more cunningly the features, gait and speech of men, their wonted clothes and turn of phrase.”    

Prior to Ovid, the Ancient Greeks did not deify or even personify dreams, but saw them as crafted images as in Homer’s Illiad, where Zeus sends “an Oneiros” to Agamemnon in his friend’s form, or in the Odyssey, where Athena “made a phantom (eidolon) in the form of a woman” who “slipped through the keyhole; And became a sigh in the air.” Even when singled out from what Greek poet Hesiod called “the tribe of dreams” or Latin poet Statius called the “dark brood of Night,” Morpheus is in Ovid’s poem only one of thousands of Oneiroi, whose brothers include Ikelos-Phobetor (who the gods named ‘Like,’ but is called ‘Frightener’ by humans), who “takes the form of beast or bird or the long serpent”; and Phantasos (‘Fantasy’), who “puts on deceptive shapes of earth, rocks, water, trees, all lifeless things.” 

And far from being the ruler of dreams, Morpheus, like his brothers, is ruled over and sent out by their languid father, Hypnos-Somnus, whether in The Metamorphosis or in Greek poet Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, and who was a far more popular figure than the Oneiroi in Greco-Roman literature and art. Sometimes Hypnos’s twin brother Hades-Pluto is the “master of the black-winged Oneiroi,” as in the anonymous Greek Lyric V; or it is their mother-grandmother Nyx (Night) who “opened the two gates of Oneiroi” in epic poet Colluthus’ Rape of Helen, and is trailed by black dreams as her train in Ovid’s Fasti and in the Orphic Hymn to Nyx. According to depth psychologist James Hillman, by locating the tribe of dreams under the parentage of Nyx as part of her daemonic brood that includes not only Sleep and Death but Old Age, Envy, Strife, Doom, Lamentation, Destiny, and Deceit, Hesiod’s Theogeny allows us to see our true relation to dreams, who bring not the optimism of growth psychology or the delight of repressed desires, but the depressive downward journey to the underworld, where our dooms and destinies might be revealed. Another chthonic genealogy for dreams is found in Euripides’ play Hecuba, where they are born from the primordial earth goddess Chthon in order to wrest the power of prophecy from the dayworld control of Apollo.

To illustrate the inhumanness of dreams in the Greco-Roman world, the most common descriptive characteristic of the Oneiroi are their dark wings: they are “long-winged and dreadful” in the Orphic Hymn to the Oneiroi, and are “black-winged” in the anonymous Greek Lyric V. Even Morpheus is described by Ovid as flying “on noiseless wings.” In their behaviors, the Oneiroi are even more animalistic: in Statius’s Thebaid they “cling to beams and doorposts, or lie on the ground,” in the Odyssey a dream “perches upon a jutting roofbeam” in the form of an eagle, in a fragment from Greek poet Alcman they “dwell under a rock,” and in Virgil’s Aeneid they “cling to the bottom of every leaf” of the huge elm tree in which dreams dwell at the edge of the underworld. More than being personified deities, Greco-Roman dreams seem closer to the Mesopotamian zaqīqu, wind demons who slip, like the dream-phantoms of Athena, through the cracks in the door. The only recorded visual depiction of Oneiros as the personified dream god comes from Philostratus of Lemnos’s Imagines, in which he describes an ancient Greek painting of the oracle of Amphiaraos at Oropos, which depicts the god of dreams “in relaxed attitude, wearing a white garment over a black one” (which Philostratus suggests represents “his nocturnal and diurnal work”), carrying a horn to call up dreams through the Gate of Truth.

Given the relatively few classical references to the god of dreams, all of which are artistic and literary, historian Gil Renberg suggests that there is no real evidence to indicate that Oneiros-Morpheus was worshipped in the kind of cultic practices that attended other Greco-Roman deities. While there have been attempts by scholars to link Oneiros and Hypnos to incubation practices, statues of the dream and sleep gods have only been discovered at one incubatory temple, the Sikyon Asklepieion, with dedications to them also appearing only at the Epidauros Asklepieion. Likewise, Oneiros is not evoked or mentioned in any of the oneiromantic spells found in the Papyri Graecae Magicae, except as an epithet for Hermes. The only existing ritual text that mentions the Oneiroi is the Orphic Hymn number 86, part of a larger liturgical initiation rite that pays honor to the entire pantheon of Greco-Roman gods, and which evokes Oneiros (or the Oneiroi, depending on the translation) to bring prophetic dreams through an offering of aromatic incense. 

Despite his absence from classical oneiromantic practices, Morpheus has increasingly become a central deity evoked in modern oneiromancy, Such as in the eclectic ‘dream yoga’ practices described by Samael Aun Weor. Metaphysical dreamworker Michelle Belanger calls on Morpheus to open the gates of dreams and/or one’s own unconscious, and imagines him in his depiction from Gaiman’s comics as the King of Dreams. Asenath Mason and Edgar Kerval’s Dream Gates & Astral Paths contains decontextualized myths, accounts of personal rituals, and artistic sigils for evoking Hypnos and the Oneiroi, and describes Morpheus as a “living darkness” with bat wings. As studies on the the appearance of the divine in lucid dreams show, gods appear to us in dreams in the forms we expect, and as such, in my own dreams, Morpheus has never appeared as Gaiman’s anemic and gothic rockstar obsessed with his own tragic undoing, nor as an edgy occult shadow, but more in the vein of McCay’s immense and bed-ridden King of Slumberland who grants the dreamer Nemo increasing authority over the dreamworld. Although occasionally he has appeared in the guise of my own father.