Initiated Page 16
Arms raised toward the fireworks exploding their sulfur and sparks across a sea of exuberant faces, tears streaming down my cheeks, I watched the crowds kissing and swinging each other around. Wetting the surface of my palms with my tears, I offered their salt water as libation, saying, “Please, by the powers of the Goddess and the God and the Holy Androgyne, send me a protector. Send me someone to help, someone who will love me and keep me warm, even if it’s just for one night.”
I clapped my hands together and then flung them up to the sky, releasing the Guardians of the directions to find my protector and bring them to me. Even before I left the plaza, I knew my spell would work.
A mentor of mine, Robert Allen, a ceremonial magician in the tradition of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, says spells have three components: emotion, intention (symbolic thought), and action. At any of these points, the magical practitioner can go wrong, but the trouble often starts with the emotion. If your emotion is anxiety or desperation, look forward to a wild ride ahead. In any case, generating emotion in the first place is often difficult to achieve. Now, when I do spells with my clients, sometimes they feel shy, or find it difficult to access the emotion that brought them to me in the first place. Being able to access emotion on demand is why witchcraft takes practice, just like theater takes practice. To be able to call upon a powerful, authentic emotion at will, and to have it be the right emotion for the job, is not easy to do. All the most effective spells have real emotion behind them. Like most engines, spells need combustion to make them go. Emotion ignites the spell; action sends it out into the universe to do your work.
Soon after New Year’s Eve, I checked myself back into Bob’s Youth Hostel. Homeless people were freezing to death on the streets, and my apartment was only a few degrees warmer. Given that it was the holiday season, I was lucky to get a bed. I took a bunk in the crowded girls’ dorm room, grateful to sleep amidst the blazing bodies of two dozen strangers. I noticed on the bunk below mine someone had left her guitar case. Someone had been so committed to her music that she was willing to lug her guitar around with her while she was traveling. I wanted to be that committed to my own art practice.
Later that day, I sat at a cheap café in the Red Light District, blowing steam off salty spoonfuls of French onion soup, watching the snow dance beneath the streetlamps outside. I wonder how long I will have to wait, I thought, before my helper appears. At that moment, a diminutive figure bustled into view, emerging through the whirls of snow on the dark city street, strawberry-blond hair peeking from beneath her cap, pointy upturned nose reddened by frost. It was Isla. My Fairy Queen and Fairy Monster. Appearing through the snow like the White Witch of Narnia.
No. This can’t be right, I thought to myself. My Fairy Queen disappeared into the veils of shivering white. I hesitated. I was terrified of this woman. When I’d arrived in Europe, I worried that she’d hire a hit man to come find me. We hadn’t communicated since I’d left for Europe nearly half a year before. In that time, she’d come to represent to me absolute chaos and the potential for annihilation. How could this be the angel the Goddess had sent for me? And yet, I reasoned, to reject this messenger would clearly be to reject the Goddess’s will. After a long moment’s hesitation, I leapt from my chair and chased after her into the red maze leading toward the city center.
When she saw me, her eyes widened and she shook her head, blinking, as if I were an apparition. Without speaking, we wrapped our arms around each other, spinning and tracing circles into the snow. It was clear. We were together again. Now. Maybe forever.
It had been Isla’s guitar that I’d seen on the bunk below mine in Bob’s Youth Hostel. She had only been planning on staying in Amsterdam for three days. On the night of our reunion, she rented us a room down the street in a five-star hotel. I saw the choice to go after Isla as an inevitable one. As if the Goddess had chosen for me simply by placing her on my path. When we’re unstable or traumatized, we might not see the opportunities that magic presents us with; our expectations and patterns can blind us.
Within a few days of running into Isla, I’d also received a reply to an inquiry I’d put out on a message board about nannying. A Dutch woman was looking for a nanny for her two kids, ages six and nine, to live with her in her central A’dam flat and mind the kids for half the day in exchange for room and board and some petty cash. I met with the woman and the offer seemed good; she was an artist and had a sense of humor. Her flat was cozy, full of good books and ceramics and brightly colored wall hangings made out of yarn. She said that she had planned on getting a nanny the following month, but when she saw my message, that I was here in the city now and desperate, she wanted to help.
I turned the artist mother down. Isla had already started looking for an apartment for us, and there was the idea that I would start to dance again. I assumed, without asking, that the artist mother wouldn’t allow me time off to dance in the evenings. Without ever seriously considering that the artist mother could’ve been the helper that I’d prayed for, I declined her cozy house and joyful kids. Instead, I chose Isla. The choice was mine. The magical heat was telling me to slow down and pay attention. The magical heat was a sign from Hecate that I was at the crossroads. On our life paths, signs are abundant. It’s when we stop paying attention to the details of these messages that we take the wrong road, the road with the ruts in it, carved from all the times we’ve moved toward our wounds instead of toward healing. Hecate had placed the signs before me, but only I could choose which way to go. While unintended detours may still lead us to good places, if your road sign says Slippery When Wet, the wise witch would do well to slow down.
Isla and I moved into a newly remodeled flat on Spuistraat in Old Town, right near the city center. Long and thin as a railway car, our front window looked out onto a street festive with flower-boxed windows and people bustling by in their brightly colored scarves. Isla immediately began to remodel, painting the white walls lilac and replacing the sensible slate gray shag with a carpet thick and twisted as the wool of a black goat. She strung up her hammock and painted the ceiling, wood beams and all, a dark indigo. The dark ceiling and carpet made me feel like I was prostrate between two anvils. Isla soon got up to her old antics, bringing lowlifes around and presenting me with an all-night fairy buffet of mind-altering chemicals, but at least I slept beneath a down comforter and could blast the central heating to tropical temperatures.
At Waterlooplein, the outdoor flea market, Isla bought me a sheepskin coat out of a fairy tale: hooded and crimson with a lining in long, silky black wool. On our way back from the market, I discovered a shiny, new building, all glass and steel in jutting angles like a ship: the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. The new performing arts school. Outside was a sign for the School for New Dance Development. Inside, the School for New Dance Development had an entire floor. Not only that, but they were also currently enrolling for their six-week intensive course. It would begin in a month, after which they would hold auditions for their BA program.
All of a sudden, everything I’d longed for, I had.
Spring came and Amsterdam was alive. The canals melted, trees lined the streets green and fragrant. We rode our bikes past the buskers dressed as medieval suns, light shimmering off the cobblestones wet with spring rain. I danced every day and made friends with my fellow dancers. Ines, an Austrian intellectual, who spoke slowly and deliberately from beneath a mane of coarse blond hair. Nerea, a birdlike Basque, eyes always shining, always ready to embrace you as if her life depended on it.
It was in a video viewing room at the SNDO with Ines and Nerea that I saw the choreography of Pina Bausch for the first time. The Rite of Spring. The videotape was at the end of its life span. Stravinsky’s sound score crackled with static, white lines of digital decay rolled through the image. But it didn’t matter. I could still smell the broken bones and raw carnage through the screen. Dancers ankle deep in red earth, split into tribes of male and female, the former sacrificing one of the latter. T
hey offered up the body of a woman to appease the ravenous gods of nature. Trembling, the women shunted between them a red dress, a hot thing that hurts to hold. Whoever ends up with the dress must sacrifice by dancing herself to death. Dancing oneself to death being a common trope for the Western ballerina, someone who smiles as her toes crackle and she bleeds into her shoes. Ballerinas make the pain look easy. But it does not look easy when Pina’s dancers do it. Pina’s choreography slits the belly of ballet’s patriarchal undergirding so we can see inside. “I show you brutality so that we can see the opposite,” Bausch says.
Dance, the body, our immediate physical experience, constitutes the essence of this glorious life. Witches don’t seek to transcend material reality. We know that the material world is where the work happens; we want to wring its juice and drink it. We don’t seek a spiritual existence in a golden cloud surrounded by angels or virgins. Nor do we abandon our bodies for an abstract realm of mathematical forms. Witches know that it is in our relationships with each other and with our planet that the true magic occurs.
If nothing else, I needed to be in Amsterdam so that I could have that one brief moment with Pina Bausch. So that she could show me that even though material reality can wound and terrify you, even though it screams in our face with its brutality, we can redeem its crimes. We can heal our ancestral wounds. We can even rectify our own mistakes. No need to confess our sins, or make the deity suffer our burden for us. When we create beauty, we become our own redeemers. The Goddess speaks through our deeds. If we can bear to see the brutality we humans have rained down upon this world through our acts of destruction, then we can resurrect its opposite by taking creative action.
By the time audition day arrived, I was confident all roads of my life led to Amsterdam; this was my place and my purpose. Though a hundred dancers from all over the world lined the walls of the audition auditorium, and though the school would select only nine new students, what were numbers when I had Fate on my side? Fate laughs at numbers. She created all the numbers in the universe. My desire to be at the SNDO would surely trump anyone else’s talent. All the signs had told me so.
Of course, I didn’t get in.
“We’ve been watching you, Amanda,” my interviewer told me. “This is a school for dancers. We think you’re more choreographer than dancer.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
She continued. “We create collectively here. We see you more as a solo artist.”
“No,” I said, then repeated, “No. That’s not true. I’ll do what you tell me. I had a vision that I was supposed to be here.”
“You clearly have a strong vision,” she told me, matter-of-factly. “And that’s what makes you not right for this school.”
After the audition, my reason for being in Amsterdam, and my reason for being in general, collapsed. All my magical heat had added up to nothing. In the bargaining phase of my grief, I questioned the Universe: Why would I be given all those signs? Why have that dream, why meet that dancer who told me to go to Amsterdam? Why suffer through all the cold, the years of being lost? Why be given a longing to dance supernatural in its proportions, if I was never going to get what I wanted? Why would the Goddess, the Universe, the powers that be, make me want something so badly if it was always going to remain outside my grasp?
Magic and synchronicity had led me to Amsterdam, and then they abandoned me there. Or at least that’s what I believed at the time. But the signs had been accurate; it was my interpretation of them that had room for improvement. For instance, in the dream that led me to Amsterdam, I should’ve noticed that magicians are known to be tricksters, and fire trucks follow fire. The dream was telling me about the quality of the time I’d have in Amsterdam, rather than telling me where I should go. Knowing that wouldn’t have necessarily led me to make a different choice, but it might have led me to have different expectations.
And, too, my spells had worked. While rereading my old journals during this period of my life, in my late teens and early twenties, I kept coming across an explicitly stated intention of living life to the fullest. Of experiencing as much of life as it could offer me. That doesn’t mean getting your way all the time, or always having everything be easy. Adventure is rarely comfortable. And I achieved everything I had set out to do. In my stated intentions, I didn’t say, “Graduate from the SNDO with a bachelor’s degree in dance.” I said, “Study dance at the SNDO.” Check. Did it. For six weeks. Magic is the ultimate adventure, because even if you get what you want, you rarely get it in the way you expect. Still, now that I’m older, adventure seems less appealing. Today, when I do any kind of spell, I always make sure to include the phrase, “This spell shall cause no harm, nor turn on me. For the greatest good of all concerned and for the greatest good of all beings. This or better. Victory to the Goddess!” I’ve learned the hard way how important it is to include caveats. Sometimes, I even ask that the changes my magic bring about be gentle and easy.
Magic is a duet between you and the Universe. A romance. Signs are the way the Universe speaks to you; they’re sweet whispers, not orders. Still, as in ordinary life, if your lover gives you a bouquet of roses, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be together forever. It can have a dozen different meanings: apology, gratitude, obligation, affection. Most importantly, it means connection. It means relationship. And relationships require listening, not just for what you want, but also what your partner is trying to say. When you receive a sign, your interpretation matters. And then, how you act on that message is just as important as the fact that you received it in the first place.
Our stories don’t end when we don’t get the result we want. I didn’t get in to the School for New Dance Development. At the time, I believed that my magic had failed me. When really, my dream, my signs, my spells, opened up my life, got me to Europe, and so much more. Even these words are part of the message of that initial dream. Turns out, as it always does, my Magician’s magic words were the right ones.
4 The original version of this chant was written by Ian Corrigan, but then it was amended and added to by many people throughout its years in use in pagan communities.
Chapter 9
Enemies and Allies in the Astral Realms
Now women return from afar, from always:
from “without,” from the heath where witches are kept alive…
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
The princess died a few days before I arrived. England was in mourning. Prince Harry and Prince William walked solemnly behind their mother’s funeral car, wading through streets knee-deep in bouquets of flowers. Flowers piled high along the road. Flowers waist-deep outside the palace gates. At the time, I looked like Princess Diana. Hair short and dyed blond. People would come up to me on the streets crying, offering me their crushed bouquets. I identified with their grief. I identified with Princess Diana. I loved how she’d said, “I like to be a free spirit. Some don’t like that, but that’s the way I am.” As a child, I used to have a paper doll set with the princess in all her outfits: her fur coat, her prim high-collared blouses, her tiara, her wedding gown. Princess Diana’s death was a signal, for some of us at least, that the myth of the princess—rescued by the prince and then living happily ever after—was over. No one was going to come save us. Patriarchy had tried to sell us on the princess myth, and we could see where it ended: in flames.
I arrived in England, the isle of my ancestors and the birthplace of modern witchcraft in early September 1997 and took a room in the home of a widow in New Cross Gate, South London. The widow was an elderly woman, jolly, who’d once lived at Westminster Abbey when her husband was alive and a deacon there. Now she let her spare rooms to students. It was a Victorian tangle of a house, made of brick, each house on the street pressed up against the other with no space in between, no front yards, but the back gardens all joined together in wild joy that reminded me of Peter Rabbit. Each lot was separated only by low white picket fences and gardens full of willo
w ponds, purple cabbage, Queen Anne’s lace, and a host of ravens that would snicker and snarl at each other, swooping on hunched black wings to gobble up the snails.
During the Blitz, Nazis had strip bombed South London because it was near the docks. Each block in our neighborhood had strips of modern buildings that had sprouted up in the 1950s, scars from the war slicing diagonally across the streets for miles. My landlady had been in London during the Blitz. Her father had been a priest, rushing from house to house of his parishioners, offering them bread and succor as the buildings around him trembled and fell. My landlady told me she certainly would have joined the clergy herself, only the church wouldn’t allow it since she was a woman, so she did the next best thing and married a deacon. She raised his children and baked the bread he ate while ministering to his people. In the sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe had been murdered in a pub down the street from my house, and William Blake had seen a tree full of angels in an overgrown cemetery just over the hill where I would often walk to remind myself that no torment would last forever. Given time, the hungry vines and crumbling crosses told me, nature solves all riddles.
My room was pokey and narrow, the walls papered in a William Morris mesh of birds, vines, and pomegranates, with a dim northern light tiptoeing through the lace curtains. On my first night, I lay in a bed lumpy and misshapen from the sweating bodies of a dozen other students before me. I couldn’t sleep. All night long, bloodcurdling screams hailed from the back garden. The next morning, I told my landlady that someone had been murdered beneath our willow tree and she said, “Oh yes, that’s the foxes. They do make a racket, don’t they? But you’ll see in the spring their pups are darling; roly-poly balls of red fur.”