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  But Medusa’s story didn’t simply end with her exile. Men came from far and wide to try to slay this snaky demon and thus earn a heroic reputation for themselves. But any man who looked upon Medusa would be instantly turned to stone—their expressions of horror and repulsion recorded in sculptural form for all eternity. Every time Medusa passed these grimacing statues, it would serve to remind her just how repulsive she truly was. How shameful. How repellant.

  In Ovid’s version of the myth, Medusa has no feelings, no thoughts, no desires of her own; she is merely there as an obstacle for the hero Perseus to overcome. Ovid didn’t tell the story of Medusa to record the injustice of her experience. The only reason he mentions her at all is because, on one of his adventures, Perseus finally managed to hack Medusa’s head off as a favor to a king whose daughter he wanted to fuck.

  In the end, Medusa was brought down by a mirror. Athena gave Perseus a hot tip. He should use his shiny shield to reflect Medusa’s own face back at her. Upon seeing her reflection, Medusa would be stunned by her own ugliness. The trick worked. As predicted, Medusa was frozen in disappointment and alarm; she was hideous. Perseus cut off her head and shoved it in a bag. Occasionally he’d pull it out to show off at parties, or as a weapon against advancing armies in his myriad other adventures. By the end of the story, reality was as it should be. The hero won, the monster lost, the crowd cheered.

  But in school, I began to learn about a different version of the story. We were studying French feminism: Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Catherine Clément. I read Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and I began to realize that the Medusa that had appeared to me at my first abduction was not my tormentor, but my ally.

  In ancient Greek, the name Medousa translates as “guardian,” or protector. When Medusa appeared to me, coming out of the closet in my childhood, she appeared because she knew what was coming for me; she’d experienced it herself. Medusa is an avatar of the Dark Goddess of the Crossroads, and she comes as a guardian and guide for those whose selves are fragmented and torn away piece by piece.

  In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous talks about how the space of the imaginary, the magical, “the other” (i.e., women, gay people, people of color, people with disabilities, non-neuro-normative folks) has been defined as something that stands outside of the ordinary realms that she and the other French feminists call “the Symbolic Order.” The Symbolic Order is a term originally coined by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and then developed by French feminist philosophers. The Symbolic Order is another name for what they call “the Law of the Father,” where the child is given “a symbolic identity and place in the human universe of meaning.”5 The child is born blameless and unformed, then becomes both an independent subject and a subject of the laws of her culture, by fiat of the language that orders her universe. She is a girl. She throws like a girl. She wears a girl’s clothes. She isn’t funny. She’s made of man’s rib. She’s sugar and spice. She is named, and through that naming, like the demons of John Dee, she is compelled to behave according to the Father’s laws. As soon as language ensnares us as children, we are caught in the web of the Symbolic Order: a prison of language and symbols from which the subject cannot escape. Witches, women, and all “others” are exiled to the dark swamps that surround the Symbolic Order. We who stand outside the Symbolic Order are affected and influenced by it, still subject to its whims, but never allowed to wield the magic wand (the phallus), that scepter of power, for ourselves. But rather than try to protest our Medusa-ness, our witch-ness, our monstrousness, and fight our way to a place at the hero’s round table, Cixous argues that we should claim the shadow realms for ourselves. Outside the Symbolic Order, our uncharted territory extends into infinity. The islands of Circe and Medusa and Morgan le Fay are in this wild space, the land of the witch.

  “Stop looking for a way out of the underworld,” the Medusa told me. “Instead, start looking for a way to claim your dominion. If the Lord exiled you into the desert, the Goddess can transform that sandy wasteland back into a garden of delight.”

  Once I heard the Medusa speaking to me, I started to realize I wasn’t alone. I had allies all around me. Maya Deren. Hannah Wilke. Sylvia Plath. Katherine Dunham. Nijinska. Hélène Cixous. Sandra Cisneros. Audre Lorde. Martha Graham. Remedios Varo. Dorothy Cross. Simone Weil. Phoolan Devi. Wendy Houston. Frida Kahlo. Pina Bausch. When I’d first been introduced to the work of Pina Bausch, I hadn’t known that she was my ally. I’d seen her as my North Star, a guiding light perpetually out of my reach. But my situation began to turn, my London initiation complete, when I started to realize that I had the power not just to follow her, but to be with her, to be a part of her coven. That is the shift in perception that Starhawk was talking about. The moment you stop seeing yourself as a supplicant and start seeing yourself as a participant, a co-conspirator, an agent, that shift marks the moment you become a witch.

  Pina Bausch tunneled straight into the most vulnerable, feminine parts of experience and exulted in them. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Café Müller. The scene where a woman, in love with a man, desperate for his acceptance and support, throws herself into his arms, and he refuses to catch her. She falls to the floor like a sack of hammers. But she doesn’t stop. She keeps flinging herself at him again and again; again and again and again falling to the floor, brutalized by her own need and his lack of interest. It gave form to a feeling I’d had, of throwing myself upon men, begging for their mercy, their care, their help, and being rejected, scorned, dismissed, “not caught,” and then treated as if, by the very fact of not being caught, and of being wounded by not being caught, I had rendered myself worthless. Damaged goods. A bruised apple left out for whatever scavengers would deign pick it up. But recognizing vulnerability as a strength made Pina an oracle and witch of the first order. When a witch comes to power, her vulnerability, her vision, cracks the world open and changes everything. Wands appear for her everywhere, sprouting up from the earth. In the myth of Persephone, Hades abducts the maiden to the underworld just as she is reaching for a flowering narcissus. For the world order to be maintained, he can’t let her reach the flowers. Her flowers are her magic wand, the instrument of focused transformation. Its seeds are carried in the wind. When all the witches of the world seize our flowering wands, the patriarchal order will fall.

  Just as classical mythology is filled with stories of hideous monsters slain by the heroes of the Symbolic Order, classical dance is filled with stories of magical women who meet their death in the fairy realms, the deep dark woods, places where you can dance yourself to death. La Sylphide, Swan Lake, The Rite of Spring: all originally composed by men. As a young woman, I often felt like one of the dancers in Pina Bausch’s version of The Rite of Spring, flinging the cursed red dress at each other, not wanting to be the one who gets sacrificed at the altar of patriarchy. In the end, one of the dancers in the story dies, she loses, but Pina found a way out of that binary of win or lose, because Pina made the dance. Pina told the story.

  In another myth, Ovid tells a story of Apollo, the god of patriarchal civilization. He fell in love with the Cumaean Sibyl, a prophetic priestess of the snake goddess, but she scorned him. In attempt to woo her, Apollo promised her eternal life; the Sibyl refused his advances. Apollo punished her for rejecting him. Thinking himself generous, he still gave her the gift of eternal life, but then he withheld eternal youth. Over time the Sibyl shriveled away, becoming first a bent old woman, then shrinking to the size of a cricket, then a withered leaf; finally, she crumbled into dust and blew away. All that was left was her voice, hushing in the wind. But the Sibyl still lives. We still breathe her in. In defiance of Apollo, the Cumaean Sibyl declared, it is “by my voice that I shall be known.”6 Through us, the Sibyl can find form again. Through us, she can speak and create and be heard. The voice of the Sibyl travels by wind and storm. She shakes the leaves; she flickers your candle flame; she looks for witches through whom she can speak, thos
e of us who are attuned enough to listen. The voice of the Sibyl, the voice of the Goddess, is like the wind, never-ending, always moving, always present. She says, Create works that give form to me, bring the Goddess back into the world.

  People get confused about the idea of a spirit coming to you. We’re trained by the media to expect it to come as a vision, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, to stand in the room gesticulating with firm and bony arms. But just as often, Spirit comes to you through coincidence, or as witches like to think of it, synchronicity. During my London initiations, Medusa started appearing to me everywhere.

  I’d see her face painted on the side of buildings, on the cover of books, in artworks. And soon, she started appearing in my own work. My final dissertation was on deconstructing the classical narrative through performance; the dance piece that accompanied it was called Medusa Recalcitrant. Recalcitrant means “willfully disobedient.” As a twenty-three-year-old, the idea of willful disobedience against the Classical Narrative and the Symbolic Order it helped to reinforce exhilarated me. In my piece, each dancer embodied a different aspect of Medusa’s spirit. In the classical version of the story, Medusa is decapitated, her mind, her subjectivity, severed from her body. My piece was an intervention, a way of keeping Medusa alive, and ultimately, an effort to reunite all her fragmented parts. To re-member her. If, as poet Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” my desire was to toss aside the master’s tools and to use a witch’s tools instead: wands, cauldrons, the body, the imagination, community, breath, life force, my allyship with Medusa and the other exiled beings wandering the mist-shrouded isles of enchantment.

  I began to remember rather than reject my roots. My dancer friend and classmate, Joanne, and I had talked about witchcraft and my growing up as a pagan. We’d have breathless conversations down the local pub, in smoke-filled rooms lamenting the inquisitions of Europe and the women who were killed—a big part of the mythological legacy of my childhood. Joanne came from a solid, happy, upper-working-class family in Somerset, without much religion, but she was fascinated by the idea of witches and made a dance piece about them, which she invited me to perform in. After graduation, I decided I wanted to make a film inspired by the piece.

  I wanted to commemorate the women who were killed during the Inquisitions. To celebrate their lives and memorialize those who had been forgotten or who were never recognized in the first place. We went out to Glastonbury Tor at midnight on a moonless night, on a wild hill, overgrown with weeds and shrubs. Glastonbury Tor, where Morgan le Fay lived in the mists of Avalon. Known to be a necromancer, Morgan le Fay was a sorceress able to summon the spirits of the dead. I aimed to commune with and learn from her. I wanted her help resurrecting the spirits of witches from time immemorial. In the opening shot of my film, Nikki, one of the dancers, emerges from the dark, her hair lashing in the wind. By calling out to the witches of history, I summoned my ancestors from the earth, both the genetic Celts from whom I descend and my spiritual ancestors, the wild women and sorceresses who’ve existed throughout the world across space and time. I could feel their fear and their hunger. I could feel them come to me, asking to be heard, to be reborn.

  In Laurie Cabot’s book Power of the Witch, she discusses the African American botanist George Washington Carver. He knew the secrets of the plants; they would reveal their purpose as medicines when he spoke to them. He said that the way to hear them was to love them. “The secrets are in the plants. To elicit them you have to love them enough…I learn what I know by watching and loving everything.” The same is true of witchcraft, of magic, of the Goddess herself. I love witches. I love the Goddess. If we turn toward what we love and listen, if we walk in her direction, the Goddess reveals her secrets; she whispers and a path of flowering wands bursts forth to lead us home. And as every witch knows, wands are the tools of initiation.

  5 Emily Zakin. Psychoanalytic Feminism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-psychoanalysis/.

  6 Marina Warner. From the Beast to the Blonde. 1994. P. 10

  Chapter 10

  The Demon Lover

  They had not sailed a league, a league,

  A league but barely three,

  Until she espied his cloven foot,

  And she wept right bitterly.

  Author Unknown, “The Demon Lover”

  I had a demon lover once. They often appear when a witch is about to step into her full power. A Scottish folk ballad tells the most infamous version of the demon lover story thus: a woman abandons her husband and child to leave with her lover on a ship across the sea. She thinks she and her seafaring man are going to live together forever on a shining island of lilies and gold. Turns out her lover is actually Satan, and he’s taking her to the black, dark hill of hell, where she will suffer forevermore. In literature, when the demon lover appears, it always upends the world of the heroine. Everything she thought was real turns out to be false. Finding herself tricked, she is made to know that she can’t rely on her own experience or perceptions.

  Demon lovers are not new. Some occult traditions call them incubi, male demons who press like heavy stone upon the chests of sleeping women, luring them into acts of fornication. The incubus appears in ghost stories throughout the world. Hungry, night-walking spirits in the forests of the Amazon; shape-shifting creatures with the wings of a bat in the Spice Islands of Zanzibar; in each case they come to seduce their prey and tear their worlds apart. In the Sumerian Legend of Gilgamesh, the eponymous hero was spawned by a mortal woman and her demon lover Lilu, a night spirit who coursed above the wastelands in the shape of a foul black bird. In 1948, Shirley Jackson wrote a short story about a demon lover, as did Elizabeth Bowen, in 1945, moody works strangled with anxiety, set in airless spaces or frantic cities with broken chimneys, bombed out buildings, and cold shafts of light. In the stories, the demon always comes to punish the woman in some way. Women who are single, who want to leave their relationships, or who didn’t wait for their partner as long as they should have. Women who are not under the protective aegis of patriarchal authority. In literature, demon lover stories often revolve thematically around anxiety over women’s role in the political world: the desire for freedom should not overrule the obligations of one’s gender. Anthropologists believe the story of the demon lover was created as a cover for pregnancies conceived during incest. Even Dracula was a demon lover, hypnotizing Mina Harker and stealing her partner away from her. The demon lover is the devil himself.

  In general, witches don’t believe in the devil. As pure evil, the devil is a Christian invention; pagan gods have more nuance. Deities that are difficult in the pagan world are not necessarily evil; they just have agendas that work in opposition to our own, or sometimes, on rare occasion, in antagonism to the life force itself.

  In the classical Rider-Waite-Smith version of the tarot deck, the Devil is the trickster character, the shadow at the gate. He’s the guardian you must battle before you achieve your breakthrough. The Devil is evil if you give in to the fear he generates, but he becomes Lucifer, light bringer and wisdom snake, when, through dealing with him, you realize your own power, that you have choices and that you are at no one’s mercy. In most versions of the tarot, the Devil is depicted as the deity Baphomet, a winged hermaphrodite with the breasts of a woman, the muscles of a man, the head of a goat, and the Latin words solve and coagula written on his forearms. Solve meaning to dissolve, to destroy, to tear apart, and coagula meaning to bring together, to make whole again.

  Supposedly once worshipped by the Knights Templar, in many tarot decks the Devil card depicts Baphomet sitting atop a pyramid with a reversed pentagram emblazoned on his forehead. Beneath him, a couple, who once appeared in sacred union in the Lovers card, now reappear bound in chains; sometimes hordes of people appear, all of them bound in some way, either tricked or forced or otherwise compelled to act against their own interests for the benefit of the devil himself.

  I know that this perso
n, my demon lover, had his own reason for existing. He didn’t just appear in my life, as women so often do in the narratives of patriarchal literature, as a catalyst for my self-realization. He had his own existence and agenda. Still, for witches, events have meaning; the people who come into your life have messages. To be a witch is to live inside your own personal myth…even if you know you’re creating it yourself.

  As in myth, my demon lover was a monster, a vampire, a powerful, ugly, otherworldly figure that my friends and I often referred to as Nosferatu. A shape-shifter, he was only ugly sometimes. He had no problem getting women, a fact that contributed, for obvious reasons, to him being my nemesis. One time, he and I were looking through a box of his things and there was a Polaroid of a famous ’90s punk rock model sitting in some secluded field in what looked like rural England, squinting and smiling and shielding her eyes from the sun; she looked like she was on a romantic picnic. She looked like she’d just had sex with the photographer. “I took that picture,” my demon lover told me, affecting nonchalance, confirming what he could see I already suspected.

  He was handsome: tall, with peppered graying hair and brown eyes full of longing, hidden behind circular spectacles that made him look like a turn-of-the-century Austrian intellectual. But also, he could seem almost grotesque at times, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He would snort and push snot back up into his nose with the heel of his palm like he was in second grade; he would slouch and seem dehydrated and gobble greasy croissants with extra mayo and wear rumpled Comme des Garçons shirts with sooty black rings around the wrists and collar. In all the time I’d known him, it never looked like he’d recently showered, even when he’d just gotten out of the bath.