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  My mother had seen Hecate too, on Mother’s Day, five years before I was born, when she was eighteen years old. She was inner-tubing with her friends on the American River. At some point she slipped, caught in the boiling froth, the rapids pulling her downriver, away from her friends who called out and reached for her to no avail. Trapped beneath a stone, she struggled upward for breath, panicked and hit her elbow on a rock, then gasped. Water flooded her lungs. Everything started moving in slow motion. Green light called her through a long spiraling tunnel. When she emerged, the Goddess was all around her. She could see 360 degrees in all directions, the face of the Goddess: Earth! Bright and shining. Drifting peacefully in the atmosphere of our world, my mother was still herself, but expanded somehow. Soon she noticed a group of people below gathered around a pale and lifeless woman, beside whom a man crouched, pounding on the woman’s ribs. My mother didn’t care. The world around her shone, a breathing, living planet awash with light. Still, she descended, closer and closer, until she was nose to nose with the lifeless body beneath her. Then she felt a yank. Jerked back into her body as if by rope, her first feeling was outrage that she’d been forced to return. She didn’t want to be back in the human realm of violence and treachery. But come back she must; she had more work to do in this world.

  When I was born, after my mother awoke, she thought I was dead. Alone in the hospital room, her belly had been hacked open and sewn shut with black wires. Finally, the nurse appeared and dropped me in her arms. People tell her there is no way this could’ve happened, but my mother swears when I first opened my eyes, I smiled. Having already died before I was born, I was grateful just to be in this strange and beautiful world, to enter conversation with its beauty through the rituals of witchcraft.

  My mother says that during my birth, my father was at the bar across the street turning a violent shade of drunk. My father counters that he was in the waiting room of the hospital, crying and terrified we’d both died. Either way, six months after I was born, my mother hatched a plan to leave him. She spirited us away from the foggy vineyard farmhouse they were renting in Northern California and brought me to a tiny wooden bungalow on the Central Coast in San Luis Obispo. One of my first memories is of my mother standing above a cauldron of bubbling water in our tiny apartment, singing blessings over our Kraft macaroni and cheese.

  Witchcraft has always existed. The term comes from the Old English word wicce, pronounced “witch”: a wise woman. She practices oracular arts and sings incantations; she knows the secrets of herb craft and can talk to spirits. The word wit and witch share the same root: “to know, to understand, to be a person of intelligence.” Etymologically, the word witch refers to a kind of Northern European shamanness. That’s the root of the word, though witchcraft is practiced throughout the world, by folks of all genders. You don’t have to have Northern European ancestry to identify as a witch. In Spanish witchcraft is called brujeria; in African American folk magic, it’s called conjure. In Italian, a witch is a strega. In Mandarin Chinese, a witch is a wūpó. Witches exist throughout space and time. Witchcraft brings together the magical people throughout the world for the shared goals of justice, liberation, and celebration of the life force of the earth.

  The witch gene has traveled through my lineage. Eileen, meaning hazelnut, fruit of the Celtic tree of wisdom, is the middle name of each firstborn daughter in my family going back generations, back to the old country. My mother practiced witchcraft before she even knew that’s what she was doing. Women in Northern Europe probably stopped calling themselves witches around the same time you could have your tongue ripped out for saying you were one. So instead, my mother called herself an activist when I was a child. Years later, she told me that she saw activism and witchcraft as two parts of the same practice: devotion to the Goddess. From an early age, she always wanted to protect women and children. Claimed by the goddess Demeter even before I, her eldest child, was born, my mother identified with the mother archetype.

  In her early twenties, during Vietnam, my mother joined Mothers for Peace, to protest the war. Then, when the war was over and the activists turned their attention to preventing the destruction of the earth, she joined the Mothers in that work too. When I was about five years old, I remember she took me to a protest at Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power plant looming over the cliffs lining the Pacific Ocean, built on an active fault line. The Mothers dragged a brass bed to the beach with a muslin canopy. In the bed, a skull-faced capitalist in a top hat and tuxedo ravished his bride, a naïve woman in white, representing the people of Central California who were in bed with their doom. My mother didn’t know her then, but Starhawk (grandmother of Reclaiming, a contemporary witch movement, whose book The Spiral Dance launched the rebirth of Goddess culture) was at that protest, and many others like it. Later, they would meet each other, but even then, they were working in service of the same Goddess, the earth herself.

  People encouraged my mother to spank me. I was too wild, they said. When it was nap time, they’d find me dancing in the yard. I wanted to be out running in the grass, making proud crowns of juniper, singing my elaborate incantations in honor of the sun and moon and the light on the leaves. Despite the fact that the school administration called my mother in more than once, I refused to wear anything but my purple unicorn shirt every day for over a year. In department stores, I’d hide in the sacred circles of the clothes racks, wrapping myself in sequined scarves and whispering oracles to startled shoppers as they passed by with their carts.

  I talked back to adults. A receptionist at my school told my mother I was the rudest child she’d ever met. She didn’t mention that she’d brought it on herself; she’d embarrassed my friend for having wet her pants, and she told us to shut up when she heard me comforting her about it, so I told the receptionist she should lead by example and shut up herself. Through it all, my mother refused to hit me. The world I was born into was brutal enough, she said. She’d been beaten by her own father. And, too, one of my childhood playmates was murdered by her stepfather, ketchup shoved down her throat, then thrown against the wall for refusing to eat her pancakes. Even as a child, I knew I needed to find a place where the “Law of the Father” could not reach me.

  Children don’t just believe in magic; they live it. Early child psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim were convinced that children are by nature animists. Children see the sun, the moon, the rivers, the animals, the trees, and the stones as alive and full of intelligence. Everything that moves is alive, and everything moves. Atoms buzz, the planets spin. Nothing is still. Every bit of the universe vibrates with Spirit.

  René Descartes, exemplar of Western philosophy and forefather of “the Enlightenment,” is most remembered for his axiom cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I exist.” But, he argued, the existence of anything else must necessarily be doubted. The earth might be a trick. Your lover might not really be there. Other beings could all be a mirage, but you, dear individual thinking man, you exist for sure. On a roll, Descartes also said that animals are basically organic machines that cannot think or feel pain. It’s pointless to feel compassion for them, he said. And from his argument, so celebrated within the canon of Western philosophy, evolve things like chattel slavery, factory farms, and the slash and burn of the Amazon. For Descartes, only humans—white male land-owning humans in particular—have minds and souls, and thus, only they have rights to consideration. But even in the seventeenth century, children knew that the world was speaking, calling out for love.

  “Just because we don’t understand what the animals are saying doesn’t mean they’re not saying anything,” I remember telling my mother as a child as we were driving through the eucalyptus groves of San Luis, watching the hawks circle through the lazy sunshine. “We’re just not listening right.” But both Descartes and Bettelheim would have disagreed with me. Recognizing the intelligence of nature is just a temporary coping mechanism children and “primitive people” employ until they can be civilized into solving th
eir problems through “reason” alone.

  On the surface, the Enlightened Man’s reason seems stronger than the magic of children, or even the magic of the witches and wizards and indigenous shamans of the world. But the Enlightened Man finds his power by imposing kyriarchy (a word for the master/slave, oppressor/oppressed dynamic), and kyriarchy is slowly asphyxiating our species and all life on the planet. Kyriarchy is like a virus; it kills the organism that sustains it. Even as a child, I wasn’t going to give the Enlightened Man all the applause, gold ribbons, and Christmas bonuses with which he awarded himself such a regular and hearty congratulations.

  Bettelheim might argue that I only want to persist in my belief in magic now as an adult because as a child I was forced to abandon my magical thinking too early. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, he says:

  Many young people who today suddenly seek escape in drug-induced dreams, apprentice themselves to some guru, believe in astrology, engage in practicing “black magic,” or who in some other fashion escape from reality into daydreams about magic experiences which are to change their life for the better, were prematurely pressed to view reality in an adult way.

  Bettelheim may be right. As someone who loves astrology and magic of all shades, I know the kyriarchy tried to force me to abandon my magical thinking way too soon. But he was wrong when in the same book he argued that once a child was successfully convinced that life could be mastered in “realistic ways,” she would let go of her childish magical thinking. What was the realistic way Bettelheim spoke of? The realistic way is that we capitulate. We’re supposed to ignore that Western civilization was built upon the enslavement of people of color and the destruction of the natural world. We’re supposed to ignore all of that and get good jobs as doctors and lawyers and bankers, or if we can’t do that, at least try and marry one. We’re supposed to ignore that the icecaps are melting and the planet is heating and the bellies of the fish are filled with plastic. Buy more stuff. Be more reasonable. Bettelheim says: “By his own social, scientific, and technological progress, man [can free] himself from his fears and threats to his existence.” But when we’re encouraged to be rational, often we’re really being encouraged to be more individualistic. We’re being encouraged to see ourselves as separate and in competition with others. But magic is about connection, collaboration, magic is a process of bringing things together. Ultimately, magic is about love.

  As is true of so many witches, I was born delighted with the world, seeing the radiant, interdependent spirit of stone and leaf and animal-kind. But, as is also true of nearly every witch I know, my childhood was less about learning to recognize my agency within that web of interdependence than being forced to concede that the power and freedom I saw as my sacred birthright was not recognized by the rest of my species. I wanted to play in the enchanted garden of the Goddess, to marvel at the way things grow, to encounter Her creatures, to dance in the fields and sing at Her altars. But the disenchanted world and its minions were always getting in the way.

  Even Disney, a company that broadcasts its allegiance to enchantment, schooled me on the disenchantment of the world early on. I would always start bawling when Bambi’s mother, explaining to her little fawn why they had to hide, laments, “Man has entered the forest.” Soon, Bambi’s mother would be shot dead and the forest would be on fire. Fawns learn early that “Man” is always interfering with the way the forest creatures want to experience the world.

  In my first experiences at elementary school, “Man” demanded I be put on Ritalin. “Man” didn’t want me to free the hamster from his prison; he wanted me to sit still at my desk under the glare of fluorescent lights, with both feet on the floor, looking my teacher straight in the eye. Recite your multiplication tables, “Man” demanded. Repeat after me: George Washington never told a lie. Now…watch the Challenger explode. From an early age, I saw that “Man” was perfectly happy to order you around, criticize you, put rules on you or withhold things from you, but if you resisted, you were branded rude, rebellious, and ungrateful. “Man” thinks you should smile more. “Man” diagnosed me as dyslexic and put me in all the remedial academic groups because “Man” was concerned I wouldn’t be able to meet his demand for academic excellence. “Man” didn’t care that I had better things to do.

  “Man” made sure the school lawn was buzzed to a respectable length for competitive games, but he didn’t see the ladybug queendom flourishing in the sour grass around the edges of the field. Yellow flowers with translucent green stems that, when chewed, would make the faces of my beautiful baby-witch friends pucker with joy. My childhood witch companions offered me solace in a hostile world. For instance, Vanessa, the petite earth-colored Austrian with a passion for altered states of consciousness, taught me to take too-hot baths, then swoon down on the bathroom floor to press our naked cheeks against a mercy of cold tiles. Or Leia the Generous, with wide Russian cheekbones, who gave me her rabbit talisman when I left mine at the creek. She and I spent countless hours sheltering in dark coves of pine, calling the fairies with thimbles full of tea and sour apple candy. We’d dress up in costumes, swathing ourselves in cloaks like the Nordic Völva, the wandering Scandinavian priestesses. We’d chase orbs through the woods and pound our staffs on the granite boulders in the hills behind her house, commanding the rains to come. I also loved Hanna, skinny and blond with a raspy voice. We shared a total animistic conviction that our stuffed animals held picnics the moment we left the room, complete with balloons, ribbons, songs, and carnivals. Hanna had all her animals in a circle around her when a stranger broke into her house in the middle of the day and raped her grandmother in the next room. My childhood friends and I lived in an enchanted world, but “Man” was always lurking, rapacious and sinister outside our windows.

  For the first four years of my life, my mother and I were alone together. We lived in a little white house on Peach Street, in San Luis Obispo, with a gray tabby cat named Spencer and a little porch with vines growing up the lattice. A single mother, my mother worked hard to support us. When she wasn’t working, she’d read me D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. A book that schooled me: for thousands of years the gods of patriarchy have been hungry to devour their children. But still, I loved the stories and was seduced, naming the fish in my fish tank after the gods. Zeus, the guppy with the thunderous red tail, was true to his name. He’d eat all his guppy babies if I didn’t swaddle them away in a separate tank. Iris, my rainbow neon tetra, was named after the messenger goddess; she shimmered between the water ferns and sunken temple leaves.

  Night was different. I had nightmares. I’d sleepwalk. My mother would find me outside, wandering down the street in my nightgown. We live on haunted land, in a haunted world. Conquistadors and colonizers spilt the native people’s blood; dark deeds haunt the lineage of many white American families. As a child, I was always sensitive to the ghosts of the land, of my lineage, of the oppressors and the oppressed. On the most haunted nights, I’d crawl into bed with my mother. She’d sing me lullabies and tell me stories about magical worlds with a little character named Amanda, who made friends with dragons and could slide down rainbows with Iris the messenger goddess.

  As predicted by Bettelheim, when I was in control of my imagination, I felt safe. The danger happened when I felt like I was at the mercy of the libidinous, roiling imagination of our disenchanted civilization. Humanity’s rejected monsters lurked around every corner. Every night before I went to sleep, my mother would perform a banishing ritual in my room, clapping her hands and banging pots and demanding all the evil spirits lurking there leave at once. “By the powers of the Goddess within me, I command all corrupt spirits to leave this place!” Bang! These were on the nights that she wasn’t working at the Olde Port Inn as a cocktail waitress.

  Days, she worked at Easy Ad; sometimes she’d take me to work with her when she’d make phone calls all day, selling ad space to local businesses. In subtle apology for having no other option but to bring her child to work
, she’d parade me in like a young page bearing offerings of donuts in a pink cardboard box: maple crullers, old-fashioneds, thick waxy chocolate with a confetti of rainbow sprinkles.

  Aunt Mickey ran a daycare center. Often if my mother was working, I’d be there, even though I hated it. There was a horrible teenage boy—I don’t know if he was a cousin or just another kid at daycare—who would always threaten to flush my best friend, a little girl too young even to walk, down the toilet. He’d take her in there and laugh and flush while I pounded, weeping, on the door.

  My mother remembers hearing my screams down the phone wires. One day at Aunt Mickey’s, at around age two, I went to investigate the kitchen. I wanted to wrestle the thick black cords slithering around the counters, vines that wanted climbing. In the ’70s, some coffeepots plugged straight into the wall. I was always a climber, an adventurer, into everything. My mother doesn’t remember which of her Easy Ad coworkers drove her to the hospital. She just remembers the sound of my screams down the hospital hall, vibrating the room as if I were a Titan trying to escape a tiny steel cage. The coffee had scalded 80 percent of my body, blistering my toddler skin so that it crackled and oozed like pork rind.