Initiated Page 21

  My wound was a father wound, of course. Both my biological father and my stepfather had lost interest in me when they had sons. For my stepfather, I had simply been an extra mouth to feed. My father claimed to love me, but his love was confusing and conditional, liable to be withdrawn at any moment if I didn’t concede to his demands or tolerate his frequent insults. He’d written me songs and adoring letters, praised my creativity, took me camping, made me poached eggs on toast, and bought me bouquets of flowers on every birthday, and before I’d ever even had sex, he’d yelled in my face that I was a slut and an embarrassment to the family. He told me he’d pay for my brother’s college education but not mine, then acted surprised at the hurt look on my face, even though at the time I was putting myself through school as a sex worker. When my brother turned out to be gay, he beat him to the floor and my brother ended up in foster care and worse. By my late twenties, I’d stopped expecting my father’s approval or even his love, but the wound was still there, whetstone and elating shame, a ferocious, needy animal scratching in the basement of my consciousness.

  Perhaps the most troubling thing about my experience of possession, the thing that caused me the most anguish, was that even after I knew, consciously, intellectually, what was happening, even though I knew my feelings for my demon lover were projections, and even though I knew Nosferatu was duplicitous, manipulative, and cruel, I couldn’t make my heart stop hurting. I couldn’t make myself stop wanting him.

  I tried medication, therapy, new relationships, throwing myself into my work. By the time I graduated, a year and a half had passed since my demon lover and I had broken up and it still hurt like the first day. On the verge of losing all hope, I worried my obsessive grief would never end. That he’d captured my heart forever and would keep it as a talisman to empower him until the end of time. After he died, he would keep my wounded heart in his crypt and people would find it a thousand years later and curse themselves.

  My mind was not my own, and as a last resort before throwing myself off a cliff, I decided to try meditation. The most essential practice for any witch, meditation is the first step in any how-to magic book; it was what my ballet teacher had recommended to me over five years before, and my Zen therapist had been only too happy to recommend again.

  In magical practice there’s a thing called a pharmakon, an ancient Greek term that can mean medicine or poison, depending on the quantity and quality of the dose. According to the practices of Elemental Magic, my dis-ease was an excess in the pharmakons of water and air. The knife in my chest was a problem of water, a problem of emotion and relationship, a disease of the West (the absence of compassion). Whereas my obsession was a problem of the air, of the East, it was a problem of mind. My mind was out of control and could not be still; it kept circling back to land on and be tethered to the armored arm of my demon lover. If I wanted to heal my obsession, I had to administer to myself a dose of healthy mind. I had to turn my poison into medicine.

  The summer after graduation, I checked myself into a Zen monastery in upstate New York. Deep in the Catskills, we novices would wake up before dawn, meditate for hours, chant, meditate some more, spend the rest of the morning performing labors like moving the wood pile or scrubbing floors, afternoons writing haiku or practicing calligraphy, then we’d meditate again until bedtime at nine. The final week was called Sesshin, a full week meditating over eight hours a day, looking no one in the eye, speaking to no one, in effort to gain total intimacy with the self and, thus, the universe. By the end of my summer at the monastery, I’d cleared away most of the sediment that’d been muddying my view of the world. But my head was still cut off from my heart, and my heart was still locked away in Nosferatu’s closet. And that heart, stolen and locked away, still hurt.

  Nevertheless, in the final days of the Sesshin, my mind had grown increasingly still. With the silt of my aggravation and anxiety settling, the world had taken on a luminous quality, ecstatic and sharp, like Gustave Doré’s angels ascending in a spiral toward my own personal Paradiso. I could hear monks chanting all through the woods, day and night, their voices hanging in air fragrant with balsam fir and maple. Incanting the Heart Sutra:

  Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita, clearly saw the emptiness of all five conditions, thus completely relieving misfortune and pain…

  On the day the Sesshin ended and we novices could finally speak, I remarked to one of the residents of the monastery how beautiful the chanting of the monks had been in the forest. He looked at me with barely disguised displeasure. “There were no monks chanting in the forest,” he told me.

  “But there were,” I protested, surprised.

  He shook his head. “They were all in the Buddha hall the whole time.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “I heard them plainly, same as I hear you right now.”

  “It’s called a makyō, a hallucination brought about by meditation. We’re supposed to ignore them. I’ve been here two years and I haven’t had one.” He seemed disappointed, and yet we both knew that in Zen you’re not supposed to want auditory or any other kind of hallucinations, which are delusions of the imagination. You’re not even supposed to pay attention to your dreams. Zen is about clearing your mind, not indulging its fantasies; that’s why in many forms of Zen you’re supposed to meditate with your eyes open so that you don’t have visions. “Don’t go to sleep!” the monks would frequently admonish us. Don’t have visions. Pay attention only to what is.

  I had heard the chanting throughout the entire second half of the Sesshin, not just when I was meditating, but also when I was walking up to the cabins, during my work practice, and at night as I was falling to sleep. It was hard for me to believe the chanting wasn’t real.

  Having a natural connection to the spirit world can be dangerous, making you prone to all sorts of fancies and persecutions. But it can also provide you with great insight…if you’re grounded enough to receive, interpret, and then act on it. The summer I spent meditating had provided me with that grounding and discipline. So though my time at the monastery was ending, and my heart still hurt, on the second to last day there I received a flash of insight: a recipe for an exorcism.

  The monastery was at the base of a mountain, at the convergence of two rivers, one muddy and slow, the other fast and fresh. I gathered a treasury of river stones, stopping only when the stones grew too heavy for me to carry. I lugged them, step by woeful step, to the place where the rivers met and set them up in a pile, a lingam, representing the male polarity within myself that needed to be healed, restored, and regenerated.

  Stones are the memory cells of the earth. They hold on to everything. Many of them were formed before the time of the dinosaurs, certainly long before humans showed up. Stones connect us to the earth, to history, to the history we store in our bodies. In How to Know Higher Worlds, Rudolf Steiner talks about how everything in existence lives; we just live in different ways. Animals, like humans, have agency; they act upon the world. But stones are receivers. Every arc of wind, every sluice of water slowly dialogues with the stone and changes its shape. Stone can teach us to receive, too, to yield with strength and to give us the patience to heal our own history.

  Witches work with the elements, the spirits of nature. I’d spent the summer honoring and celebrating the spirits of the plants and trees and rivers on this mountain and now I summoned them in humble request of their assistance. I named all the goddesses I knew, called upon the spirits of the water to heal my heart, the powers of the earth to regenerate my life force, the powers of fire to cauterize my wounds, the powers of air to restore my mental clarity. I didn’t follow all, or really any, ceremonial protocols. No circle was cast. No incense lit. No pentacles inscribed in the air in blue flame. Just me and the rivers, the mountains and stones; I could feel their power and their presence. I knew that was all I needed.

  I picked up the stones from my pile one by one. To each stone, I whispered a memory I had of my demon lover. I named it: “How he l
oved to call me Panda and I thought he was trying to belittle me. And he seemed so hurt that I tormented myself for months about it. I should have let him call me Panda. I should have loved that he called me Panda. My defensiveness ruined everything…” I asked this stone to carry my memory to a place where it could be healed. I threw the stone across my body, sending it out in the river, to be taken by the currents, gulped away into the rapids’ grinding foam. I proceeded this way until my pile of stones was no more; then I said his full name, shouted it into the wind, and declared with total conviction and authority: “I banish you, I release you, I sacrifice you for the greatest good of all concerned. Go with honor, go with love, be gone! Be gone! Be gone!”

  It was the phrase for banishing rituals that my mother had taught me.

  At the place where the two rivers converged, I baptized myself anew, beginning in the mud and muck and emerging where the currents ran clear. When I rose from the water, I thanked the spirits and walked away. I didn’t look back.

  That night, as I lay in bed for my final night’s rest in the bottom bunk of my monastery bed, I felt a snap in the front of my skull and saw a flash of light. I felt a rush, like water draining from one side of my brain to the other. When I woke up the next morning, my heartache was gone. My haunting had ended. My demon lover, vanished. My river rites had drawn the knife from my chest. In place of that wound was a calm understanding that I had learned what I needed from my demon lover and that I had moved on. Love meant something to me again, and if it had taken a years-long heartbreak to awaken me to that, then so be it.

  Chapter 11

  Saturn Returns

  Did I escape, I wonder?

  My mind winds to you

  Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable

  Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

  In any case, you are always there…

  Sylvia Plath, “Medusa”

  I used to worry I would fail my Saturn Return. As if my Saturn Return was a test: pass and graduate into my adult life, or fail and be kept back a year…or a decade. Saturn is the planet each of us has to wrestle in order to enter into adulthood. Everyone gets a Saturn Return; for each of us it begins somewhere between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, when Saturn, the planet of karma, of hard lessons and boundaries, makes a full circle around the sun and then crosses the threshold back into the sign it was in at the moment of your birth. It takes Saturn two and a half years to make this transit through your natal sign. And during that period, as the astrological theory goes, Saturn, “the great taskmaster,” lets you know whether or not you’re on the right track in life. If you’re on the wrong track, things will fall apart. Your relationship will break up. You’ll get sick. You’ll quit school or your job, or whatever it was you were so attached to, and decide to move across country and start over. Things like that. Many people experience their Saturn Return as painful. Saturn interrogates: “Are you sure this is what you want to be doing with your precious, fleeting life?” Oftentimes, the answer is no.

  Saturn is known as the Sun of Night. Whereas the sun is large, bright, and life-affirming, Saturn is dim, a pale cold ghost plowing through the black spheres of outer space, blinking his milky geriatric eye, reminding us of how quickly we’ll be gone. Saturn is an old man, a grandfather. In the NASA recordings, Saturn sounds like static electricity crackling along the edges of lead. Ringed in ice dust 40,000 miles across, the plains of Saturn are the wasteland we must cross to make it to adulthood.

  Medieval astrologers called Saturn “the Greater Malefic,” the big bad. In mythology, Saturn began as Cronos, the Titan who devoured his children. In another version he was Kronos with a K, the father of time. Saturn’s female incarnation is a familiar figure to us witches—Hecate, Guardian of the Crossroads. No matter how the great gas giant appears to us, Saturn is the planet of initiation.

  Part of what makes Saturn’s initiations so painful is that they’re all bound up in our karma. Our Saturn Return is a life review, and if there’s been a pattern to your choices, you’re going to start seeing it. But this review is not just of your karma, but also your family’s. Karma isn’t just the consequences of your own deeds; it’s the consequences of the actions and beliefs of your ancestors. Karma is DNA.

  My Saturn Return reached its zenith in a double-wide trailer in Ojai with wood panel walls and beige carpet. A boomerang child, after the Zen monastery and grad school, I moved back in with my mother, while Saturn was transiting the sign of Leo. Follow Highway 150 from the Pacific Ocean and wind your way east, through the Topatopa Mountains, past family farms with hand-painted signs for marmalade and strawberries, past places with gingham curtains in the kitchen and goats in the yard, and you’ll find the little town of Ojai. I hadn’t spent much time with my mother since a few summers previous. She was living in a trailer then, too, in the eucalyptus groves and tar sands of Elwood Beach near Santa Barbara. That mobile home park was the only place she could afford, and then only because her income from her administrative job at the local university was supplemented by the treasury of Pete, a man twenty years her senior whom I loathed. A wealthy retired Boy Scout official from Santa Fe with a long white ponytail, he’d never had any children of his own and couldn’t understand why my mother tried so hard to forge a good relationship with me, her prickly, wayward daughter.

  My mother wasn’t the only woman Pete was “helping.” I don’t think my mother even liked Pete, even though she tried hard to convince herself that she did. Whenever I asked her what she saw in him, she always told me she was grateful to him. When she first got divorced, he’d offered to let her stay with him for free in his condo at Leisure World, the retirement community in Long Beach where my great-grandmother had lived when I was a kid, with her beanbag frog and Andes mint candy. Later, he paid the ridiculously expensive space rental on my mother’s Elwood mobile home.

  Never having fully recovered from her divorce, my mother had a hacking cough at that place. There’d been an electrical fire in the walls while she was sleeping, from which she’d narrowly escaped with her life. After the firemen came and sprayed the house with fuzzy green chemicals, she was too tired and too depressed to clean the mess away. I arrived months later to find her sitting in a pool of chemical cancer spores, willing herself to get a long, slow kick off Kyriarchy Island. Every time she coughed, it was as if she drove a spike into my hand—it pained me that much. I wanted her to take care of herself and she refused. It was like it just wasn’t important to her.

  Witches need to keep practicing witchcraft, even if we’re busy, even if we’re depressed. When witches stop practicing witchcraft, we languish. My mother was pasty white and swollen then. Her witch practice at that time had dwindled to the point where it was mainly conceptual. She thought about the Goddess still, reading books like Merlin Stone’s Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, but she no longer made braids of cardamom-infused Lammas bread or held monthly full-moon ceremonies with her moon group. Her best friend and moon groupie, Ginny, lived in the trailer across the way, but she, too, was busy working all the time, three jobs, two demanding sons. Both she and my mother were too exhausted to do much more than sit on the couch together and commiserate.

  During my childhood, they’d planned rituals together, with my mother leading and Ginny organizing. They held ceremony at public parks and at the bedsides of dying friends. They’d read each other’s tarot cards and sip wine from red glass goblets, giving each other goddess figurines as birthday gifts: a smiling green Gaia with an earth in her belly; a prehistoric sandstone goddess, fat and reclining with her hand on her hip. “Yes, yes, yes!” They would squeal as they unwrapped their gifts and planned their future altars.

  The Santa Barbara Elwood trailer had an enclosed porch out back we called the sunroom. The Sunroom of Night. It was stuffed with boxes of Christmas lights and old spelling tests, ripped trash bags full of clothes to give away. Boxes of my stuff, my old letters and notebooks I’d made my mother hold on to when I went
away to London, and boxes of notes for her own book about the fall of matriarchy that she’d abandoned years before. She was carrying a lot in that room. A blender she’d had for almost thirty years that she got as a wedding gift when she married my father. It broke the first time she used it. She’d carried it with her for decades. The idea was that at some point she was going to fix that blender. She took comfort in the idea that, if she held on to those broken things long enough, somehow, by some magic, she’d find a way to fix them.

  Though the Sunroom of Night actually got a lot of light, it always made me depressed. In the middle of the room, jammed between all the boxes, was a hot tub Pete insisted my mother get. I don’t want to know why. Anyway, it was in disuse, puddled with a brackish green slime that splashed in my mouth when I tried to siphon it out so we could get rid of the damn thing. My mother was grateful for my willingness to wrestle with that slimy hydra; she wanted that hot tub gone the moment she and Pete broke up. But that was the only piece of Saturnine ballast in that room she wanted me to touch. My renovations went too far when I threw away her herbs one day while she was at work.

  When I was a child, my mother had a little room she called her apothecary, filled with glass bottles of herbs and powders and potions all made or ground by hand. She’d use them to make medicinal teas and poultices. She wrote in her Book of Shadows, the book where witches record their spells, all about the properties of the plants: oil of clove eased the pain of toothache; damiana was sweet enough for healing baths and love spells; belladonna could be used as a pain reliever, but only with extreme caution—too much and the nightshade became a poison. By the time my mother reached her Elwood Trailer period, her apothecary had become the Sunroom of Night and fallen into disuse. The chamomile had turned to powder, coating the bottom of the jar like old mustard; the valerian was spindled in fuzzy gray mold. In my mind, every time my mother walked past these mummified medicinal relics, she’d beat herself up about how she wasn’t doing enough and all the things she’d lost. I saw these dead medicines as a toxic form of bloodletting, leeches sucking at her confidence, just another piece of evidence that she was no longer the woman she wanted to be. But when I threw them away, she was furious.