Initiated Read online

  It was as if by throwing away her herbs I’d thrown away any chance she had at rebirthing her witchcraft. I understood, but I couldn’t concede. The herbs were old, mostly dust; they were unusable. When you get the Death card in tarot, the best thing you can do is pull the plug on whatever it is in your life you’re keeping on life support. If you don’t let it go, it will suck all your energy. Rebirth will be impossible. My mother had taught me that herself. But rather than seeing my intervention as help, she saw it as a violation. The herbs were an extension of her body, their rhizomatic roots reaching back into her earth, her history. To have someone take them from her without permission was to have someone destroy a piece of her and violate a boundary she didn’t want crossed. And yet, I’d thought I was protecting her. Funny how protection and violation are often two words for the same action.

  Saturn is the planet of boundaries. In my sessions with my witch clients now, I often tell them that Saturn’s boundaries are like the walls of your house. Without the walls, your house would be useless. We need boundaries; we need structure and security. Saturn gets a bad reputation. He was once the god of the harvest. His festival, Saturnalia, inaugurated winter with the fruits of fall laid out in a cornucopia upon the table. It was a time of reversals. On that day the slave would be master and the master, slave. Like many goddesses before him, Saturn was the god of grain, threshed into the soil, sprouted and grown, turned into bread, into body, into earth. Saturn was death and resurrection.

  Because of the fight years before over the thrown-out herbs, and many other things, I’m not sure my mother wanted me to live with her in her trailer in Ojai. I think she was worried about it. But, to me, the move seemed like an ideal solution: I could live in the orange groves of Ojai rent-free, job-free, and focus on my writing. I was grateful for the opportunity to have some rest. I knew I was deep in my Saturn Return. I knew my Saturn was in the sign of Leo, the sign of creative self-expression. I was writing a pilot about a haunted plantation off the coast of Georgia that calls its descendants back to deal with their ancestral history. I was blind to the fact that I was working on my own.

  When I moved in, my alliance with my mother was loving, though uneasy. It was a difficult time for my mother then, still. I visited her a few times in her cubicle at work. Poked and prodded as she was by the Machiavellian tactics of her bosses, she nevertheless kept a goddess figurine on her desk below a picture of her brother and his partner pinned to the partition wall. My uncle had died a few months before, after a decades-long battle with HIV. His partner of twenty years shot himself in the head out of grief three months later. We spread their ashes in the desert. My uncle had lived with my mother at the mobile home in Ojai, too, because he’d needed her care, but like me he also hadn’t paid rent. Saturn is the planet of boundaries and it’s always toiling to teach the women in my bloodline to have better ones. Still, my mother was proud to be able to offer us refuge, and to be able to buy the place outright with no mortgage, even though it meant a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work and back each day. And she was excited because behind the double-wide, there was space for a little garden. There she grew the vegetables we ate in our dinner salads and worked on her medicinal herbs. Somehow, in all the difficulty and stress, she’d managed to eke out a small lifeline for herself by resurrecting her connection with her plants.

  Wanting me to feel welcome, my mother insisted I take her bedroom, while she slept on the trundle bed in the spare. Mornings I’d wake up at 6:00 a.m. and meditate, then do chores until she woke up, unable to write if I knew at any moment she might come in and talk. To make her morning commute bearable, she’d wait out the traffic at her computer, glued to the Democratic Underground, an alt-left website with which she was on an intimate acronym basis: DU. My mother’s task was to hold up the pillars of DU. She tracked the stories, learning the names of the wrongdoers, noting in which news stories they made an appearance, making connections. I’d make her poached eggs on sourdough and serve it to her at her desk, where she’d sit, saturating herself with the misdeeds of those in power. They really were as horrifying as she’d suspected all along. Her Democratic Underground was the home of rabbits, thumping out the approach of men like her father, evil men, lurking in back rooms, smoking cigars, plotting 9/11 from the inside, hatching schemes on how to betray the vulnerable, persecute women, enslave people of color, destroy the environment, and undermine democracy. Thump thump thump, went the listserve. Like the rabbits of Watership Down, saying, “There’s terrible evil in the world.”

  When she left for the day, I’d write. I’d walk to a nearby café and sit beneath the oak trees, writing out my TV scripts by hand or working on completing my novel about Persephone’s escape from the underworld. I’d write for hours, as long as I could, then return to my mother’s wood-paneled chamber and fend off the tentacles of the Internet that devoured her each morning.

  In the evenings, when my mother and I were calm, sometimes we’d go through a box of old photographs sent by my grandmother and write the stories we could remember on the back of each one. Most of the women we now identify as witches wouldn’t have called themselves that for the past thousand years or so. Many would have considered themselves Christians, Protestants, or Catholics, but they practiced the techniques of witchcraft, speaking to spirits, using herbs, finding lost objects. The roots of my family lineage go back deep into the land, by the standards of European Americans at least; we were here since before the Civil War, since before California even became a state. Images of women in high-necked Victorian dresses wearing gloves of hand-crocheted lace, standing before a clapboard shack in an oil field in Culver City. “I think that’s your great-grandmother, Grandma Een,” my mother told me. “She always wore her hair piled on top of her head like that.” The woman in the photograph was too glamorous for that oil field; children with dirt streaked on their faces played with an old tin can at her feet. My mother had a special interest in the women in my family, though mainly it was the men who were recorded in history. I’m a direct descendent of Daniel Boone, frontiersman and coonskin cap wearer. Also, John Hart, signer of the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. The men in my family came to California for the oil, the black gold pooling in underground oceans beneath the dry earth. And some came for the metals, the yellow gold, the silver. But the stories of these men’s wives and daughters weren’t written down. The only stories we know of my ancestresses are those within living memory, many truncated to just a footnote.

  After her husband died, my grief-stricken great-great-aunt Meta left her daughters on the steps of a whorehouse in Anaheim as punishment for ingratitude. The girls sat on the steps until eventually my great-great-grandmother Marianna came to rescue them, back when there was no Disneyland, no I-5, just orange groves and jackrabbits for days. I loved the picture of my great-great-grandmother Marianna. In it she wore an embroidered bolero jacket I still have hanging on the wall in the room where I practice my magic, a maroon velvet jacket lined in gold silk, with scratchy gold embroidery and stained glass beads. As the witchiest of my kin, Marianna wore that jacket in the circus. My grandmother tells me she was a feisty woman, with a monkey that bit. She smoked cigars and drank whiskey and scandalized Southern California when she insisted on wearing pants so that she could straddle her horse. Her saddle is still in the Anaheim museum today. But, as the story goes, she always had to have a man. As soon as one would leave, she’d dig around in the earth until she could find another to take his place. My great-great-great-great-grandmother went by Lady Dean. My mother is convinced she was a noble, though I have my doubts. On her way from England, she died in childbirth while sailing around the cape to the port of San Francisco, where her seven surviving children would seek their fortune in the Gold Rush.

  In the box was a picture of my grandmother from the early ’50s, all blond and coquettish, with her pointy bra, modeling for a catalogue. Standing beneath the studio backdrop, leaning her weight jauntily on the tip of her umbrella, she tilted her
chin up toward the spotlight. She must have been about eighteen in that photo, before she married my grandfather the demon, then contracted polio. Once divorced, as a single mother, eventually she fought her way into a position selling ads at the Morro Bay Tribune, and worked her way up, from secretary to editor, until she was thrown out via patriarchal coup d’état. She was born at the exact moment of a great earthquake. An ornamental plate fell to the ground and cracked; it still hangs upon the wall in her house in Northern California. A sign that the goddess Persephone ruled our family line, the earth shook, and Hades rose from the chasm to claim his underworld bride.

  In that same box was a photograph of my mother from my early teen years when she was at the height of her witchy powers. Her hair long, she’s draped in fabrics the color of stone and wine and blood. She holds a power amulet between her fingers and stares out at the viewer with an arched brow and narrowed eyes, as if staring in the face of some medieval prosecutor with an expression like, “I see you. You’re a hypocrite and you have no power over me.” That picture always scared me, because I knew the inquisitors, hypocrites though they may be, did in fact have power. They controlled the planet. They certainly controlled my mother. When she divorced my stepfather, she had nothing. The powers that be offered her a choice: submit, and scratch out a life beneath our rule, or be destroyed. And in fact, we might destroy you anyway, just for pleasure. What good could candle spells and moon goddesses be in the face of that?

  We kept all these pictures in a heavy folding box, its slick red cardboard suggesting it’d once been used for Christmas sweaters. One evening, after a few hours of weeding through the stack of photos, I looked down and saw a little girl, strawberry blond and awkward, her face swollen with allergies and asthma, and I realized it was me. My image, on top of this huge stack of other images, women from my family, stories of love and longing and struggle, and the time would pass, and other faces would come after mine, and on the back of my photo there’d be one line of penciled text to sum up my life: She once lived in a garden shed in Santa Barbara. She was once the Oracle of Los Angeles, though I didn’t know at the time that’s who I would become.

  Some of my ancestors emigrated from France as Huguenots, Protestants who escaped Catholic persecution and fled to America. In French, there’s a word used to discuss the provenance of wine: terroir. Terroir refers to all the things that affect the spirit of a grape and influence the flavor of the wine. Technically, terroir is the land, but more it’s the spirit of the world the grape grows in. The temperature of the briny air as it gusts off the winter sea, the mineral salts in the nearby creek, the veins of copper running through the fields and the pine sap soaking the hills nearby. For me, Saturn didn’t just represent my walls, the ones I’d built for myself; it lived in my foundation, my family, my terroir.

  My mother would often joke that I had moved to Europe to get as far away as I could from the story of my family. But in Europe I learned that wherever you go, you take your stories with you. Saturn permits no escape. One night, my mother and I had an argument. A common one for us. Our arguments would drag us into the dark, and down at the bottom I’d find a piece of my mother I didn’t want to see. A piece that terrified me.

  In her depression she no longer seemed to inhabit her body. Her hair, once her glory, white and thick down to her waist, she now wore up in a schoolmarmish bun like Mrs. Claus, if the jolly elf had her rosy cheeks sucked gray by a vampire. In her most active witch years, my mother had worn long drapes of fabric in mustard ochre or russet batik. I’d always admired her necklace collection: Yoruban palm beads and turquoise squash blossoms and a silver moonstone pentacle she’d bought near a sacred well in Glastonbury. But she rarely wore jewelry anymore, with the exception of a silver ring with a symbol for balance that her finger had grown too swollen to take off.

  By her own admission, my mother was just waiting to die. She told me so herself. The only reason she kept going was me and my brother. She went over her past relationships again and again, like a river over a stone, wearing the memories smooth, polishing them and holding them up to the light. “Why didn’t they love me?” she’d ask again and again, about her father, about my father, about my stepfather, about Pete. “What is it about me that makes me so unlovable? I try to figure it out, I try to do everything right, and I just can’t figure it out. Why didn’t they love me?”

  My mother’s sorrow, her pain and self-criticism, her lack of self-love provoked in me an irrational fury that I would never extend to anyone else. I didn’t know where it came from, or why I felt it, but it was something about how our stories were blended together. Something about how her struggles were tangled with my own. And even though I could name this fury, and reason against it, I felt what I felt, and my feelings could not be banished. Starting at my heart, when she’d say these things, my blood would catch fire. I’d want to tear down our house and stomp on the walls. “It’s not that you’re unlovable,” I’d howl at my mother, wanting to scream it in her face and shake her. “They couldn’t love! They couldn’t love you; they couldn’t love anyone!”

  In the lonely afternoons, after I’d finished my work for the day, I’d take long walks along the backroads of Ojai, spiritual mecca of late nineteenth-century theosophical societies and yoga gurus, nestled between two mountains in groves of citrus and avocado. California! Land of my birth. A golden land with a golden hour, right before sunset warm light would shoot streaks of pink along the leaves and fill the air with monarch butterflies. That golden light caresses your face; anyone whom it touches takes on the shine of love. It troubled me that my mother felt herself unworthy of it. I’d never, never once in my life, ever seen my mother be mean. Even at her most wounded and depressed, she always had love to offer the world. She fought for the rights of the vulnerable; she knew the goddesses’ names. She craved simplicity; she loved to watch the plants grow and learn their habits and protect them. She’d read everything, and even though she hadn’t graduated from college, she still had perfect grammar and spelling, and beautiful handwriting in loops and swirls.

  One of my favorite things about my mother is her ability to love what other people love. As a child, my brother loved blocks, and my mother could play blocks with him endlessly, just because she loved to watch him love them so much. I loved contemporary dance, and my mother could talk about dance with me endlessly, even though she didn’t know anything about it, because she appreciated love wherever she saw it. If someone loved something, she wanted to celebrate that love; she would be a devotee kneeling at the altar of that love, even if she never felt like she would get any of it in return. Even if it was doled out to her in scraps that barely kept her alive, my mother’s hunger just made her appreciate love more.

  As a young witch, my mother understood the power of naming. She named me Amanda, meaning worthy of love, because she wanted me to always know that I was valuable and worthy. She wanted to give me the thing she never felt like she could get for herself.

  I was a couple miles from home by this point in my walk, and I came upon a junk heap on the side of the road. Rusted metal things that looked like they once lived in a tractor, diseased children’s toys matted with mud, a mattress and a dresser drawer and an old lamp with its guts pulled out and…a goddess about three and a half feet high. Venus, Goddess of Love, with coils of hair falling below her waist, made of white cement and stained at the foot, as if she’d been half buried in the earth for decades. Chipped around the edges, she was still intact, though heavy when I tried to lift her. For most of the two miles home, I carried her on my hip like a child, though she kept sliding down, and sometimes I’d have to flip her around and carry her on my back, like an eighteenth-century peasant carrying bushels of hay.

  In the little plot of land behind her trailer in Ojai, my mother’s terroir was imperfect, but still beautiful. She’d made a strong effort to grow things in it. Even though it was difficult, her earth packed hard like a dirt parking lot, she grew pumpkin and squash, corn and bean
s. She could conjure the plants up from the earth with the gentleness of her voice. She didn’t like pesticides and had long been a follower of permaculture, a witchy system that looks for ways to encourage mutual benefit and collaboration between animals, plants, and people. She grew herbs on a spiraling mound, with the rosemary and lavender at the top so they could grow their roots deep, with the thirsty mint and skullcap at the bottom so they could drink the water as it drained away.

  I put the goddess near the squash. There she stood in the wide wrinkled blossoms, reclining upright against my mother’s herb shed, surrounded in vines, serenaded by the burbling of our electric fountain. She could gaze at the little tabby tiger sleeping in the crook of our neighbor’s lemon tree. Each night when my mother got home, even after eight hours in her cubicle and several hours of traffic, she still made an effort to spend time in her garden. And so that night, when she stepped into its blue shadows, I ran to the back bathroom and listened at the window screen. “Oh!” my mother exclaimed, delighted. “There’s a goddess in my garden.” From behind lace drapes crocheted by my ancestors, I watched my mother caress the Venus’s face and smile. She never asked me how the statue got there. I believe, secretly, my mother always knew the Goddess of Love would find her.