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When the boys left, Orpheus pulled me into the room to make love. He wanted to go for hours and never stop unless he was playing music. When I said there were other things I wanted to do with my life than just listen to him practice with his band and have sex all the time, he said, “We don’t have sex all the time.”
“Yes, we do,” I told him. “We have sex like five times a day.”
“Five times a day is not a lot,” he said, pulling me close again.
One night he played the Cake Shop. After load-in but before the show, everyone lounged around. The boys were quiet. They flicked matches at each other and talked about record labels and kinds of amps and places they’ve toured: musicians’ standard discourse. Orpheus and I sat together uneasily. After one of our biggest fights, I tore off to go write and he stayed home and wrote a song. Both of our pieces were about wolves, their muzzles bloody in the snow. We were connected in the realms of magic like that. But after about six months I realized that though we were in the spirit world together, I was becoming a ghost. I was not Amanda, writer and witch. I was Eurydice, Orpheus’s girlfriend. We’d made love all afternoon but it ended in a fight. He wanted to know where I’d been while he was rehearsing. Whenever I went out, he’d quiz me on what I did, who I was with, where I sat.
“I thought you were sitting by the window.”
“I was, I moved.”
“Why’d you move?”
“It was too noisy by the window.”
“Was anyone with you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know anyone there?”
“No. No one. I was just writing.”
“Did you move to sit next to someone?”
“No.”
He was suspicious of me; he constantly worried that I would cheat on him. He felt threatened by my sexual history. But I knew his jealousy was not because I was unfaithful, but because he was. He worried that I would do the same to him as he had done to me on all the little tours he took when I had to stay home and work. I want to lock you in a tower until I’m ready to be the man you need, he told me. We fought constantly, and I would be this close to leaving, but then he’d have a show, and I’d see him onstage, celebrant, priest, consort of my same goddess, and I couldn’t bear to leave him.
That night at the Cake Shop was the same as every night. Our lovemaking, our fighting, our silence and sullenness. He went onstage, looking tired and half drunk. But then the club lights dimmed, and the mic turned on, and there he was, in all his glory. As if he’d called the gods to enter him, he came alive. As if his life offstage were just a waiting period, an elevator ride, until the music started and he came to true form. Orpheus awakened, a sleeping beauty kissed back to life by the music singing through him. That night, I saw him onstage and I knew, he was in love with the Muse, husband to the magic bride. If I stayed, I would always and only ever be his plus one.
When Saturn departs the house of your return, if you were a good student and mastered his lessons, he will leave you with a gift. When I returned, alone, to Los Angeles, the gifts I received were abundant. A few months after my return to my native land, I decided to hold an official witch ceremony on my birthday. It was to be the first time that I would officiate a ritual as priestess.
In New York, I’d felt rootless, severed from my connections. I needed a way to touch ground. I returned to Los Angeles, eager to reconnect with my friends and my community. I moved to Echo Park, into a bright yellow cottage with an opuntia cactus scratching up against the white picket fence and heirloom tomatoes climbing joyously up the wall. I shared the place with my friend Milly, the writing partner I’d gone to Georgia to visit before I got sidetracked in the erotic underworld with Orpheus.
Uncertain how to hold a formal ritual, I called my mother and asked her how she did it. It was the first time that I’d asked for her ceremonial help as an adult. By then she had moved in with her new love, quit her hateful job, and enrolled back in college where eventually she would go on to complete her BA, and then her master’s degree. Speaking with her on the phone, it was as if she were singing. It had been years since I’d heard that lightness in her voice, and my decision to return to the craft only increased her ebullience.
She reminded me of the steps I’d seen her perform so many times when I was growing up: ground and center, cast a circle, call in the guardians, invoke the Goddess, do the working, give offerings, thank and release the spirits, ground again.
I held the ceremony on the living room floor around a temporary altar I’d constructed on coils of lace my ancestors had woven and bowers of juniper from our front yard. It was an intimate ceremony, formal and fumbling. Since it was the first time I’d done it, I felt like I had to follow a strict formula. I spent days collecting items for the altar; they had to be just right. It took me hours to decide between a smoky quartz to represent the spirit of the North or a chunk of black tourmaline. I spent days writing out the procedure, borrowing chants from my mother and the books I’d “borrowed” from her library. I had to read from the printout as I did the ceremony.
After we grounded and called in the Guardians, I used a traditional chant made famous by British twentieth-century Wiccans Janet and Stewart Farrar, which they learned from the witch Doreen Valiente, and she in turn from her witch grandfather Gerald Gardner, who, I believe, assembled it from a variety of sources: an eighteenth-century French text and an obscure magazine article called “The Black Arts.”
Eko Eko Azarak
Eko Eko Zomelak
Zod ru koz e zod ru koo
Zod ru goz e goo ru moo
Eeo Eeo hoo hoo hoo!
It’s a chant that basically means nothing, which is true of chants in many magical traditions throughout the world. Like a sound poem, the words are less important than the power you feel when you say them. None of my friends were brought up in witchcraft, and so I think initially they felt a little silly chanting this meaningless rhyme, but after a few rounds they started to get into the groove, giving themselves over to the spooky, crackly rhythm of it. In that sense, the chant did exactly what it was supposed to do.
It was a small gathering. I chose eight of my closest friends for the celebration, plus me making nine, a good number for a coven. Each of the people present represented a different quality I wanted to honor and embrace. To each member of the group, I gave a commitment for the coming year: “As you are my witnesses, I vow to you, in service of the greatest good for all concerned and the greatest good for all beings, I commit myself to…” I went around the group. For health, I’d invited Lauren. She who never eats sugar, has never in her life smoked pot, and will drive across town at rush hour (something every Angelino understands as true commitment) to get pastured eggs from a lady who raises the chickens in her organic backyard garden. For abundance, I’d invited Jade, a friend who always inspires me because she expects to be valued for her work. The first in my friend group to set up a retirement account, Jade asks for raises and she gets them, and she always contributes back to the world, raising money for battered women’s shelters and volunteering on Get Out the Vote campaigns. For wisdom, I invited Jordan, a social worker with the homeless and a double Cancer; she always places her connections with others before anything else; she helps me understand that it is by cultivating community that we create our greatest strength.
Something powerful happens when you call your friends together to help you achieve specific intention. You recognize them; you honor them. You say, “You matter to me,” and they echo the same back to you. It creates a web of power, a trampoline, and in my case, it bounced me up, a little bit closer toward finding my true purpose in this world.
Each person brought me a memory of something we’d done together; each person brought me an object that represented a wish, something they hoped would grow in their own lives and in mine and in the world around us. It was fun to see all my friends by candlelight, to sing the songs I’d remembered from my childhood. As each person added their wish, we thre
aded together a web of connections. I read the Charge of the Star Goddess:
I Who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.
I wasn’t yet the Oracle of Los Angeles when I did this ceremony, much less a professional witch; nevertheless the ceremony fulfilled its purpose. It reconnected me with my roots, my people. Saturn had led me back to the earth. To touch ground on what in my life was real and of true value. The ceremony was imperfect. I have a stronger sense of each section of a ritual now; it’s important to know why you do each part, and to develop your own relationship to it. But even though it may have been a bit clumsy, after the ceremony I felt a sense of rightness.
On the night of my first ceremony, I realized that nothing could give me the satisfaction of witchcraft. No lover, no job, no money or career success. Witchcraft was love; it was engagement with life. Witchcraft marked the X on the spot where I realized I wasn’t at the mercy of the world, but that I could create the world I wanted, together with my friends. This power was something unassailable and true, something that could never be taken away nor doubted. I knew this was a place I could always return to, my root, my fourth house, my terroir.
Chapter 12
How to Travel through the Underworld and Make It Home Alive
Can we imagine reconstructing our lives around a communing of our relations with others, including animals, waters, plants and mountains…not the promise of an impossible return to the past but the possibility of recovering the power of collectively deciding our fate on this earth. This is what I call re-enchanting the world.
Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World
The cavernous gallery space was empty but I could hear crowds gathering outside the front doors. Inside was quiet, an aquarium of flickering light cast by a video projection on the wall behind me. There were at least ten other artists showing at Human Resources that night. The entire office space upstairs was ankle-deep in chalky red clay. Downstairs in the main gallery, I crouched in a box about the size of a refrigerator on its side, a cardboard temple I’d made myself. I’d spent the day of the opening reassembling it in the gallery, laying its floors with geometric woven carpets in maroon and indigo, sheepskin blankets and plush pillows. In a few moments, the curator would open the front doors to a stampede of art audience: artists, writers, collectors, college professors. It was in this cardboard temple box that I would make my first appearance as the Oracle of Los Angeles.
It had been several years since I’d performed that first formal ritual with my friends. After that first ceremony on my thirtieth birthday, my mother gave me her Book of Shadows, and under her tutelage I started studying from the rites and rituals she’d written there. I pulled out all her old witch books and began a rigorous daily practice on my own. I took classes with healers, witch elders, and shamans. I made a commitment to the Goddess, to the life force in all its raw beauty and power, that I would place Her at the center of my life.
Since my birthday ceremony, I’d led personal rituals and workshops for small groups. But that night at Human Resources was to be the first time I performed a magical act publicly, with people who hadn’t actively sought me out with the intention of practicing magic together, people who didn’t know anything about what I was doing. I willed myself to breathe slowly, closing my eyes and letting my vision adjust to the dim filtering through the dozens of one-inch windows I’d carved into the cardboard walls with a box cutter on my back lawn. It had taken me days to fashion my little oracle booth, the structure flapping and falling over in the wind as I labored to make it stand with sandbags and duct tape. Now reconstructed in the gallery space, I kneeled inside it, behind an altar of electric candles, a rattle, a little pile of bones, and other tools of divination. Gulping the scent of frankincense essential oil off my palms, I tried to soothe my nerves and ground into my intuition.
My homemade oracle booth was a replica of Los Angeles City Hall, which stood in real life less than a mile away, a bone-white Art Deco erection of the 1920s, its tiered tower jutting thirty-two stories high. From its halls the city’s authorities—the mayor, the lawyers, the judges, the administrators—make decisions about who goes to jail, which kids get funding for their schools, who gets access to health care, which homes get bulldozed to make a freeway. If you climb to the top of the tower and survey the streets below, a few blocks away you might catch a glimpse of Skid Row. Tents and cardboard homes that sprout up at night, padded with rags and newspaper, a whole second city in the heart of this one, with its own systems of authority and social order. Every morning a patrol comes through with a bullhorn, demanding the structures be demolished so tourists don’t get the wrong idea, that the city doesn’t care about the homeless, a Sisyphean task commanded by the despotic gods of capital. There are no natural borders corralling people in to Skid Row. No rivers, no deserts, no mountain ranges; the streets are porous and can be crossed. Technically, the people who live there can leave anytime. But invisible walls trap them on those streets, the forces of racism, trauma, addiction, poverty, white supremacy, capitalism. The story our civilization tells itself is that this suffering is a sad but inevitable fact of life, that there’s nothing that can be done. There will always be winners and losers. We tell ourselves this story, but it isn’t true. We can change the way the story goes.
On the night I became the Oracle, I was thinking about the city as a living organism that communicates to itself, that is constantly speaking its pleasure and its need, an organism changing, evolving, living, and dying, but also that is, essentially, immortal. Each of us makes up a cell in this being; each cell participates, performs its labors, proclaims its values. My plan that night was to open myself to the voice of the city itself and let it speak through me. To let new stories be told.
“Opening now,” the curator, Brian, shouted as he walked to the front door, jingling his keys. I sat inside my booth, visualizing roots reaching from my spine into the tar soil and fossils beneath me, rooting between the tectonic plates, as the chatter of gallery goers, single-channel video installations, and car alarms from outside rose in a tide around me. I listened for the Queen of the Angels, the Spirit of the City of Los Angeles, the Spirit of the land before the city was born, the voices of the settlers, the voices of the Tongva and Chumash who lived here long before any European settlers arrived and who are still living here, the voices of the saber-toothed tigers and mastodons who were here long before humans of any kind. The Spirit of this city is an egregore created by all the beings who have ever walked this land, who have contributed their stories to this dynamic, clanging beast, sprawling across what was once chaparral and riparian woodland, and before that, ocean, and before that, stardust. I listened for Spirit, the Spirit of the Earth, the Anima Mundi, the life force that reaches across the world, beyond history and culture. And, as the first gallery goer came and kneeled before my little cardboard temple and peered inside, I found I could hear the Anima Mundi speaking.
The voice was low at first, the rumbling of an elephant. As soon as the doors of the gallery opened, people lined up outside my little cardboard City Hall. One by one, on their knees, they climbed inside to consult with the Oracle and placed their palms on mine, shining their eyes at me. The fact that they had to enter on their knees was important. In order to enter a ritual space, a space between the worlds, you need to cross a threshold; even if it’s subtle, something has to happen that signals something outside the ordinary is about to happen. Changing the way our body moves through space can initiate a change in consciousness.
My first visitor was Liz, a girl I knew from grad school four years before. We weren’t close, but we’d had plenty of nights together chatting at openings, discussing our course assignments, or joking about our hangovers. She knew me, but she entered my cardboard temple with wide eyes, hovering, her thumbnail scratching a nub of cardboard until she conjured up the nerve to enter. Slowly, nervo
usly, she crawled toward me along the carpets, then folding herself cross-legged, held her hands out to me palms up, her head bowed. Her hands were petite, silky. I smiled at her. “The Spirit of the City welcomes you. Do you have a question?”
I could feel her hands grow damp. Someone stumbled by, jostling the box, but Liz remained steadfast. She leaned closer. “A few months ago, I had a miscarriage,” she whispered. “Will I ever be able to have children?”
For a moment I froze. I hadn’t expected the first question of the night to be something so personal. Liz waited in stillness, eyes troubled with tears. Through the little windows cut into the walls, I could see a line had formed across the room and all the way to the street. Impatient people crouched down to peer inside, gauging how long they would have to wait. I shook off their urgency and willed myself to focus, tuning in to the heat inside my little enclosure, the feeling of the air on my skin, my breath expanding between my shoulder blades. I felt my weight resting on the earth beneath me, my roots pushing through the gravel. Listen, I thought to myself. Open your heart and listen. An image of the Empress tarot card flashed in my mind. I could hear the whispering of vines as they grew around us, leopards clawing and the screech of parrots as they flocked over the rivers of the Amazon. The Empress is the jungle teeming with life, is unbridled creativity; the ultimate mother, the Empress is fertility itself. I saw the Empress slink up to Liz and slip inside her; flowers and water dripped from her fingertips. I heard the Empress whisper to me, “Your body is not your enemy.” A message I passed on to Liz. She acknowledged that with her fertility treatments, she’d begun to see her body as a rebellious animal she’d been trying to subdue by force, an animal made to mate in a cage. She wanted to return to the wild. She had an abundance of passion, an abundance of fertility that needed to be expressed. She needed to recognize her body not just as a machine of creation, but as a site of passion and pleasure. “Make space in your life for creativity of all kinds. Start creating for pleasure again, and the children will follow,” I said, seeing her in a field surrounded by cubs. Liz cupped my hands in hers, squeezing, pressing her forehead to my fingertips. “Thank you,” she whispered as she backed out of the arched threshold and was quickly nudged aside by the next person waiting to crawl in and visit the Oracle of Los Angeles.