Initiated Read online

  It was time for the exorcism. The room was still. Silent. We could feel the egregore of capitalism pressing in on us from all sides. Humming in off the 110 freeway to the north, the first freeway ever, slicing neighborhoods in half; a black cloud of fumes blowing in from the industrial warehouses and toxic factories to the south; and from the east the temperatures rising and from the west the cost of rent rising; rising on all sides. We were ocean beasts, weird and glowing beneath the pressure of the kyriarchical demiurge: that colonizing force, melting our icebergs, gripping our guts, eating its way out, gobbling our bodies, our planet. I called out:

  O Spirit of Capitalism!

  You who value profit above all

  You who determine that only the rich shall be saved

  Destroyer of Relationships

  Destroyer of the Environment

  Promoter of War

  Exploiter of Shame

  Settler of the World

  And

  Colonizer of Our Minds

  We call you now to appear before us in this circle

  By the Power of the Great Goddess,

  We command you O! Spirit of Capitalism

  appear in this seal

  cause no injury, and be bound…

  A sulfurous stench filled the room. I stomped my feet, brought two stones together with a loud crack. I was not a witch alone. My people were with me. I could feel my blood coursing through my wrists, my neck, my heart and theirs, our pulse, going back in an unbroken line, to the beginning of all life on earth. We were sacred beings. Free. We took up the cords and walked widdershins, counterclockwise, against the sun, grinding the genetically modified grain of capitalism backward into dust.

  We have never stopped resisting.

  We are the children of Lilith

  our DNA is that of the primordial goddess

  who bends before no man.

  O! Spirit of Capitalism

  Hear our indictment against you.

  Attend to us!

  One by one, the people in the crowd stepped forward, naming their grievances. Brothers imprisoned or killed by the police; sisters lured into addiction by the pharmaceutical industry; daughters raped by a coworker at a holiday party; fathers denied a visa; mothers kicked out of their homes so the landlords could build condos. Humans spending their lives in cubicles, destroying their bodies, wasting their time to generate capital for faceless corporate overlords. Knees bent in grief watching their world swallowed in fire, coated in oil, sucked lifeless by factory farms.

  We are witches and rebels and lovers of the earth.

  Now, here

  again and forever

  we proclaim our refusal to submit.

  As each person stepped forward with their testimony, the crowd responded, echoing back, “We hear you, we see you, we suffer with you.” Using a ceremonial athame, I cut the cords binding the Spirit of Capitalism to my community. Our tethers withered to the ground. Banging our drums and stomping our feet, we chanted:

  O! Spirit of Capitalism, we created you

  And now we destroy you!

  In the name of the Goddess of Love we destroy you

  We cast you out forever from our minds and hearts

  We banish you

  We banish you

  We banish you

  Begone!

  It’s rare that we get to declare our collective intentions like this—at least it is for my people, the weirdos of the world, the artists, the exiles, the people on the fringe. Most of us don’t holler at sports rallies; most of us don’t go to church anymore. The tenets of the Abrahamic religions don’t resonate: God the father, watching us from on high. Following the laws of the priests and popes of the world, the CEOs and presidents, their laws were not created by or for us, nor their idea that the earth was created for amusement and exploitation by “Man.”

  And yet, the places where we do find ideas that resonate, the political rally, the university, these places are devoid of ritual and of magic. They have been settled too. But by practicing ritual, we create the world we want to find, a world where the imagination is exalted. A world where we priestesses, witches, and weirdos can banish the Spirit of Capitalism together, or at least contribute to the effort. Practicing ritual together strengthens the bonds of our community. We empower each other. We stand together, arm in arm, breath mixing, declaring our support for one another, collectively addressing our grievances, in recognition that we are not alone. We are not just isolated individuals struggling to stay afloat in a system that dictates to us the terms of how we should live and thrive. We are not merely objects acted upon by outside authorities. When we come together, we do more than resist. We create connection. We create healthier ways of living together on our planet. We create love.

  And now, O! People of Los Angeles,

  The Spirit of the Goddess is with us.

  We create Her.

  She is already here.

  Through us She is reborn again and again.

  Her spirit rises within us

  What will we create?

  Speak your vision now…

  From the circle, voices rose. A young woman with sharp bangs and dark-rimmed glasses declared: “I create the Spirit of Trust. That we can all trust each other to stand up for one another.” Together, the group of initiates echoed back to her: “We invoke the Spirit of Trust. We create this Spirit with you…” More and more people joined in, calling in the Spirit of Patience, calling in visions of gardens on every street, of compassionate support for people recovering from addiction, for an end to borders, for shared resources, for enthusiastic consent. We all called out:

  All acts of Love and Pleasure are Her rituals.

  “Anyone who wishes to be initiated into the cult of the Goddess of Love, step forward now,” I said. Hundreds of feet advanced. We rise, we fall, we rise again. Like the priestesses of Eleusis two thousand years before me, I raised a sheaf of wheat above my head and chanted:

  By the powers of the Goddess within us

  together we consecrate ourselves.

  We are witches

  children of the Goddess of Love.

  Together we are powerful.

  Together we are free.

  Together, we are initiated.

  Victory to the Goddess!

  “Victory to the Goddess!” a chorus of voices sang back to me.

  Epilogue

  Your corner is your corner, comrade and sister, and it’s your turn, as we are here in Zapatista lands. These new bad governments think that they will easily defeat us, that we are few and that no one supports us in other worlds. But no matter what, comrade and sister, even if only one of us remains, that one will fight to defend our freedom. And we are not afraid…

  Letter from Zapatistas to Women Who Fight

  All Over the World, February 2019

  When a thing is sacred, it cannot be destroyed.

  Chloe Erdman

  My mother’s body is not comfortable; her hips are sore and cramped. We’ve been traveling for fifteen hours already, our tailbones bent at odd angles. Catching our connecting flight in Copenhagen, she had to have a wheelchair meet us at the gate or we wouldn’t have made it across the airport in time. Her feet no longer respond to her commands; she tries to find a way to adjust them so that they’re not tangled in our bags and pinched by the seats, but there’s hardly any room. The airplane is so basic it may as well be military.

  “Are you nervous?” my mother asks me as I punch the pillow and squirm in my seat, trying to find a way to settle in for the final leg of our journey from LAX to Athens, Greece.

  I shrug. “You mean about the tour?” I ask her, and she nods. Though it’s not at all clear that’s really what she means. I’ve already been short with her several times on our thirty-plus-hour journey; I think she might really be asking if I’m nervous to spend so much time with her. Three weeks traveling with anyone is a long time, especially if that person is your mother. “I guess I’m nervous about all the other people
.”

  She pulls a blanket up around her shoulders. It’s freezing on the plane; you can almost see our breath. “Yes, me too,” she murmurs, “I worry what they might think of me.”

  Even though the women on the tour will all be there to commune with the Goddess, she’s still nervous how they might treat us if we call ourselves witches. When she was living in San Luis Obispo, she tells me, after she and my stepdad broke up, she was teaching the Cups for the Queen of Heaven classes about women’s spirituality. The local independent newspaper started writing about how she “called herself a witch.” Some people in her community didn’t like that. They didn’t want a weird, eccentric, irrational person teaching classes at the Unitarian congregation or saying she represented them. She felt pushed out, marginalized, like she had to hide.

  “But if you’re a public person, people are always going to disagree with you and criticize you; that’s how you know you’re getting successful,” I tell her. “The more public you are, the more people are going to wag their finger at you.”

  “Yes…or kill you.” She nods, consistent with her track record of always believing that the worst thing that can happen, will happen.

  “I’m more worried about spending all that time with people I don’t know and not being able to have time to myself,” I say. I never would have chosen to go on a tour on my own; it wouldn’t have occurred to me. I like fumbling my way through foreign places, allowing the winds of fate to prevail. But I’m glad my mother invited me to come; I want to get closer to her. I want to try opening myself to my mother’s way of doing things, even though I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it. “Do you think we’ll get a chance to do our own thing ever?”

  My mother gives me a look. I know she’s worried that I’ll behave like I did when I was seven and we took a trip to New York City. We got off the bus and I ran off into the crowds of Times Square before she could even collect our luggage. I can feel her resist the urge to bring that story up; she knows it bothers me when we constantly retell the story of how difficult I was as a child. She pats me on the knee. “I’m sure you’ll get your chance to wander, honey.”

  When, during my Saturn Return, she and her new partner, Will, got together, she was in her fifties. Not only did she fall in love, but also after they got married she returned to school, graduated at the top of her class with both a BA and a master’s degree. After that, she pulled out the book she’d been writing all throughout my childhood and began working on it again. It’s the reason for our trip to Crete: research. She loves to go over all the plot points of the book with me. It’s an epic trilogy of historical fiction cataloguing the resistance of women throughout the ancient world even through the final triumphs of patriarchy. The series begins in Egypt, travels west to Libya, and ends where our trip together would end, in Crete, where the Minoan mother cultures made their last stand.

  My mother pulls out her manuscript from her purse, and instantly her mood begins to improve. The exhaustion of the flight evaporates. She runs her finger over her notes, over her beautiful, almost musical handwriting. Wondering out loud, she says, “I keep asking myself, why did we let them? That’s what I’m trying to figure out in my book.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We must have seen the patriarchal hordes coming,” my mother continues. “Why didn’t we fight?”

  “Maybe we loved too much,” I say. “They were our lovers, our husbands, our children. Maybe we didn’t want to fight them.”

  “Well, actually, we did fight,” she says, going on to remind me of our favorite stories, of the Amazons of Libya and Phrygia, clans of female warriors, archers who fought on horseback from the virgin woods and desert wilderness.

  “But the patriarchy still won,” I say. “They had bigger weapons.” The stewardess comes to take away our plastic cups, water bottles, and empty pretzel bags, telling us to prepare to land. Below us, Athens clamors for our attention, white and dense, industrial warehouses and shipping yards; I can see the Parthenon off in the distance.

  Everyone is smoking at the Athens airport. Pink oleanders line the highway into the city, just like they do in L.A. “The Latin name for those is nerium,” my mother tells me. “They’re known as one of the baneful herbs in witchcraft. Poisonous.”

  Our Brazilian travel agent picks us up in a van. “Tell them about the coffee here!” she commands the driver.

  “We love coffee in Greece,” the driver tells us, describing one varietal with an aftertaste like chocolate.

  Mom can’t hear him. “What? What?” She asks me, “It’s like a mocha?”

  “No, Mom,” I tell her. “It tastes like chocolate. It’s not a mocha.” I want to be less sharp, less temperamental. More Oracle, less Amanda. I remind myself how I would feel if someone was patronizing and impatient with me in a foreign country where I was trying to impress my only daughter. I would feel like shit. It would only make me more stressed. Still, I find myself being impatient with her when she seems confused or has difficulty walking. As if her body is an augur of my own future.

  Throughout my childhood, my mother was never able to stay in her body, never had much interest in taking care of it. I watched her disassociate from it, simultaneously tethered to the body’s pleasures and seeing it as a site of torment and rejection. I remember asking her questions while we were cooking or driving. She would answer five minutes later, as if the question had to travel a great distance to reach her. She was drifting past Pluto, communicating to me on earth through a series of satellites.

  Our first morning in Athens, we sit having breakfast on the hotel balcony, looking out over the rooftops colliding against the Acropolis, the tallest point in the city, built on a hill, surrounded by fortifications of golden stones. My mother is questioning me about how I intend to get milk for our coffee. She’s concerned that we aren’t supposed to bring our coffee cups to the milk at the buffet, but instead are supposed to fill the little jugs with milk and bring them to the tables. “I’ve been on this planet for decades,” I snapped. “I think I can manage to get milk in our coffee without supervision.”

  “I’m just worried that we’ll look like rubes,” she tells me. That word again. Rubes. She said it at the airport too. Later I look up the word rube on the Internet. I know what it means, but I want to see the precise definition since she uses it so much, describing how she fears people might see her, might see us. Rube: an awkward, unsophisticated person. RUSTIC. A naïve or inexperienced person. She’s worried in Greece everyone knows how to get milk in their coffee but us; everyone will know we’re hicks from an unsophisticated country with a smug white supremacist for a president.

  Later in the day, as we’re walking up the slippery marble steps to the Parthenon, the temple to the goddess Athena, my mother labors to find footing with her cane. “I can do this!” my mother incants, clearly believing the opposite as she hobbles up the path through the olive trees to the ancient temple of the Goddess of Wisdom and War.

  “Of course you can!” I tell her. “Focus on the part that doesn’t hurt. Old dancer’s trick. Focus on your shoulders.”

  “Are those not supposed to hurt?” she puffs. In the end she can only make it halfway. She stops just short of the entrance. We’ve traveled halfway around the world to get here, but she doesn’t get to see the temples with all their golden stones, the caryatids rising somberly above the olive tree. She sits on a bench near the buses and when it gets too hot, she gets a strawberry lemonade.

  Human frailty is on my mother’s mind. Her very close friend, Ginny, is in hospice in California, her right side paralyzed, her eyes glued shut because they no longer produce the fluids necessary to keep them wet, her body riddled with cancer. Ginny, co-leader of my mother’s Moon Circle and a mentor of mine who took me to care for abused horses and gave me books by Ursula K. Le Guin. She had two boys about my age and raised them on her own (her husband killed himself without warning, or even leaving a note, when her children were young. She walked in holding their h
ands at Christmas and found him hanging in the garage). When her parents grew old, she took care of them, moved in order to be closer to them, wiped their brows and their bums; but now, facing death, finding someone to care for her was proving difficult. Ginny insisted that we go on the trip, despite the fact that she might die while we were away. My mother thinks of her constantly. She brings a little goddess figurine they used to keep on the altar during their Moon Circles to every site we visit. She pulls out the little goddess and holds her up in front of the friezes, at the Café Diogenes, in front of the columns lining temple of Zeus across the street from our hotel, so she can send Ginny the pictures on her cell phone, and show them to her when she gets home and say, “You were with us in spirit!”

  In the museum of the Parthenon, on a stone tablet on the first floor, a citizen thanks a priestess by name for taking such good care while presenting his offerings to the goddess Athena. Upstairs are dozens of statues of the Korai, women dressed in priestess’s robes, presenting offerings of apples, pomegranates, and libations of wine to Athena and other deities who had smaller chapels all over the Acropolis. But according to the wall text, the Korai are not priestesses; they are “female figures.” When the Parthenon was in active use, there were thousands of these women, these statues, standing with wide, unblinking black eyes all over its grounds, amidst the groves of herbs and olive trees, their marble eyes painted in kohl, their linen robes bright with ochre paint, smiling as they presented their offerings. But still, the wall text informs us that no one knows who or what they were. When, however infrequently, male statuary appear, they are of course identified as heroes or priests. The presence of so many women in a sacred space is totally mysterious. Why on earth were they there? “Perhaps,” the wall text wonders, “the gods found the female figure pleasing?”