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  The call to witchcraft often begins with trauma or illness. To navigate the underworld, you need to go there many times. A person who’s been to the underworld can be of special service to those trying to escape its clutches. For months, I had to go to the hospital every day to have my scabs peeled off so they wouldn’t scar. It took three nurses and my mother to hold me down for the doctor; I was too young for anesthetic. My mother thinks the experience gave me an unconscious mistrust of her. She says if she had to do it again, she’d leave the room even if it took five nurses to hold me down. Years later, when I was beginning grade school, my mother would have to take detours so we wouldn’t drive by the hospital on the way. If I glimpsed its imposing cement walls, I’d scream and claw at the seat belt, trying to throw myself from the moving car in an effort to get away.

  Soon after the burn, I started to get asthma. My lungs would constrict until my lips turned blue, until you could see my heart begging for blood and oxygen from across the room. I would wheeze and wheeze, my ribs pinned by a steel corset, drawn into a rhythmic trance of pure survival. Everything would disappear, the world would turn black and fade away, all that existed was the silken string of my breath and I would hold fast to it like an astronaut lest I be sucked into the void.

  From that void crept my first familiar.

  When my father was called up for the National Guard, sometimes he’d come down from Northern California and stay in the army barracks at Camp San Luis. I remember orderly rows of long wooden buildings, whitewashed with green trim. Spartan rooms with nothing in them but metal cots, wool blankets pulled tight across starched white sheets, heavy wooden trunks at the base of each one. No room for anything personal, the sameness and regularity of the space frightened me.

  My father went for a meeting with his commander, leaving me in the dark barracks, overhead fans ratcheting, pale sunlight infiltrating through industrial metal screens. No living troops were there on base; it was just me alone with the warrior spirits. The residual hum of march and step; yes, sir; no, sir. The regular rhythm of rifle fire.

  When my father came back, he found me sitting cross-legged on a bed, perfectly still, incanting a low, guttural song. “Who are you singing to?” he asked me. I told him I was singing to my guardian, the crocodile Wheezer, who grinned out from beneath the bed, eager to snap out and protect me with supernatural speed.

  Years later, when I grew up and learned more about animal familiars, it struck me that my first one took as its name one of my most painful torments: Wheezer. Asthma constricted my lungs so that every breath I took during an attack would cause me to wheeze. Asthma prevented me from taking action in the world. Christmas, Disneyland, birthday parties, any event that got my child-heart racing would invariably lead to my having an asthma attack and having to stay home, or with me languishing blue-lipped on the sidelines as my friends built sandcastles and frolicked in the ocean.

  That my familiar introduced himself by the name of my wound tells me something. Through my wounds I can find my strength and my power. I can touch ancient places. My wounds may not come to me of my own volition, but they appear like bullet holes in the wall guarding my internal garden of Eden. I am not grateful for my wounds, but I am grateful for the power that has come seeping into my world through them.

  Wheezer is fierce. I stand atop him like a surfboard. Crocodiles connect us to the primordial. Memory holders, they’re stones that swim. The crocodile is an embodiment of the ancient, explosive power resting just beneath the surface of consciousness. In ancient Egypt, Sobek the Rager was one of the deities who took the form of a crocodile; according to The Book of Symbols, he was a personification of the “pharaoh’s capacity to obliterate the enemies of the kingdom.” Wheezer, too, was a rager, coming to me in the knowledge that my kingdom did in fact have enemies. Man has entered the forest. But always my rager, Wheezer sits at my feet, a languorous lizard with an explosive power coiled tightly at his core.

  Your experience of the world changes when you imagine a crocodile by your side. Half asleep yet weary, head on your lap, one powerful little elbow crooked possessively over your thigh. Wheezer came to me for the first time in the army barracks. Our war-loving culture likes to pretend the army is mostly adventure and explosions, but really most of it is bureaucratic drudgery: photocopying documents in triplicate, waiting on the chain of command, bleaching the latrines. In that most disenchanted of places, Wheezer brought me orchids. Rising from the swamp mist, Wheezer brought me skeins of Spanish moss, the screaming of panthers and the snap of turtles, the glowing orbs of will-o’-the-wisp.

  There’s a famous pundit, a patriarch of the Incels, who sneers and says, as if it’s an insult, that witches come from the swamp. In a way, he’s right—witchcraft is born of the swamp. We witches come from the dark lagoon, bubbling and sulfurous. Black leathery eggs hatching underneath. At the base of this swamp is the decay of history, the primordial, of everything that was ever known. Our knowledge is held not in a computer chip but in the living, thinking organism of the planet, in the bodies of plants and animals and stones and roots and rain. When “Man,” colonizer and castle-dweller, enters the swamp, he dies. But the swamp teems with life. A watery world, navigable only by boat, the shores of the swamp are constantly shifting with the tides. Our swamp represents the unconscious, the lizard brain, the root system that expands infinitely beneath the surface of the water. It’s the undifferentiated place from which all forms emerge. To have a crocodile with you means you are empowered by this place of mystery, this dangerous territory, hinterland and underworld, wild and untamable; you are one of the beasts that lives there.

  Why does the call to witchcraft demand a trip to the underworld? Why does it so often come with trauma, with illness, with strife? Because like shamans, witches are healers. To be a witch/shaman, you must visit the underworld. You must be humbled. You must recognize the limits of your power and confront the mystery, that there are forces that you can’t see and don’t understand, forces that have no beginning and no end. You emerged from those forces, a crocodile from the riverbank, and to them you will return, slipping back into currents dark and cold as outer space.

  Today, I still call Wheezer to my side when I do my rituals. I raise my left hand and draw a path for him to come to me from the primordial realms. I whistle his signal, then tap my thigh until he comes to rest, coiling around my feet, hissing at all those who might seek to do me harm.

  For witches, the portholes of the imagination do not slam shut at puberty. The animal spirits and guardians that came to us in our childhood are with us throughout our lifetimes. Even when we forget them, they wait, water sheening off their backs in blankets of light, watching for our return.

  Our power doesn’t come from denying the inherent spirit of the natural world, or in turning away from the Imagination. Our power as witches comes from our skill at weaving reason and magic together. We can work in collaborative concert with the world around us and the worlds beyond. Our spirit guardians and familiars are still here with us, waiting for us to call upon them, to reclaim the inspirited world that is our birthright.

  Chapter 2

  The Language of the Birds

  1. SET CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUND RULES

  Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand.

  Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane.

  Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and

  Treated with goodwill.

  The land is a being who remembers everything.

  You will have to answer to your children,

  and their children, and theirs…

  Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

  “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.” My new stepsister and I would read the augurs from the crows we spied out the back window of my father’s red Plymouth Valiant. Long trips, twisting through the back roads of gold country in a car held together with bailing wire and duct tape. We didn’t know that augury was the tongue
of occult initiates, those who could understand “the language of the birds.” The seers of ancient Rome determined when to launch ships and inaugurate their leaders based on the direction of crows in flight. The Yorùbá people of southwest Nigeria wear beaded headdresses, strung with veils and crowned in birds who symbolize their ancestors, the grandmothers, whispering in their ears, giving their leaders guidance. One-eyed Odin, the Nordic god, master of ecstasy, poet, diviner, and traveler between the worlds, had two crow familiars, Hugin and Munin, cackling the news of the world into his ears and bringing him wisdom and the stories of the battlefield. Birds speak the messages of the gods. My sister and I watched the birds, and said our rhymes, but we didn’t know what sorrow meant yet; we were only five years old.

  My stepsister was new to me. We met when my mother sent me up to Northern California to live with my father for half a year; she was entering a relationship and didn’t want me to become attached to the new man if it didn’t work out. And since my father had been begging her for more access to me, there I was, in the little vineyard town of Lodi, California. My great-great-grandfather had built our little bungalow on Eureka Avenue with his own hands, and then died falling off the roof. Eureka is what the gold miners cried when they found gold. Eureka! Meaning, “I have found it!”

  I’d met my sister on the first day of kindergarten and loved her at first sight. Her hair was so thick and sandy she couldn’t fit a rubber band around it. She had thick glasses to match her hair, and buckteeth to match my own. By nature, my new sister was obedient, but when a little boy with permanent Kool-Aid stains on his top lip criticized the way I colored outside the lines, she rolled her eyes and said, “She’s being creative.” She sighed in exasperation at his stupidity; I decided to love her forever.

  We introduced her single mother to my single father on a trip to the roller rink. There beneath the disco ball glitter, serenaded by the clack of fat pink wheels on leather skates and Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” playing on repeat, a romance ensued. Their love pact was signed in my blood. I streaked it across the waxed wooden floor before I even made it one time around the rink. Showing off how I could snap my fingers and skate at the same time, my stunt ended in the hospital with five wire stitches across my chin. As omens go, it wasn’t a good one. And in fact, my father and new stepmother divorced ten years later.

  But initially we lived in idyll. My father would write me and my sister songs about our alter egos, “the Weasel sisters,” on his old acoustic guitar and sing them to us while we ate tuna sandwiches and fed rolled up balls of Wonder Bread to ducks at the lake. They’d hiss and squawk at us and my sister and I would squeal and clamber up onto the picnic tables. And even though my father laughed uproariously as we ran in terror from the monster-sized geese and the obscene red things hanging off their bills, I adored him. He’d take us to visit my aunt’s ranch up in the foothills with the garter snakes and the horny toads and her whole coterie of stray dogs and new kittens. We’d watch Star Trek and get frozen yogurt at Honey Bear, or spend nights at the Pizza Garden chatting with Ray, the wizened old bartender who’d give us root beer–flavored Dum Dums while we played pilot on the red plastic buttons on the jukebox. Together as a family, we went panning for gold in the local creeks, mostly turning up pyrite, or “fool’s gold,” in our little pie pans, jiggling them in the water and watching their bright flecks shiver in the sunlight. Pyrite was common and brittle, worth nothing to most people since it couldn’t be bent and shaped into jewelry, but it was fun to see it shivering in our pans. Most of the gold had been stripped from the hills long ago. But our most celebrated treasures were the obsidian arrowheads cast off by the Miwoks. I once even found one in our backyard. Sharp stone tools speaking of expert hands, speaking of a deeper history of the land and the people who’ve lived since here long before we arrived. People whom my own ancestral lineage had tricked, coerced, or killed. To find these relics, all one had to do was scratch the surface of the earth, and there they were, barely hidden beneath the imported grapevines.

  Lodi smelled of Cheerios from the General Mills factory on the outskirts of town: a smell of earnest, wholesome childhood, fortified with vitamins and minerals. On the weekends, my dad would take me and my new sister fishing for perch, or exploring the stalactites and stalagmites at the Moaning Caverns, or camping at Big Trees where we would walk in a reverent hush beneath the millenarian redwood trees towering hundreds of feet above us. We’d do the “Blind Walk,” feeling the fibrous bark and sniffing at the pine needles, sharp as pins, and listening for the feet of the chipmunks as they shimmied through the branches. Unless my father was angry and cussing about all the foreigners visiting the park and the way they threw diapers on the ground, or the doofus way we’d tie the ropes on the rowboat, or how we couldn’t follow simple directions pulling the kayak from the back of the truck. Whenever we showed up at the river, my sister and I would silently pray there wouldn’t be any kids swimming in it already. We’d show up in our bathing suits and flip-flops, my father in his gym shorts, sports socks pulled up to his knees and his baseball cap high on his head. We’d have to hold him back from shouting at the “nancy boys” drifting in their inner tubes instead of rushing the rapids like “real men”—which is what he would have done as a child.

  My father was determined to be a good dad, to do better than his father had done by him. But he was haunted by patriarchy, too, the rigid set of rules that dictates what men do and what they have a right to: everything. He knew as the patriarch he was supposed to have the power, but like the perch we tried and usually failed to catch, he had power but never felt like he could get a tight enough grip on it; the power to command us was always slipping through his hands. If only everybody would just fall into line—the neighbor’s yapping dogs, his children, his wife—everything would just be so much better for everyone. But try as he might, he could never get everyone to submit to his authority and just be done with it. Our submission was never permanent. He’d herd us along at the mall, but we wanted to go into stores while he wanted us all to march in a straight line like soldiers. A subscriber to the Tightwad Gazette monthly newsletter, once every couple of weeks he’d splurge and take us out to the Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet. A generous act for someone so concerned with saving coin, but we’d have to eat at least three plates to make it worth his money. I was a garbage disposal and would gladly eat five plates if he wanted, but my sister had trouble even finishing one, and so we’d all have to sit there, waiting, while she slowly pushed the food around and tried to sneak scraps of it to the floor while no one was looking; then she’d get a swat for making a mess. My father longed for a return to the 1950s, when white teenagers picked the grapes in his town and women weren’t constantly complaining about what men did wrong. “I want ‘never kissed anyone’s ass’ to be written on my tombstone,” my father says. But he forgets that no one likes kissing ass. No one has ever truly accepted anyone else’s dominance. Patriarchs invented weapons because someone was always challenging their authority, not because anyone was naturally docile. People, animals, nature always struggle toward freedom.

  My new sister and I loved to be alone together, without adults around to tell us what to do and how to do it. We had fantasies about tying up the adults around us so they couldn’t lash out, then giving them a piece of our mind and throwing them in a volcano. She and I would kick our feet over the front porch, listening to the boats droning at the nearby lake, nipping the tips off the honeysuckle vines, drenching our tongues with their nectar. We’d scrunch rose blossoms with our child-damp palms and mix them with hose water to make love potions with a sweet, old-timey scent. Happy Dog, our patient little Queensland heeler, was our favorite doll. We dressed her in felt capes and pretended they were princess clothes. Happy would supervise us, panting in her finery, while Kristin and I spent all afternoon making mud pies, squishing the brown muck between our fingers, then hiding in the laundry hanging on the line, blaming the mess on our alter egos, fairies named S
parkle or Glitter or Shine.

  I was around five years old when the Gorgon appeared. It was right around the same time my new sister and I began to be molested by our cousin, who was just a year or two shy of his eighteenth birthday. Aside from his abuse, I have little recollection of him. He had a damp upper lip and a nervous smile, like he was always laughing along with a joke that was on him. One of the only other memories I have is in the car, my dad driving us on a camping trip, my cousin pressing his slack ass to the window so he could fart out of it and not stink up the car for the rest of us. He was considerate like that. When he was molesting me, he would always ask me if I liked it, if it felt good. “No,” I’d cry, and try to pull away. But his questions were rhetorical. He gripped my arm and didn’t care about my answer. He did what he wanted and kept going. Pulling me out to the old trailer down the hill when we played hide-and-seek, he always demanded we partner up, then promised me chocolate bars that I didn’t want for my “good behavior.” And if I told anyone, He’d kill me. He’d slit my throat. He’d kill my parents. I’d get in trouble, or he’d get in trouble, or we both would. I’d be punished. He’d go to prison and it would be my fault. It was my fault anyhow; I brought it on myself, etc., etc. The usual. Abusers never accept any blame; they try to get everyone else to take it, especially children. He’d abuse me with my parents in the next room, with me crying and saying no and him laughing. With my sister looking on helpless. My nos meant nothing to him; my preferences meant nothing. My safety, my happiness. My boundaries. Nothing. Nothing.

  No was supposed to be a magic word. You were supposed to “say NO, and GO, and TELL someone.” But my magic no meant nothing and had no effect. And if I told someone, my cousin convinced me that it was I who would be punished for committing such shameful acts. Shameful acts in the crawl space with the kittens beneath the bed. Or “playing doctor” at his insistence on my bunk bed. He’d abuse us when my father and stepmother would have him over to babysit us. But mostly he preferred my sister. She was less defiant. My defiance annoyed my teachers and frustrated my parents, but throughout my life it has saved me a thousand times.