Initiated Read online

  One purpose of magic is to help release us from our family’s karmic bondage. There’s a writing curse in my family, a curse I was determined eventually to break. Sprawling out across my lineages is a desire to tell stories, a ghostly mycelium, spawned in history, corded around the throats of my ancestors, preventing us from finishing our works, from speaking out, from being able to fully realize our aspirations. Something always got in the way: children, marriage, abuse, polio, lack of confidence. Our houses were filled with books, but somehow the books could never emerge through our own fingertips.

  When I was eight years old, both of my parents, my mother and father, with their new spouses, had sons. Suddenly I had two new brothers on either side of the family, both of whom were far more interesting to my father and stepfather than I was. My stepfather now had a full-blooded child of his own. And my own father would wrap his arm around my brother’s shoulder and chant, “My only son, my only son,” so excited to finally have another male with whom he could “throw the football around.” (Too bad for my father that my brother was practically born singing show tunes and was far more interested in ballet than ball games. My father still suffers over this, but I can promise the suffering he and the world have inflicted on my brother because of it is far, far worse.)

  My mother knew I was now living in exile in my family home, a tolerated yet troublesome guest, and she didn’t like it. But she didn’t know how to change it. She had a new baby, no college degree, and her partner was stable and a good father to her son. She thought that if she was an extra good mother to me, if she led youth groups and made us heart-shaped pancakes on Valentine’s Day, and led the PTA and Bluebirds, and sewed my Halloween costumes by hand, perhaps that would make up for the fact that my stepfather did not love me, nor even particularly want me around, and that my full-blood father was more concerned with his new family than me, his old one.

  Despite my mother’s best efforts, I struggled in school. Students were just starting to be diagnosed as dyslexic, and I was one of those students. Plunked into all of the most remedial groups, I was told constantly that I was a slow learner with an errant brain. And so the other kids would watch me walk the plank to my resource classes where I and all the other dummies would get stuck with all the most stunted math problems and boring books. See Jane Run. See Amanda Pound Her Head on the Table in Frustration. I’d run my finger along the well-worn tracks beneath the words, trying to sound them out. They’d get garbled in my mouth, fall out hard and heavy like stones: mute, stubborn, a runic language that had eons ago been lost to interpretation. I was lucky. I had a mother who had the time and inclination to sit with me at night, rearranging note cards to try and form sentences, to see if the scratch marks on the cards could somehow come to form a lattice of meaning. But they refused.

  I loved when my mother read me A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Where the Wild Things Are, and D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I’d tear at the paper in the mythology book, trying to shred it open and let the stories out. I ached to read them myself, but the books were dense matter. I could grind my teeth in frustration and cry all I wanted, while the other children made fun of me and shunned me, but I couldn’t pass through those pages to get to the other side where the meaning was.

  In sixth grade I was still struggling, still in “resource” (like a poisoned well is a resource), but now convinced of my defectiveness. Just before I went to junior high, they had me reassessed with a woman assigned by the county, and to everyone’s surprise, according to her tests I had one of the highest IQs of any child she’d ever tested. My thinking patterns and nonlinear abstract reasoning were highly unusual and inventive, and as a result, I must see the world in a different way than most people. But this time she meant different as a compliment. The dyslexic has the mind of an ancient astrologer. She sees stars spread out across the universe and assembles them into a lion, a ram, a water bearer. Her thoughts come together in a chorus, singing in a diversity of voices. A rose nebula bursts and she knows, Now is when the king will fall. Or, Your fortunes will change come October. In the primordial world, I imagine the non-neurotypical as the ones who found new paths, invented new uses, could conceive of a world outside of ordinary convention.

  My sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Yokabaitus, put me in with the “Gifted and Talented Students” when I went into junior high. Overnight, I went from reading at a third-grade level to reading at a college level. I started reading Voltaire, W. Somerset Maugham, books like Dangerous Liaisons and The Golden Bough and The Moon Under Her Feet (about the priestesses in the temples of Inanna), and all the books on magic and witchcraft my mother had in her back library: Merlin Stone, Riane Eisler, Starhawk, Luisah Teish, Margot Adler, Scott Cunningham. Of all the things that have happened in my life, my learning to read is the thing that most convinces me of the efficacy of magic.

  Once upon a time, meaning thumbed its nose at me from behind a locked door, but now as a witch I can read the clouds, read sticks fallen to the floor, read tarot cards and tea leaves, scrolls of Hermetic philosophy and postmodern theory. By transforming our perceptions, we transform our world. We tend to think of magic as hair-of-bat potions and anointed candles, when in reality magic is a shift in perception that allows us to open up new worlds, new possibilities for our lives. It wasn’t that other people’s beliefs changed me as a child; it was that suddenly, their encouragement made me believe in myself. That belief in myself changed me so profoundly it rewired my brain. Magic works.

  Around the same time that I broke through to the meaning side of written language, my mother, with her writing and her imagination, was pulling more deeply into the territories of the Goddess. She was rediscovering her roots as a witch. But she always saw it as a practice of devotion. Witchcraft wasn’t a means to become rich or attract a lover; it was a way to honor what was sacred in her life: to comfort the sick, empower the weak. It was a means of understanding the nature of reality. She wasn’t interested in spells, though she had many books on them. I learned those later, on my own.

  A passionate devotee of the sacred feminine, she taught me to read tarot cards. Piercing the earth of our potted philodendron with a stick of myrrh incense, we let the smoke curl around us until its stream shifted from a straight line to a diaphanous cloud and she knew we were ready to begin. On the carpet in the living room, she spread a paisley silk scarf on the floor. She kept her Motherpeace deck in a circular, lidded basket that she’d woven herself from pine needles. “Let yourself get still,” she’d tell me, spreading the circular golden cards before us in an arc. I’d run my hand along the top and wait for the ones that felt hot on the center of my palm. Hasty with anticipation, I wanted to know how many I should choose. “Draw eleven, but take your time,” she told me. She pointed to the places they should go. The significator was at the center; it revealed how Spirit saw me in my current situation. The other cards would fill in the story, telling of my hopes and fears, my future, my foundation. “What do you know that you’ve forgotten you know?” she’d ask as we gazed at the cryptic images, goddesses swathed in leopard skin reclining on a field of green, or priestesses leaping with gazelles and antelope before a red clay mountain, holding crystal wands aloft in their exultant hands.

  On nights of the full moon, she gathered herbs from our garden—chamomile, lavender, mint, and mugwort—for the tea she’d provide her coven later that night: mothers, scientists, academics, businesswomen, leaders in our community. They’d sit in the dark, gazing into their scrying mirrors, bowls stained black with soot, then filled with salt water. The point was to see “beyond the veil,” to look into the black mirror and past it, into the unfathomable, into “the mystery” as they called it, the realm of Hecate, keeper of all secrets, of everything known and unknown. They sat before an altar swathed in silks, bedecked with pentacles and sheaves of wheat, shells and chalices of wine. My mother’s moon coven was in the Northern Californian tradition of Reclaiming. Their practice was one of re
claiming their bodies, their imaginations, and their power. Rewilding them. Rewilding everything. Rewilding the world. Incense hovering in our living room, they’d cackle into the night, chanting to the Triple Goddess:

  Horned maiden huntress, Artemis, Artemis,

  New moon, come to us.

  Silver shining wheel of radiance, radiance,

  Mother, come to us.

  Honored queen of wisdom, Hecate, Hecate,

  Old one, come to us.

  My mother was gaining in her power and her voice, leading spiral dances with hundreds of people, where they’d look into each other’s eyes and spiral into the center of a labyrinth chalked onto the plaza in Alice Keck Park and back out again. She always placed the old and infirm at the center of the spiral, so they could know how central they were to our community. She wrote a play called Demeter’s Daughter and performed it at our local Unitarian Universalist congregation. Too young to have a larger role, I played a river nymph, witness to Persephone’s abduction. Draped in shimmering blue organza, I kneeled on the linoleum floor in the auditorium and bashfully directed the mourning goddess Demeter toward the gash in the earth, a black line of construction paper, into which I’d seen Hades drag her daughter.

  In the evenings, my mother began leading Cakes for the Queen of Heaven workshops, classes in women’s spirituality. Women from our community were constantly calling my mother for guidance, stopping her in the supermarket, on the street. It took us forever to go to the post office, as someone always recognized her. Sometimes, if I was alone, they’d stop me. “You’re Amanda, Lucinda’s daughter, aren’t you?” When I responded that I was, they’d go moonish and passionate, saying, “I love your mother. She’s so powerful; she’s helped me so much.”

  Often, my mother would attend the bedside of the dying. She was paid sometimes, for croning or menarche ceremonies, or helping mothers heal from empty nests. But most of her labor was unpaid. Like many women and nurturers, she supported so many, but there was no way she could have supported herself financially through her labors, despite the endless hours she devoted to them. Though I was attracted to witchcraft and had an affinity, even a longing to serve as a priestess as my mother did, most of the time I didn’t ask her to show me how. I had always longed for freedom, whereas my mother’s spiritual life was full of obligations and responsibilities. My mother practiced magic, but her life was still hard. How could that be?

  When I turned fourteen or fifteen, my evil grandfather started writing my mother letters. He was hiding out somewhere in Florida, molesting his new daughter and forcing her cancer-ridden mother to eat their TV dinners in another room so she wouldn’t contaminate their meal. I never met this man. Everything I know about him, I learned through stories. I’d come into my mother’s study to find her face blanched white as she studied the letters. I’d hover in the doorway and watch her reading; with every page, she seemed to shrink. These letters to my mother dangled the carrot of a father’s love before her. He’d always loved her; couldn’t she see that? If she could not see that, if she could not admit that he never abused her, that it was all in her mind, then, he told her, she needed to be careful. For me, for my brother. We would be in danger.

  My mother was working then, at a small publishing company for tourist books, and was proud of the copy she was writing on Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty. When I latch-keyed my way home from school, hungry for turkey Hot Pockets and afternoons of Oprah and Phil Donahue, under no circumstances was I allowed to open the door. If someone knocked, I was to hide in a cupboard. If I saw any strange men lurking on the street, I was to run the other way. Never get into the car. It would be better to die in the street, shot in the back, than to get in that car, my mother told me. Whether or not they have a psychopathic grandfather, it’s a warning many girls receive. If you get in that car, it’s a fate worse than death.

  No matter what abuse her father hammered upon her as a child, my mother would always resist. I knew this because (a) my grandmother told me, and (b) like most traumatized people, my mother constantly talked about it without realizing that she did. From what I understand, the main goal of my grandfather was to get my mother to give in. To concede his right to do whatever he wanted to his family, to her, to the world that was his oyster. But my mother would never concede. She always resisted, regardless of what beating or sexual abuse he inflicted on her. That was the witch in her. The resister. As the eldest, she would protect her brothers and sisters from her father’s malevolence. That was the witch in her too. But every time she resisted as a child, it cost her. Every hurt, every wound, pushed the witch in her further and further into the hinterlands, the dark woods of her psyche. The swamps. Inaccessible to the mundane traumas around her. Until my mother came out the other side and started to take refuge in ordinariness.

  As a child, she always wanted that: to feel normal, to feel ordinary. Her family was constantly chased out of town when she was a kid, for the flashlight games her father would play at the windows with the little girls next door, and for what he would do to them at the playgrounds. To my mother, ordinary meant safe; her family was not normal or ordinary and it caused her so much pain. But then I was born and I was not normal or ordinary. I was a resister too. A witch from birth. Changing the lines in the fifth-grade school play because they weren’t feminist enough, I whirled across the stage and said, “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up,” instead of “I want to marry an astronaut,” as my teacher had commanded. My mother beamed at me from the audience with tears in her eyes. But even though she loved and celebrated the fact that I was such a resister, and so full of spit and pride and wildness, she would often lament the fact that I didn’t seem to want to behave.

  By her early thirties, the witch in my mother had gone dormant. She was exhausted. Her struggles first with her father, then with my father, then as a single mother, then again to keep her marriage with my stepfather together had sucked her oceans dry. And for a while she thought if she could just be that perfect woman, wife, mother, daughter, be beautiful and kind and not complain, then things might get easier for her. But then, when things did get easier and her life stabilized, like a plant in your garden some call medicine and others call a weed, the witch in her came flowering back.

  Witchcraft, as my mother saw it, was an aspect of women’s history. She saw her witch work as part of the same project as her work preventing child abuse, preventing abuse of all kinds. Even as a teenager, she was a student board member of Planned Parenthood. Abortion rights and women’s rights to their own bodies were as much a part of her spiritual belief system as prayers or invocations to the Goddess. Working on behalf of women, children, and the vulnerable people of the world was a prayer in itself.

  But around the same time my mother’s father reinvaded her life, her marriage to my stepfather was growing increasingly strained. We never knew who my stepfather voted for, what his true beliefs were about anything. If we talked about politics, he would always play the devil’s advocate for either side and never reveal where he stood. Perhaps he stood nowhere. He was a ghost. He had no exact location in space. Their relationship was passionless; they never had sex. He told my mother they should stay in the marriage because of my brother. But he also told her that he could never love her, that she repulsed him. She should take a lover, he said. Then, when my brother was grown, they could separate.

  But then, when my mother did take a lover, my stepfather was furious. My mother was a dirty whore. She was a fat slut. In a near suicidal depression, my mother the witch would sit in front of that luxurious pool they’d both sacrificed so much for and contemplate drowning herself in it. Her lover left her. Her marriage failed. She was broke. I’d already long since started going off the rails. Late-night rides clinging to a stranger’s back as we stormed the San Gabriel Mountains on his motorcycle; LSD flashbacks while performing The Glass Menagerie in the high school play. I was sixteen then, had tested out of high school and started going to the community college. Testing my moth
er’s nerves by spending nights, sometimes several nights in a row, away from home. I had always been in competition with my mother’s pain. She had so much of it and she held it so close; it was so dear to her, a huge part of her identity. She talked about it all the time. She was so abused; she’d suffered so much. My suffering with my cousin was small in comparison. “I haven’t told you all of it,” she’d tell me. “I haven’t told you everything.” But even when I was a kid, I remember knowing a lot. I knew her father forced her to give him blow jobs, to teach her “what men liked.” I don’t know how I knew that. She says she never told me. But somehow I did know, either through some kind of sympathetic cognition, or because, without realizing it, she regularly shared her trauma with me. I felt like for my pain to be taken seriously it had to be worse or at least commensurate with hers. She’d always told me that she was forced to move out of her parents’ house at sixteen years old. And even then, her father pursued her, broke into her house, slashed her sheets. It was horrifying, but sometimes her suffering seemed to be the maypole she danced around; it was so central to her life and sense of herself. Wiccan priestess and journalist Margot Adler says, “The witch is woman as martyr; she is persecuted by the ignorant; she is the woman who lives outside society and outside society’s definitions of woman.” Because my mother had moved out at sixteen, I was determined to move out at sixteen too. And I did it, a week before my seventeenth birthday, sliding into a youth hostel on State Street in Santa Barbara, sharing a room with a homeless woman with a wet cough who liked to listen to white noise on the radio. My mother protested that she hadn’t wanted to move out but was forced to by the circumstances of her family. I did want to move out. I was born wanting to be free. I always felt like I wanted to determine the course of my own life. But really, whether or not I wanted it, I didn’t have much choice. My family home had fallen apart. My mother was moving back to San Luis Obispo to try and claw her way back toward survival, and I, as a spooky intruder in the house of my stepfather, had long since worn out my welcome.