Initiated Read online

  Chapter 4

  Blood Rites

  In the form of a raven she emerged from her fairy-mound and perched on a standing-stone, singing of her Mysteries: “I have a secret that you shall learn. The grasses wave. The flowers glow golden. The goddesses three low like kine. The raven Morrigan herself is wild for blood.”

  Barbara Walker, quoting Norma Lorre Goodrich,

  The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

  It was a golden summer. When I wasn’t at school or at work, I’d spend my days at the Espresso Roma Cafe on State Street, with other local youths who’d sit around scribbling in unlined notebooks, smoking clove cigarettes, and writing short stories in the style of John Fante and Jack Kerouac. Within the Roma’s brick walls, beneath graphic nudes painted by a local skateboard artist, I met and fell in love with a barista, Darshak. He’d slip by my table, dropping off free mochas and lattes and occasionally one of their half-baked chocolate croissants. Darshak loved to blast John Coltrane and Minor Threat from the café stereo; we’d listen to it and shout through the din about the stories we were reading in the English class we took together at City College. A few months after we started dating, Darshak and I moved in together, into a small bungalow shaped like a houseboat in a 1930s garden apartment complex called the Magnolia.

  The eponymous magnolia tree towered three stories above our little garden village of Craftsman cottages, its waxy white blooms intoxicating us with the scent of youth and beauty. Raccoons prowled the grass in our garden like sea beasts on an ancient map, and our little bungalow sailed through blue-green waves of bamboo and morning glory. Darshak and I would spend our afternoons typing stories on his prize possession: an aged Royal typewriter. He in his ribbed white undershirts, khakis, and Converse, me in my Doc Martens, vintage slips, and plum velvet jacket lined in pink satin culled from a thrift store on State Street. We’d read our stories to each other sitting on blankets in the garden, eating seeded baguettes from Our Daily Bread slathered with tangy goat cheese and cheap black caviar we thought was the height of decadence.

  Originally from Trinidad, Darshak would make me goat curry when I got home from school. His long brown fingers deftly chopped the carrots and onions into a vat of sizzling ghee as we listened to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on vinyl and I’d read him our favorite excerpts from Salinger’s For Esmé—With Love and Squalor. He’d reach out to hold my hand as we rode our bikes down Olive Street, our tires squishing through the fat fallen fruit as we rode toward the beach. When he left for work, he’d leave me notes on the tins of leftovers in the fridge, reminding me to warm up my food because he knew of my habit of eating cold beans from a can like my conservative father.

  Late at night, we’d study and write each other love notes at Hot Spots, the all-night café. It was so close to the ocean you could hear the waves pounding even over the blare of music the baristas would entertain themselves with at four o’clock in the morning. Morrissey crooning: Please, please, please, let me, let me, let me get what I want. Lord knows it would be the first time. Sometimes we’d make predawn pilgrimages up into the mountains, to the burned-out grotto of Knapp’s Castle, watching the stars be gulped up by the milky blue morning. We hoped friendly aliens would come whisk us away to the land of milk and honey; we didn’t realize we were already there.

  We had it pretty good for a while, with Darshak “practicing the fine art of espresso” at the Roma, and me in my shifting array of bookstore and café jobs, studying philosophy and art history at community college, assembling our zines for free when our punk rock friend Jaime worked the late shift at Kinko’s. “God is dead,” my zines said, quoting my Nietzsche from class, “How are we to exist?” At that moment, we seemed to exist fairly easily without a god. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I also moved away from the witchcraft and goddess worship I’d grown up with. I wanted to distance myself from my mother, who at that point just seemed miserable. I saw her goddess as a sad wish that could never be fulfilled. I was searching for a way to make sense of life. I wanted to find the delta where imagination and adventure, reason and security converged. A place where I could drink from those combined waters and become an agent for myself, not at the mercy of the gods, goddesses, or anyone else.

  Rather than model myself after the PTA moms and divorcées that came to my mother’s moon groups, it seemed preferable to align myself with Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Camus. They could exist in a state of questioning and still be celebrated by our culture. The women of my mother’s moon group were second-generation feminists fighting for their rights for equal pay, birth control, and freedom from sexual violence. But they were still caught up in misguided racial politics and a middle-class life that seemed bloodless and depressing to me. Looking back, it’s hard for me to believe it, but then, I wanted to be on the men’s team. The team that had all the power and the best ideas. The team that created Madame Bovary and the Sistine Chapel. In Philosophy 101 class, there had been one chapter in our book devoted to all the female philosophers throughout history; it was called “The Philosophy of Care.”1 Women, when they could pull themselves away from obsessing about their lovers and milking their breasts in sticky rivulets all over their offspring, made philosophies about caring for things. Nurturing! Pfet! Disgusting. Clearly, nowhere near as important as the Socratic method, Cartesian logic, or the epistemologies of Immanuel Kant.

  I started going around declaring that what was exceptional about humans was our ability to reason and telling my mother that there was no evidence there ever was a matriarchy. I wanted to be at the table with Sartre. But the philosophers I studied at school were all white men; if I imagined myself sitting around a dinner table with them, I knew I would be perceived not as an equal, or even a student, but as an amusing novelty. A mistress or a servant or a wife who’d eventually be banished to the ladies’ sitting room. I hadn’t yet found the allies I would later discover in the other exiles: Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, James Baldwin, Hélène Cixous, Audre Lorde.

  Simultaneous to my sojourns into continental philosophy, I took a somewhat guilty pleasure in hanging out at Paradise Found, a New Age bookstore on Anapamu Street, across from the library. Tinkling bells and singing bowls and crystal prisms catching the light. Fairy statues. What’s alluring about the New Age is also what makes it vulnerable to criticism. New Age philosophy says that change can be instantaneous and easy and that we can get the things we want simply by embracing an abundance mentality or saying the right mantra. The larger social context of our desires is rarely taken into consideration. Everything in Paradise Found was personal; nothing was political. They had crystals and animal cards, messages channeled from gods and goddesses via Midwestern housewives, angels, and angelic beings with something important to say: there is a purpose to our lives, we are protected, everything is going according to a plan, and there are angelic watchers who will come to our rescue and prevent us from destroying ourselves.

  While I did enjoy the idea of a host of angels guarding me who knew exactly how to help, I also wanted to live a life of bold intellectual adventure, recognizing the absurd and lonely human condition of perfect freedom. “I rebel, therefore I exist,” said Albert Camus. “Yes!” said I. Not knowing how to reconcile my desire for rebellion with my desire to be safe and cared for, the main place I found solace was in dance class. In other words, it was in the body that I found my home. And it comforted me that Nietzsche himself said, “We should consider every day lost that we have not danced at least once.” In dance, the questions of existence were worked out through the flesh, through weight and breath, music and movement. My dance teacher, Kay Fulton, a black woman in her forties with an exuberant smile and a passion for cowboy hats, was always dropping wisdom about allowing ourselves to be confident, to take up space. “Feel your feet on the earth. Let your body announce I AM,” she coached us, and in doing so dismissed the Cartesians from my philosophy classes who favored the disembodied mind.

  It wa
s during all these investigations into adulthood that I received my first call to witchcraft on an evening I now refer to as my Blood Rite. Darshak and I were having sex on our futon. In general, our lovemaking was innocent, a bit fumbling, but performed with a rare affection. I traced my finger along the curve of his eyebrow; he’d bury his face in my neck so that I could feel the flutter of his long lashes. That night, our angular teenage forms pushed peaks into the blankets. After ten or so minutes of focused efforts, Darshak, giggling, asked me if I’d wet the bed. He asked because of the sloshy moist sound as we shifted our bodies.

  We pulled back the covers and found that we were wet, knee to sternum, drenched with a warm, sticky substance, black in the dappled moonlight. Running into the bathroom, we turned on the lights and saw that it was blood. Somehow, immediately, blood was everywhere. Spattered on the walls, creating messy smears on the floor, running in rivulets down the shower curtain and onto the tile, running down his legs and mine, flooding the drain. We didn’t know where it was coming from. I wasn’t expecting my period, and they’d always been rather light anyway.

  Turning on the shower, we looked down at Darshak’s penis to see if he’d been cut. I thought I noticed a small scratch; Darshak grabbed the shower curtain as his knees gave way. He teetered and fell backward, and would’ve slammed his head against the tile had I not caught him in time. His face gaunt and drained a milky gray, I shouted his name. “Darshak, Darshak!” I thought he had died. I didn’t know what to do. Without thinking, I jumped up and ran out the door, into the night garden, shouting for help. I banged on the door of our first neighbor and no one answered. I realized I was naked and covered in blood. I ran back into our bungalow to grab a towel, and I saw Darshak’s eyes had fluttered open. He was okay. I climbed into the bathtub to try and pull him out and get him dry. But the blood was still gushing down my legs, big clumps of it globbing in the shower drain. Then it was my turn to faint.

  Something had broken free in me. I wanted to return to the wild. Destroy civilization. Fuck women. Voracious appetites consumed me. I’d stopped eating. I didn’t feel like I needed it. I could eat the sunlight. There was so much of it. I could gulp the air. I’d never be hungry. I didn’t want to participate in the life assigned to me. Suddenly, I just couldn’t anymore. After my Blood Rite, I awakened. I could feel the full rush and force of my power. I was like an arrow, shot through the air, wind rushing over sharp contours. Flying free. Until patriarchy raised its shield, and there my arrow lodged, right in the forehead of the Medusa.

  Some kind of rupture had happened in my uterus, the part of my body that by cultural decree assigns me as female. I never found out why. My gynecologist said it could have been a miscarriage, but there was really no way to know. That this Blood Rite happened during sex is significant because sex is one way we are initiated into adulthood. This was an initiation related to sex, to sexuality, to partnership, to motherhood, but ultimately to my role as a woman. The womb itself is a threshold: go one way you are born; go the other and you become a sexual being, an “adult” capable of procreation.

  Historically, panculturally, initiation rites around sexuality exist in order to educate children about the roles they will be expected to take on in their culture. These initiations teach young people their culture’s creation myths; they teach them who in their civilization has power and who doesn’t. Genital initiation rites might include circumcision, menstruation, loss of virginity, and so on; they’re supposed to help children understand their place in the world, and to be able to perform what will be expected of them as adults. Unfortunately for many of us, our puberty rites often awaken us to the injustices of our culture. You grow breasts, and the puberty rites of America inform you that it is on the pleasing qualities of your breasts that you will be judged. But a call to witchcraft initiates us down a different path. When you are awakened to the culture of the witch, you are being called to a culture of interdependence and co-creation. There, your value is not contingent on your worth as a sexual amusement, reproducer of the workforce, or your ability to generate capital, but on what you contribute to the process of re-enchanting the world. Our call to witchcraft presents us with the things we need to heal, rise up, and seize our power. I would’ve been able to spare myself years of struggle and confusion if I had been able to recognize my call for what it was, a call to power, instead of just a time of crisis that left me begging for mercy as I was pounded to the floor.

  Around the time of my Blood Rite, I reached into my little velvet pouch and drew the Hagalaz rune. Runes are the Norse divination tools from pre-Christian Scandinavia, often carved in stone or bone. I’d created mine out of clay at summer camp around age thirteen and had painted them with my menstrual blood. Clearly one of the most existential runes, Hagalaz would have been favored by Nietzsche; it is the rune of disruption, but also the rune of initiation. Something breaks, an opening appears, we walk through it.

  Be aware, my Book of Runes told me,2 that what operates in the Hagalaz rune does not come from the outside. “You are not at the mercy of the external world,” it said. “Your own nature is creating what’s happening, and you are not without power in this situation. The inner strength you have funded until now in your life is your support and guide at a time when everything you’ve taken for granted is being challenged.”

  I wasn’t able to heed the wisdom of my runes. I was distracted, disoriented. Soon after the Blood Rite, colors were brighter. Red curbs became brilliant electric slashes across the pavement. Everything seemed to have some sort of special significance I felt like I should understand but couldn’t quite remember. The octagonal shape of the stop signs. The sound of the wind through the magnolia branches. Every little bit of stimuli crying, “Remember? Remember!” But remember what? I didn’t know how to interpret the signs.

  Crows began following me. For months, I could hear the whoosh of black wings above me as I came home from work or school. These dark guardians would appear at crossroads and watch me from electric power lines, shunting from telephone pole to treetop as they made their pursuit. Cocking and calling, peering at me with their black eyes, expectant and wanting a response. Sometimes they’d caw at me and I’d caw back. One time in particular the crow nearly jumped out of its skin with enthusiasm at my attention. Cawing and nodding and shifting from foot to foot, the crow addressed me and I tried to respond. My sense was that I was being hailed.

  Crows circle above charnel grounds. They strut around carcasses with no respect for the dead, parading and guffawing, like knights at a table. Crows are the harbingers of initiation. Without death there can be no rebirth. Before you can be initiated into your new way of life, the old way, your old self, has to die.

  The Morrígan are the Celtic triple goddesses who often appear in the form of a crow. Sometimes merging into a single being, the Morrígan are known as the Queen of Phantoms and are guardian spirits to those whom they wish to lead toward victory. Companions to many goddesses of the underworld, crows are carrion birds picking apart corpses in places where they bury them straight in the ground or let them rot on a pyre. Crows always appear near openings to the underworld. Persephone, the maiden goddess, was abducted into a palace of graves. Eventually, she also became phantom queen of that world, a goddess in her own right, parallel in power to her own mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest. Maiden becomes mother becomes crone. Creator, preserver, destroyer.

  Hecate completes the triad in yet another form of the triple Goddess. She is the crone, traveler between the worlds, between the above and the below, life and death. Hecate is the ancient goddess of magic and witchcraft, keeper of all knowledge and experience. She stands at the crossroads, flocked by her crow familiars. Crafty and intelligent, these birds make plans, use tools, and remain untamed, even in the depths of the city. Dropping their shining treasures in our yards, marking their territory, they call to each other across the trees. Sharp, crisp cries; guttural alerting croaks. Crows bring wisdom and warning. The crows had called me a
nd I made an attempt to follow. They would feast and laugh around the carcass of my old life. They would cluck and cackle and circle overhead as the porthole to the underworld materialized before me and I took my first steps toward its hungry maw.

  In an effort to ground, to stabilize, I started a regime every Wednesday getting free acupuncture in my ears at a nonprofit rehab clinic. I didn’t drink or do drugs more than any ordinary teenager, but it was supposed to calm you down, and it would work, sometimes, for a little while. I scrambled to get some kind of low-cost mental health care through my community college, but there was a long waiting list. I clung to my dance classes in an effort to pull myself back into my body. I hadn’t danced since I was a child, but soon I began to live for those classes. It got to the point where I was only happy when I was dancing. Shaking my shoulders and doing jazzy slides across the floor to War’s “Low Rider”: “Low rider knows every street, yeah…take a little trip, take a little trip and see.”