Initiated Page 7

  Still the calls came in different forms, rushing louder and louder. Impossible to ignore. Someone was calling my name. A woman’s voice. A female scream. A cry for help. The first time I heard the screaming, I was in our little houseboat apartment, reading. I put my book down and went out to search. I thought maybe a neighbor was in trouble, but I couldn’t find the source. At first, I only heard the screams when I was alone at home, and sometimes it would be hours or days between occurrences. But eventually it happened when Darshak was home. I’d been telling him about it, asking him if he thought there was some abusive situation going on with our neighbors. But he never heard anything, even when we were standing right there together listening to it. Even when I could hear it as if it were in the next room. I asked him, “Can’t you hear that?” He just shook his head, his fawnish brown eyes narrowing in concern; his fawnish spirit afraid, beginning to withdraw from me.

  It’s hard enough for people to handle it when their partner has a head cold. Sometimes it can feel like they’re doing it on purpose to annoy you. So I can only imagine how Darshak must have felt as a seventeen-year-old, watching as his girlfriend began to hear voices, careening between ecstasy and despair, rhapsodizing nervously about the crows that were trying to communicate with her. I was scared. I was combative. We both knew our summer of love was over.

  Darshak left. He moved back into his mother’s Craftsman full of hand-painted china and leather-bound books. The voices I was hearing were telling me there was a woman at risk, and now I know that woman was me. But at the time, in my visions and messages, as in real life, I couldn’t figure out how to rescue her. Instead of helping, I moved. I hoped that if I went somewhere else, the screams would stop. I moved from our little garden apartment into a wooden shed in a stranger’s backyard on Sola Street, feeling like Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” a half-crazy girl hidden between the garbage and the flowers.

  Crows signal periods of rupture. At five years old, when the crow had come screeching through the sky and fell at my feet, my world was breaking apart then too. But though my first crow event could be seen as an omen, a signal of the many violations my goddess nature would experience before she would be able to reintegrate, it wasn’t my official call to witchcraft. Because as a child, I wasn’t old enough to answer it. Our true call only comes when we can respond of our own free will. If we can recognize that call for what it is, we might just find that our trials also present us with the keys that can liberate us from the underworld, and help others do the same.

  Hecate stands at the place where three roads converge. As the Goddess in her crone aspect, avatar of age and experience, the most existential of goddesses, she tells you, “When everything breaks, you still have choices.” You can take the road that walks you deeper into your trauma, deeper into the knife, until it kills you; you can walk away from the knife, away from risk and potentially any feeling at all, choosing a life of convention, hoping that the authorities won’t notice you and will leave you alone; or take the third road, the shadowy animal path, carved into the edges of a cliff, half covered in vines, a trail you have to forge on your own.

  At the time, I didn’t recognize Hecate’s rattling caw as a call to initiation. “Destroy the patriarchal hordes that have invaded your mind,” her crows were telling me. “Show no mercy. Pick the bones clean.” These calls were the fanfare that launched my journey. But many more initiations would have to follow before I would be fluent in the language of the birds, the mother tongue of occult initiates.

  1 For some reason Ayn Rand wasn’t included in that chapter, despite her possession of a womb.

  2 From The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum.

  Chapter 5

  Entering the Underworld

  On this day I will descend to the underworld. When I have arrived in the underworld, make a lament for me on the ruin mounds. Beat the drum for me in the sanctuary. Make the rounds of the houses of the gods for me.

  From Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld,

  circa 1700 BCE

  Inanna, Queen of Heaven, raven-haired Sumerian goddess of magic and power, travels to the underworld in order to rescue her lover, Dumuzi. It’s one of the oldest myths of initiation in recorded history. Inanna the Wise shows up at the gates of hell, ready for an adventure. She goes willingly. Into the earth she descends, into history, where records are kept and stories scar the earth as water carves stone. Trailing her fingers along the wall, she can smell the decomposing leaves, hear the bats rustling behind the flow stones. She can hear her demon sister, Ereshkigal, raging deep below in the volcanic heat. Once the goddess of all things, under patriarchy Ereshkigal had become a shadow version of Inanna, demoted. Ugly, rotting, now hers was a palace of grave stench, her lonely throne sitting between the stalactites, dripping mineral milk into pools of bloodred clay.

  To confront her demon sister and rescue her lover, Inanna passed through the seven gates of hell. Each gate demanded a sacrifice. First, her lapis-encrusted sword was taken. Then her bronze shield. Gatekeepers took her gold bangles and hennaed robes. They demanded her silver girdle, her copper crown, even the black kohl was smeared from around her eyes. “Do not question the ways of the underworld,” the gatekeepers commanded her. Each item they took represented an aspect of her authority, her station in life, her power. All of it gone, Inanna arrived in the pit of hell, naked and defenseless. Her demon sister turned her into a corpse, a piece of meat, gamey and rancid, hanging from a hook in the wall.

  Over thousands of years, the story of Inanna was told and retold. The name of the goddess changed as the story migrated. In Assyria, Inanna became Ishtar the Bold, warrior and light bringer, demanding entry at the gate of death, “threatening to smash it open and set the dead loose on the earth’s surface if her request were denied.”3 In biblical times, Inanna becomes Salome, performing the dance of the seven veils to get the head of John the Baptist on a plate. In Greece, after the triumph of patriarchy, Persephone is the goddess of the underworld, an innocent maiden abducted, dragged to the underworld by force, made into the dark lord’s unwilling queen. Always, the story of the Goddess’s descent into the underworld reflects the values of the time and culture in which it was produced. Always, the story wrestles with power, sex, death, and the sacred mysteries of regeneration.

  Again and again, our goddesses and heroines travel to the underworld. Again and again, we descend in our own lives. Why do we tell this story over and over again? The underworld is where we confront the wounded, exiled pieces of ourselves. The pieces we’d forgotten, hidden, or didn’t want to see in the first place. We confront the monsters of our culture, the parts howling for attention and care. We go into the underworld to reclaim the integrity of our lineage, to snatch it back from the hands of those who had taken it from us. Sometimes those takers are our own kin, our own blood, ourselves, our Ereshkigals.

  In myths, the Goddess suffers, but as an immortal, she is guaranteed many future adventures. When these underworld initiations take place in our own lives, there are no guarantees of success and the correct course of action is rarely clear. The Goddess in us knows the way out, but our human selves can get lost. Like a bird in a cave, we chase what glitters, thinking it’s the light of day, when really it’s just a reflection off the water, underground rivers rushing us deeper into the labyrinth, toward the gaping mouths of the monsters that howl there.

  After the night of blood, I became sensitive to the passage of time. I felt a sense of enclosure, a need to escape. Everything was urgent. The café job that I once enjoyed became unbearable. Once, I’d loved the burnt garlic smell of the everything bagels and the process of making a cappuccino, drawing the frothed milk slowly up from its cold baseline, not letting the steam head sputter, so that the bubbles would be tiny and slow to melt. I wrote riddles on the chalkboard with elaborate flower vignettes, beaming smiles and free coffees at my regulars when they were able to guess the correct answers. But after the Blood Rite and my breakup, haunted by screams, chased by crows,
broke, living in a shed, exiled from my family, eating mainly day-old croissants, one day I had a full-fledged breakdown while making sandwiches.

  It was a week after my eighteenth birthday. Painting spoonful after globby spoonful of tuna salad onto ciabatta bread, I felt the hours of my life draining away. I saw a sickness of poverty and monotony stretching unto death: here in this glorious life I would be trapped at the sandwich station, in an endless future of ciabatta and bathroom keys and brokenness, teased by the boys I worked with who felt like they should’ve been promoted to supervisor instead of me, sexually harassed by the cook who kept trying to corner and kiss me. I got frustrated over some small thing, a rude customer or a coffee spilled into the sandwich bar, and I kicked a mop bucket across the room, pounded the wall, and then crumpled sobbing onto the floor next to the industrial dishwasher in the kitchen. A few of my coworkers stood around me, wide-eyed and silent, not sure what to do, until one of them said, “Go home, Amanda. You should just go home. Get some rest.” So I went, back to my little shack on Sola Street, accompanied by a murder of crows who sat outside my house chattering. I never went back to my café job again.

  Rent in Santa Barbara was just as outrageous then as it is now. My sixty-square-foot shed on Sola Street with vines growing through the wall, a cot for a bed, a dirt floor, a padlock instead of a doorknob, and bathroom privileges in the main house only, cost $450 a month.

  Even after I lost my job, I was lucky in that I was able-bodied, cisgendered, and attractive according to society’s conventions. Had I not had those unearned privileges, I don’t know what would have happened to me, since working a conventional job while experiencing what was essentially a form of mental illness became increasingly impossible. If I couldn’t work, I couldn’t pay my rent and couldn’t eat. What happens to the people without the advantages that I had? I couldn’t keep it together for eight hours at a time, much less forty hours per week plus a full-time school course load. I hadn’t yet developed the skills I needed to take care of myself. Simultaneously, though, I had a passion to live, to adventure, to travel, to write poetry. I wanted to be safe but I also had a call to explore the hidden depths, to test myself, to visit the wild country where the witches still live.

  Our lives are often determined by chance encounters. Bethany, a girl I’d worked with at the Earthling, only worked at the café one day a week to hide the fact that she was a stripper from her dad. At that time there were no strip clubs in Santa Barbara. Instead, you’d join a service, where guys would call in and then you’d go to their hotel rooms for a “private dance.”

  Taboo and beguiling, a bit dangerous, impossible to resist, strippers appeared in movies and TV shows: they were tacky and trashy, men tossing money at them. The idea of becoming one seemed an impossibility to me; I’d never even considered it. Yet, I’d been enlightened to the fact that I would be sexually harassed by men before I even entered first grade. It seemed reasonable to me that if I was going to endure that kind of abuse, I might as well get paid for it.

  Had I not met Bethany, I doubt I would’ve sought out sex work on my own. Even then, I worried that if I became a stripper, it would make me hard and nasty and turn me into a drug addict. Bethany was none of those things. Blond and upbeat, she seemed like someone who’d major in hospitality and play volleyball. She gave me the number of the guy who ran the stripper service, but before I called him, I asked her, “Does it change you?”

  Bethany responded with a shrug, “Everything changes you.”

  The audition process was basically that Jeremy, the owner of the business, came over to my crow-encircled shack. In his oversized jersey and jeans, Jeremy talked with me about becoming a stripper but it felt more like chatting with a daytime bartender about baseball. Jeremy was matter-of-fact: “Either I or one of my guys will escort you to the door. The client will give me the money. You’ll be safe because he’ll know we’re with you, just outside the door, and we’ll keep the money for you until you get out. You just go in, do a little dance. Give the guy a massage. And that’s it. It’s $415 for the hour, you get $315 and any other money you make in there is up to you.”

  I thought he meant that if anyone tipped me, I got to keep the tips. Later, I found out that wasn’t what he meant.

  But in any case, $315 for one hour’s worth of work was more than I made in a forty-hour workweek at the café. I told Jeremy I’d give it a shot, and he said, “Fine, I just have to see your tits.”

  I was sitting on the edge of my bed, barefoot, in rust-colored corduroy bell bottoms, a thermal tank top with little yellow flowers on it, and a Riot Grrrl plastic flowered barrette in my bangs. I paused for a moment, gauging the situation, trying to feel out if I was in danger. It was the middle of the day; I could hear someone hammering something next door and the clink of dishes being washed in the kitchen a few yards away. I lifted up my shirt and bared my chest. Jeremy nodded, neutral. My breasts were small but serviceable. He left a pager on the top of my bookshelf and told me he’d call it when he had a client.

  Two days later, Jeremy paged me and told me he’d had an easy one for my first time.

  We pulled into the Motel 6 parking lot in Goleta at twilight. In a way it felt safe, familiar. I’d driven by this motel countless times in high school; it was right across the street from the Taco Bell, where I’d slathered my bean burritos in spice packets before going to my afterschool job stuffing envelopes.

  Drowsing on the horizon, the sun whispered through the palm trees, electric pink in the hot salt breeze. I sat, thighs sticking to the car seat, my boom box on my lap and the window rolled down, watching a virginal white egret performing its ballet in the reeds of the adjacent lot. Jeremy fiddled with his pager. He hadn’t talked to me the whole ride over. He didn’t seem to want to get personal. But finally, he smiled at me and nudged me on the shoulder. “You ready?” he asked.

  I pulled my boom box to my chest; it felt heavy and good, like a shield. Jeremy was already out of the car, standing up, waiting for me to close the door so he could lock it. “But, what do I do again, when I go in there?” I asked him.

  “Paul’s a regular. A nice guy. He’ll make it easy for you,” Jeremy said, coming around to my side and closing the door.

  My stomach dropped. I wanted to ask him more. I still didn’t understand what was supposed to happen. I’d been trying to visualize it: Flashdance. Jennifer Beals coming out onto the stage in ’80s power suit and stilettoes, spinning off her clothes like Wonder Woman, baptizing herself with buckets of water, shaking her sopping hair and pounding the floor with all the pent-up rage and Eros the divine feminine had been holding in for eons. I envisioned something like that.

  “You don’t need to make this a big deal,” Jeremy said, shaking his head, telling me I reminded him of his girlfriend. “It can be as chill as you want it to be.”

  I looked down at my shoes. I couldn’t yet afford to buy new ones just for the occasion. I didn’t own any high heels—I’d never worn them—so I did the best I could with some wedged linen espadrilles. In my hippy purple paisley sundress, face pale as the moon with messy cropped black hair and lipstick in ’90s rust, I looked like I’d just got back from an unsuccessful day at the beach.

  “And you’ll be right outside?” I imagined him standing outside the door with his arms folded, a soldier protecting something of great value.

  “You’re a stresser, aren’t you?” Jeremy asked, chuckling.

  “No, I’m not,” I lied. I was, of course, a total stresser. I was vibrating on the edge of everything then, always about to fall off.

  “I’ll be in the car,” he said.

  Paul’s room was on the bottom floor in room 5. Five, the number of treachery and struggle. In systems of numerology, five represents humanity. Jeremy knocked; my stomach churned, slick and inflated like bread dough. Heart thumping, I gripped the handle of my boom box, my fingers popping white like gristle. Paul opened the door a crack and I felt a blast of air-conditioning. He stood there, a sh
ade, naked except for his grubby tighty-whitey underwear. Shorter than me by a few inches, but stocky, sunburnt, baffled-looking, and wounded. His brown eyes were itchy and red beneath a thin, brown comb-over haircut. Paul slipped Jeremy a wad of cash with his right hand. His left hand was jammed in his underpants, masturbating.

  He was masturbating. Already. When I saw that, the spirit of “Amanda” just switched off. I became neutral, blank, automatic lizard brain operating on instinct. I wish I would’ve called Wheezer to my side; I wish I would’ve known I had that tool. I wish I would’ve grounded and centered, a witch’s most essential daily practice, where she calls her full spirit back into her body, where she visualizes herself growing roots to the core of the earth. I wish I would’ve created for myself a mountain shield, or practiced a Queen of Swords level of discernment, icy and calm. But I didn’t. I didn’t know how. Like they used to tell me in grade school, I’m a slow learner. And it turns out I often have to learn the hard way.

  Clearly, harm lived inside room 5 of Motel 6. Why did I walk into harm? I could’ve turned around and left. I could’ve said, “No, this isn’t for me.” But I didn’t. In some way I knew that it was exactly for me. And I knew that because I’d been given harm as my lot at a vulnerable age. The weapon had lodged in my heart while I was still growing. My bark grew over it, but it was still buried there, magnetic, an attractor. Yet this weapon wasn’t just mine alone; it was an heirloom passed down to me through generations. My grandfather had plunged it into my mother’s heart, until it touched her spine, touched her ancestors and mine. You could walk that wounded heart road all the way back to Europe, to the Inquisitions, to the blood that fell on the smashed altars of the Goddesses of Babylon.