Initiated

by Amanda Yates Garcia

  Wherever you find kings, you find warriors, their great deeds recorded and sung by bards, painted in fresco or carved into obelisks. After all, kings need someone to defend their treasure. But the Minoans have no art celebrating warriors, just dancing priestesses, women playing lutes, men joyfully leaping over bulls, and happy animals squawking and smiling. After the Mycenaeans invaded from the north, they brought their warrior ethic to Crete. They destroyed the temples of the Goddess and used the stones to build shrines to their own gods. Brutality seeped into Cretan art: men wrestling, stabbing each other with swords, stabbing lions as they grimace and roar. Warriors appear, raping women, pillaging villages, plundering wealth. With the Mycenaeans, warrior graves appear at the Cretan archeological sites. The Indo-European raiders rode down from the north, the sky god’s thunderbolts igniting their torches. The warriors had no art, but they had very inventive weapons. Shiny swords inlaid with lapis, given names, like we do to corporations: Monsanto the destroyer, Nestle the drought-bringer. The priestess’s sacred centers became the palaces of warrior kings, walled cities guarding treasures, women, and slaves.

  We sit in our tour bus looking out across the sea as we’re leaving Heraklion. The water is choppy and fierce, a tangle of swirls, like the designs on the ceramics shattered by the Mycenaeans. I’m sitting next to Sharon, a queer English professor from the Midwest with a passion for the work of Audre Lorde. She’s always looking out for everyone, always asking after my mother. “Think how dangerous it must have been for the first Cretans arriving from Anatolia, rowing into that water on a small boat carved from a cypress tree,” she says. I gaze at the choppy water and think of all the children, the Syrians, the Congolese, the Libyans, whose bodies wash up on these shores even now. If we could see with forensic goggles, the waters of the Mediterranean would be red with blood.

  It’s halfway through the tour. We check into a hotel high up in the mountains surrounded by citrus groves. A freshwater spring fills a pond at the local taverna where they breed the trout they serve at dinner. The full moon in Sagittarius hangs low over the cypress trees and I can hear locals playing their three-stringed lyra, practicing the songs for this evening when they’ll teach us the steps of their folk dances. My mother rests in our room while I grab my things. The rooms are so cheap here, I decided to get my own room for the night. I know she’s feeling hurt, even though she doesn’t say anything, but I can tell by how withdrawn she is, how short her answers are.

  “It’s not your fault,” I tell her. “Everybody snores. I’m just a sensitive sleeper.”

  “Of course. It’s fine,” she says, rolling over and putting on her eye mask.

  “This way you won’t have to worry about keeping me up and you can just relax.”

  She nods but says nothing. As I grab my bags, I notice her blood sugar test kit on the nightstand. “Hey, can I test my blood sugar?” I ask.

  “Do you know how?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, don’t use too many. I need them for the rest of the trip.”

  “I only need one,” I say. “What was yours this morning?”

  “Eighty-five,” she tells me, and I feel relieved. Only a year before I’d nearly clobbered her when I found out she’d stopped taking her meds and her blood sugar had gone up to 300. “You could have gone into a coma!” I’d yelled. “You could have gone blind. You could have DIED. Can you PLEASE just take CARE of yourself?” She said she knew, that I didn’t need to worry. But her answers were vague and unconvincing. It was like she had a shield up. Nothing I said penetrated.

  I prick my finger and let the machine have a taste of my blood. “Beep,” says the machine. The numbers come up: my blood sugar is at 95. Prediabetes starts at 100.

  “My blood sugar is ten points higher than yours,” I say, and feel a little like I’m sinking into the floor.

  Lifting off her eye mask, my mother looks at me. “It might be because we’re traveling. Maybe with the time change your body is confused…”

  In the Sacred Center of Malia, Asha and I stand together in a circle of stones paved with chalky red clay the color of garden pots. Asha, a forty-eight-year-old herbalist from Montana with a serene smile and hair down to her thighs, is telling me how she was cast out by her biological white family at age fifteen for getting pregnant by a Native American man. “They called me a spiteful renegade hedge witch,” she says, laughing bitterly, shaking her head. Her new partner’s family took her in, the Shoshone women of the Rocky Mountains. They were kind to her and taught her their rituals, which is how she came to be interested in herbs. The Shoshone helped her with the birth of her child. Now she has six children.

  As she’s speaking, I feel a gripping in my womb and then a release. I tell Asha, “I just got my period five days early.” Most of the women on our tour are past menopause, but still their bodies pulled my cycle toward our collective center.

  “I know,” she says. “I haven’t had my period for eight months. Thought I was done. I had a croning ceremony and everything. But yesterday in the cave, I began to gush blood.”

  “It’s so amazing how just traveling together for a few weeks can affect us…biologically,” I marvel.

  “Women naturally come into sync,” she says, “It’s like Wi-Fi. We get together and immediately we start to come in sync with each other. Our bodies, minds, and spirits connect.”

  As we speak, two snakes rise from between the smooth red rocks, coiled together in an ecstatic dance, the same black and white snakes that writhed around the wrists of the Cretan snake priestesses three thousand years ago. Asha and I stop and watch them, breathless, until the snakes part ways and hum back into their holes.

  In the seaside town of Mochlos, I am befriended by Milena, a Bulgarian woman in her early thirties, tall with sharp cheekbones and dark almond eyes; when she smiles, she reveals a mouthful of beautifully crooked, smoke-stained teeth. A waitress at a seafood restaurant, she takes breaks from her service to dance Cretan folk dances with her boyfriend, a Greek man in his late seventies. She kneels on the ground, clapping while he performs a dance called the robetiko, a dance just for men, created by displaced people shunting the liminal lands between Turkey and Greece. Though aged and at least ten inches shorter than his Bulgarian girlfriend, he’s proud and dances with all the passion and vitality of a god, stomping and kicking his feet, a cigarette dangling from between his fingertips.

  “How did you two get together?” I ask my new friend.

  She lights one of her filterless cigarettes and inhales, holds it. “I used to take care of his mother,” she says, exhaling. “He was so kind to me. He arranged my papers. That’s when we fell in love.”

  The owner of the restaurant comes to our table and apropos of nothing tells me the Bulgarian “works like an ox.” She sends money home to her mother. He claps her on the shoulder and leaves.

  “Everyone I know is in poverty,” she tells me.

  Milena gestures to an ancient Minoan site that sits atop a rocky island a hundred meters off the coast. Milena barely speaks any English; it’s hard for me to understand her. “Vasilisa, Vasilisa,” she tells me, urgently pointing to the island where there is a temple ruin and a cave full of bones. I recognize the word Vasilisa from the Russian fairy tale by the same name. But I don’t understand what she means. Another waiter comes up and translates, “She’s telling you that thousands of years ago, a powerful queen once ruled this island.” Milena looks at me proudly and nods, beaming, flashing her crooked teeth.

  The “queen” she was referring to was probably Ariadne, the goddess worshipped all throughout Minoan Crete. The suffix -ne is not part of the Greek language, and so linguists suspect that it is a pre-Greek term from the Neolithic Cretan language. Ariadne was the Snake Goddess celebrated by the priestesses of Knossos. When the patriarchal hordes arrived, once again they changed the narrative. Whereas once Ariadne was a life-giving goddess, in the new version of the myth, she became a princess, daughter of King Minos. In the new
version, when the Greek hero Theseus arrived on the island of Crete, the princess Ariadne fell helplessly in love with him. Wanting to conquer the land, Theseus convinced her to betray her people. “Help me slay the Minotaur,” he begged her, offering her roses and rings and candy and all the other things girls like. The Minotaur was a bull that lived at the center of the labyrinth, sacred to the goddess; bull horns appear everywhere in Minoan art. Once Theseus killed their beloved beast, the people of Crete were understandably furious. They turned against Ariadne for helping him. By cover of night, the couple escaped together by boat, pushing out over the cold sand. But almost as soon as they left, Theseus got sick of hearing his new girlfriend crying, yammering on about all she’d lost. He left Ariadne on the shores of a deserted island and ran off with her sister. Devastated, Ariadne waited on a cliff for a week and then, realizing Theseus would never return, she hanged herself from a tree. Once a goddess, now a lovesick suicide.

  In the afternoon, my mother is tired. We keep trying to connect but can’t seem to do it. Slowly, we make our way back to the hotel from the restaurant where we had our lunch, eggplant moussaka and wild greens with capers, lemon, local olive oil, goat cheese, and oregano. I’m going to drop her off, and then, before we meet back up with our group, I want to swim out to the island with the ancient temple. I feel a sense of urgency as I walk next to my mother; I only have an hour and a half. She navigates the rocky terrain with her cane, fussing with the floppy hat the wind keeps blowing off her head, tangling the cord around her neck. “Let me hold your purse,” I say. She hands it to me but doesn’t look my way. Again, she’s being short with me; I can feel something simmering beneath the surface but she won’t tell me what it is. “What’s wrong?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head and says nothing. I worry that maybe she’s sick. She left her diabetes medication in the refrigerator of the hotel in another town. “Were you able to find a pharmacy?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s all being handled.”

  We arrive at our hotel. The lock is tricky, but we make it into the room. With some difficulty, she lowers herself onto the bed. I want to leave, to grab my suit and go swimming, as today will be my last chance, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the right time. We sit in the dark room, curtains drawn, my mother having flung her arm over her face, listening to the incongruous sound of our neighbors next door, a bunch of college kids belting out Beyoncé, “All the single ladies,” as they pound shots of raki.

  Finally, my mother says, “You don’t seem to want to be near me. Here we are together on this trip, who knows when we will get to do something like this again, or if we ever will, and you don’t even want to be around me.”

  I feel a flash of anger, as I always do, much to my own frustration, whenever my mother admits a vulnerability. Her woundedness is a shot fired, launching my chariot race. The words leap out of my mouth before I can even think: “It just feels like we can’t have a conversation without you warning me or trying to modify my behavior. Asking me if I said thank you, telling me to pick up my purse. When you ask me about my book, you don’t seem excited; you’re just anxious I won’t get it done in time. I’m on vacation. I don’t want to be monitored all the time.”

  Stung, she responds quietly, “I’m your mother. I’m just doing that because I want to protect you. I want you to be happy.”

  “I’d be happy if we could have one interaction where you didn’t criticize me.”

  “I’m just trying to protect you,” she repeats.

  I imagine most kids have arguments with their parents like this one, but for me, whenever my mother and I argue, there’s always this rage hovering just beneath the surface. Our arguments quickly escalate. We’re not here, in the hotel room in Crete; we’re flying on broomsticks over my childhood, looking down on all the fires. All the ways we both went wrong.

  We keep going, a few more back-and-forth exchanges, small accusations and defenses, excavating minor wounds, and then suddenly the fires leap up to lick us, catching our clothes. We leap, from the present moment, back three decades into the past in a single instant.

  “You can’t protect me. You never protected me. You were too wounded, too broke, too broken. Every time I suffered, you just let it happen. You let yourself suffer, and you let me suffer with you. You were valedictorian of your high school, you could have done anything you wanted, and then you lingered on in these shit jobs, dependent on men who didn’t love you, didn’t care about you, never taking care of yourself, and we both paid the price for it. But I’m the difficult one. I was hard to raise. I’m the rebellious one that makes everything hard for you.”

  She sighs. Her sigh is a key that opens the door on one of our most familiar rooms and we both step in. The room is dark, heavy and hot, too close. It’s a place my mother can really get comfortable; it’s her territory. The room of her failures, my fury. The room that appeared in every house throughout my childhood, no matter which town or neighborhood. She doesn’t get mad in this room. She takes everything on.

  “I knew that you were angry. You’ve always been angry. I thought if I could just absorb it, just absorb it and absorb it, whatever anger that came my way, we’d be okay.”

  I see her absorbing like a swamp absorbs toxic chemicals. I didn’t want her to absorb; I wanted her to make pollution unthinkable. “I didn’t want you to absorb it. I wanted you to set limits. To set boundaries, to protect yourself and protect me.”

  “You didn’t want me to set boundaries. You wouldn’t accept them. I tried. You just plowed through and did whatever you wanted to do.”

  “I was a child.”

  “Nothing I did was ever good enough. You would run around; you wouldn’t mind anyone.”

  “I hate that story. I was a child. I wasn’t in control of anything. And you just gave in. You didn’t fight for us.” My heart is racing, my blood boiling, totally out of proportion to what is happening.

  “I tried, Amanda. But I was doing it alone, and it wasn’t easy. I was tired. I did my best…” She sinks back heavy into the bed. “But clearly it wasn’t good enough.”

  I can never tell what’s real when we get to this place. Am I mad because I’m truly mad, or am I just feeling defensive, worried that I’m making her life more difficult once again? Is she saying she wasn’t good enough because she wants to make me feel guilty, or because she genuinely believes it?

  “You’ve always wanted me to single-handedly fight the patriarchy and win. And I couldn’t do it, Amanda. I’m sorry.”

  As she says it, I know it is true. I wanted her to protect herself. To keep us safe in a world where it was impossible to be safe. But the fact that she couldn’t was not her fault. My anger was misdirected. I was angry at a larger system of injustice, not angry that my mother, with her library of goddess books and her apothecary of garden herbs, was not able to overthrow our entire patriarchal civilization by herself. I know that as a child I often directed my anger at my mother because she was the only person around who was ever willing to take any responsibility. In fact, she took all the responsibility. Absorbing it whether it was hers to take or not.

  As we argue, I rearrange my things, unpacking and repacking my bags, shuffling for my bathing suit. As I did so, a little brown treasure rolls to the floor and under her bed, where my mother stares bleakly at the ceiling. Scrounging on my knees on the cold tiles, I fish it out.

  “What’s that?” my mother asks me.

  I hold it up, a fibrous little brown locket. “It’s a seed from that fruit that fell at my feet at Knossos.” A few days before, when our pilgrimage had visited the sacred center of Knossos, Carol had been giving a lecture on the history of the goddess cultures, of Ariadne and Persephone and Demeter, while we pilgrims rested in the shade. And as she was speaking, a fat, fuzzy fruit fell from the apricot tree and rolled to a stop, just touching my sandaled foot.

  “Oh yes!” my mother says, excited. “I remember seeing that. What a gift.” She smiles at me and pats my hand.


  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, pushing up to sit next to her on the bed, clutching the seed in my palm. “You may not have been perfect; neither was I. But you brought me here. Not just here, to Crete, but here to my life. Everything I hold most dear and most sacred in my life is in it because of you.” Like the tiny seed in my palm, that sacredness was both vulnerable and resilient at the same time.

  “I love you,” she tells me, the historic room of failure and fury dissipating around us as if it were a mirage. Using the arm of a nearby chair, she pushes herself to standing, ruffles my hair. “I’m just glad we get to be here together.” She walks over to the window and pushes back the blue curtains. From where I sit, I can see the peeling white walls of the cantina across the street. A skinny black cat, blinking in the midday sun, nurses her kittens on the roof. “What are you going to do with the seed?” she asks.

  “Bring it home. Put it on my altar. Try to make it grow.”

  She smiles, but I see a flash of nervousness. “How are you going to get it through customs? I don’t think you’re supposed to…”

  “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” I say, wrapping the seed in a scarf and hiding it in my bag.

  I know she wants to question me again. To make sure I won’t get in trouble. But in keeping with her character, she also chooses peace. “To get it to grow, crack the pit open and soak the seed in water overnight. Then you can plant it and it will sprout.”

  That evening, we pilgrims perform a labyrinth ritual on the hillsides of Mochlos, gulls flying low in the pink sky as we walk the serpentine stone path in a procession through the town, then sing a revision of a Reclaiming chant:

  She goes down and we go down

  We follow her underground

  Hail Ariadne, who dies and is reborn

  And deep calls to deep, and deep calls to deep…