Jenny, an artist with quiet, watchful eyes, proceeds through the labyrinth first, performing the role of the Priestess of Ariadne. The only way to resurrect Ariadne is to practice her rites. She recites a poem to the ancient one, Minoan goddess of the labyrinth. “You have found center,” our priestess tells each of us as we reach her. “Return to the world with joy.”
A big part of our Goddess Pilgrimage involves descending into caves, into the underworld, literally. We go to so many caves, I lose track of which one is which. The mouth of Skoteino cave is wide, hidden in muffs of olive trees, dripping with bat guano and the green lace of ferns. Skoteino is the modern Greek word for darkness. Stones breathe and bleed in layered drips of rust, lichen green, and bone. Water drips to the floor along stalactites formed over a million years, their inner marrow gelled in deep time. Inside the cave is a dark cathedral, flying buttresses twisting organically through the shadows. We bring a ladder with us, to help us descend into the second chamber, a smaller and closer place, lit only by the sweet-smelling beeswax candles we carry. We lower the ladder and feel our way down the cool, stone curves.
Three thousand years ago, the Minoans left offerings in this underworld shrine, on an altar formed of a natural outcrop, talismans and other things to be cast into the abyss, a black gash exhaling digestive gases that smell of wet walls and damp earth. We must be careful not to fall into it ourselves. We set up our own menagerie of goddess figurines here, one for each of us pilgrims, showering them with flowers and libations of milk, honey, and wine.
Before we left for Crete, Carol had directed us to bring a stone from home that represented something we wanted to banish. I brought a black obsidian knife that I had collected at a geological shop while visiting my father in the north, a replica of a Native American tool. But Native American culture is not what I wanted to banish. I wanted to banish the bloodlust in my own culture that had enacted genocide on the Native Americans and then sold their culture at a gift shop. I wanted to banish the arrows that had killed the Python, that had lodged in my own heart, and that I had then directed against myself and others. I wanted to banish the weapons of trauma and abuse that had been used against the women in my family for generations. I wanted to let go of any weapons I had picked up, like some scared fugitive backed into a corner, that I used to defend myself. I wanted to feel safe in the world without my weapons. I wanted to feel confident I could navigate the world without wounding others. I wanted all weapons to disappear.
One by one, with the pilgrims and goddess figurines as our witnesses, we stand in front of the abyss and present our objects. As each pilgrim stands before the chorus of candlelit faces, she chants:
Guide me Ariadne, guide me Skoteino, as I enter the darkness
I am stripped naked. I am letting go.
Finally, it’s my turn. I walk, trembling, to the mouth of the fissure. To throw the stone into the void is a symbolic gesture, but because of the context, there in the dark, with our chanting echoing off the cool, wet stones, it feels real, real as the blade of the obsidian knife cutting into my clenched fist. I step up before the other women and try to speak but can’t. I don’t know why this is so hard. I hold up the knife, its sharp edges glinting in the candlelight. Without my weapons I’d be defenseless. Regardless of my desire for it to be otherwise, it’s still a dangerous world. If I lay down my weapons, how will I protect myself? But the problem with weapons is as much as we turn them against the world, we turn them against ourselves: Live by the sword, die by the sword. To let go of my weapons means committing myself to finding healthier ways of dealing with conflict. Even if I don’t always know what those are, I know I need to be willing to fumble around in the dark until I can figure it out. “I’m sick of fighting against the dominator culture, of playing by its terms of engagement,” I say. The women around me nod; they are not strangers to these battles themselves. “I want to find a new way of living. I want to use wands, not weapons.” I hold the knife above my head and bellow: “I cast my weapons into the abyss!” With a grunt, I cast down the knife, listening to it clink against the cave walls and then disappear into the deep black void.
When each of our stones is gone, we extinguish our candles and sit in the pregnant darkness. It only takes a few moments before I lose my sense of direction. I can hear the scrape of the women’s feet against the stone, the sound of their breath, I can feel them near me, but I cannot see them. I can feel them living, but the stones also feel alive, as does the earth itself. Each of us is anonymous. The dark is boundless; we reenter the womb, a time before we were even conceived. What were we then but earth? Wheat, minerals, insects, water sloshing against rocks, gurgling in pipelines, coursing down our mother’s gullet to form our new bodies.
In our contemporary world, we build structures to take us as high into the sky as we can go. We want the penthouse apartment; we want to shout our dominion from the mountaintops. But we rarely go underground anymore. We go on subways sometimes, but they are brightly lit, packed with people, places where we wait impatiently to be taken from place to place while we read a book or listen to a podcast. We don’t make it a regular practice any longer of being humbled inside the earth.
But what if we honored the underworld and its messages? If we honored our trips into the unknowing and weren’t always trying to rush back to productivity? What if, as a culture, when we visited the underworld, instead of trying to escape, we listened? Caves take us inward, to a place where civilization’s rules and laws and authorities can’t harm or defend us. In myth, the underworld holds gems, gold, and wealth. Only through the earth is wealth created. All wealth comes from the land. Our food, our work, our homes, our friends, our bodies; without the earth we live on, none of it exists. In our culture we don’t remember what true wealth is. True wealth is our connection to the earth, our community, our ancestors, to the life force itself.
Our group sits meditating in the underworld of the cave until one of the women says, “Let there be light.” We relight our candles and make our way back up to the surface. Unable to make the climb down, my mother is waiting at the mouth of the cave with Rebecca, a redheaded video artist from Canada with dark-rimmed glasses and a sassy bowl haircut. Rebecca had adventured around the world to make her art but felt queasy at the idea of descending into the cave. As each of us emerged into the light, my mother and Rebecca threw their arms up and rejoiced, embracing each one of us they exclaimed, “Oh, good! Another girl!” The feeling of being embraced like that for being a girl was surprisingly moving, like a bird flapping in my chest, a sense of lightness and motion. So many of us had faced disappointment from our fathers at not being boys. Ann, a Canadian folk singer in her seventies, tells us the story of how when her father came home from the hospital after the birth of the youngest sister in her family of four daughters, he’d locked himself in his study for two days and would not speak.
As we leave, we descend down the mountain through a field of wild grapevines and goat pellets, the tolling of sheep bells and bee hum. My mother points out the long soft ears of the mullein plant. I remember the sweet herbal taste of mullein because my mother used it to make my asthma medication when I was a child. Now the plant is healing her, inspiring her with its joyfully protruding stalks of yellow blossoms. She walks with the help of three women from our group as they sing to her:
Heal Lucinda, heal Lucinda, oh Goddess heal Lucinda, heal her with your love.
This is what magic is: singing in caves, lighting candles, meditating in groves of trees, taking care of each other. Rituals heal us because they honor our experiences; they help us to remember that the earth, and our lives, are sacred. And in fact, by doing these rituals, we make them sacred. We consecrate them. Ceremony can seem like a pain, climbing to the tops of mountains, lugging statues of goddesses and bottles of wine down the slippery inclines of a remote cave, singing, frequently off-key in the darkness after an exhausting day. But somehow, we do it and life takes on new meaning; we feel encouraged to keep going. B
ut our healing alone is not the purpose. We must then go out and take that healing to the world, to whichever corners of the world we live in: doing spiritual work means creating justice for all beings.
We are exhausted, but still, later in the day we visit the Eilitheia cave, “the cave of the pregnant rock,” hidden in a hillside fragrant with purple thyme. Down the hill the sea sparkles, sapphire streaked with aquamarine, blinking bright as a peacock. At the entrance to the cave, a fig tree grows, bursting with fruit, humming with bees. As we step inside, we reach out to touch the stalagmites, round and smooth. Fat, naturally occurring fertility goddesses congregating at the center of the cave. When Minoan women wanted to conceive, they would rub their bellies up against these rock formations, a practice that continued well into Mycenaean times. Over thousands of years of caresses and supplications, the women wore the limestone figures smooth. But the heads of the goddess rocks are missing, their necks broken and raw. Women went to this cave for millennia to celebrate love and life, and when the Byzantine soldiers arrived, they hacked off the heads of the sacred stones with an ax. Everything the Goddess worshippers loved was destroyed. Their assailants wanted to make sure no stone was left undefiled.
The forces of patriarchal authority have destroyed our stones, our caves, our temples, our cathedrals. Turned our Goddesses into scorned women, whores. Controlled our wombs. Taken our bodies. Ignored our words. Burned us at the stake. But we are still here. Throughout history, in secret, witches have kept the fires of the divine feminine burning. Small coals, tended secretly in our caves. Our initiations are the pains of our labor. The Goddess is being reborn.
On the final day of our trip, we climb down the mountain from Kato Symi, an archaeological site where an ancient plane tree grows, hollowed out into a fold. The tree grows above a sacred spring at the site of a Minoan shrine, which evolved over the millennia into a temple of Aphrodite and Hermes of the Tree. We follow the water down the hill to a family-run taverna where the spring flows freely for all weary travelers to drink from a marble spigot plugged into the mountain wall. All around the taverna, the creek flows into a series of pools holding schools of curious orange, white, and gold koi. We stand in a grove of cherry trees, the fat red orbs glowing in the leaves. Around the corner a braying donkey wants to eat our skirts, and a gaggle of chickens cluck. We set up an altar to Sappho, strung with flowers and jewels, incense smoking, just as she would have done it, with the poet’s guardian, Aphrodite, goddess of love, at the center. Once the most famous poet in all of Greece, most of Sappho’s work has now been lost to history and appears only in fragments, sometimes just a single word. But even in just that word, you can feel her longing for beauty, for love, to share its qualities with the women by her side. Each pilgrim chooses a poem to read out loud. Mine is a fragment about a young woman whom the poet loves, who has to leave the beautiful idyll in which they live, to return to her home town where she must be married, and according to Greek custom at the time, lose her freedom. Sappho says:
I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to
me, “This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.”
I said, “Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song…”
I love to think of her, with the girls in the fields, and the oasis of beauty she created in a land clamoring with the swords of heroes and great men. After reading Sappho and pouring our libations, we honor the poets, activists, artists, and scientists who still influence us, to whom we are grateful: Dolores Huerta, Nina Simone, Remedios Varo, Hildegard Von Bingen, Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Sei Shōnagon, Emily Dickinson, Hypatia, Artemisia, Boudicca, Simone Weil, Toypurina, Ada Lovelace, Sojourner Truth, Enheduanna…we say their names and for each one we give an offering.
As our ceremony ends and our pilgrimage concludes, we ascend a stone staircase leading out of the grove. At the top stands Chloe, Carol’s assistant, a PhD student of anthropology with a gift for making everyone’s needs, no matter how impractical, seem worthy of being met. Beneath a bower of grapevines, she anoints each of our foreheads with oil of myrrh, her jade-green eyes meeting each of ours in turn. “Welcome to the Ariadne Sisterhood,” she whispers.
My first initiations brought me into the underworld. Persephone playing in a field of flowers, taken to Hades by force, initiated into the ways of patriarchy, humbled there in the dark. But Persephone didn’t just eat the seeds of the underworld…she WAS the seed. The seed of Demeter, goddess of the earth. The goddess within us goes underground, and in that dark, she grows and changes, until she bursts forth and becomes the tree that bears her own fruit. Our initiations are not the end. Our initiations mark a beginning. In the story of our species, and the story of our lives, our initiations come again and again, like waves. Our sorrows initiate us into the cult of the mysteries. They humble us before the power of the life force, the Goddess herself. However they find us, our initiations lead us into the underworld, where we witches, priestxsses, and magical beings are keepers of the seeds. In winter the gardens die, but in the spring they are reborn.
We are the trees in Her sacred grove. We are Her seeds that grow. And now, we rise. Now we sing our songs, we pour our libations, we dance our dances, we make love in the fields, we link our arms, we stand together, we refuse to be dragged from the protest, we storm the prisons, we jam the phone lines, we tie ourselves to the trees of knowledge, we protect those trees, we eat their fruit, we plant their seeds, we march in the streets, we love, we resist, we re-enchant the world.
Gratitude
Even for a project such as this one, which has required countless hours spent alone, there have been a thousand hands supporting me, without whom I’d have never been able to accomplish this work. First of all, thank you to everyone at Grand Central for all of your work, but especially Maddie Caldwell, my editor. Maddie, you were knight, page, and fairy godmother all in one. Thank you so much for holding the thread for me as I went down and fumbled around in the dark. You gave me courage. Thanks for your sensitivity and rigor and patience. And thank you so much to my agent, Adriann Ranta Zurhellen at Foundry. Thank you for finding me, for being such a hungry huntress, and for always knowing just what to do and how to do it. Your steadiness and professionalism have made the process of publishing so much easier than I ever imagined it could be. Thanks so much to you and the entire Foundry team.
For my more personal thanks, I have to begin of course with my mother, the first witch in my life. Mom, thank you for your endurance, your brilliance, your kindness, your unfailing belief in me, and your nuanced application of witchcraft. Thank you for encouraging me, not censoring me, and for being a constant source of knowledge and inspiration. And thank you, Will, for being such a great consort to my mother, for teaching me what it means to work in service, for all your kindness and humor. I don’t know what our family would do without you. Thank you to my father and Linda, for your generosity and love, and your desire to bring us together as a family. Thank you, Dad, for wanting family, even when we don’t always know how to do it perfectly; thank you for trying to create it with me. I think we’re getting there in the end. Thank you to Conor for your joyful spirit, intelligence, and love. Thank you, Nick, for your curiosity and your calm. I feel so grateful to have you both in my life. Thank you, Steven and Vanessa
, for coming in. Thank you, Gram, for the orange rolls and the brownies and the stories, and Pop for the chocolate milk and tigers. Thank you both for all your care; I never would have made it through my childhood without you. Thank you, Aunt Sandy, for always stepping in to help. Thank you, Steve, Larry, and Lance. Thank you, Aunt Tammy and Uncle Larry. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you to all my family, who have given me endless support and certainly lots to talk about.
Thank you to my teachers: Nancy Yokabaitus, for putting me in G.A.T.E. I might not have made it if it wasn’t for you. Jan Clouse, for getting me interested in language and craft. Val Rimmer, for holding me to a higher standard. Thanks to Nancy Buchanan, Bruce Bauman, Jon Wagner, and Berenice Reynaud, and all my other teachers at CalArts, especially Janet Sarbanes, Dodie Bellamy, John D’Agata, James Benning, Sam Durant, Thom Andersen, Steve Erikson, Gary Mairs, and Rebecca Baron. Ryuishin, Hojin, Hogun, and Daido at ZMM, thank you. Thanks, Dr. Marion North, for giving me a chance. Francesca Lia Block, thank you for the inspiration, the wisdom, and cracking open the door for us literary witches. Thank you, Amanda Foulger, for the spirits, and Robert Allen, for the technique. Thanks for the reading, Lon Milo Duquette. And thanks, Jenn Witte, for your bookselling heroics.
Thank you to my friends, colleagues, and coven: Jade Chang, for always being my bridge over troubled water, let’s sail on silver, forever. Margaret Wappler, so glad to be in this life with your bright spirit. Lauren Strasnick, for your loyalty and endless love. Milly Sanders, because I could just talk and talk and TALK with you, about everything. Nancy Stella Soto, we’re hacer-ing it! Love you so much. And thank you, Max Maslansky, for being hilarious and brilliant. Thank you forever to Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, for your love of magic, and for bringing the Strange Magic clan together. Thank you, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener. What would I do without you in my life? Thank you so much to all our Strange Magic listeners and to our worldwide coven; your support was essential in my garnering the strength to write this book. Thank you to Mary Lowry, for always promoting the project of witchcraft in the world. Thank you to Michael Massman, Stuart Krimko, Danielle Waldman, Joanne Wilmott, Kira Riikonen, Nikki Darling, Akina Cox, Brian Getnick, Christie Roberts Berkowitz, Deb Klowden Mann, Edgar Fabian Frias, Vera Brunner Sung, Brigid McCaffery, Jessica Ceballos, Salima Allen, Asher Hartman, Carol Che, Carrie Cook, Adrienne Walser, Reneice Charles for the biscuits, Leah Garza for the Zapatista quote, Michelle Garcia, Sophia Lyons, the WCCW, Sophia Louisa Lee, Claire Anderson, Paradox Pollack, John Precour (thanks for breaking down ’90s SF with me), Alexandra Grant, Zoe Crosher, Jillian Speer, Ginny Harper, Nancy Self, Kiran Mahto, Benjamin Sealey, Scott Jeffress, Bill Langworthy, Jordan Press, Carolyn Elliot (you made me go big or go home). Thank you, Niki Ford, for all the nourishment. Beth Pickens—OMG!! I couldn’t have done this without your support. Thank you, Priscilla Frank, Agatha French, Lucianna Bellini, David Elliott, Kerry McLaughlin. Thank you to the witches of the Commons and Johanna Hedva. Melanie Griffin for the brilliant herb workshop. Michelle Tea for creating my first public reading experiences. Thank you to Michael M. Hughes, for all you’ve done for magic in the world. Thank you to Leslie, for traveling between the worlds with me. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia; our chapter together here had to be cut, but it would have needed volumes anyway; thank you for all your encouragement and support. Thank you, Matthew Houck; I see you across the snow and smile. Thank you, Benjamin Russell; you had to listen to me cry and stress, refuse the sunset, and nearly snap so many times, but you always showed up with kindness, generosity, and the best lentil soup under the sun. Thank you for sharing your genius with me. A huge thank you to my clients from whom I learn so much; it’s such a privilege to be allowed into your worlds. Every day I thank the Goddess that we get to make our magic together. Thank you to Carol P. Christ and the women of the Ariadne Sisterhood; you’re the source of the happy ending. Thank you to my ancestors, those who lived well and with love. Thank you to the Chumash and the Tongva people, on whose land I grew up. Thank you to all the unsung laborers who have made my life possible. Thank you, Pythia. Thank you, Boudicca. Thank you, Sappho. Thank you, Muses. Thank you, Medusa. Thank you to Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter. Thank you, Hecate; thank you, Ariadne; thank you, Persephone. Thank you, Demeter. Thank you, Earth. Thank you, magic. Thank you, witchcraft. Victory to the Goddess! Thank you to all my spirits, for showing up every day with humor and grace. Thank you to all the witches throughout time who made this work possible. I may not know all your names, but I have not forgotten you.
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