by Rob Brezsny
But now I had arrived: the avatar of the Queen of Death; servant of She who lovingly breaks the old containers to make way for the shock of the new. There could be no doubt that I had been Mary Magdalen, because only the reborn Mary Magdalen could understand and articulate Persephone’s latest dispensation: the radical logic of yes AND no; the annihilation—no, the transcendence—of the infantile Us versus Them.
“For what sort of mind wrestling with what sort of issue is the ideology of oppositionalism so useful?” wrote James Hillman, one of the geniuses I had discovered in my quest for wisdom beyond the canon my mothers had provided. “The heroic ego,” he answered himself, “who divides so he can conquer. Antithetical thinking, found by Albert Adler to be a neurotic habit of mind, belongs to the will to power and the masculine protest.”
I was without a doubt Mary Magdalen because I had mastered the perspective that allowed me to see I was both Mary Magdalen and not Mary Magdalen.
And since I was Mary Magdalen, the holy bowl was my personal prop to do with as I saw fit in order to advance the goals of the Pomegranate Grail.
My last night at the Sanctuary was the fourth day of the fourth month. I was in the fourth day of my fourth menstrual period. Four fours: a propitious omen to launch the new covenant. Numerologically, four means order, system, control, command.
I waited until the last entranced drummer retired from her shamanic quest in the music room (Sibyl was visiting her own death, guided by her astral vulture ally, Cronos) and until the questers in the sweat lodge shuffled off to the dream incubation chamber (Burgundy was hoping to receive a “medicine vision” that would relieve some of the paralyzing panic that had gripped her during her mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer).
Shortly after 2:30 A.M., I tucked the Pomegranate Grail under my red silk-clad arm and left the menstrual hut via the outdoor stairs. With a flashlight I made my way to the place in the nearby woods where I’d stashed plastic garbage bags containing two leather tote bags full of essentials. I jammed my red silk robe and gown inside one of the plastic bags and stuffed it under a holly bush, then changed into black pants, black blouse, and black leather jacket.
It was here where my master plan almost got derailed. With a twinge of fear, my heart yearned and stretched in the direction of the burned-out redwood tree, a couple hundred yards away, which had hosted my ritual escape to Melted Popsicle Land and the Televisionarium for more than ten years. How long would it be before I could return to it? Would I be able to open the doors to the Televisionarium with the same ease from a new location in Marin County? Most pressingly, what would happen to my life with Rumbler? I had no doubt that we would continue to meet regularly in dreams; I was sure I would feel his comforting and arousing but elusive presence from time to time during my daily rhythms; but I felt less sanguine about the rendezvous we invoked with the aid of my ritual popsicle sticks.
As if in answer to an unformulated prayer, Rumbler surged into me right then. He didn’t “speak.” I got no specific message from him. But I felt enormously comforted. It was like getting a hug on the inside; like my heart filling up with “I’ll Fly Away,” a favorite old gospel song from childhood. Automatically, without willing it, I relaxed. My natural confidence returned. I felt united with my decision. Leaving the woods, I headed to the parking area at the other end of the compound.
I probably could have fired up the Honda without waking anyone. But just to be safe, I put it in neutral and rolled it silently maybe a hundred yards down our long driveway-road. Only when I was far out of earshot of even the guest cottages at the Sanctuary did I turn the ignition.
Forty minutes later I was enjoying coffee, scrambled eggs, and tapioca pudding at the Golden West in Santa Cruz—the same all-night restaurant where my biological mom and dad used to love to hang out. I wondered where they were at that exact moment. Magda was probably asleep in her little shack in Live Oak, a few miles from here. As for Jerome, nobody had heard from him for a few years, but I liked to think that wherever he was on the physical plane, his astral self was engaged in some righteous work with Joan of Arc or Anne Hutchinson or Jesus.
At 6:30 A.M. I left, drove downtown, and parked the car on Cedar Street. Then I hoofed it to the Greyhound bus station, where I caught a bus to San Francisco. I slept on the way, thank Goddess. My dreams were invigorating. In one I was planting lightning bolts in black loamy dirt near my redwood husk temple. In another I was inside a silver bathtub balanced on the crest of a tidal wave that was also a fountain.
The bus arrived in the big city around 9:30. Two hours later I was in a room at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, showing Mr. Anthony Barso the relic he’d only seen photos of up till now. Elsa, my friend from Caffé Pergolesi, was also there to offer moral support. The tentative deal we’d arranged in the previous weeks was that Barso would pay me seven thousand five hundred dollars for the bowl: one thousand five hundred dollars up front as a deposit, and the remainder within three weeks, after he had a chance to run tests on it to confirm its age and authenticity.
Barso was not a demonstrative person, but I could tell he was pleased when he first touched my precious. On the other hand, he either didn’t care that the bowl was the Grail, or pretended that he didn’t. The age, the quality of the silver, and the unusual artwork seemed to be his main concerns. He indicated in a detached tone that he had seen this same group of symbols only once, and that was on an eighteen-hundred-year-old chalice.
By the time room service brought up our sandwiches, Barso was counting out seventy-five twenty-dollar bills.
The transaction was shady by necessity. We had a written document, but I knew there was no way I could enforce it if he really wanted to flimflam me. One favorable sign was the assurances I’d gotten from Elsa, who had known Barso for years and sincerely believed he wouldn’t cheat me. Elsa was half in love with me; I could sense the same awed protectiveness coming from her as I’d felt so often from my mothers.
By 3 P.M. I was on a northbound bus for Marin County. As I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, I pulled one of my new twenty-dollar bills out of the wad and rubbed it on my forehead in a silly act of sympathetic magic.
Somehow I had managed, until that moment, to ward off all thoughts of the grief I might be causing my mothers. I’d been aflame with visions of the scoured new face that awaited me. My imagination had also been toying with fantasies of what I would do if the chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail renounced and banished me. I couldn’t believe they’d resort to that, but if they did, I was prepared to launch my own damn mystery school. It would be anchored in the old teachings but fueled by the epiphanies that awaited me.
Unexpectedly, though, as massive Mt. Tamalpais loomed to my left and sparkling Richardson Bay to my right, Vimala’s devastation was pouring into me without any censorship whatsoever. I was not projecting or imagining what she felt. Her actual emotional state was being reconfigured in me. I’d had this experience before, but never at such a great distance (when had we ever been separated so thoroughly?), and never saturated with such anguish. I didn’t know the thoughts that went with it. Had she already discovered that the Grail was missing? Surely this much pain couldn’t have been stirred simply by my as-yet short-term absence. She couldn’t possibly know yet that this was the beginning of a time of travail for her. Could she?
My master plan was vague on this point. Would I let my mothers know with a brief phone message that I was all right, even as I continued to hide my whereabouts from them? Or should I make a complete break, maintain utter silence, and require them to wander in limbo, terrified of what had become of me? The former would increase my risk of being found and would make it more difficult to carry out my grand experiment free of their vibes. The latter would be cruel but might be necessary if I hoped to sustain the resolve I’d need to transform myself.
By 5:30 I was checking into the slightly seedy but cheap and serviceable Villa Inn, about three-fourths of a mile from downtown San Rafael. My room had a kitchenette,
and there was a coin-operated laundry room on the premises.
I loved the name of the motel. If you shoved together the two words in “Villa Inn,” you got “Villain(n)”—the perfect hiding place for a renegade avatar.
No one in the world had any idea where I was, not even Elsa. I’d told her I was bound for Santa Rosa.
What I was looking for in a plastic surgeon was similar to what I liked in a gynecologist: a frank, earthy, voluble woman. The Yellow Pages were full of female doctors, and I began calling them on my first morning in my new digs. Dr. Lilith Elfland quickly emerged as the clear favorite. Her receptionist said they’d had a cancellation, and I could come in that very afternoon. Besides that, I liked her name. The ancient Hebraic heroine Lilith, much revered in the traditions of the Pomegranate Grail, was Adam’s first wife, and a far feistier companion than Eve, the naive babe who replaced her.
A nurse led me into an examination room and wrote on a clipboard as I answered questions about my medical history and reason for my visit. Wanting to keep things simple, I didn’t mention the heart surgery I’d had as a baby. I had my fake Oklahoma birth certificate in my bag, but she didn’t ask for it.
Five minutes after she left, Dr. Elfland entered.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, push back your hair,” she greeted me, throwing what I took to be a bemused glance at the spot where my bangs covered up my birthmark.
I was taken aback at her jocularity, and overcompensated by being much too quick to pin back my forehead hair with bobby pins.
“I don’t think I’ve come across that name in thirty-eight years,” she said, leaning against the edge of the metal-framed bed to face me. “Since I was six years old sitting on my mama’s lap.”
She was shorter than me, about five feet, six inches, and thin for a woman her age. Her black frizzy hair bordered on being an afro, and she wore no make-up that I could see—both unusual touches. I liked her immediately. My off-the-cuff telepathic scan registered her as smart and free-thinking yet kind.
“You know, I can’t remember how that story ended,” she continued, pushing beyond the boundaries of light introductory banter. “Her step-mother banished her from the tower, right? And sent her into the wasteland? Then what? The usual fairy tale BS about the handsome young prince saving her?”
“No, actually. More like the other way around. Rapunzel and the prince found each other by accident in the wasteland. Her tears fell on his eyes and cured the blindness he’d suffered when he jumped out of the tower escaping from the witch.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. A happy feminist ending.”
“Yeah, except for the fact that the prince had made Rapunzel pregnant right before they got separated. Twins, it turned out. A boy and a girl. She had to give birth by herself out in the hinterlands, then raise them by herself on roots and berries.”
“Booooo.”
“Well, but there’s this. Once she and the prince made it back to the home of his dad the king, I imagine she had all the childcare help she needed.”
“Hooray.”
Dr. Elfland moved close to me and examined my blotch. I liked the way she smelled. It was a natural, non-perfumy scent. Sweet earth.
“ ‘Dysplastic nevus’ is the name we experts call this phenomenon,” she said. “What do you call it?”
“Splotch. Blotchy splotchy smirch.”
“It’s smooth and flat. That’s good. Not likely melanoma material. Have you noticed any changes in it over the years?”
“No. I mean except that it’s grown bigger with the rest of me. I think it takes up the same fraction of my forehead now as it did when I was young.”
“So what took you so long? Must have been a difficult cross to bear.”
I was shocked and pleased at her forthrightness. Should I respond candidly?
“Never had the money before now,” I stammered. “My aunt and grandma finally decided to take up a family collection for me.”
“Well, here’s my plan, Rapunzel. A four-step process. Possibly five, but I think we can do it in four. First time we get together we excise half the birthmark. Local anesthesia. You’ll be in and out of here in a couple hours. A week later we take the stitches out. Depending on how fast you heal, you come back in four to six weeks and we excise what’s left of the mole. Same routine. Stitches out in a week. Third step is to re-excise the scar left from the first two surgeries. About six weeks later we use a machine to sand down any scar that’s left.”
“It’s all outpatient?”
“Yup.”
“And what does it look like when we’re finished?”
“You’ve got a faint horizontal scar that looks more and more like a worry line as the months go by.”
“How painful is it?”
“Not too. I’ll give you a painkiller afterwards, but you may not even need more than good old Advil.”
“When do we start?”
“Let’s go check with the receptionist to see what’s available. She’ll go over the costs as well.”
As we walked together up to the front desk, she had another surprise for me.
“Now how about this other name of yours? Blavatsky. Is that like Madame Blavatsky, as in the author of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine? Blavatsky as in one of the most notorious mystics of the nineteenth century?”
I couldn’t believe she’d heard of the woman who, according to the somewhat suspect tales of my flaky biological father, was my ancestor. A plastic surgeon who was on speaking terms with theosophical literature? Though she’d used the wrong term. Blavatsky was an occultist and magician more than a mystic. She was too strong-willed to be a dissolve-the-ego mystic.
“Madame Helena Blavatsky was my great-great-great grandmother,” I asserted with more certainty than I felt. In fact, my research into the life of my supposed foremother cast doubt on Jerome’s claims. Blavatsky told some people she was unable to bear children, having suffered damage to her womb in a fall from a horse while bareback riding in the circus.
On the other hand, there’s also the story that she had a child with the Hungarian opera singer and member of the radical Carbonari sect Agardi Metrovitch, whom she saved from assassins in a back street in Cairo—or maybe it was Constantinople. Her accounts varied.
I heartily wished it were true, that we were linked by blood. She was an improbably accomplished, colorful, and well-traveled woman. The erudite (if sometimes wacky) tomes she wrote synthesized Qabalah, Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism and were among the most influential occult books ever written. More than a few scholars of the Western Hermetic tradition view her as the mother of the occult explosion that began at the end of the nineteenth century.
At different times in her life, she had as spiritual mentors Swami Dayananda, Jamal ad-Din, and Thakar Singh—the leading reformers of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, respectively. She survived a shipwreck off the Greek coast; dallied with secret agents in Central Asia; studied with voodoo priests in New Orleans; hung out with bandits in Mexico; toured Serbia as a concert pianist; worked as an itinerant spirit medium in her native Russia; set up shop as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris; established the Theosophical Society in India; and traveled in Tibet at a time when it was virtually impossible for anyone, let alone a white woman, to penetrate that inaccessible place.
And besides all that, she had a wicked sense of humor. No less a judge of poetic justice than William Butler Yeats reported approvingly of her pranksmanship. Like the time she snookered a gullible disciple with a story of how the Earth is actually shaped like a dumbbell, having a twin orb stuck on to it at the North Pole.
She was also famous for her supernatural powers. Legends abound of her precipitating showers of roses out of thin air, clairvoyantly finding lost objects, and causing lamp flames to flare up simply by pointing at them. Yeats reported an eerie encounter with her cuckoo clock while alone in her house. Though it wasn’t ticking and had no weights, its little bird suddenly emerged and whooped.
“Your fem
inist pedigree is certainly impeccable, then, isn’t it?” Dr. Elfland said as we waited for the receptionist to get off the phone. “Rapunzel, the only heroine in the history of fairy tales to actually save a handsome prince. And Blavatsky, one of the most powerful, charismatic, and intellectually formidable women of the nineteenth century.”
“Also the most madcap woman, maybe, who ever lived. Did you hear about the time she supposedly made little chunks of ice magically materialize inside the suit of a pedantic sycophant who was boring her to tears?”
“I’d like to have that ability.”
The receptionist set me up with an appointment the following Monday morning at 9. Each surgery would run four hundred dollars, the dermabrasion one hundred fifty dollars.
I felt so excited, so brimming with energy, that I walked half the way back to my motel. En route, I decided to make a brief call to Vimala. Why not? She couldn’t stop me now. I was master of my destiny. Compassion was a luxury I could afford.
I bought a blue popsicle at a convenience store and got some change, then picked out a pay phone at a gas station.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded frail.
“Vimala, it’s me. I’m fine. Don’t worry. I just need some time away.” My voice was shaking.
“We need to work on this together, dear. Where are you?”
“I promise to take extra special care of myself. You know me. Ms. Responsible. I couldn’t do something foolish if I tried.”
“You’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry, mom. I love you. I will be back, I promise you.”
“When?”
“Not sure yet. I’ll let you know next time I call. Bye.”
That didn’t feel good. I could already feel my resolve to go through with my plan eroding just a little. “Better not call again until after the first time under the knife,” I thought.