Brida: A Novel

by Paulo Coelho

  The Magus altered his state of consciousness. He looked again at the people gathered there, this time with a changed perception, and he could see a vast range of different-colored auras, all of them, though, were shifting closer to the color that would predominate that night.

  "Wicca really is an excellent Teacher," he thought again. "She works very fast." Soon all the auras, the energy vibrations that surround each physical body, would be vibrating as one. And then the second part of the ritual could begin.

  He looked to left and right and finally located the point of light. He decided to surprise her and approached without a sound.

  "Brida," he said.

  His Soul Mate turned around.

  "She's gone for a walk," a young man said politely.

  For a moment that seemed to last forever, the Magus looked at the man standing before him.

  "You must be the Magus that Brida has told me so much about," said Lorens. "Join us. She won't be long."

  But Brida was already there. She was standing opposite the two men, breathing hard, eyes wide.

  From the other side of the fire, the Magus sensed someone watching. He knew that look; it would not be able to see the points of light, because only Soul Mates could recognize each other, but it was a deep and ancient look, one that knew the Tradition of the Moon, and the hearts of men and women.

  The Magus turned and faced Wicca. She smiled at him from the other side of the fire--in a fraction of a second she had understood everything.

  Brida also had her eyes fixed on the Magus. They were alight with pleasure. He had come.

  "I'd like to introduce you to Lorens," she said. The party suddenly seemed like fun, and she no longer needed any explanations.

  The Magus was still in that altered state of consciousness. He saw Brida's aura rapidly changing and moving toward the color that Wicca had chosen. She was pleased and happy that he had come, and anything he said or did could so easily ruin her Initiation that night. He must, at all costs, control his feelings.

  "Pleased to meet you," he said to Lorens. "How about pouring me a glass of wine?"

  Lorens smiled and held out the bottle.

  "Welcome to the group," he said. "I'm sure you'll enjoy the party."

  Wicca looked away and gave a sigh of relief. Brida had noticed nothing. She was a good student, and Wicca would have been loath to remove her from that night's initiation ceremony because she had failed to take the simplest step of all, by not joining in with the general good cheer.

  "And he can take care of himself." The Magus had years of work and discipline behind him. He would be capable of keeping his feelings in check, long enough at least to replace those feelings with something else. She respected his hard work and his stubbornness, and felt slightly afraid of his immense power.

  She chatted with a few of the other guests but couldn't quite get over her surprise at what she'd just seen. So that was why he'd paid so much attention to Brida, who was, after all, a witch like any other witch who had spent various incarnations learning the Tradition of the Moon.

  Brida was his Soul Mate.

  "My feminine intuition clearly isn't working very well." She had imagined everything, except that most obvious of reasons. She consoled herself by thinking that at least the result of all her curiosity had been a positive one: it was the path chosen by God to enable her to rediscover her student.

  The Magus spotted someone he knew in the crowd and excused himself for a moment to go and speak to him. Brida was euphoric, enjoying his presence there beside her, but she felt it best to let him leave. Her feminine intuition was telling her that it was best if he and Lorens didn't spend too much time together; they might become friends, and when two men are in love with the same woman, it's better that they hate each other than that they become friends. Because, if that happened, she would end up losing them both.

  She looked at the people around the fire, and suddenly she felt like dancing, too. She asked Lorens to join her; he hesitated for a second, but then took courage and said yes. People were still spinning around and clapping, drinking wine, and beating out a rhythm on the empty wine bottles with sticks and keys. Whenever she danced past the Magus, he smiled and raised his glass to her. This was one of the best nights of her life.

  Wicca joined the circle of dancers, where everyone was feeling relaxed and happy. The guests, who had been rather anxious about what might happen and worried about what they might see, had now entered fully into the spirit of the night. Spring had arrived, and they needed to celebrate, to fill their souls with faith in future sunlit days, and forget as quickly as possible the gray evenings and lonely nights spent at home.

  The clapping grew louder, and now it was Wicca setting the rhythm. It was an insistent, regular rhythm. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the fire. No one was cold; it was as if summer had arrived already. The people around the fire began to take off their sweaters.

  "Let's sing!" said Wicca. She sang a simple two-verse song several times, and soon everyone was singing with her. A few people recognized it as a witches' mantra where what mattered was the sound of the words, not the meaning. It was the sound of union with the Gifts; and those endowed with magic vision--like the Magus and the other Teachers present--could see the filaments of light joining various people.

  Lorens eventually grew bored with the dancing and went to join the "musicians." Others moved away from the fire, some because they were tired and others because Wicca had asked them to help keep the rhythm going. Only the Initiates noticed what was happening, that the party was beginning to enter sacred territory. Very soon, the only people dancing around the fire were the women from the Tradition of the Moon and the witches who were to be initiated that night.

  Even Wicca's male students stopped dancing; the initiation ritual for the men was different and took place on a different date. What was turning and turning in the astral plane immediately above the fire was female energy, the energy of transformation. So it had been since time immemorial.

  Brida began to feel very hot. It couldn't be the wine, because she'd drunk very little. It was probably the flames from the fire. She had a great desire to take off her blouse, but she felt embarrassed, an embarrassment that gradually lost all meaning as she clapped and sang that simple song and danced around the fire. Her eyes were now fixed on the flames, and the world seemed less and less important; it was a feeling very similar to the one she'd experienced when the tarot cards had revealed themselves to her for the first time.

  "I'm going into a trance," she thought. "But so what? This party's fun!'

  "What strange music," Lorens was thinking as he kept time, beating the bottle. His ear, trained to listen to his own body, had noticed that the rhythm of the clapping and the sound of the words vibrated exactly in the middle of his chest, as happened when he heard the bass drum in a concert of classical music. The odd thing was that the rhythm also seemed to be dictating the beating of his heart.

  As Wicca quickened the pace, his heart beat faster, too. The same thing must be happening to everyone.

  "More blood is flowing to my brain," the scientific part of his mind told him. But he was part of a witches' ritual, and this was no time to be thinking such things; he could talk to Brida about it later.

  "I'm at a party and I want to have fun," he said out loud. Someone beside him cried: "Hear, hear!" and Wicca's clapping grew a little faster.

  "I'm free. I'm proud of my body because it's the manifestation of God in the visible world." The heat from the fire was becoming unbearable. The world seemed far away, and she no longer cared about superficial things. She was alive, the blood was coursing through her veins, and she was entirely given over, body and soul, to her search. Dancing around that fire was not new to her, for the rhythm awoke dormant memories of when she had been a Teacher of the Wisdom of Time. She wasn't alone, because that party was a reencounter with herself and with the Tradition she'd carried through many lives. She felt a profound respect for herself.

 
; She was once again in a body, and it was a beautiful body, one that had fought for millions of years to survive in a hostile world. It had lived in the sea, crawled upon the earth, climbed trees, walked on all fours, and was now proudly standing with its two feet on the ground. That body deserved respect for its long struggle. There were no beautiful or ugly bodies, because all had followed the same trajectory; all were the visible part of the soul they inhabited.

  She felt proud, deeply proud of her body.

  She took off her blouse.

  She wasn't wearing a bra, but that didn't matter. Yes, she was proud of her body, and no one could criticize her for that: even if she were seventy years old, she would still be proud of her body, because it was through her body that the soul could do its work.

  The other women around the fire did the same, and that didn't matter either.

  She unbuckled the belt on her trousers and finally stood there completely naked. She felt freer than at any other time in her entire life. There was no reason behind what she was doing; she was doing it simply because nakedness was the only way to show how free her soul was at that moment. It didn't matter that other people were there, clothed and watching, all she wished was that they could feel about their bodies as she felt about hers. She could dance freely, and nothing impeded her movements. Every atom of her body was touching the air, and the air was generous; it brought with it, from afar, secrets and perfumes to clothe her from head to toe.

  The men and the other guests beating the wine bottles noticed that the women around the fire were naked. They clapped or held hands and sang--sometimes softly and sometimes wildly. No one knew who was setting the rhythm, whether it was the people beating time on the bottles, the clapping, or the music. They all seemed aware of what was happening, but if, at that moment, one of them had been brave enough to break the rhythm, they could not have done so. At this point in the ritual, one of the Teacher's greatest problems was making sure that no one realized they were in a trance. They needed to feel that they were in control, even though they weren't. Wicca was not violating the one Law which, if broken, was punished by the Tradition with exceptional severity--manipulating the free will of others--because everyone there knew they were present at a witches' Sabbath, and, for witches, life means communion with the Universe.

  Later, when this night was just a memory, none of these people would tell what they had seen. There was no prohibition on doing so, but they all felt they were in the presence of a powerful force, a mysterious, sacred force so intense and implacable that no human being would dare to defy it.

  "Turn!" said the woman in the black, ankle-length dress. She was the only woman still fully clothed. All the others were naked as they danced and clapped and spun.

  A man placed a pile of dresses beside her. Three of them would be worn for the first time, and two were very similar in style. These were people with the same Gift, which took material form in the dress each woman had dreamed.

  There was no need for Wicca to clap now, for the others continued to do so, as if she were still keeping the beat.

  She knelt down, pressed her thumbs to her head, and began to work the Power.

  The Power of the Tradition of the Moon, the Wisdom of Time, was there. It was a highly dangerous Power, one that witches could only invoke once they had become Teachers. Wicca knew how to use it, but even so, she first asked for her Teacher's protection.

  In that power dwelled the Wisdom of Time. There was the Serpent, wise and masterful. Only the Virgin, by crushing the serpent's head beneath her heel, could subjugate it. And so Wicca prayed to the Virgin Mary as well, asking her for purity of soul, steadiness of hand, and the protection of her cloak, so that she could bring down that Power on the women before her, without it seducing or overwhelming any of them.

  With her face lifted to the sky, her voice steady and confident, she recited the words of St. Paul:

  "If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

  "Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.

  "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

  "And again, the Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.

  "Therefore, let no man glory in men. For all things are yours."

  With a few deft movements of her hand, Wicca slowed the rhythm of the clapping. The people beating on the wine bottles beat more slowly, and the women, too, began to spin and turn more slowly. Wicca was keeping the Power under control, and the whole orchestra had to work well, from the loudest horn to the quietest violin. To achieve this, she needed the assistance of the Power but without actually surrendering to it.

  She clapped her hands and made the necessary noises. Gradually, everyone stopped playing and dancing. The witches came over to Wicca and picked up their dresses--only three women remained naked. At that point, there had been an hour and twenty-eight minutes of continuous sound, and although all those present were in a state of altered consciousness, none of them, with the exception of the three naked women, had, for one moment, lost a sense of where they were or what they were doing.

  The three naked women, however, were still in a trance. Wicca held out her ritual dagger and directed all its concentrated energy at them.

  Their Gifts would soon become apparent. This was their way of serving the world; having walked long and tortuous paths, they had finally arrived. The world had tested them in every possible way, and they were worthy of what they had achieved. In daily life, they would continue to have their customary weaknesses and resentments, perform their usual small acts of kindness and of cruelty. The agony and the ecstasy would continue, as it would for everyone who is part of a world in a constant state of flux. However, at the appointed time, they would learn that each human being carries within them something far more important than their own self, namely, their particular Gift. For God placed in the hands of each and every person a Gift, the instrument He used to reveal Himself to the world and to help humanity. God chose human beings to be His helpers on Earth.

  Some came to understand their Gift through the Tradition of the Sun, others through the Tradition of the Moon, but all eventually learned what their Gift was, even if it took several incarnations to do so.

  Wicca stood by the great stone placed there by Celtic priests. The witches, in their black robes, formed a semicircle around her.

  She looked at the three naked women. Their eyes were shining. "Come here."

  The women walked into the middle of the semicircle. Wicca then asked them to lie facedown on the ground, with their arms outstretched to form a cross.

  The Magus watched Brida lie down on the ground. He tried to concentrate only on her aura, but he was a man, and a man always looks at a woman's body.

  He didn't want to remember. He didn't want to think about whether he was suffering or not. He was aware of only one thing--that his mission with his Soul Mate beside him was over.

  "It's a shame to have spent so little time with her." But he couldn't think like that. Somewhere in Time, they had shared the same body, felt the same pain, and been made happy by the same pleasures. Perhaps they had walked together through a forest similar to this and gazed up at the night sky where the same bright stars shone. He smiled at the thought of his Teacher, who had made him spend so long in the forest merely in order that he should understand his encounter with his Soul Mate.

  That was how things were in the Tradition of the Sun; each person was obliged to learn what he needed to learn and not merely what he wanted to learn. In his man-heart he would weep for a long time, but in his Magus-heart, he felt exultant and grateful to the forest.

  Wicca looked at the three women lying at her feet and gave thanks to God that she had been able to continue doing the same work throughout so many lives; the Tradition of the Moon was inexhaustible. The clear
ing in the wood had been consecrated by Celtic priests in a time now long forgotten, and little remained of their rituals, only perhaps the stone before which she was standing. It was a huge stone, so large it could not possibly have been transported there by human hands, but then the Ancients had known how to move such stones by magical means. They had built pyramids, observatories, and whole cities in the mountains of South America, using only the forces known to the Tradition of the Moon. Such knowledge was no longer needed by man and had been erased from Time so that it could not be turned to destructive ends. Nevertheless, out of pure curiosity, Wicca would like to have known how they had done it.

  There were a few Celtic spirits present, and she greeted them. They were teachers who had ceased being reincarnated and now formed part of Earth's secret government; without them, without the strength of their knowledge, the planet would long since have lost its way. Above the trees to the left of the clearing, these Celtic teachers were hovering in the air, astral bodies surrounded by an intense white light. Through the centuries, they had come there at every Equinox, to make sure that the Tradition was being maintained. Yes, said Wicca with a certain pride, the Equinoxes continued to be celebrated even after all Celtic culture had disappeared from the official History of the World. Because no one can destroy the Tradition of the Moon, only the Hand of God.

  She observed the priests for a while longer. What would they make of people today? Did they feel a nostalgia for the days when they used to come to this place and when contact with God seemed simpler and more direct? Wicca thought not, and her instinct was confirmed. The garden of God was being constructed out of human emotions, and for this to happen, people had to live a long time, in different ages, often adopting very different customs. As in the rest of the Universe, man was following his evolutionary path, and each day he was better than on the previous day, even if he forgot the previous day's lessons, even if he complained, claiming that life was unfair.

  Because the Kingdom of Heaven is like the seed that a man plants in a field; he sleeps and wakes, day and night, and the seed grows even though he knows not how. These lessons were engraved on the Soul of the World and existed for the benefit of all humanity. It was important that there were still people like those present at the ceremony, people who were not afraid of the Dark Night of the Soul, as wise St. John of the Cross had described it. Each step, each act of faith, redeemed the whole human race anew. As long as there were people who knew that, in God's eyes, all of man's wisdom was madness, the world would continue along the path of light.