The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  She has known you all your life; she knows that you have a spark, that you have what it takes to pursue this mystery. Find the spark of will and courage inside, and feed the flame. When you feel your will and courage burning brightly, thank her and say good-bye, knowing that she is always here for you, and you can return at will. Return up the seven steps and out of the Castle of Family Secrets. Reverse the induction, and allow yourself to return to normal consciousness. Take your time, making sure you and your friends are all the way back. Share some food, and take time to discuss your experience and write about it in your Book of Shadows. Only when you are completely ready, open the circle.

  Exercise: Walking Away from the Old Castle

  Now you have discovered a mysterious question about your own inner life. With the help of the old nurse, you have found the courage to pursue it. It’s time to make a break with the past and begin a new cycle in your own life story. Since a Witch’s altar reflects her own inner landscape, it’s time to do a bit of altar magic.

  Set aside some undisturbed time for yourself, and create sacred space at your altar. If you are working in circle, your circle may already be keeping an altar together. If not, now is an opportunity to build an altar together as you work through the story of the Twelve Wild Swans.

  If your altar is at all like mine, it is likely to be full of bits of old magic: the candle holder with traces of wax from a candle I burned for a friend’s healing, a moving bit of poetry I copied, a dry, faded flower from a meditative walk, a once-beautiful piece of fruit I offered to the Goddess.

  Take the time to clean your altar thoroughly. Wash the altar cloths, clean the candleholders with hot water and salt, dispose properly of old spells, wash your magical tools, and create some fresh space for yourself. Dress some new candles, of a color that pleases you, to burn for your new project of self-healing. Place your notes, drawings, and objects from the exercises in this chapter on your fresh, clean altar, light your candles, and sit quietly. Breathe in the circle of your own living warmth, your courage. Breathe in your commitment to yourself—and to your circle sisters, if you are working in a group. Breathe in your openness to your own mysteries. When you are ready, open the circle.

  Searching for What Was Lost

  Now Rose knows her task: she must find her brothers and break the spell. They have flown into the wild, and she must pull them back into human form. She has gained the courage to take the first step, which is always the hardest one. She walks away from her old life.

  Just like Rose, we have also found our task. Using Rose’s story to guide us, we will search for what we have lost. Something of ourselves has flown into the wild, through no fault of our own. We must search for it and pull it back into our human lives. It is hiding behind our own veils, but it still calls out to us in the disturbing dream or divination image, or the mysterious gesture or sensation we have chosen to investigate. And as we search for what we have lost, we will learn some magical practices that will serve us well if we choose to lead a Witch’s life and seek to know and love ourselves. We choose to commit ourselves to our own healing, to our own wholeness, because a healthy priestess makes all things whole and because this is part of the Goddess’s charge to us: “If that which you seek, you find not in yourself, you will never find it without. For behold! I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.” (Charge of the Goddess, Spiral Dance, p. 90)

  The Outer Path

  In our fairy tale, Rose sets off on a quest to redeem her brothers. Something is very wrong in her world, and she decides to change it. In doing so, she becomes a priestess, one who takes on responsibility not just for her own spiritual well-being, but for the well-being of others.

  The Outer Path takes Rose’s story as a framework for offering the tools and skills we need to foster community, to create public ritual, and to teach ritual skills. The lessons we learn in our magical growth infuse our activism, so that when we write a letter to an elected official, or serve food to the homeless, or facilitate a meeting, or plant the garden, or sit down and link arms at a blockade, we are consciously and intentionally doing magic, with all our allies in all the worlds acting with us.

  While the Inner Path is about self-transformation, the Outer Path is about world transformation. In the Reclaiming Principles of Unity, we say that “everyone can do the life-changing, world-renewing work of magic.” As we become empowered to change our own lives, we become conduits of the great healing powers that will be needed to restore the living diversity of the earth. Our awakened creativity can renew the vitality of our communities; our sheer hard work can make our visions real.

  Our story offers a deep challenge for those of us following the Outer Path. How do we take on appropriate responsibility for healing ills we did not create? How do we come to terms with the mixed inheritance from our families and our ancestors? In the Inner Path, we worked with these questions from a personal and individual perspective. Now we must look at them from the perspective of a community leader, of an activist.

  The Dalai Lama, in his 1999 address to the World Conference of Religions, said, “It’s not enough to pray and meditate; you must act if you want to see results.” Rose doesn’t just pray about the fate of her brothers; she sets out to free them. Like Rose, we are called to offer real service to others, to the Goddess. That service may take many forms: mopping the floor after the party, priestessing rituals, healing, planning, teaching, carrying the heavy cauldron from the car, sitting with a dying friend, writing up the minutes for a neighborhood meeting, organizing a protest to protect a sacred place from development, writing letters to Congress, training others in nonviolent civil disobedience, growing food, or changing the baby’s diapers. All of these can be life-changing, world-renewing acts of magic.

  Years ago, I spoke on a panel with a Native American woman named Inez Talamantes. She said something I’ve never forgotten: “In our tradition, if you have a vision of a Goddess, if you dream of her, it means you have to work for her for the rest of your life.” A dream, a vision, an insight, has power because we take it into action and do the work that is needed to serve the cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. Aligned with those cycles, our own lives become filled with rich experiences and deep meaning. It was said of the Goddess Isis in ancient times: “Her service is perfect freedom.” Freedom may not be the word that leaps to mind when you’re pushing the broom at 1 A.M. after the ritual or trying to stay calm at the demonstration while the riot cops prepare to drag you away. The Goddess’s service is not free from discomfort, inconvenience, even sacrifice. But we are sustained by a deeper sense of freedom: the joy of acting in accordance with our deepest ideals.

  The service we offer to others emerges out of our own growth and empowerment. In the Elements Path, we are introduced to the world of magic. We learn to tap the rich creative sources we each carry within. As we move deeper into the practice of magic, the world we inhabit becomes infused by great life-sustaining powers. We become creatures of air and fire, water and earth, attuned to the wild, alive to our own erotic connection to all of life. Our ears begin to open to the great conversation around us, through which all of life communicates with itself.

  As we work the Inner Path, the healing path, we begin to close the wounds that have kept us less than fully alive. Our sense of personal power and efficacy grows stronger. We no longer believe that we deserve pain or humiliation. And as our sense of interconnectedness deepens, we no longer believe that anyone deserves pain or humiliation.

  The practice of magic may make us less comfortable. When we come alive to the mythic dimensions of our lives, we may find it intolerable to go to work every day at a job where our boss regularly humiliates us. When we know, with the deepest fiber of our being, that all of us are interconnected, we cannot pass by the homeless beggar undisturbed. When our blood is alive and singing with the sound of the wind in the forests, we can’t be complacent about the clear-cutting of the trees. And when we’ve ta
sted the communion of the circle, the ecstasy of raising power together as a group and feeling love and support and appreciation surrounding us, we cannot settle for isolation and alienation as our daily fare.

  Why, you might ask, would we want to do this to ourselves? Why make ourselves uncomfortable, dissatisfied with what is? Magic is our birthright: to know nature unsubjugated, to live fully from our depths, to be enfolded in the embrace of a nurturing community. We can’t just settle for what is; like Rose, we claim our right to determine what will be.

  Changing the world is a big job—too big for any of us to tackle alone. The big issues of injustice, inequality, and the destruction of life around us are collectively created, and it is only collectively that they can effectively be addressed. To become world shapers, earth healers, we need the support of a community. The tools, exercises, and rituals of the Outer Path focus on creating, developing, and nurturing magical community.

  A guiding value of Witchcraft is that each of us carries the responsibility for guiding and shaping our communities. Traditionally, every Witch is a priestess or priest, an empowered leader, an active cocreator of our spiritual lives. In the Outer Path, we take on the responsibility of becoming leaders, priestesses, and healers in our communities.

  We call this the Outer Path because this work requires putting your attention and focus outside yourself for a time, as we must when leading rituals, teaching, facilitating meetings, or taking on any of the roles that indicate leadership in a community. You don’t have to be a Great High Priestess to do Outer Path work; you simply need the desire to make it happen, a sense of integrity and honesty, and a good dosage of basic human kindness and compassion.

  In hierarchical groups, leadership roles are often the occasion for someone to be the boss or the star. The group may focus on the personality, desires, and vision of the leader. In contrast, our vision of leadership is service.

  Being a priestess of the Goddess, we often say, is a lot like being a waitress of the Goddess. When you work as a waitress, you serve up the meal for the diners, setting the stage with china and cutlery, bringing on each course in turn, paying attention to whether or not they’re enjoying the fare and to when they’ve finished the appetizer and are ready for the entree. At the end, you take away each dish you set out. As a priestess, you also set the stage for the ritual with altars and tools, “serve up” each phase of the ceremony, paying attention to the timing of each part, the attention level of the participants, and their readiness for the next movement. To end the ritual, you must clear away the energies you’ve brought in, and many a priestess has finished a night of ritual by packing away the altar tools and sweeping the floor with her Witch’s broom.

  A good waitress can make a meal smooth and enjoyable—but the experience of the meal is not about the waitress. The focus of ritual is on the spiritual food: the work, the magic, the Goddess—not the server. Of course, the server needs to get fed, and in Reclaiming rituals when we are priestessing we may also help choose the menus, cook a dish or two, present the courses, and sit down and eat along with everybody else. But still the focus remains on the work, not the priestess.

  We need to have done some of our own healing before we take on the work of serving others. If we’re so wounded we’re bleeding all over the tablecloth, the meal may be not only unpleasant but even dangerous to the diners. The work of personal healing may be a lifelong task. We don’t need to be completely done with it; if we did, none of us would be teaching. As Hilary says in the introduction to the Inner Path, part of our gift to our students is our willingness, as teachers, to go through a healing process together. But we do need to be far enough along so that we can comfortably set our focus outside ourselves and our own needs. If our healing becomes the major issue in a class, or if we are teaching to satisfy our own needs for approval, admiration, or support, something is wrong. Yes, praise and support feel good, and we need to be able to take them in, but we also need to have other ongoing sources of esteem in our lives beyond our students.

  As our personal power grows and we direct our efforts at the world around us, we become agents of change. The good we do is amplified, but the mistakes we make will reverberate far beyond us.

  In fact, our story begins with the consequences of a magical mistake: the ill wish of the queen. The world we live in today is also full of the results of ill wishes, unbalanced desires, and thoughtless programs. To heal that world, we must be capable of seeing far-reaching consequences, of setting aside our whims of the moment and looking at the needs of the whole. Yet none of us are all-seeing wise elders or selfless saints. We each have our full human share of blind spots, illusions, arrogance, and self-interest. How do we presume to become teachers and leaders of others?

  We can walk with integrity upon the Outer Path only if we are willing to deepen our inner work. Before we can delve into the material our story presents, we need something that can serve as an anchor to our true worth. We must deepen the daily practices we have already developed and strengthen our sources of energy and nourishment. But we also need some specific tools to keep us sane and grounded as we take our magic out into the world.

  The following practice is the one with which I begin any program of advanced magical training. I use it myself on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, and it is a key exercise that we will refer back to many times in this book.

  Anchoring to Core Worth

  When we begin our magical training, we are often exhilarated to discover that the range of human consciousness is far broader than our culture has led us to believe. As our skills advance, we must first learn to recognize the psychic/emotional states we tend to fall into, and then learn how to make choices about them.

  Anchoring is one of the key “magic tricks” we use for moving in and out of particular states at will. We first use a meditation or physical exercise to evoke a particular state of consciousness, and then create a visual image, a word or phrase we can say, and a gesture or place on our body we can touch to associate with that state. Anchoring is a concept used in hypnosis, but it is a far older technique. In fact, it is key to the effectiveness of much ritual, particularly of those parts of ritual that are repeated. If we always use the same words to end a ritual, they become an anchor to the shift in consciousness we make when we leave sacred space and return to ordinary space and time. If we use the same grounding meditation again and again, in time just a breath and a memory of the image will ground us.

  Bringing in three different sensory modes means we are speaking three different dialects that Younger Self understands. Some of us respond more powerfully to visual images; others are more kinesthetic or more auditory in the way we take in the world. When we lead an anchoring exercise for a group, we incorporate all three modes so that everyone, regardless of their sensory orientation, will find the exercise effective. Often an anchor works most powerfully through a sense that is not our primary mode of experiencing the world. A highly verbal person may find that touch shifts consciousness better than words; a visual person may find that a magic word or rhyme works best.

  The other key concept in this practice is the idea of our core worth. In the Goddess tradition, each one of us is valued simply for being who we are. Core value is not something we have to acquire, achieve, or prove. It cannot be ranked, and no one has more of it than anyone else. We may make mistakes or commit wrong acts, but we still are creatures of worth, part of a larger whole. This recognition of the inherent value of every being is the foundation of our nonhierarchical tradition. We try to teach, work, and plan in ways that honor the core worth of every person involved.

  When we are in touch with our core worth, we are firmly grounded in our own inherent value as human beings who are part of the living Goddess. We are in “neutral” —relaxed, at ease, comfortably ourselves, not trying to impress anybody or project any image of who we are.

  In our larger society, we often expect leaders, teachers, or celebrities to come from a place of self-inflation, to pro
ject a strong image that may or may not reflect a core reality. Our politicians spend millions of dollars on image creation: our entire advertising industry is based on “selling the sizzle, not the steak.”

  Think of inflation as “false glory,” the consolation prize we are offered in systems of domination when our true worth has been taken from us. The flip side of inflation is deflation and self-hate.

  The more we grow in personal power, the more strongly our state of being impacts those around us. Just as the queen’s ill wish affected her universe, our own energetic state sets a tone that creates a resonance in each person we encounter. If we are inflated, other people respond unconsciously by puffing up, contracting down, or simply resisting our control. If we are deflated, others may shield themselves to protect their energies from being drained, or respond with boredom or with irritation. And so, in teaching, leading, and priestessing, we try to avoid inflation or deflation and remain connected to our core worth.

  Whenever we step out on the Outer Path, whether as a writer of books or a teacher of small classes in our living rooms, we open ourselves to the force of others’ projections. A strong anchor and a deep sense of our core worth can help us stay grounded and centered regardless of how others perceive us.

  In this exercise, we will create an anchor to our core worth and then explore our own images of inflation and deflation, using our anchor to bring us back.

  In sacred space, sit, stand, or lie in a relaxed position. Breathe deeply, and let yourself think of the times and places in which you feel most relaxed, most yourself, when you are in touch with your inner power but don’t need to use it, when you can truly let your hair down and just be who you are. Pick one situation, one place, and slowly let it fill your awareness. How does the air feel on your skin here? What do you smell and taste? What do you hear? What do you see around you? How do you feel in your body? How are you holding your body, and where is your breath coming from? Make this situation, this state of being, as real as you can.