In a glimmer, my occult research brain is back on, and a new avenue for divine relationship has opened up.
Some self-healing spell work for gathering strength and hope, both for a friendship that had gone south and a presentation on new research at Paganicon, was first in the form of a vigil candle with the Rider-Waite-Smith Strength card as the label; the image of the goddess in white with a lemniscate over her laurel-crowned head gently closing the mouth of the lion. An ancestor’s whisper said to tie a red thread around it to bless it, so I dug out the wrapped bundle of red wick I had laying among my candle working supplies and tied it around the candle as it burned.
When the strength candle burned out, the thread was subject to a slipknot spell I learned from Stacey of Axenthoff Thaid, then it was braided and tied around my wrist. I wore it for courage, for shielding, to keep evil eyes off, and to remind me why I had to do what I had to do.
It did help. Even though a conversation turned to confrontation, which buried a friendship until another season, maybe someday… and even with the rollicking fun and work that was Paganicon, with all the hundreds of people and energy throwing and magic and good booze and bad food — I got through it. But not without a loss, a hurt heart, a hangover, and another spiritual crash, tempered by readings and support from other rootworkers I trusted. My bus threw a wheel and I needed to stop for a bit. So I did.
The bus is another exercise with the Maeja women of FireHaven — our next phase in cleaning out our closets as changing women is a visualization where we go deep within and step into a bus that pulls up, which contains as passengers all those parts of ourselves we need to acknowledge and heal. We step off the bus with each one and ask them what they need to be whole, and tend to it.
Some of mine were expected: the young, beautiful flower child who assured me that my youth was not wasted, and it’s never too late to be sensuous and carefree; the angry, tattooed, mohawked teenager, armed with a stick and screaming about beating away anyone who would try to hurt me, who I thanked for keeping me safe, but assured her I’d take care now, to let me now find the love we both have been denied; and one unexpected rider. I stepped off the bus to wait for her. She was wrapped in a swirling, diaphanous red veil, eyes covered, moving very slowly, as if she was sick. I stepped up and extended my hand to help her off the bus; she took it and squeezed it. Her hand, and her whole body under the veil, was gaunt. She was starving.
She needed to be fed to be whole.
Another candle. Someone invisible – again – said, instead, look to the Thoth tarot for the image of Strength this time. Ah — but the Crowley-Harris “Strength” card is Lust. Babalon, riding the Beast, holding the holy grail of desire and rebirth… ohh… OK…
As I was searching online for a printable image of the Lust card I came across the scholarly work of and the book The Eloquent Blood by Manon Hedenberg White, which is her ethnographic tome on gender performativity and femininities re-engaged by practitioners of modern Thelema. Recalling what a gendered mess my own occult research was twenty-plus years ago, it was exciting to see a fresh burst of esotericism scholarship, aptly engaged by a new voice in the discourse arena of religions research. My brain did a big “yeah… about time…”, and as I read reviews and found Dr. White’s scholarly articles addressing her research on gender and Thelema, it also brought me to brought to me… tears. How much I missed the excitement of plunging into fieldwork, and the space and time to fill your life with your passions, scholastic and spiritual, really grabbed me at that moment. I didn’t fight it. I’m cut off from all the libraries I used to have access to now that I’m no longer faculty anywhere, but I’ll be getting my mitts on that book eventually. Like most first edition academic tomes, it’s too expensive to buy. And times are tight right now…
The red thread came off my wrist and I wrapped it around the candle again. Yes, I was alive when in ecstatic relationship, when in the throes of scholarship, never seeming to find the partner who could simultaneously desire me and respect me… I thought I’d met him fairly recently, but he crumpled under the weight of his own admitted fear. It’s always felt that my desire for love and my desire for success were opposed as I moved on from a passionless marriage in grad school, and moved through a series of relationships where the men I were involved with insisted on a tempering of one for the other, as a price to pay for companionship. So much time wasted. So much starving passion. And they left anyway once I began to take up space in their lives.
A couple of years back, my Fire Circle sister Stacey and I had dreams about volcanoes the same week. Mine was about walking toward the volcano in Iceland, where lots of locals were sitting around, camped out to watch the world being born again. As I approached a natural walkway to cross over a fissure of lava to move closer, a man walked up next to me, took my hand, and asked if he might walk with me. He was believably good looking, had sincere eyes, and I was hot and excited, so I said, “Sure!” Getting a thumbs up from my Fire Circle tribe — who suddenly appeared in the dream — we then walked over the fire, toward the mountain being born.
I’m here to find someone to walk over the fire with me, to something new, ecstatic, amazing. That’s why all this. Why all this.
I fight my feelings. I grow older. I wonder if he really exists.
Reading Dr. White’s work to this point has been a light in my own mind, a new path carved. The men of Thelema, not surprisingly, submit in sacred union to a whore goddess, a process replete with the baggage of cultural expectations of feminine sexuality and desire they carry. The ultimate goal for them through relationship with Babalon is to move beyond it all toward their own divinity and rebirth. The women of Thelema speak in Dr. White’s thesis of what it is to be Babalon, to claim that mantle of divine sexual urge, of the holy harlot, on their terms, free of the cultural collateral from both Crowley’s exegesis and decades of patriarchy floating in the air. It isn’t free of stumbles on the path, but often exploring these trips set for women, on the way to being fully liberated, yields treasure too.
I’m not sure what this candle lit for Babalon means yet to a Pagan Witch Doctor, scholar of occult studies, trained in Reiki, Buddhist meditation, and hoodoo rootwork, who does alchemy dancing and scream-singing to thunderous drumming around a fire for three nights. Crowley never scared me — he’s pretty hilarious, actually — and he was a pal while I was pushing through grad school. Ceremonial magic and lodge structures bore my cantankerous ass, and Thelema’s soteriology feels too simplistic and smells like old English privilege as described by Crowley. (That said, Gardner’s Wiccan soteriology and liturgy were also pretty simplistic — until his priestess initiates got ahold of it, reworded its Crowley-esque liturgy, and retooled it.) It appears in reading Dr. White’s work that Thelema is filled with fresh critical engagement by its adherents of a meaningful and exciting kind.
I honor orishas, gods, bodhisattvas, saints, ancestors, angels, and demons without initiation — my folk-religious soul can’t live in just one house. So I’m not surprised that Babalon has stepped into my house to be heard, consulted, honored, embodied. There’s a reason why she slowly came to me. Rather than try to anticipate what it is, I’m back to walking toward the volcano — this time, no tempering of passions, no compromises, no secrets and shame, no starving to make due.
So, the candle, the waiting for signs, the reading, the quiet… and the red thread is slipknot-spelled, braided, and tied around my wrist again. The offerings are wordless, but melodic and physical. The apologizing and beating myself up for desiring, over. This mystery will be revealed in its time.
And you should see us eat and drink together, She and I. I have a goddess, a divine harlot to keep healthy and fed.
To Don and Desiree: thank you for your Strength and shoulders at Paganicon.
To Mosska: thank you for your ears, support, and silence.
To the Maejas, Fire Circle sisters: back on the bus!
To Old Uncle Al: thanks for the vision. I’ll take it from here.
Rose in the Retort 