A Love Letter to Initiation

I am down in the sea, scrambling over rocks, washing my hands in the crashing waves while crabs manoeuvre around me and dance perpetually with the waves. We are in Gadigal and Bidjigal Country with the cliffs, slightly north of the original site of British invasion into sovereign Aboriginal Land. We are just north of so-called Botany Bay who was named and claimed by Captain James Cook, who met his death at the hands of enraged Indigenous Hawaiian peoples several years after he completed his expedition along the east coast of Australia. Whenever I am down at these cliffs - wandering, reflecting, meditating, aligning, singing with the spirits - I think of how the First Fleet, the ships filled with convicts from Britain and Ireland - would have sailed north on their way to Warrane, the place Captain Arthur Phillip then named Sydney Cove after the man who devised the plan to send convicts here.

All of this swirls through my attention as I begin to breathe with the Four Kin - this is one of the names Wildwood witches give to four great families of mystery and spirit. Black spirits and white, red spirits and green - gather, gather, gather to be seen… I am being breathed by these mysteries as I ascend the rocks back to where my friend is. He has been an aspirant of the Wildwood for nearly two years, a Tradition I guard and love. He may be my last student in this Tradition - in this way - for many years.

I ask if he’s feeling aligned and grounded and I notice he closes his eyes to affirm if this is so and I take the time to do the same. We have acknowledged the Law and Sovereignty of this Aboriginal Land and we have grounded ourselves here, drunk of the power here, and aligned our souls through our cauldrons, through the realms, breathing blessings and acknowledgement to our Ancestors of Blood, the Ancestors of Land, and the Mighty Dead. This is one of the first things we passed to this aspirant, to most aspirants. He had learnt it in several classes and courses in the years we’ve known him, but after he formally aspired to the Wildwood, we went back in, slowly and more gradually this time, and constantly returned to these cauldrons of hip, heart, and head, and the three realms of Land, Sky, and Sea, and how they flower within us as Souls vibrating with Ancestors.

We now sing to St Brigid, the Saint and Mysterious One, a Goddess, who our branch of the Tradition enshrines as especially sacred. She, for us, comes not only to sain - bless, protect, make hallowed - our space, but She is also the lover of Our Lady, the midwife of Our Prince, and the witness to the seasons, the kin, the directions, the worlds. She is the great and wise judge under the Tree, by the Well, in the Forge. We sing and chant to Her, offering water, smoke, candle flame, and hearts opened in devotion, so that She may come among us and cover us with Her sacred mantle. We do this before casting the Circle because our Circle is not a protection device but an orientation to the Infinite and anchoring and blossoming of this no-place-every-place here and now.

Brigid holds the House, She holds our House of Witches and many of our Tradition are deeply dedicated to Her. We sing to Her often.

We begin to chant the powerful words that open us to the sacred, that merge us with the Infinite, the Here and Now. We chant the words that gather and concentrate power in this place.
We weave the Wyrd of Wildwood
The Ancient Place where stones once stood…
We chant the words through three times as we spiral and spiral. We seal the words in the same way each time. Words I inherited from a witch I knew when I was a teenager, a witch of Italian and Scottish heritage who had studied with a Druid priestess and is still one of the most potent spirit-workers I have ever encountered.

The Circle is the Compass is the Crossroads for our kind. So we whisper certain other words and orient in other ways. We turn out and we open ourselves to the Guardian Beasts of our Covenant, but as we do this we name the Guardians of this Place too…

Horned Owl, genderless one, emissary of Air, across this Great Ocean, from the Rising Sun, down the road who is red with shining blood, we greet you. Nankeen Kestrel, White-Bellied Sea Eagle, Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo, Mighty Ones of this Place - Peace, Praise, and Power to you all!

All the Guardian Beasts are invoked and our Circle is strengthened with their presence. It vibrates now, it is thrumming with power. Now we acknowledge and affirms ourselves as Ara, the First Witch. In other rituals this may have come while we were aligning, or right after the Circle was cast, or perhaps at the very culmination of all the invocations… but most regularly these days I call to Her after the Guardians.

And now as Ara - as the First Witch - we call to the Witch-Wreathed Gods we know as the Sacred Four. Our Tradition is filled to overflowing with inspired and powerful songs and chants to these Spirits. Sometimes we are silent and we make gestures, or we might dance Them in, or we might start drumming and trance or fly into the Wildwood - the witch’s forest - and greet Them there. But today we sing to them and we invoke them with inspired words. It is a rare day indeed in which we invoke them with words written on paper. These Gods are the heart of our Tradition. Those of us who aspire to the Wildwood and who decide to enter the Rose House or Inner Court of our Covenant will meet Them over and over, will be transformed by Them deeply… the Grandmother Weaver, the Grandfather Green, the Lady, the Prince of Paradise… these Powers, Spirits, Mysteries are who initiate us into the Craft. We use the term dedication for our primary initiation rite because we are dedicated in relationship with Them.

Magic unfolds.

We are there with the wind and the sun and the waves… this may be my last Wildwood student for many years. We walk back to my home a different way, more in the shade, and we go to a community garden full of herbs and plants and talk about wort-cunning and plant lore. The learning never ends. This is why years ago I stopped calling these meetings ‘lessons’ because I no longer wanted to think of it that way, so I began calling them convergences instead. We converge and things happen, what is real or most necessary comes forth, and the skilful teacher can weave in the lore, mythos, technique, and story of Our Craft through and with the blood and breath of our lives.

I have stood in the Circle of Art where the three worlds meet for over fifty witches for our Rite of Dedication and for twenty for the Firebrand Initiation in the Wildwood. Not all of these witches have been my direct students or initiates per se, but I have had something to do with each of their learning or growth in this Tradition I love or else I would not have been invited or come. I have stood in the Circle with my own initiates on hills and in forests in other lands while they conduct (and are conducted by the Gods and Spirits) the initiation rites for their students… these times have been immensely sacred to me. To witness what I have passed and received be passed on so beautifully, fiercely, tenderly, joyously, respectfully.

I am 35 as I write these words, but to already have been present in so many rites of initiation in one Tradition, let alone within my other Traditions, has revealed to me that somehow - for now - this is where I am at. I have had the most energy I will likely ever have over the past two decades and I have spent those two decades travelling countries and continents loving and living the Craft. I hope to continue to do this, but I notice I’m a little more tired each time. One of my own initiators remarked to me that 35 is when the chi begins to wane in Traditional Chinese Medicine terms. My housemate mentioned to me that I seem shocked at how I need to sleep so long after getting back from a trip, and we both remark that yes, mid-30s is different to mid-20s. I am aware at the irony of this as so many of my own mentors and initiators are a couple or several decades older than me and do so much. And some of them have died. And we really never know when death will come for us. When I was an adolescent I used to feel this intense feeling of ‘running out of time’… I felt I must do what I have come to do now. I took a lot of risks back then that have catalysed my life, that have me writing these words.

I think of how each person I help to mentor, provoke, challenge, invite, and initiate into the Witch’s House is a gift to that House, to that Tradition, to that Covenant. I learnt that phrase and thinking - gift to the Tradition - from Cholla, a witch and elder I hold very dearly. It also makes me want to be a gift to the House and the Tradition too. I have helped to mentor and initiate people who I have felt deeply disrespected and betrayed by, who have trashed the House and tried to tear it the ground, but vastly the people I have helped to bring in, who have helped to bring me ever more deeply into the Mystery of the Craft I love, have been the kindest and most fiercest of people. We are full of foibles and we may mistakes, but in the muck of that are the jewels revealed.

The words we speak in the Rites of Initiation are the most sacred to me. They are the words I try to live my life by. They are the words that reverberate through all realms for me, the holy names that ground and find me when I feel lost and scattered, these are the people I will always be able to trust and turn to. But this work is the work - to borrow my beloved Pandora’s reflections on Iron and Pearl Pentacles - of lifetimes and I must turn up to the work-play-love of it all through the cycles and seasons of oy my life. And with many lives with mine. In time, by need, and through holy desire, is it done.

Though the magic of Initiation may be harrowing and unravel us to our core, it is the most fierce and fruitful of magics I know. Hail to the Mighty Dead who have watered these thorny roads with their tears and blood, who have passed onto us the secret ways where we might meet Mystery, and who gather still at our love-filled rites to pass the power and wake the blood.

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