Initiation. Again. x
We are in the car, four of us, on the way to a mountain. Each of us carrying masks, ready to offer them up and lay them aside. Each of us having prepared for months - for our lives it seems to me - to have been brought to this moment, to this mountain, to recognise who we really are and come home to a primordial covenant we know. In the depth of our bones and blood, we know this.
Initiation in witchcraft is a feast of perils, a forest of enchantments broken and sealed… a profound challenging of the core of our being, an invocation of that core into more powerful-beautiful expression in the worlds. Initiation in the Craft can be healing-work, soul-retrieval; a reclaiming and honouring of so much we may have thought we’d lost. A witch is a witch is a witch; and initiation at the hands of the spirits and living human witches, bound by threads of fate, lineage, tradition, and lore, may be part of our fates as well.
I’m in a field in high summer in Somerset. I am walking the land before I am taken to Glastonbury Tor to spend hours before they come again. It will be a whole decade since the near Faerie abduction at the Tor in 2008. I am here, six months after my Saturn Return has wrapped up, for initiation into the Anderson Feri Tradition at the hands of two initiates. One who lives here in Somerset and one who has flown from the west coast of the so-called USA. I am making offerings to a number of Spirits. I am communing with my faerie lover, my fetch-mate, and asking him how he feels about this. I have umm’d and ahh’d about this for seven years. He offers his assent to this and reminds me of certain visions and threshold-points, granting me access to even more mystical perspective.
Initiation may tie us to lineages of humans, dead and living; it may mean we are now related to a whole group of irascible, frail, loving, well-intentioned, annoying, skilful humans. Some people believe this is not the point, that it is not the reason for the initiation, nor the magic of it. Perhaps I am too much of a relational-liver, too collectivist, but I don’t believe this at all. It’s all so connected and my experience of human communities and traditions filled with human initiates, deeply affects, impacts my experience of those traditions as well. At the same time, what often helps me to remain alive and dynamic in the work of a Witch Tradition is that it is not only the human people; it is also the Lore, the Mythos, the Spirits, the Powers, the Wonder and Mystery of the Initiatory Current. There will always be conflict and crunchiness, there will always be shadows and frustrations, but there will always be softness, delight, pleasure, and fierce love as well. It’s all mixed in the same cauldron.
Two years before my Feri initiation, I am in Ramaytush-Ohlone lands. I am in so-called San Francisco for the seventh time. I have spent quite a bit of time here accumulatively over these cycles and seasons. I am here in September, one of the best months to be in San Francisco. It’s finally warm and there are sunny days; there’s a joke, often attributed to Mark Twain, that the coldest winter I ever spent, was a summer in San Francisco. I am sent out through the city on the day of my initiation. I have no knowledge of what is to come. I have been initiated into the Mysteries of two potent Witch Houses in my life already: Wildwood and Anderean Craft. Years have passed. Six years ago I realised I was and am a Reclaiming witch. I didn’t look for this, I didn’t realise there was a whole clamorous-activist-poetical-mystical-mythic network of witches out there who I’d feel this connection with. I have spent the past three and a half years inside the Reclaiming initiation process. I have changed. I moved to Bali for two years and moved back to Australia - to a new city - in that time. I surfaced out of a divorce and entered a new romantic relationship in this time. I have found myself a new being, different from before. I am changing.
Initiation is the crooked road I wander; it is the spiral-path of labyrinths that takes me deeper into the nature of reality, into my self, into powerful relationships with Gods, Ancestors, Spirits, and Legend. I am a fallen-in-love one. I am one of the faerie people. I am dead and alive. I am betwixt and between. I am a moving-wandering door to the Wildwood. Because I travel continents and landscapes - through land, sky, and sea - and share and teach ecstatic spirit-work and witchcraft, I meet people. Over the years I realise I have become a crossroads key-keeper - I am a worker with Hekate after all - and I join people together. Many people have later told me my introducing certain folks at specific times ended up catalysing the formation of groups or the creation of events that have had even further affects. This continues to happen. I have a magic of linking things together, of helping to call back old-lost-stolen things and re-weaving them into the world with the help of others. I am a child of Persephone and a lover of Hermes, we always return. We know the ways.
I have stood inside this eternal ritual - happening outside of time and space - many, many times. When I count, it’s over fifty. I know this rite like I know a lover, a best friend, a dance, a story. I know how the words sound and the gestures crackle. I know the feelings and sensations well. I know that this person kneeling here at the edge of what they are about to remember and become, is in a profound state of awe, stillness, fierce love, and determination. But I know that when they are brought to stand, when they cross over through the gate of paradise, they will and must surrender. They must trust us now, since we trusted them enough to speak the Holy Words over their heads even before they came into the Circle. We wouldn’t do that unless we love you, unless we know that you are one with us already. One with the old covens from the old places, one with the shipwrecks and the shining islands rising from the mist. One with the Witch Gods and the Serpents who are creation. One with the first coven and company from the well of the Woods.
In the depths of these forests of the heart (to borrow the title of a book* I loved as a teen) are undying truths. Truths that teach us about love and wisdom. In the Wildwood we often pray to, commune with, initiate by these three things, three gifts of the Lady: Love, Truth, Wisdom. Sometimes we say that they reveal the blossoming of the Beauty that is the Terrible Beingness of All Things. These are the laws of Our Lady, Rosy Crescent-Crowned Goddess of Witches. These truths have taught me about the nature of truthfulness, the power of friendship, the promise of agency, the fierceness of presence, the humility of honour, the courage of cunning, and the need for vivacity. All of this teaches me about the art of initiation.
For if I am to come close to you and share your eyes and ears, and feel our hearts beat against each other. If I am to know the same mystery of the sweet kiss of the knife and what lays behind the wheel of stars. If I am to kneel and rise and promise myself as priestess to the peoples, then I must know that initiation is completely inevitable and completely hidden. It is neither what we were looking for and yet the treasures are infinite. If one is to come through the gates and be witnessed and bear witness to themself in holy and incalculable, ineffable power and truth, then one will be irrevocably altered. One will be ground down to to the finest grain - hopefully to pass through the eye of that needle into forests and seas filled with stars and wonders. And there will be blasted heaths and deserts in which we will feel heartsick and lonely. And there will be the crumbled ruins of what once was, where hopelessness and loathing reigns. And there will be all that a human can feel and conjure. But by your marking - our gnosis - may the wastelands become green once more. May the power of the Witch who stalks the darkness and sings flowers to burst open, rivers to return, and moons down from the heavens, be the promise of how we may come back to ourselves and make the magic that changes things. Again.
*Forests of the Heart, Charles de Lint.
