Witches of America, page 13
I ask Karina what this first “cycle” of training will entail. This phase, she explains, will be about clearing out, cleansing, setting the table for a long-term witchcraft practice. (Much of her approach, especially this early on, could be applied to starting out in other Craft traditions.) She reminds me that Victor and Cora gave different lessons and tools to each of their students, based on a sense of their individual needs. “It’s not a cookie-cutter tradition.” The goal is to “bring the student to herself,” to help me see clearly what my personal advantages and obstacles are—all psychological, of course—and how they’ll help or undermine my magic. “One of the things Feri asks us over and over is ‘Who are you, who are you, who are you?’” she says. “We examine the blocks inside you that hold memory and determine our behavior. We start clearing those out—the things that derail us—so we can start making choices that were not implanted in us by people who were stronger than us when we were little.” The objective of Cycle One, therefore, is to “become self-aware”—a goal some people spend four sessions of therapy a week for years trying to accomplish. I may have just enlisted for therapy through witchcraft.
I tell Karina that I’m already conscious of one mental block. I know that I’m drawn to ritual and the high-mass mystery of spellwork—but I’ve only begun to grasp the religious side to the Craft. Who is this Goddess to me? Do I have a bona fide relationship to her, not to mention the other categories of deities in this many-pronged system of gods of this-or-that? And does this all presume that I have an unshakable belief in any kind of supernatural being? I know I believe in something greater than the sum of our quotidian business, but, as I wrote to Morpheus, I do not think that “something” is embodied by a woman in white, flowing robes: to me, that image belongs to the hippies on the Pagan scene, more seventies Stevie Nicks than Creatrix of the Universe. As I discovered in Illinois, right now I cannot imagine growing closer to that woman, that idea—I can only hope there’s an incarnation of her that I can relate to.
Karina sort of phone-shrugs at this. “What we’re doing is realizing our own divine nature,” she says, and quotes Victor Anderson: “‘God is self and self is God and God is a person like myself.’ So when we commune with the gods we can commune with them as peers.” I tell her this reminds me of reading the Greek and Roman myths when I was a young girl: I was struck by how like humans their gods and goddesses were, with their petty jealousies and ranting and raging. “We’re not meant to revere them as beings without fault,” Karina says, “but to see that they’re no different than we are, and not to martyr ourselves to what they are.” Besides, there’s no rush: in Cycle One, the cleansing and self-awareness comes first, only then to be followed by “working” with deities. Because this easy relationship to the gods (assuming you can subscribe to their existence) requires a lot of sweat. You have to clear up your own issues so that you don’t bring a lot of baggage or presumptions—most likely from the religious system you were raised within—into your Craft practice. Again with the psych talk: you have to get past “false beliefs” in order to avoid having an unhealthy, “codependent” relationship with your gods.
In trying to suss out what our teacher-student dynamic will be, Karina asks how old I am, and I tell her: thirty-four. “That’s a great age for this work,” she says. “In our culture, we don’t even get to be grown-ups until we’re thirty. You’ve lived enough life; you’re not going to argue with me like I’m your mommy, like twenty-two-to-twenty-seven-year-olds do. The unresolved mommy struggles get projected onto me, and I hate that. I have my own kids, and you can’t pay me enough!” She laughs hard.
As we continue talking, for forty minutes or so, we both let our guards down a bit; she lets herself curse when the urge strikes her, and I’m relieved. She’s a straight talker, and she finds parts of this woo-woo witchcraft talk as funny as I do. I’m learning that anyone who cannot laugh about lofty spiritual talk is not someone I can relate to or fully trust. Besides, I like the sound of her voice, and I can tell she’s a tough woman: the only disposition I would accept in a teacher.
Decided, I tell Karina that I will start my training next week. I have found myself a mentor in witchcraft.
One topic I deliberately did not bring up in this first talk with Karina—it would have been wildly premature—is my fantasy of Feri initiation. At this point, I know only what Morpheus has told me about her own experience, and maybe it’s immature of me, but I want to know what she knows. The climactic moment involves the whispering in your ear of the true name, the unpronounceable name, of the Goddess. (Is it whispered? That’s how I imagine it.) At first this did not sound like a big deal—it’s just a word. But, thinking more about it, imagining that precise moment, I see the magnitude of finally hearing a name that only a very small, select number of people on the planet know. A single word you are meant to contain inside of yourself, to whisper inside your head, to dare pronounce out loud only in the most intimate circle—a circle that likely doesn’t include even your closest friends or family—for the rest of your life. This is how a mystery tradition treats language: as a secret to be experienced, not merely repeated to others like an instruction manual or facts laid out on a Wikipedia page. And what’s more important, Feris understand, is not so much that abracadabra name itself, as sacred as it is, but the shock of hearing it for the first time. A witch learns how to withhold language—and when to release it—for maximum impact.
There’s a long list of secrets that Morpheus knows that I do not, and I want in on all of them—because secrecy is intoxicating, but also because this is the only way to understand her experience as either reality or self-delusion. I can still see her clearly that night in the double ballroom, pacing the carpeted floor in her bare feet, gripping her vulture wings, and speaking to the hundreds of people there in a wholly different voice. I want to understand what happened that night, what could not possibly have happened that night, what might have happened that night.
But how might witchcraft initiation, if I got that far, shift my story of myself? Now solidly in my thirties, I spend increasing amounts of effort piecing together my narrative, explaining my past behaviors to myself as chapters along the way to the protagonist I’ve become. And if this protagonist was revealed to be a “witch,” what then? I have always lived as an insider’s outsider: raised in a high-end part of Manhattan, but to immigrant, so-called New Money parents; educated at a private school for girls, but one of the few who were not ethnic blondes who rode horses on the weekends; certified by an Ivy League university, but as a “creative type” determined not to take advantage of its business-government matrix; an attractive woman, but with a challenging, overly rarefied taste in “creative” men. At this point, I see that at nearly every step I’ve chosen a complicated freedom over anything that might look or feel too much like a conventional life or a traditional relationship. In and of itself, this is difficult—but the real threat to myself has come through my unwillingness to own my nature, attempting, instead, a half-assed balancing act between the freedom I’m attracted to and something stabler, more comforting.
I don’t blame myself: it is terrifying to contemplate an identity as a noncommittal, non-child-bearing woman who’s married solely to her art and her travels and her friendships—in many essential ways, an outsider. If that’s my true story, my nature, then right now, in committing to train in witchcraft, I’m edging into territory that I’ve been meant to inhabit all along.
Because isn’t that what a witch is? The mysterious solo woman at the edge of town, consumed with her own fascinating schemes and unconcerned about what the townspeople think? She’s part enigma, part exile, like most artists. People are excited by her and don’t know what to do with her. Of course, she’s also repellent, the woman the townspeople rise up against and stone to death in Act III. But that’s more than I can process right now.
9
Cycle One
I receive my first lesson from Karina in an e-mail labeled “Cycle One Class One,” saying “Karina has invited you to view a folder of content”—“content,” in this case, meaning oath-bound lessons in witchcraft. I click on the enclosed link and find a series of nearly twenty video clips at an encoded website. I’m supposed to watch each clip in order, without repeat and without interruption, for a total of six hours of class time.
Here are things that I know—that many of us know—a witch does: she lights candles, she chants, she charges objects with magic, she pours things in and out of chalices, she waves daggers through the air, she mixes up herbs and powders, she talks to gods and goddesses. By this point, I’ve tried most of these things on my own, and I’ve taken part, in my searching around, in enough rituals—rituals open to the still-uninitiated—that I am already at least vaguely familiar with the rhythms in common, the dramatic gestures, the liturgy and invocations repeated across certain traditions. And now I want to know what it would take to cross over, to begin slowly traveling toward the inner circle of one of the Craft’s more secretive and ecstatic clans. To learn a piece of what Morpheus knows.
Toward this end, I find myself, yet again, trying to strike a balance between the exotic and the super-banal, positioning my laptop on the coffee table and shoving throw pillows behind my back, the better to sit up at attention. I start playing the clips; as requested, I watch them all the way through, one time only. The look of the videos is simple and as lo-fi as promised, shot about five years ago, in the den of Karina’s previous home, by a student with a consumer camera and a tripod. Karina sits—the whole thing’s a still shot—with a small circle of students, whose voices I hear, and who sometimes flash an arm or a leg on-camera, but who are otherwise kept anonymous. I later learn that her current students, all twenty-five of them, are in several states—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Oregon, and California—as well as in Germany (Karina leads Feri workshops there). In this first glimpse of my witch-teacher, Karina’s wavy brown hair is cut short and loose, and she wears the kind of comfortable clothes good for getting work done around the house. Her warm, round-nosed face exudes an almost bodhisattva calm as she leads the fledgling witches in exercises, or shares anecdotes about Victor Anderson and other figures from Feri’s recent past. Now and then, while she talks to the group, a black cat jumps into her lap, demanding she stroke it.
As Karina had explained, the first training rounds will entail an emphasis on cleansing (your environment, yourself), and on clearing up the obstacles (psychological, spiritual) that every person puts in her own way. Clearing the path to make room for witchcraft. I’ll admit that some part of me finds this annoying, the meditation and quiet chants and prayer that are required—none of the flashy stuff that my teen self dreamt about. I get the sneaking suspicion that, as with anything worth knowing, my initial studies will test my patience.
Karina named her line of the tradition BlackHeart Feri, after one of the core ideas of Feri: “the black heart of innocence,” it’s called, in florid language. This is a nod to what Victor claimed is an African saying: “How beautiful is the black, lascivious purity in the hearts of children and wild animals.” Our black heart is the wild, animal piece of each of us, the part that most of us lose sometime in our childhood. Our capacity to be dumb and amazed in the face of beauty, the experience of physical pleasure, the deep intake of breath. Karina talks about “becoming black-hearted again,” childish and sexual at the same time—a counterintuitive, even taboo combination. Feris, she says, walk “the knife’s edge,” that precarious zone where seeming opposites meet—good and evil, light and dark—embracing the whole spectrum of the universe, not reducing it to polarities. (In Feri, the words “black” and “dark” also run contrary to how they are often used in white American or European history: something “white” or “light” is not necessarily “good”; and darkness is not inevitably a source of evil.) Karina’s own teacher, Mark, told her to “let the universe play you like a violin, all the notes.” The entire range of experience, without self-censorship or embarrassment. I am not there yet.
During the first couple of weeks, I began making my way through the reading list, what Karina rightly refers to as a graduate student’s courseload of books on Feri and related magical sources. This, paired with daily practice (as she outlined it for me) and a weekly e-mail check-in with my teacher (my chance to run any questions by her), constitutes my budding magical career. In this way, I begin learning some of the core concepts and practices that, in spite of the divergent lines of the tradition, all Feris have in common.
First of all, there’s the key belief that we have not one but three souls—and our personal power and health and clearheadedness and connection with the divine depend on their being properly aligned. These souls have many names, but they are known mainly as Fetch, Talker, and the Godself (or Godsoul). Broadly put, Fetch is your animal, or most primal and instinctive preverbal, self—“fetch” after the folk notion that a witch can send a part of herself out into the night to bring her whatever she wants. Talker is a lot like the Freudian ego, the intellect, the communicator, what connects you to others. And the Godself is your personal god, your direct line to the wisdom of the universe, the aspect of every human being that is actually on a par with the gods, in communion with them—Feris say it’s a blue sphere that hovers above your head, like a halo. The reason ritual is powerful, they believe, is that Fetch, turned on by the visuals and music and heavy breathing and ecstatic dance that come with these ceremonies, sends that high straight up to your Godself. Every Feri practice is grounded in the alignment of these three souls, uniting your parts. To walk around with your souls unaligned is to leave yourself weaker, unsteady, vulnerable to outside influence.
Though ceremonial magic is intensely cerebral, so many of the fundamentals of the Craft are more grounded in the instinctual, in recognizing and using our ties to the natural world and the life cycle, the rhythm of the seasons, the power of sex. Alignment, Karina teaches me, happens by gathering and then redistributing “life force,” or mana, and we take in mana—all of us, even those who will never hear that word—through the simple act of breathing. Something so critical to this form of witchcraft does not require chalices or athames or gothic outfits, just your own breath.
Feris breathe in a prescribed way, in sets of four, and then release that mana to do magical work. This is done through the Ha Prayer—ha being the Hawaiian word for “breath.” I learn how to do this each morning, following Karina’s instructions. After the prescribed sets of breaths, focusing on moving mana through specific parts of my body—I do this until all of me is tingling, until I feel dizzy and giddy from the exaggerated flow of oxygen—I say out loud, “May all three souls be straight within me.” Then another set of breaths, exhaling the last one hard, up to my Godself: “Ha!” And as I absorb the tingling sensation, I launch into some lines from Victor: “Who is this flower above me? And what is the work of this god? I would know myself in all my parts.” In other words, I’m asking myself—me, “this god”: What is my work? Who am I?
I do this every morning.
And what else? I cleanse. I cleanse my apartment and I cleanse myself. I protect my apartment and I protect myself—through folk spells that are over a century old, not specifically Feri but useful toward our ends. As prescribed, I clean the place obsessively. I burn an incense called “dragon’s blood,” producing the precise thick, musky smell of Greek Orthodox services from when I was a kid. At night, I take baths in beer and salt. Most mornings, I rub the base of my skull and lower back with an egg and hurl it whole into the toilet. Somehow this is going to provide my body and my home, even my temporary home here in New Orleans, with “a clean slate.”
“Whatever works,” Karina writes of this folk stuff. “This is a strong principle in my lineage, as it was with Victor and Cora: Use what works.” I am becoming increasingly aware that initiation into Feri, and practicing any serious form of witchcraft or ceremonial magic, requires a lot of work. You can’t simply wake up one day, have a revelation, and be baptized into this.
I soldier through and continue to write to Karina each week by the designated date and time, ignoring my reluctance and feelings of embarrassment, and she responds with corrections and thoughts. Sometimes she replies at length, indulging in her habit of capitalizing certain words in German-epic style—“Souls,” “Passion,” “Work,” “Great Power,” “Mysteries”—as if to say, “Let me be clear: this is what’s important.” Sometimes she replies with, simply, “Trust the process,” or even “Yep.”
This “process” I’m supposed to trust is packed with words and terms and personal experiments that set off my New Age know-thyself alarm bells—but Karina’s straight-talking sense of humor prevents me from feeling completely alienated. In one video clip, she tells her students that we have to function as priests “while still paying our car insurance,” “because the policeman doesn’t care about your black-hearted wonderment.” At the same time, her multiple personalities—from Zen priestess to no-bullshit teacher to pushed-to-her-limit single mother—have me on edge. She does not hesitate to write admonishing, sometimes testy e-mails to the group when she believes it’s called for.
I’ve deliberately signed up with a group not known for a forgiving, tree-hugging approach to witchcraft, a community that demands respect, seriousness, and total focus—even if, as in my case, you are training from a distance. The single word that comes up most when other Pagans speak about Feris is “intense”; and when Feris talk about themselves, it’s often as difficult, headstrong, highly sexual, sometimes barely socialized people. “Feris are the ones who are of the tribe but not of the tribe, of the community but not of the community,” Karina says in Class One. Victor used to say that when primitive man gathered around the fire to get warm and tell stories and prepare for the next day, the witch would walk away from the gathering and out into the darkness. “The witch would walk into the darkness to understand the mysteries, and bring that back for her tribe,” Karina says. “We stand on the borders of the culture.” While outsider status is romanticized, the reality of standing apart from the culture is frightening. The tenuousness of being that woman at the edge of town.
