Читать книгу Seasons of Moon and Flame - Danielle Dulsky - Страница 12

Your journey begins here, in the House of Initiation. Take a breath, hum so loudly your teeth rattle, then whisper: “It begins.” Imagine this house at the center point of a simple map. To the east lies an ivy-walled cottage surrounded by lush blooms and kept well by the wise Garden Hag. To the south stretches sandy and hallowed grounds ruled by the loving Desert Hag, with the spectral Sea Hag enchanting the gray and salty waters to the west. Finally, in the north looms a haunting snowcapped peak where the Mountain Hag awaits you. Here, you are at the epicenter of your spiral journey. Here, you are the wild and sovereign hag who has learned a softer witchery, remembered how to dance with time, and made peace with her position in this wicked and wondrous world.

The Spiral Journey

Where you go when you leave your House of Initiation is entirely your choice. You might begin by asking yourself to what season you feel most akin. Which of the thirteen moons lives in your soul all year-round? Perhaps begin there. If you are only in need of some story medicine, a quick hag lesson, or a timely ritual, look to the appendices at the end of this book for summarized descriptions and see where the specific themes carry you. Of course, should you be feeling practically minded and find yourself on the cusp of a new moon, look for the chapter that is beginning for you in this moment, according to the season you are in. When all else fails, book divination always serves well. Leave it to the Mystery, flip to a page, and see what word-witchery awaits you. Permit your Craft to breathe. Grant yourself space. Leave out what is not for you, and let these words be invitations to remember, more than instructions to follow.

Hag Lesson #7

What is wild must always change.

Each chapter is a single moon cycle, a single lunar “season,” with three chapters dedicated to spring, summer, and winter, respectively. There are four chapters dedicated to the autumn season, accounting for the enigmatic “thirteenth moon.” Included in applicable chapters are descriptions of rituals and ceremonies for the celebration of the equinoxes; solstices; and the cross-quarter days, called Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc in the Celtic tradition. Each chapter is organized as if you are a guest, a visiting apprentice, in a magick-rich hag’s home. The “Grandmother Speaks” sections describe your mystical encounters with the elder; here, the hag shares her lessons, stories, and words of wisdom for each phase of the moon cycle. The spellwork, ceremonies, and opportunities for reflection are all deeply rooted in the hag’s words to you. While the work is sometimes cumulative from moon to moon, know that you are fiercely encouraged to become the outlaw and stray from course from time to time.

Surely, This Babe Wakes Wild

An Ode to Time’s Outlaws

She is a keeper of secrets, that old Witch, and she just remembered how to slow-dance with time in those forbidden dips and forgotten lifts that defy all our modern schedules and queer our many labels. She has begun a new naming, an initiation of the Holy Wild fool. Surely, this babe wakes wild on this seemingly mundane morning, for her breath comes easier and she’s moving with a certainty only gifted to time’s outlaws, only to those who hold hands with the dark and sacred cosmos, touching solid skin to stardust and whispering aloud to all things alien and infinite. Yes, surely this babe wakes wild; you can see it all in her moments of pause, in that stillness and silence that responds to loudmouthed demands for answers. This year will most certainly be her wildest one yet, truth be told, for she’s come home to the Mystery and rejected those tired rules and outplayed maneuvers meant to birth the best life.

Surely, this babe wakes wild even now, even as the moon sets demurely and the sun rises in its daily ceremony of jewel-bright becoming. They are time’s outlaws, too, you know. The sun and moon have a good laugh together just now, when they pass one another in the sky, at the human creatures’ bustling and going about their business, snickering with an ease that eludes the frantic hearts — but, surely, this babe wakes wild, for she’s taking her lessons from those crawling celestial orbs now. This is her initiation, and she’s set her tamer ways to burn.

A Softer Witchery

There is much to be said for self-discipline, for keeping our promises to ourselves, for harboring a deep knowing that any new way of being in the world is going to come with moments of intermittent discomfort that must be welcomed as small rituals of growth and learning. No long-held pattern is broken without effort, and to forge a more meaningful relationship with time means not only disrupting our own understanding of aging, of success, and of ambition but doing so within a societal context that heralds speed and pins bright medals to the puffiest and proudest chests. To have a gentler partnership with time is to embrace the paradox, to rebel against the systems that rely on a range of ill-isms in order to maintain their power, including but not limited to capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism. It is to reject a central tenet of many world religions: that we live, be it once or through multiple incarnations, in order to reach some great goal, receive some immense pardon or reward from a deity far superior to ourselves, and relieve our tired souls from the earthly grind.

In Weaving the Visions, Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ write: “God’s transcendence is frequently understood to mean that God is different from humanity and nature because God is pure spirit uncorrupted by a physical body. The human body with its connections to nature then is said to keep us from God.” The spiritual practices of those who choose to live — physically, psychically, or otherwise — on the fringes of a society undergoing a large-scale and necessary transformation are inevitably ones that resist unquestioned conformity to linear time and embrace the body’s sanctity.

Witches live on the fringes of what is socially permissible, and — though they acknowledge the merit of certain structures and systems — they are centrally concerned with nourishing a kinship with what is fundamentally wild and of the earth. There is a humility to their Craft, you see, an acknowledgment that many parts of the human experiment have failed, and a thorough and constant admission that they may not know anything for sure in a world that has evolved to not only support and sustain blatant and egregious economic, political, and societal inequities but embed these ills within our very flesh; this is particularly true if they have benefited from these imbalances, as have the white, cisgender, and able-bodied. Witches are constantly unlearning even the self-taught lessons, all while holding themselves in the fiercest compassion and warmest grace, without running from discomfort.

Here, in this House of Initiation, you are invited toward a softer witchery. Here, magick is more of a wave, a pulsing heart, and a slow dance than a penetrative blade. This is an approach to the Craft at once gently structured and entirely malleable according to where you find yourself now in that epic story you are living. Be wild, trusting that wildness is a never-ending process of reclaiming what belongs to you, of owning your ancestral inheritance and, importantly, acknowledging that you belong to this complex and beauteous web we might only call nature.

Hag Lesson #8

We must be gentle with ourselves.

A key lesson learned in the House of Initiation is that no one can impose any rules or restrictions on a Craft that is fundamentally our own. We Witches must constantly be questioning the extent to which, by denigrating the spiritual practices of others, we sustain or even strengthen the very social norms we are attempting to reject. For some, Witchcraft is a religion. For others, Witchcraft is art; neither approach is superior or more authentic, and to assume so is to reinforce spiritual hierarchies similar to those that brought us to the stakes.

Hag Lesson #9

This Craft is yours and ours.

This is your house, Witch. This is a place of beauty and joy, of practice and poetry. Many of those who seek out the Craft do so not because they feel they have been chosen by a deity or born a natural Witch but because they crave slow living — because they sense the majesty in nature, a sense that is now unique and something to be remembered but was once not only a given but the very container for our ancestors’ bodies, psyches, and spirits. In this house, may you live slowly. May you take time for both somber stillness and frenzied dance, and may you reflect on how the elements have always held you — swaddled you, in fact, like an infant hungry for nothing more than a felt-on-the-skin belonging.

Our Wilder Circles

When you leave this house, when you venture out in whatever direction you feel called, you will be offered occasional opportunities to cast a circle. Consider the circle like you would any other container; it holds what you brew, gives you a psychic and physical place to work, and initiates the sanctity of whatever ceremonial act you are about to begin. The circle, if nothing else, frames that particular moment in time when you were at one with your magick.

As with any other aspect of our Craft that we might hold as holy, we must seek to inspire our circle-casting, to carve away the places where calling the directions becomes rote, when we are reciting words written by someone we have never met or from a tradition that was never ours. Approach the circle from your own experience and write your own incantations. Fall in love with the round. It may serve you to conceive of circle-casting as simply a way of creating sacred space, integral to many animistic traditions; it is a means of both empowering and humbling yourself, of declaring to the elements surrounding you that you are both the maker and what is made, the dreamer and the dream.

The Circle as Story Ritual: Invoking the Witch’s Place

Permit the circle to be a story. This is a foundational ritual, a way of connecting to ground and embodying place.

1.Beginning with north, ask: What does the north mean to me? Is it the holy direction of craggy rocks, winter, and the earth element, or do you have different associations entirely? Recall a memory that you can fully embody and feel quite viscerally. Do you have a memory of feeling completely whole within the essence of the north? It need not be an objectively epic and momentous event. Perhaps you were a child watching snow fall outside your window and knowing you would be granted a blissful and blessed reprieve from academia if only for one day. Perhaps you were standing firm on the ground for the first time since you left a constraining relationship, or perhaps you once looked a mother wolf dead in her eyes and became her kin. Ask yourself what north means to you in this moment, and call up a memory you can see, smell, hear, taste, and feel.

2.Do the same with east, that innocent direction of new beginnings, the air element, spring, garden blooms, and possibility; south, that hot and lustful direction of fruition and high fire; and, last, west, the direction of death, mystery, autumn, gray waters, and muse.

3.Gather all four of your seed memories now, one for each direction, then move to stand here in your House of Initiation facing north. Call to mind your memory for this potent direction; speak whatever words you like that honor what lies before you, perhaps starting with “Beloved and ancient elders of the north, those who are my most whole and compassionate kin, I call to you and invite you into this circle.” Feel the memory with your entire body, perhaps permitting yourself to move in a spontaneous body prayer. Breathe deep. Soften your knees and feel your foot bones connect to ground.

4.Face east and do the same, allowing your seed memory for this direction to arise in your consciousness, stepping into the memory with your whole being, and inviting the blessed and loving ancestors to join you. Do the same for the bright and wild south and the dark and mysterious west. Feel held from below and blessed from above, perfectly positioned in your own story of becoming, fully nested within your body and warmed by your blood.

Alternative to Circle-Casting: The Pentagram of Being

As an alternative to calling the energies of the directions, the “pentagram of being” is a simple way of grounding, acknowledging sacred space, settling into your skin, rooting into a deep knowing that we are cocreated by many forces, and forging a connection between multiple participants in a circle setting, be it intentionally magickal or any other collective that requires an embodied sense of coming together, of joining one another on common ground.

1.Begin by taking a breath low in the belly, feeling whatever bony parts of the body are connecting to ground. On the exhale, settle into the experience of gratitude, humming softly and calling to mind for what or whom you are grateful in this moment.

2.Inhale again, and on the exhale, call to mind your unique ancestry; this can mean envisioning the lands from which your forebears hail, the names of your beloved dead if you know them, or a more general and unnamed sense of the deeper medicine that runs in your blood.

3.For the third point on the pentagram, feel into the land you are on and acknowledge the indigenous people, the tribes by name if possible, that belong to this ground.

4.The fourth point on the pentagram is your own body; take a breath and on the exhale, without judgment, notice the multitude of sensations present in your creaturely body now, at this moment.

5.Last, inhale deeply, and feel into the current season or moon cycle on your fifth and final exhale.

Moving through the entire pentagram of being takes less than one minute, and it is a simple practice that can be done at the inception and ending of gatherings, solitary ceremonies, and any event that deserves a certain level of dedication and reverence.

To My Pagan Foremothers, I Am Still Here

Word-Witching the Circle-Round

I know not whether I dream of you, you circle of hooded heathens with drums ’tween your legs and smoking pipes dangling from your lips, or if I am, in fact, a living dream of yours. Did you conjure me on some dark-cloaked evening when the thunder rolled and the oldest gods walked heavy on the earth? If I be your vision only, even so, I am still here.

Grandmothers of the North, come to me. Bear witness to this initiation of mine while I face the snowcapped mountains and bid my bones become stone. Grandmothers of the East, come to me. Whisper hushed hymns in an alien tongue while I welcome the warmer winds to bless this naked and aging skin of mine. Grandmothers of the South, come to me. Tend this altar fire while that primal dance takes hold of my flesh and animates these overstiff joints dried out from joylessness. Grandmothers of the West, come to me. Drench me in seawater and weave kelp into my locks so I might remember the old salty mother who bore me.

To my Pagan foremothers, I am still here, held by the loamy ground below and blessed by the vast indigo night above. And so it is.

To Tend a Better Altar, to Write a Better Book of Moon and Flame

The time is nearing now, the time when you will leave this House of Initiation and begin to seek out the hags, as you have many times before within this lifetime and countless incarnations. Before you enter each hag’s house, you will be asked to take to your altar, to create a tangible space that will honor the essence, the potency, and the medicine of those particular lunar seasons you find yourself in. Your altar might be simple, a portable tray that can be moved from room to room or a hidden shelf in a cabinet that can be tucked away in the dark. So, too, can your altar be grand and stationary, your holiest of holies in your wild home.

Witchcraft always meets you where you are, and you need not exhaust your precious resources to prepare for this journey. Your altar is a place to work, to make magick, to honor deity if you feel called, to remind you that your witchery is the stuff of beauty, and to serve as hallowed ground, a place to return when life is tugging at your skin. Before you leave this House of Initiation, define an altar space that will support your work, and name it as your own.

Hag Lesson #10

The altar is a touchstone.

Find for yourself, also, a large blank book that will become your Book of Shadows or, if you like, your Book of Moon and Flame, a place to record dream visions, sacred symbols, bizarre images, spellworkings, word-witchery, and all the secrets learned from those cunning hags. This is a living text, a book penned by your hand. You are both author and reader, thus you cannot misstep in writing upon these pages. Clear your altar when ready, place your blank book alone on that surface that will see you through many, many initiations as you journey, take a breath, feel the tingle of intense potential and vast possibility, and begin.

An Initiation of Blood and Bone

This is my initiation of blood and bone. I am naming myself Witch, and I am seeking out those hidden treasures in my psyche left there by my heathen grandmothers so long ago. I am taking back what is mine, and the wildest gods with the greatest stories are dreaming me into being and naming me their Priestess. Awakened I am on these precious days, and my most beloved dead are walking with me as I undertake this great journey and live the wildest year I have ever known.