AND WHAT IT ISN’T
WHO AND WHAT WE REALLY ARE
I have unlocked the stories in my bones. Memories of ancient primordial forests in which I hunted, making love beside a vast still lake. Remembering that my dead mother’s skin still lies there, remembering running silently between towering spruce trees in the snow, following the reindeer along deep ancestral tracks. My father was born on the pelts before the fire pit in a house made of earth, his mother and aunties chanting birthing spells low in their throats, and the small wide eyed children of the horse keeping vigil until the heavily tattooed old woman bites the cord. His child is me. A thousand generations ago you and I were there. Nothing has gone. Life has changed and many have suffered an unbearable isolation because no one has reminded us of who else we are other than beyond the current skins we wear. A walking man explained the Celtic word hiraeth to me as homesickness, a longing, deep and inexplicable because we don’t know what home is. The suffering this causes. Dispossession is in our marrow and that fear, beneath the surface we present to the world, of lovelessness and plastic and asphalt, crowding us into a corner from which we cannot escape.
Initiation is a mapped and charted experience that many people do not understand or recognize when the experience is not on their terms. You will be woken up. When wolf mother takes us in her jaws and pulls us into the myth we must realise we are helpless. Myth is not fallacy. Myth is as real as the skin that keeps our rawness clothed. Joseph Campbell, in Hero with a Thousand Faces, explains initiation as firstly a Threshold. We die to who we have been. And yes, always tragically. We cross into the Liminal World and become lost. This could last a lifetime if we lack the necessary insight to realise what is happening. We need to be on the lookout then, as we travel the days and nights of desolation and confusion, for the signs of the Return. We must keep our ears pricked and our tails bushy. There must be a Return. Someone to know us. To be met and the purpose of this new life be revealed.
When we consciously recognize the place in which we currently live as the liminal world of not-life we may very well be ready to Return. We will know. We will meet the Gatekeeper. This could be someone already there or someone new. They will complement the true us. This is not like any other compliment. The person is recognized for the depth of them and how far they have climbed from that pit. Words will liberate the dark night of the soul. The Gatekeeper gives the keys to a new life. Do we have the guts to walk through? To accept the change with only courage? To leave that lost place, savage forest, mist of futility, cave of self-doubt and take the challenge of being raw, temporarily blind and furless?
No one can hold us should we choose to make this choice, to wear the next mask and to clothe ourselves in this new garment of self. We don’t have to cleave to the identity that we thought defined us. Life is art. Life wants experience through who we are and what we do. Wants the lone wolf to run with the pack.
My most recent initiation took nine years and I didn’t know until I reached the other side.
My birthday 2006. Five hours at the clinic in Tweed Heads while my daughter has an abortion. Arriving home to my eldest son waiting with a bunch of flowers. Them starting in on each other. Him calling her selfish for doing this on my birthday, her not defending herself, standing up to him because what he does not know is that she is bravely battling the comedown from a speed addiction. The conversation escalates to all-out screaming.
I tell them to both go away. There is no birthday. Then I sit on the chair by the kitchen window wondering what the fuck just happened. Absolutely convinced I am dead. Pointless. I don’t know how long I stay there barely breathing. I walk across the road towards the beach. Then I’m sitting in the gutter of the street parallel to the ocean. Unable to move. A stranger comes out of her house bringing cigarettes. She lights one for me. We sit in silence. She must know if not the facts, the feeling.
To take or give initiation at the hands of a person is one thing. Quite another when life is the initiator. Because something is wanted. But first skin is flayed from us, brains are burned to ashes, souls turned inside out and air blown into them to rid them of creases. Bones are ground to powder and this dust is sent, by wind and water, across the whole earth seeking a home to fertilise with memory. To remember a terrible and tragic beauty to drag into now.
Year after year I stripped away the seeming-knowledge I had accrued over a lifetime—as witch, as woman—hunting for the pristine pools of limey water that lie silent within bedrock. A mystery successfully hidden from culture by smug-mouthed old men. Hidden in plain sight but never taught. The delusion of isolation from relationships with other species: rock, tree, sky, everything. The realization that we do live in two places simultaneously: the crass, beautiful, brutal world seen through my eyes as human, and myth world where the stories are that of forest and stone fortress, and initiation understood as clearly as an honest sentence. Where tragedy and ecstasy make sense.
Witch people, like magicians and sorcerers, conjurers, druids and hoodoo hexers, like cunning women and cunning men, kadaicha, shaman, mundunugu, manitou, angakok, curandera, bruxa, enchanters and shape shifters are needed in this world. We are the stories not bound by dogma or preserved in aspic, displayed as relics in a museum. We cause disquiet. We make questions but may not have answers. We are the wildness and the frightening places. The cave entrance under the ice at the base of that crevasse. Blue handprints on the rock face imprinted with an ochre of confusion by people we cannot name and from a time we cannot confirm. One must belong. We are Once Upon a Timepeople. People of the reindeer. Volcano people. I know that air has feelings and that messages can be sent through the earth; that I can touch someone and their lives will be forever changed but that I am not responsible. I know the shape of that cloud is a conversation. That a forked stick can find water. That the ring around the moon warns of rain. What I might tell you can go straight to your gut or the throat, and yes that’s a metaphor, but you do feel anxious because even though we are seemingly separate I can look at you and you might squirm because you know I know you are lying and are so lonely; that anything you do will have consequences. Everything has consequences. Mirrors are all around us.
Mercea Eliade wrote that Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew … can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods.[1]
The language that he uses that covers me with wasps. What Eliade wrote is in a dead and religious tongue steeped in Abrahmanic analogy.
Initiation is occult. Hidden. Unexpected. One comes to the Threshold, passes through, crosses over or drops down the rabbit hole into the Liminal Space where one is lost within mists of unfamiliarity because the only mirror we have is who we thought we were, confounded or temporarily mad. Finally, we meet a Guide, the Threshold Guardian and the Return. That return is only significant if the newly initiated individual is embraced into the pack, the culture, held in the arms as newborn flesh. Someone auspicious now drapes you in a garment with which to clothe your wise soul.
This is the deep world. The land of myth. Where we are also other animals and the voice of crow and walrus, both familiar and alien. Where we are torn apart and rewilded.
So now, at the other side of this fearful and fearless journey, I have become La Loba, the Bone Woman. I wear her skin, and my hair, once the colour of night is now white. What is the garment? Not an old language but an immortal one, hidden beneath those same old men’s prattles, their pomposity, dry and dusty with the verbiage of religion and class. Of schooling that does not educate but indoctrinates.
I’d written a book about witchcraft, published in the year 2000. Do I regret that? Not at all, but by locking the words onto the page I trapped brother wolf, manacled sister eagle, put the wild salmon in a pond and said, There. This is what you are and here is where you must abide. I closed an open system that should remain as unpredictable as weather.
I don’t know when the penny began to spin. A while before this initiation, that’s for sure. My coven converged at full moons, dressed in meticulously hand-sewn robes and talismanic ritual jewelery, lit candles and incense, placed athamé, wand, chalice, pentacle, the skulls of long-dead ravens, on an ancient wooden box I called an altar, cast the circle deosil, invoked the spirits of earth, air, fire and water, murmured the incantations to one goddess or another, to one god or another. And deep down I was now thinking I should not be doing this. Knowing in a very fearful silence that I was dressing the wild world in the garments of predictability.
Not long after that birthday and mere weeks before we were given notice to vacate our home of twelve years, I had a dream that gave me the clues I would only interpret, fully, almost a decade later. Early morning, the hazy light of dawn twilight, I approached an old, weary, shabby weatherboard house in the company of several others. We were there to clean. A gnarled, borer-holed, sadly grey plank barred our entrance, nailed like a warning across the front door. The sinewy old man made us wait. From the tool belt at his hip he took sandpaper, cloth and oil. He sat cross-legged on the grass and transformed that plank into beauty, mirroring the day. He nailed his plank friend atop the door and we entered. Come the reds and indigoes of early evening we had travelled all the way out the back and stood above a steep V-shaped valley, leading west to the last of the sun. The breathlessness of that place. Granite escarpments, shadowed and vast, trees high upon the cliff top black against the gloaming. Ravens calling sentinel for miles in all directions.
I stood beside a young woman with a bucket in her hand. She said, what happens if we leave? Do you think we’ll ever be able to find a way back? I, in my considered wisdom and certainty of experience, said, I’ll be the guinea pig, shall I?
Then night. I stood, weeping, on the derelict, deserted platform above a railway track, a young girl’s hand in mine. A station worker, with a broom and one of those long-handled scoops for rubbish on the ground, asked if he could help.
I can’t get back, I replied.
We actually moved to that house in my dream, with the escarpments and the sun setting in the cleavage of that valley to the west. But reality was fog surrounding trees in winter.
Then in 2007 I felt myself dissolving. I was no longer whole. Life made no sense, but I kept on reading tarot and the people kept coming. Many of them also broken.\
Was this what Eliade meant? Was the whole world in liminality? We were a year prior to that global financial crash, the illusion of money built on the same hollow mound as Vortigern’s doomed castle. Lots of broken people that year.
We think we’re the same person just going through travails. That we’ll wake up safe in a few days or weeks or months and the drama will have passed. We’ll be the person we were, hold the values we held previously and believe what we always believed.
Silly me, I still thought I was who I had been. As yet I had no level of insight. I thought the Byron Shire, where I had lived for twenty two years, was still my country.
In truth I had no home and experienced hiraeth, that dreadful longing, constantly.
In Melbourne in the winter of 2012 the fog triggered a memory. Fog thick and silent outside my daughter’s kitchen window. The day Samhain-like. Closing out everything. Reminding me of a lifetime ago. When my children were babies. When I was a child. When I still had all my teeth. I hid in a back room all day writing the since-deleted beginning to this memoir, knowing beyond doubt that home was no longer home. I could no longer pretend that I belonged anywhere. I needed fog, all the many shades of grey, bone-deep cold, architecture older than me. Its history and dereliction.
When I told friends I was leaving they asked why, perplexed at the thought. If I stay, I said, I will wither and fade and have bequeathed nothing of any current value. I will become a bent and invisible old woman.
The friend who was secretly a Guide said why don’t you teach Celtic studies at uni?
I didn’t understand.
I can’t, I explained. I’m really stupid. I’ve just pretended to be clever all these years.
Rubbish, he replied. You can start with a Masters if you want to. You need to meet my supervisor in Hobart.
I laughed but he wasn’t being funny. The fog thinned a little and I could sense the dapple of sunlight.
Later that year I took my twenty nine year old daughter to MONA [2] for her birthday. In Hobart I met that scholar. She gave me the keys to the Return.
The man I initiated thirty-four years ago is also a Time Hunter, one of his talents: genealogy. He asked for my biological records. What? More shredding of secret, long-held delusions of ancestral importance? Bus drivers and servants in the houses of gentry? But for me existentialism is always blended with mysticism and the curiosity to know the treasure at the heart of the Maze. I had new stories and a fledgling new language and guts.
So I allowed this goblin in.
The Time Hunter rescued the roots of my ancestral tree and, week after week he dropped names like nuggets of dull and lead-like information. These long-dead relatives all lived in the north of England. Albion. Generation after generation. I was busy elsewhere and the Time Hunter’s morsels were boring. What a brat I can be. Then he spoke a name. A spell.
Oh, he said, quizzically. They’re not all from Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. You have a Welsh ancestor after all. Caradoc ap Silures.
I must have looked ashen and the Time Hunter frowned.
I did have that strange feeling one gets when one is about to faint or the sensation of dreaming and was I really clothed?
I know that name like the back of my hand. My ancestor is also my hero two thousand years into the past. Those people that never moved were indigenous to that country. Priteni. Ancestral earth.
Born into a bigoted and sexist world, brought up as someone’s fabricated lie, living a lifetime with no family other than my children, their children and the people I adopted, the Time Hunter gave me a core reality. At the conclusion of the initiation he clothed me in a new skin. He handed me the keys to becoming La Loba and I am no longer lost.
Thanks to all who support my work
1 Rites and Symbols of Initiation, first edition, New York, NY Harper and Row, 1958
[2] Museum of Old and New Arts. Also the Druid Isle now Anglesea.