He waited, as if there was supposed to be a reply, but the crowd barely mustered a murmur, so he continued: “Wisdom! Passion! Join us and protect us in this our rite!”
It was clear he wasn’t talking to us, we of the great, half-nude army surrounding him; he was talking, actually, to the Horned One; but he wanted our help, our amplification. Despite the crowd’s good intentions, though, this Pagan priest could not get an Amen. So a priestess took over, and directing the crowd like it was a grade school choir, coaxed out a chant:
Fire of passion,
fire of light,
fire of knowledge burning bright,
fire of heart, fire of mind,
fire of soul throughout all time.
The first time around, she was pretty much on her own. The second time wasn’t much better. But by the third rep, most of the Pagans were shyly following the words, as if in a contest to see who could say them the quietest, with the least inflection.
“Yay!” shouted the little boy, the only audibly eager heathen in the crowd.
Except, of course, for the loudmouthed woman next to us. She had a mane of red hair that drooped down to the middle of her back, and she wore a green robe with a gold belt beneath a patchwork parka. She had a lovely alto-soprano voice. What she didn’t have was a spot close enough to hear the chant leaders. She kept trying to sing along with the priests and priestesses in the center, but she couldn’t really make out what they were saying, so she fudged it: “Fire of passion, fire of light, fire of hmm-mm. Ooh, fire…”
When a group of Native American singers entered the circle and began a wailing, all-vowel song, she seemed relieved; as far as she was concerned, there were no words to this one, and she could wail with the best of them. But wailing, like ritual, is trickier than it seems; you can’t just moan like a cat in heat and expect the Goddess to appear. On the edge of the great circle a small ring formed around the “ooh, fire” woman. She drowned out the Indians, and then, magickally, she mangled the next prayer, though it was the only one in the ritual everyone seemed to know. Even we understood that the words were “Earth my body, water my blood, air my breath, and fire my spirit,” but still Ooh-Fire sang it as a litany of imperatives: “Lift my body! Water my brood! Hear my breath, fiery spirit!”
And then, as if in answer to her command, there was a fiery spirit. During the chanting and the prayers, the keepers of the flame had been getting busy with long metal prods and torches doused in gasoline, and now the fruit of their labor blossomed into the darkening sky; we felt its heat before we saw it, and then we saw it too, licking over the heads of the crowd.
“Yay!”
We wanted the fire as much as the nakedest Pagan, as much as the man with the biggest rack of antlers. He, we, all of us—we wanted the flames to transform this drizzly, schleppy event into something with heat, with energy, with the old, scary gods the Pagans kept insisting were coming to the party. The flames reached the hollowed-out log perched on top of the bonfire, and it exploded with light. The fire turned from yellow to deep, dark green, roaring through the log and around it, a trick devised by the keepers of the flame. It was an answer to our prayers: big flames, big logs, century-old wood sizzling and popping, calling out, crackle, crackle, boom, boom, boom. Even on the edge of the circle, we felt the reverberations in our sternums, and the heat washed our faces like a baptism.
Yay!
A chorus of drums leapt up to join the flames, bongos and tablas and dhokals, bells and flutes and rain sticks and maybe some pots and pans. Cacophony. The man standing next to us—skinny, short, and sharp-faced, his head hairless but for a white goatee, a bit like an elvish Freud—began stripping off layer after layer, sweater after sweater, then his T-shirt and sarong, folding them neatly and piling them until he was down to nothing but bright red bike shorts. Then he peeled those off, too. Naked, he seemed less skinny; he was nothing but muscle and bone, powerfully built for his size. With his bike shorts folded and topping his pile of clothes, he leapt toward the flame like a white-tailed deer. No one knew who he was, but everyone stared. He may not have been a manifestation of Loki or Thor, or the Stag King, he may have been a bookkeeper from Wichita or a truck driver from Kansas City or a schoolteacher from Abilene, but something supernatural had to explain the—what else to call it?—the broomstick between his legs. We had never seen anything like it. No one had. “Yay!” The little kid shouted, and his mother’s eyes grew wide; people laughed and put their hands to their mouths, delighted with this miracle, transfixed as Skyclad—so we named him, in honor of the Pagan term for nudity—began dancing around the fire, dancing not with his hips or his ass or his shoulders but with his whole body, in the air as much as on the ground, his eyes black and huge, his arms akimbo and passing through the flames. Most of all, he danced with his penis, trailing behind him and swinging in front of him like a giant gong. Regardless of your sexual preference, regardless of whether you worshiped the Horned One or the Goddess whose flames engulfed him, regardless of what name you chose to call or not call the divine, it was amazing to behold.
There are many kinds of magick, Elowen had told us. Too many for just one name.
The altars at Heartland—some, smoothed-down tree stumps; others, half-buried circles of stones—were meant for leaving gifts to the gods, but kids at the festival insisted they were more like bartering tables. Leave a pretty rock, you can take a Sacagawea dollar. Leave a hemp necklace, you can take a rusty knife. Some of their parents liked to pretend magick was all goodness and light, but the kids knew otherwise. Make a bad trade, something bad will happen. Just look at the altar. Stacks of keys: Those were from people who’d left home and wouldn’t go back. Dog tags: Those were for people who couldn’t go back.
Later we joined the Salene Circle/Dark Moon Coven/Fort Riley Pagan Association at its camp, a dozen tents set apart from the crowd in an embrace of trees. We sat with a score of witches at Elowen’s campfire, passing a bottle of mead, waiting for the dedication ceremony, or “wiccaning,” of an infant girl named Aliyah. Her father, Kal-el, an artillery sergeant at Fort Riley, had missed the birth of his first child, Logan, because he’d been in the DMZ in Korea—“It’s a live-fire area. No family allowed.”—and now he was going to miss Aliyah’s first year because he was about to be shipped back overseas. Kal-el sat by the fire wishing witchcraft was what outsiders imagined it to be. “But I can’t stand up there popping off fireballs,” he said. “I really wish I could. Yes, that would be really nice, because that would end a war really quickly, a guy blasting off fireballs, people running away, people saying, ‘Okay, this is not good for our reality. We surrender.’ Then I get to go home.” He kissed Aliyah good-bye even as he dedicated her to the Goddess, rocking her in his arms.
A little bowling ball of a boy, black hair, a dragon on his T-shirt, a Charlie-Brown-striped sarong, rolled down the path toward us. There was a snake in the dirt, but he stepped right over it and stomped up to us, fingering a kid’s bowie knife, cheaply made but impressive-looking, with a serrated edge on one side and a compass in the hilt. He asked us if we’d seen any Dungeon Masters. “We’re not Dungeon Masters,” we answered. “I know that. That’s not what I asked,” the boy said, rolling his eyes. Later we spotted him showing off his knife to a smaller boy, running his finger down the dull blade, finding true north with the compass, expounding on the virtues of a leather grip. He had clearly earned his Pagan badge. “There’s more than monsters out there,” he counseled his younger friend. “You have to be prepared.”
On a grassy peninsula reaching into Heartland’s lake, the site of an altar to the hunter god Herne, the trickster god Loki, and the thunder god Thor, there was a man watching us who was so frail he looked like he might snap his fingers and disappear. Red goatee, pale skin, holding on to his cane even when he sat down on a stone. A sad, kind, quiet voice. He said he was admiring us in the sun. “Your sarongs are see-through when they’re backlit, you know.” He’d been a witch for twenty-five years and was the
last one alive of his original coven. He talked to the dead, but they didn’t answer.
“Frankly,” he said, “it’s not part of my craft to be all oogie-boogie. It’s about recognizing the gods.” He paused, reconsidering. “And it’s about remembering the ancestors.”
“The witches?” we asked, thinking of what we’d read about Paganism’s fixation with the “Burning Time,” when witches were burned at the stake.
He tilted his head and looked at us as if we were helplessly naïve, or just too young to understand.
“AIDS,” he explained. “Queers. Remembering them.”
There was a girl at Elowen’s campfire named Mary Dragon, daughter of a witch called Crow Wolf and stepdaughter of a biker named Cat Johnson. Crow and Cat had not had an easy time of it in life. They were friendly but a little shy. Mary Dragon was smart as a whip, college-bound for sure; they let her do most of their talking. She explained their religion thusly: Monotheism is a mirror that offers only one reflection; Paganism is a spinning disco ball, a thousand glittering possibilities.
Not long after Skyclad began his dance at the opening ritual, storm clouds plowed in and spattered rain and hail down on the fire. The drummers didn’t seem capable of tapping out “Yankee Doodle,” much less a rhythm that could summon up gods, or forces, or just that feeling in the gut that makes you want to move or howl. Skyclad danced alone in the rain. Later that night, though, when the sky turned clear and cold as metal, when the drums thickened, when beautiful women unveiled themselves and old men hobbled around the fire like they were marking time, we stripped down to our sarongs and joined Skyclad and several hundred others weaving loopy circles around the fire. We dipped and twirled and skimmed the flames, shuffling in the mud and the heat to polytheistic polyrhythms. A couple of skeptics made to dance like holy fools. If that wasn’t magick, it was a hell of a trick.
“What did you guys think of the opening ritual?” Elowen asked us. She meant the question pleasantly, but maybe because Willow muttered and rolled her eyes, and because we could still hear the herky-jerky bongos back up at the big circle, we told her the truth: We’d liked the fire but were disappointed with the words, the silliness of the chanting.
Elowen nodded. “That’s all right,” she said, “magick is individual. When we do our own rituals it’s not like that at all. Would you like an example?”
A tall redhead called Velvet jumped up from beside the fire. “Ooh! Do we get to do an example?”
“Yes,” Elowen said, and at her declaration several witches stood, pulling fleeces over their sarongs. A cold wind was blowing, pushing the clouds westward and making the evening even cooler. Only Elowen remained mostly naked.
“We’re going to name the elements,” she explained. “By calling to the powers found in each direction, we invite the presence of the Goddess, who oversees them all.”
Willow, who besides being a witch and a mother was also a belly dancer, was standing with her butt to the fire, casually twitching her hips and shaking her belly-dancing bells. Other than her chain-mail skirt, she was naked, her stomach a tanning salon bronze, her breasts pale and petite as any you’d find in a high school locker room.
Her bells trilled as she turned away. She disliked the talk, the explanations. She might be willing to act as a guide to the best Paganism had to offer, but she couldn’t forget we were outsiders who were there to work magic of our own: the kind, she thought, who steal stories and make the world smaller than it is; the kind who scoff at naked Pagans and their unsuspecting mothers; the kind who make so many possibilities wear the same drab name.
“Kim, do you want to call North?” her mother asked.
“I’m not calling anything with them around.”
“Suit yourself. Just stand back out of the circle then. We don’t need your negativity.”
Kim seemed to consider storming off but then decided to follow the group up to an empty field lit by a brilliant, nearly full moon. Her mother took up a position in the center of a circle made mostly of her fellow witches.
Velvet stood in the southern position. She’d come to Heartland this year to talk to a man named Owl, who besides being a Pagan was successful in business and knew how to get things done; he’d pledged to help Velvet win back custody of her baby son, granted to a fundamentalist uncle because the judge deemed Velvet Satanic. “As if I’d even talk to a Luciferian,” she’d said. She was an elf witch.
In the west position stood Night, a raven-haired Latina who’d retired from the army and now worked for McDonald’s and somehow managed to support several children. In the middle with Elowen stood Lady Keltic, who had asked Elowen for a spell to help her conceive. Elowen was the conductor; we were North and East.
One by one we called out the names of our elements—fire, water, earth, and air—and of our directions, free-associating on their attributes like we were gently speaking in tongues.
In the distance, a woman roared like a lion; a man walked by singing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”; the wind smelled like incense and Porta Pottis; we were freezing. We looked at Elowen, her white mullet glorious beneath the moon, her naked torso seemingly impervious to the cold, her feet bare in the mud, and couldn’t help ourselves: We laughed. She looked at us, in our muddy sneakers and double-knotted sarongs, shivering with notebooks in hand, and she laughed, too.
Willow didn’t get the joke. “I can’t believe you’re showing them this. They just want to make you look stupid,” she said. “To make fun of all of it. Can’t you see that?”
We started to tell her she was wrong, but Elowen had a better answer. “Kimberly,” she said. “They have no power over me. Over any of us. They’ve come here to learn about how we live and worship, and we are going to show them. What they do with that experience is on them. I don’t believe they want to hurt me, or any of us, but they couldn’t if they tried.”
Willowdancer uncrossed her arms, then crossed them again, biting her lower lip to keep it from shaking in the cold.
On the far side of the field we could see torches being juggled over the heads of the crowd that had lingered at the opening ritual; a tipped-over trash can added the sound of a cymbal to the drumming. The dancers still were circling the bonfire, all together, each alone.
Elowen took Willow by the shoulders and pulled her close. A mother warming a daughter with her heat, she swallowed Willow with her body like a flame wrapping a log.
“Do you really believe some silly book could have more power than we do?”
Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: For the time is at hand.
REVELATION 22:10
Revelation
BY HAVEN KIMMEL
Part One
There is a place outside the Franchthi Cave site in the southeastern Argolid, across a small bay from the modern Greek village of Koilada, where her bones reside, so deep beneath the surface of the rocky ground that she will not be found for approximately 237 years (three months and sixteen solar days into the year). The current scholars say there were no burials at the Franchthi Cave, that the Neolithic people who lived there made beds, they hunted and gathered, bred and gave birth, but did not bury their dead. On the whole the scholars are correct. But she is there, the one We loved. She was called one thing by her parents, another by her husband, and would have had yet a third name if any of her children had lived. We cannot repeat those names, but We can say that in the Holy Order each sound is assigned a number, and one day (while We were actually thinking about something else), We realized that if We added up the sounds of her three known names We got good old Lucky 7, of course. We don’t name them, but We do pay attention. Some come by the name honestly, some are so called but undeserving (millions, actually), for some it is the natural name but they do not know.
We loved watching her. They tell us Time Has Passed and We believe Them, and We know it must be difficult to imagine a genius in the Neolithic era, no arts and letters, no mucking about with the atom, no cinema. Hard to picture her th
ere, rocked back on her heels at the edge of the water, contemplating the sublime and recognizing it as such without access to German philosophy of the Enlightenment period, but that is what she did and who she was. No Hegel, but she both recognized cause and effect and simultaneously doubted it. [Italics Ours.] No Virginia Woolf, but she thought more than once, I would need to sew rocks in my pocket if I wanted to sink. We paraphrase. She had no word for pocket. She trusted gravity before Newton and recognized that the speed of light was constant (in general), and there are two ways she anticipated Giordano Bruno (she also died by fire, incidentally), and one of them We cannot report because it hasn’t been discovered yet. She questioned what was Inside, and what was Out. There was even in her physical comportment a harbinger of evolution not yet registered in the earth’s mechanics: her forehead was smoother than her mother’s, her arms were shorter, her back straighter.
But the moment We are thinking of, the one that caused Us to let go a collective sigh that raised a tidal wave in an unoccupied coastal inlet in China, was the afternoon she sat on the beach with the small stones. She was solitary. She loved the company of her own mind, and rightly so. On this afternoon she was grieving the death of her third child, a hydrocephalic daughter born lumpen and covered with hair; the birth had split her mother stem to stern. During each pregnancy Our Beloved had searched for a stone, one as close to perfectly round as she could find, and before the stone was located she sat and drew circles in the sand with her fingertip; she drew them until a stillness settled in her solar plexus, quieting her, and she stopped when the stillness flowed down her arm and into the sand, and as soon as she had drawn the perfect circle the stillness flew into the air like a flock of startled seabirds, she could see them go, white, the sun a shock against their wings.
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