Back at Imbolc/First Spring (yes, three weeks ago, more or less), when I was baking my Bride’s meditation Snake Bread (oh, all right, the Phallic Turd Loaves), I was given the nudge that taking one down to the cemetery and leaving it as an offering for Maman Brigitte would be a GOOD IDEA. So I wrapped the second one in tinfoil, shoved it in the fridge, and planned my trip (had to be a school day, or a day I could leave the Witchlets in the capable hands of The Hubster). I’d take along silver coins to pay my way in, take the snowdrops I’d brought in for Bride’s altar to plant by The Old Man’s Grave, share a cigar with him, offer him some Blackcurrant Hooch and then tentatively introduce myself to Maman Brigitte.
The Old Hag’s blanket of snow and then half term put paid to any prompt visits, so MB’s bread went in the freezer. Once the Witchlets were back at school, I had time to visit. Now the cemetery is only a couple of miles away, so I always walk there. I guess I could go on the bus - if I could get on a bus without having a panic attack and puking on anyone sitting next to me - but part of the whole ritual of cemetery visits is the walk there, rucksack on, one step at a time, deep in thought. Only this time I was probably slightly too deep in thought - I nearly stepped out in front of a bus, and tripped over the uneven pavement twice (honestly, you would think putting one foot in front of the other would be something I’d have mastered over the last forty-two years) so I gave myself a bit of a shake, stopped thinking deeply and carried on.
The walk is pretty much all past residential houses, and most of them were originally temporary structures put up in the sixties to cope with housing needed for the mining community - pre-fab houses. They’ve since become permanent homes; bought and sold and mortgaged. They are cheap, and not so cheerful. But there are many now with beautiful gardens, lovingly tended, the pre-fab structures painted, conservatories put up, double glazing put in, walls, hedges and fences painted, clipped and maintained. Some others have just been left with the gardens full of rubble, old toys, dog shit and rubbish. Others were once nice, but now have overgrown pathways, shrubs clambered over by brambles and bindweed, peeling paint on the walls and cigarette stained net curtains. It makes me wonder what people think of our house, with the gravel drive, dodgy rendering and (currently) dirty front door and windows. I made a mental note to get outside and clean the front door, sweep the step and clean the lounge window.
At the top of the hill past the houses I turned on to the playing fields, walking the path that runs alongside them until I got to the Victorian Park. I love this place. The planting is so different to what would be done now. Monkey puzzle trees grow near twisted hazel trees thirty foot high. Rose gardens and perennial borders, bowling greens and rockeries. Huge horse-chestnuts, Japanese Acers, juniper, beech, silver birch and ash. A young oak tree, planted by the Royal British Legion to remember those killed in action. A rowan tree, planted by grieving parents for a baby boy “born asleep”. It reminds me of my own seedling trees, a rowan, a walnut and a holly, all grown from berry and seed, planted in memory of my lost Witchlets (all planted by their big brother with a very green thumb!)
I got to the back of the park and clambered over the back wall. My heels were hurting, but not so much that it bothers me; the new boots had been comfortable all last week.
I leave a silver coin on the wall. This time I go straight to the grave the Old Man pointed out to me last time. I brush some fallen oak leaves from the granite, and perch beside the grave. I’ve brought the blackcurrant hooch again (it looks like blood when I pour it on the granite; dark and slightly thick), and I light a cigar. The Old Man is so much more formal here; none of the joking and poking fun. He still laughs; but he shows his serious side here. We talk. I ask questions. I get some answers, and some admonitions to work harder. Doubt never creeps in here. Here I feel at peace, I feel whole, refreshed, assured of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. I re-light his cigar; I light one of my own. As I breathe in the smoke, I remember the laughter of my Dad and Grandad, related only by marriage, but bonded by being the son/father each never had, having cigars and whisky at Christmas. A sense of well-being and protection surrounds me. I’m a small child again; the only child in a room full of adults who love me. I have no fear, no worries, just the sense of being in the moment when everyone is happy, everyone is loving, everyone loves ME.
“Remember this.”
I’m a little shocked to hear the words so clearly, but he’s right. Sometimes I forget how good my early childhood was. I mustn’t. They gave me that security; it was only circumstance that took it away. It wasn’t their fault. Illness took it away. My mother’s, then my Nana’s. And without learning to fend for myself, I wouldn’t have survived much that came my way later.
I finish the cigar, dousing both mine and his in blackcurrant hooch. I watch the deep coloured liquid soak into the granite. I’ve brought the snowdrops from Bride’s altar - snowdrops originally transplanted from my Dad’s garden, and before that, from my Grandad’s. I prepare a space next to the headstone, and plant them. The ivy wreath that surrounded the pot is placed on the grave. A movement catches my eye. A solitary ladybird walks past the snowdrops. The Old Man approves.
I ask him for an introduction to Maman B. I’m nervous; I’ve not approached her before. I lay the second meditation snake bread next to the tree. The wind blows, and the trees whisper. I introduce myself. I listen. Can you hear a nod? I don’t know, but something has happened. The Old Man seems happy.
“Leave birdseed.”
I do. I decide to take a wander around the cemetery before leaving. There is a new headstone on an old grave, put up by the grand-children and the great-grandchildren. It’s new and tended; I will not photograph it. Cemetery etiquette - I do not photograph or tend any grave that looks like it has visitors. Only those hidden, old, forgotten, unadorned are permitted. You tread carefully around grief. I get to the bottom of the hill, and I realise my heels are hurting, hurting very badly indeed. I take off my boots. Blisters on my heels. I’m at the furthest point of my wandering, dammit. I put the boots back on, and start the trip home.
I leave another silver coin on the wall.
I stopped by the juniper tree; one can never have enough juniper berries, in my opinion. Wonder if I plant any, whether they will grow. Might ask Witchlet One to plant them; he’s never failed!
By the time I got home, the torn skin of my heels was bloody and stuck to my socks. Blisters the size of fifty pence pieces, deep, bloody and painful. So be it; I wrap them in sterile dressings before heading up to the school to claim my Witchlets. I put on my old trainers and leave the boots on the shoe rack. I’ll rescue my old boots from the bin, and apologise to them. Profusely.
I spent years trying to get a personal connection to the Gods. Years. Way back when I was in my early teens, I flirted briefly with British evangelical Christianity. That ended abruptly; the “pastor” decided he liked looking at magazines imported from Europe catering for those with a taste in younger women. I was outta there like a shot - although my boyfriend of the time stayed for a while. Proves that the Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on priests with paedophile tendencies. When I was 18, I discovered Wicca. And Silver wotserface. This appealed to me; no more listening to what others told me I should believe in, time to do it FOR MYSELF. I still have all the original journals and writings I did back then. (They are embarrassingly naïve, on occasions I have forced myself to read some of it, but the cringing gets painful after a while.) I don’t know why I keep them, perhaps just to prove to myself how far I’ve come (and maybe I don’t read them all just in case I realise I haven’t come nearly far enough).
Anyway, I tried hard to work within specific pantheons, starting with the Greek, and then Roman, and then back to Greek. The Egyptian pantheon was next, driven by my obsession with all things Egypt as a small child. Then I tried the Norse gods - and pretty much got absolutely nothing. So for the next eight years I stagnated into working with “The God” and “The Goddess”, with occasional forages into specific archetypes (as they seemed to me) now and then. Any magic I did seemed very ineffectual.
In 2002 I was in a stinker of an abusive relationship. (Bear with me, this may look like another of my tangents, but there is a point to it.) One day in the August, the bastard had thrown me to the floor, beat on the side of my head with his fists and kicked me so hard in my left kidney I was left pissing blood for three days. Like many abused women, I had no control in the home over anything. I was the bread-winner; I had a really good job (a majorly, seriously, wonderful career) but he wanted more. His spending was out of control - but he was spending all MY money, running up debts in MY name. I finally started to make plans to leave him. He worked out what was going on, and turned on the charm. I wavered… and then, one last time, he showed his true colours. Fortunately he was too drunk to do much more than scream at me, and I barricaded myself into the spare room. As I sat there, in the cold (he’d spent the money I gave him for oil on fuck knows what else), in the beautiful converted barn I loved, I knew something had to change. And that’s when I heard my name called. Not in my head. Not from another room, but all around me. And again, and again. The voice was insistent, starting out full of sorrow, and sounding increasingly pissed off. I knew I was being spoken to by the Divine, and I knew precisely who it was.
The following morning, as I tried to creep out of the gothic arch oak door (honestly, this was my dream place, and I still can’t think about it without feeling a real pang), the bastard sat up on the sofa. “I’ll see YOU when you get home.”
He never did, because I never went back. Eventually the dust settled, and, with the help of friends, the company I worked for and my Grandfather, I rented a small terraced house and worked out a plan to deal with the debt he’d left me in. Selling my home cleared most of it; the last few thousand cleared by my redundancy payout I got when I lost my job ten months later. In that year, I had to move twice, lose the job I loved, get shafted by the Managing Director of the company I worked for, find another job (a fairly shit one, but it was all I could manage as I was teetering on the brink of a breakdown), get treated like a piece of crap by my boss, find my boss dead one morning (I don’t THINK I had anything to do with that, but you never know), work for his bloody partner (a total bitch) and listen to that bloody voice call my name every fucking time I had to make a hard decision or was facing major upheaval. I didn’t sleep beyond three or four hours a day. Things went a little weird. My life-long little OCD tendencies went into overdrive. Cleaning became an overwhelming obsession (and I lived in a house that shed brick dust and plaster everywhere like a cat sheds fur) and I couldn’t relax until every room was clean and tidy. And then I couldn’t relax anyway. I kept the television on every minute I was in that house, even when I was sleeping.
All the way through this, I continued some sort of eclectic, half-arsed Wicca. I developed decent Tarot skills. I tried finding all the love and light the fluffy bunnies spouted (I haunted the Mystic Wicks forum for hours, spouting copied invocations to Aphrodite, Diana, etc, and trying to give up doing my own Tarot readings as they invariably had The Tower, 9 and 10 of Swords and Death appear.)
And still the voice. Drowned out by the television, it started in my dreams. I could never find the source, but I’d be running down gothic torch-lit corridors of locked doors (and purple patterned carpets; still haven’t figured out the significance of purple patterned carpets) hearing my name being called over and over and over.
I knew who it was. But to me She was fucking scary, Queen of the Damned style scary. I knew Her name, I knew what little was written about Her in Bullfinch’s Mythology, and I knew only that most people saw Her as an old crone, harsh and malicious. But in the end I had to stop running, stop avoiding Her and take my childish fingers out of my ears and stop doing the “La la la la I’m not LISTENING” thing. I had to accept Hekate had an interest in me, and that she wasn’t about to take no for an answer.
The minute I did that, it was like a switch being thrown - my life turned around. I found a little home, I found the man that was eventually to become The Hubster and progenitor of The Witchlets, and I got my sleep back. Once I acknowledged Her, once I was back on the right path again, the way was smoothed. It would be another five years before I started working with Her, and another two years more before I began to honour Her in a way that has evolved into my relationship with Her now. Don’t get me wrong, life has been rocky in places these last (nearly) ten years, and She’s called my name in the same way a few more times, (once bringing me back from the brink of handing over Witchlet One to The Hubster and telling them they’d be better off without me and walking under a bus) but She has never, ever let me down.
She’s always been approachable, but we have a very specific relationship. I honour Her, I give Her offerings, I craft stuff I think She will approve of, I give money to an animal charity every month, and I petition Her when I am in great need. I occasionally ask Her to bless magical workings, but not THAT often. I have occasionally honoured other Greek deities with Her. It’s not that She’s stand-offish, or aloof, it’s just that we have set boundaries. She looks after me (fairly jealously, in the past), and I don’t race around nekkid having sex with The Hubster in front of Her shrine. (I wouldn’t call Her a prude, as SUCH - fuck me with a stick, I like living WAY too much to say that - but She’s not about to go all Dionysus on my arse.) All the mucky stuff (as the Hubster likes to call my herb, feather and bone-work) was purely witchcraft, not so much mixed with deity worship.
So the last thing I bloody expected was for her to invite a member of the Lwa into my life.
I’d started working with a land spirit in the local woods. He’s very powerful, has a right grumpy side to him (boy, was I made to feel VERY unwelcome the first time I explored his woods) but he’s softened up a lot since I’ve taken him offerings, and litter-picked every time I go. I started getting the impression there were two sides to him, as sometimes he could play tricks, laugh like a drain at me. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t get it. This was somebody else entirely. This was Papa Legba. In the end he had to go all typecast and BLACK at me before I got it (took an awful lot of ‘Yo, woman,’ and frankly unintelligible patois being whispered in my ear) but within a month or so I’d raided my Hallowe’en decorations for items for a shrine/altar for him.
I did have some doubts, of course. I mean, Hekate had pretty much prevented me from getting any involvement from any other deity, why on earth would She suddenly start inviting other metaphysical beings to come fuck with my sanity? I’m guessing that working with Hekate, a liminal Goddess that is a guide to the underworld, got Papa Legba’s attention (after all, he must be invoked before other spirits; he is the gatekeeper, so he has similar attributes to Hekate).
It didn’t end there. I’ve since been up close and personal with somebody else’s guardian angel, an Archangel, a dragon, the Queen of the fucking fairies for fucks sake and an ancient Witch. It can get kinda crowded in here.
Of course, I might be completely fucking nuts.
