Initiated

My mother's body resisted letting me come into this world; she knew the brutal way witches are treated here. One thousand years ago, my mother would have leaned into the arms of her midwives, chanting hymns to Hecate and baptizing me in a bath of mugwort tea. Ten thousand years ago, I'd have sprung into being from a peat bog, guarded by stags, under the silver light of a waning moon. As it was, I came into the world at a teaching hospital near Sacramento, under a glare of fluorescent lights, flocked by a panic of medical students still reeking of last night's kegger. They were unprepared for such a difficult birth.

Only twenty-three years old, but already well acquainted with the corrupting influence of the material world, my mother's body wanted to keep me inside where I'd be safe. Her cervix wouldn't dilate. But I insisted on making it here. I insisted on freedom. I kicked and clawed from her watery world like a reptile, until my umbilical cord tangled around my neck. I was turned the wrong way around. When my mother's water broke, it was black; I was more Goth at birth than I ever was in my teenage years. My mother remembers being rushed on a gurney down the halls of the hospital. Flashing lights, a tube in her arm. The lightning zigzag monitoring my heart rate sagged to a flat line. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, five; my heart was still. The Goddess of the netherworld had claimed me for her own.

I died before I was born. I saw the face of the Goddess. Witches have many goddesses and Hecate is primary among them. As Guardian of the Crossroads, Hecate is a sorceress; she knows the secrets of the herbs and can speak to the dead. As Queen of Witches, she is a traveler between the worlds. She leaps through hell, a black dog by her side. She soars into the future, into the past, into the body and beyond riding on the black wings of a crow. It was Hecate I saw in my mother's womb as I was struggling to breathe. Near-death experiences pull you into witchcraft. The Goddess pulls you under, and there you see Her face, and you know you are not alone in this world. You are a child of nature, and She will never leave you.

My mother had seen Hecate too, on Mother's Day, five years before I was born, when she was eighteen years old. She was inner-tubing with her friends on the American River. At some point she slipped, caught in the boiling froth, the rapids pulling her downriver, away from her friends who called out and reached for her to no avail. Trapped beneath a stone, she struggled upward for breath, panicked and hit her elbow on a rock, then gasped. Water flooded her lungs. Everything started moving in slow motion. Green light called her through a long spiraling tunnel. When she emerged, the Goddess was all around her. She could see 360 degrees in all directions, the face of the Goddess: Earth! Bright and shining. Drifting peacefully in the atmosphere of our world, my mother was still herself, but expanded somehow. Soon she noticed a group of people below gathered around a pale and lifeless woman, beside whom a man crouched, pounding on the woman's ribs. My mother didn't care. The world around her shone, a breathing, living planet awash with light. Still, she descended, closer and closer, until she was nose to nose with the lifeless body beneath her. Then she felt a yank. Jerked back into her body as if by rope, her first feeling was outrage that she'd been forced to return. She didn't want to be back in the human realm of violence and treachery. But come back she must; she had more work to do in this world.

When I was born, after my mother awoke, she thought I was dead. Alone in the hospital room, her belly had been hacked open and sewn shut with black wires. Finally, the nurse appeared and dropped me in her arms. People tell her there is no way this could've happened, but my mother swears when I first opened my eyes, I smiled. Having already died before I was born, I was grateful just to be in this strange and beautiful world, to enter conversation with its beauty through the rituals of witchcraft.

My mother says that during my birth, my father was at the bar across the street turning a violent shade of drunk. My father counters that he was in the waiting room of the hospital, crying and terrified we'd both died. Either way, six months after I was born, my mother hatched a plan to leave him. She spirited us away from the foggy vineyard farmhouse they were renting in Northern California and brought me to a tiny wooden bungalow on the Central Coast in San Luis Obispo. One of my first memories is of my mother standing above a cauldron of bubbling water in our tiny apartment, singing blessings over our Kraft macaroni and cheese.

Witchcraft has always existed. The term comes from the Old English word wicce, pronounced "witch": a wise woman. She practices oracular arts and sings incantations; she knows the secrets of herb craft and can talk to spirits. The word wit and witch share the same root: "to know, to understand, to be a person of intelligence." Etymologically, the word witch refers to a kind of Northern European shamanness. That's the root of the word, though witchcraft is practiced throughout the world, by folks of all genders. You don't have to have Northern European ancestry to identify as a witch. In Spanish witchcraft is called brujeria; in African American folk magic, it's called conjure. In Italian, a witch is a strega. In Mandarin Chinese, a witch is a wūpó. Witches exist throughout space and time. Witchcraft brings together the magical people throughout the world for the shared goals of justice, liberation, and celebration of the life force of the earth.

The witch gene has traveled through my lineage. Eileen, meaning hazelnut, fruit of the Celtic tree of wisdom, is the middle name of each firstborn daughter in my family going back generations, back to the old country. My mother practiced witchcraft before she even knew that's what she was doing. Women in Northern Europe probably stopped calling themselves witches around the same time you could have your tongue ripped out for saying you were one. So instead, my mother called herself an activist when I was a child. Years later, she told me that she saw activism and witchcraft as two parts of the same practice: devotion to the Goddess. From an early age, she always wanted to protect women and children. Claimed by the goddess Demeter even before I, her eldest child, was born, my mother identified with the mother archetype.

In her early twenties, during Vietnam, my mother joined Mothers for Peace, to protest the war. Then, when the war was over and the activists turned their attention to preventing the destruction of the earth, she joined the Mothers in that work too. When I was about five years old, I remember she took me to a protest at Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power plant looming over the cliffs lining the Pacific Ocean, built on an active fault line. The Mothers dragged a brass bed to the beach with a muslin canopy. In the bed, a skull-faced capitalist in a top hat and tuxedo ravished his bride, a naïve woman in white, representing the people of Central California who were in bed with their doom. My mother didn't know her then, but Starhawk (grandmother of Reclaiming, a contemporary witch movement, whose book The Spiral Dance launched the rebirth of Goddess culture) was at that protest, and many others like it. Later, they would meet each other, but even then, they were working in service of the same Goddess, the earth herself.

People encouraged my mother to spank me. I was too wild, they said. When it was nap time, they'd find me dancing in the yard. I wanted to be out running in the grass, making proud crowns of juniper, singing my elaborate incantations in honor of the sun and moon and the light on the leaves. Despite the fact that the school administration called my mother in more than once, I refused to wear anything but my purple unicorn shirt every day for over a year. In department stores, I'd hide in the sacred circles of the clothes racks, wrapping myself in sequined scarves and whispering oracles to startled shoppers as they passed by with their carts.

I talked back to adults. A receptionist at my school told my mother I was the rudest child she'd ever met. She didn't mention that she'd brought it on herself; she'd embarrassed my friend for having wet her pants, and she told us to shut up when she heard me comforting her about it, so I told the receptionist she should lead by example and shut up herself. Through it all, my mother refused to hit me. The world I was born into was brutal enough, she said. She'd been beaten by her own father. And, too, one of my childhood playmates was murdered by her stepfather, ketchup shoved down her throat, then thrown against the wall for refusing to eat her pancakes. Even as a child, I knew I needed to find a place where the "Law of the Father" could not reach me.

Children don't just believe in magic; they live it. Early child psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim were convinced that children are by nature animists. Children see the sun, the moon, the rivers, the animals, the trees, and the stones as alive and full of intelligence. Everything that moves is alive, and everything moves. Atoms buzz, the planets spin. Nothing is still. Every bit of the universe vibrates with Spirit.

René Descartes, exemplar of Western philosophy and forefather of "the Enlightenment," is most remembered for his axiom cogito, ergo sum. "I think, therefore I exist." But, he argued, the existence of anything else must necessarily be doubted. The earth might be a trick. Your lover might not really be there. Other beings could all be a mirage, but you, dear individual thinking man, you exist for sure. On a roll, Descartes also said that animals are basically organic machines that cannot think or feel pain. It's pointless to feel compassion for them, he said. And from his argument, so celebrated within the canon of Western philosophy, evolve things like chattel slavery, factory farms, and the slash and burn of the Amazon. For Descartes, only humans—white male land-owning humans in particular—have minds and souls, and thus, only they have rights to consideration. But even in the seventeenth century, children knew that the world was speaking, calling out for love.

"Just because we don't understand what the animals are saying doesn't mean they're not saying anything," I remember telling my mother as a child as we were driving through the eucalyptus groves of San Luis, watching the hawks circle through the lazy sunshine. "We're just not listening right." But both Descartes and Bettelheim would have disagreed with me. Recognizing the intelligence of nature is just a temporary coping mechanism children and "primitive people" employ until they can be civilized into solving their problems through "reason" alone.

On the surface, the Enlightened Man's reason seems stronger than the magic of children, or even the magic of the witches and wizards and indigenous shamans of the world. But the Enlightened Man finds his power by imposing kyriarchy (a word for the master/slave, oppressor/oppressed dynamic), and kyriarchy is slowly asphyxiating our species and all life on the planet. Kyriarchy is like a virus; it kills the organism that sustains it. Even as a child, I wasn't going to give the Enlightened Man all the applause, gold ribbons, and Christmas bonuses with which he awarded himself such a regular and hearty congratulations.

Bettelheim might argue that I only want to persist in my belief in magic now as an adult because as a child I was forced to abandon my magical thinking too early. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, he says: