Amanda Yates Garcia - Initiated: Memoir of a Witch

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.

Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk, The Charge of the Star Goddess

Now, Iwoman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language.

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

when you are in your trouble

and turn from death

this is what to do

find the meeting place:

intersectionality

under stars

way to gnosis

saying this is the place

this is indeed the place

with many layers

lie down here

Anne Waldman, Trickster Feminism

S earch for the three stars that make up the belt of Orion. I squinted through the starlight, tracing my finger along a line of instructions Id written in my Book of Shadows, the place where witches inscribe their favorite spells. Alone at a crossroads deep in the Mojave Desert, it was to the constellation of Orion that I was to address my invocation. Into the night I chanted, ATH ABRATH BASYM ISAK SABATH IA. Hot wind seared up from the borderlands near Mexico. My candles in their safety glass sputtered and died. I clamped down on the pages of my notebook lest they vanish into the spectral scrub surrounding me on all sides.

I was in the desert to perform the Headless Rite, an arcane piece of ceremonial magic where you declare yourself divine. You call down the goddess Isis to enter you; you speak in her voice: I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that life can begin. I was there because I didnt want to, because I could not, play by the rules of the status quo anymore. I was done. Done capitulating. The Headless Rite was to be the last in a series of magical initiations I saw myself as having begun at birth.

Barefoot and virtually naked, the sheer cotton dress I used during my solitary rituals snapped around my legs like wolves in the dark. I stood inside a towering cove of red rocks, each a million years old and warm to the touch, still radiating the suns heat at midnight. Spiny fields of jumping cactus, luminous in the starlight, formed a sea around me, waiting to leap out and pierce my bare legs with their thorns. It was dangerous land. Rattlesnakes, coyotes skulking through the creosote brambles. But I was mostly worried about the desert dwellers: macho, meth-addled young men in their monster trucks, out there somewhere guzzling 40s, howling their bloodlust into the desert void.

Like most women and femmes, witches are familiar with the demons of patriarchy. They follow us everywhere. Even out in the desert wilderness, we cant be alone in our rites. The shadow of violence falls unbidden, and for many of us, just the threat of it, the lifetime of warnings to be careful, the accumulation of micro and macro assaults, are enough to keep us home, safe under the protective aegis of the patriarchal father gods. Every time I saw headlights advancing along the horizon or heard the low growl of a motorcycle bounce off the canyon walls, I fought the urge to run and hide. But I would not be chased from my magic by bad boy bros who thought they owned the world. I was there on principle. I was there out of a commitment to create the kind of world I wanted to live in. A world where witches raise power in the desert. A world where a woman could chant hymns to the Goddess miles away from civilization without worrying that she might be attacked. So I chanted my incantations and spattered my libations into the red earth. And tried not to think about how Id never had to test my magic against men who, should they appear, I felt sure would have guns.

Ive always made it a policy to do things that scare me.

An initiation is a beginning, a rite of passage, a ceremony that signals an advance of some kind, into adulthood or a new form of knowledge. During my ceremonial initiation into witchcraft on my thirteenth birthday, my mother and I sat with a skein of red cord binding my wrist to hers inside a circle of mothers and daughters from our community. Called the Rite of Roses for the rose wands our mothers brushed against our dewy young cheeks, this was the ceremony for the adolescent witches of my coven as we dedicated our lives to the Goddess, and to each other. Lit by the glow of red candles, bouquets of roses festooned with ferns and puffs of babys breath perfumed our living room. Women and girls warmed the room like coals; we were there to celebrate our blood, that life force that passes through our veins, throbbing its way back to the beginning of all life on earth, carrying us forward into the unknown future we must create for ourselves. That night, we chanted the names of our matrilineal ancestors, beginning as far back into the historical mist as we could reach. When we finally spoke my mothers name, and then mine, we used a pair of scissors as an athamea ceremonial knifeto cut the red umbilicus that bound us together. I was now my own woman, a free agent. To celebrate, we took a walk through an overgrown suburban park, the full moon transmuting my girlfriends and me into silhouettes as we skipped ahead, giggling, through the weeds. It was an initiation in name only; I was still just a girl. And my life was about to explode.