I was confirmed Anglican, enrolled in the Anglican college at Uni, but I had long been curious about the old gods.
At that point it had mainly been a matter of reading – Wales has its
fair share of myths and storied locales, and I’d inherited a deep interest in
such things from my grandfather. I’d
read kids versions of the Mabinogi, I’d gone to see stone circles and wells and
valleys with reputations.
But it was all academic, you know?
Then we moved away, emigrating to Canada, and I found myself stuck far
from home in the prairies. Interest didn’t
wane, exactly, but it was a harder thing to follow. And anyway there was church, which I went to
mainly for the politics of it, and the locals were sometimes terrifyingly evangelical
so it didn’t do to say too much about such things.
When I went to Uni, and everything changed.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by so many different things. I still was far, far away from the spirits
who had called me so long ago, and surrounded by Christian things and thoughts –
none of which really held any attraction for me. But suddenly it was not only
possible, but acceptable for me to have an interest in ritual, in alchemy, in
gnosis.
Not fashionable, exactly, but instead of curses it earned me indulgent
smiles and so I poured myself into it and read, taking full advantage of the
libraries.
So, this was the context. And after a time:
It was 1989, and I was a student.
I’d already developed a quirky, mystical sort of rep by that point so
it didn’t come to anyone as a surprise when I changed programmes and moved into
anthropology. It fitted better, they
said, it was closer to their image of me than what had gone before. But with
the switch I was already behind so I started off with some summer courses and
then jumped with both feet into this new world when the autumn came.
One of the courses was a religion and ritual class. The prof had a reputation, and the rumours
you heard about the things she’d done for the sake of research were the kind of
shock stories students tell each other all the time. They weren’t true, most of them (though I
believed them at the time of course) but some things were and it turned out
that one of the things people said about here definitely was.
The rumour went that she had her favourites, that she picked and chose
from among the names she saw on the various she assigned to find the ones who seemed
to have a particular bent, people who – like her – were really interested in
ritual. I guess I must have written something, or said something in class, or
maybe I just had the look she was looking for because I was one of the
students she picked out when a group of elders came down from up North to do
some sweat lodges and other ceremonies for the First Nations community. It seemed there was a particular rite, a
journey they were doing with some young people, and they had offered to open
it up to others as well, a kind of community outreach, a way of bridging the
gap and helping us all learn about it.
The professor was well connected with the community of elders, and they’d
reached out to her, asking if she had any students she thought might be
interested in participating.
When she asked me if I’d like to go, I jumped on it. It was part and
parcel of the fascinating things I’d been learning ever since I made the
change, and I was eager to learn as much as I could. For me, it was as much about building up my
knowledge of how ritual should go as anything else.
I didn’t really believe anything would happen of course. I was still in my “historical recreation” phase,
the grasping at roots that we all go through in our teens. I was just building my rep among my peers,
expanding on the strange-but-cool persona that had somehow accreted around me.
Well, to some people it was cool, anyway.
So I went.
It was pretty much as you might expect. We sat in a circle. We drummed.
We were smudged and the elders sang.
Then they asked us to lie down. This ritual, it turned out, was a sort
of journey – it was supposed to help the young Cree men and women who were
participating dig deep and really feel their history in a way that the urban
schools just could do for them. We were supposed to close our eyes, inhale the
smoke, let the drumming run through us like water, and just…feel.
The elder who was leading it all spoke quietly to us through the
beginning of it. He explained that we were reaching inside to find our guide.
That it was OK if we didn’t think we’d touched anything, that the guide was
there anyway – it just wasn’t time for us to meet.
I smirked. It was like the mystical stuff in the textbooks, the hundred
and one cults we’d studied over the last year and a half that I sort of
believed but had an academic understanding of.
You have to realise, I’d never ever experienced anything really
spiritual before – not consciously. As I
look back now, I can see the moments when the gods started to prepare me, but
my eyes had still been closed back then.
So I smirked. I scoffed in my mind for a moment, but then I settled
down, determined to get the best academic value out of it. And if nothing else,
it was a great meditation exercise, right?
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Was I ever wrong.
Here’s what I expected: I expected that they would drum, and the
rhythms combined with the heavy smoke would make the elders’ voices hypnotic,
that they would lead us through a stylized trip where they’d introduce us to
various spirits, then at the end they’d talk us through it and help us to
choose the one that “called” to us the strongest.
Here’s what actually happened:
There was drumming. There was a
heavy, fragrant smoke. There were the
singing voices of the elders.
My breath slowed, and I could feel the drums in my chest. My heart
seemed to syncopate at first, then fell in line, and it was like my body was
the string on an instrument vibrating in time with this universal rhythm they
were pouring into me.
My breath became everything, sighing in and out of me like ocean waves.
It was dark inside my head at first, but then I thought I could see
lights – little points in the darkness that danced and shimmered, lines that
flickered and buzzed. And then things
started to resolve a little, and it seemed like I was in a cave, and I could swear
I knew I was deep underground. The weight on my chest is what told me.
I climbed, and the mouth of the cave was bright silver. I stepped out
into the moonlight and stopped under a huge tree. The cave had emerged from
among its roots.
On a branch, a raven perched, blinking brightly at me with those glossy
black eyes, head snicking back and forth as they do. It ruffled its head and
neck an krawked at me, then spread its wings and thop-thop-thop flew off and as
I turned to follow with my eyes I saw her.
Wrapped in tartan. Silver torq
around her neck. Cat swarming around her
legs. That raven again, bobbing his head as though laughing at me from the
branch behind her.
Copper hair glistening in the silver moonlight. Skin like milk. Eyes
shining like stars, and I’ll never understand how I could tell they were green,
but I did.
She smiled, and it was like my heart exploded.
I woke with a gasp, like I hadn’t breathed in minutes. One of the
elders was already beside me, like she’d known something was happening. She put
a gentle hand on my chest and pressed me back to the floor of that room in the
community center.
My heart was racing, my blood boiling. It felt like the power of a thousand suns was pouring out of the
top of my head, hosing out of my fingers.
I stared up at that speckled, institutional ceiling and I knew:
I’d just taken the first step onto a path I would follow my whole life.
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