Its funny - I look at my publication history on this blog and I realize that I go through cycles - intense spiritual connection and demarcations followed by periods of rampant depression and dysphoria. In no way, shape, or form am I implying that magic, ritual, and hedgecrossing (also known as journey work, i.e. travelling in spirit to other realms) is a remedy or treatment for mental illness, in fact I may be implying the exact opposite. Its possible to aggravate a mood disorder by knocking on the wrong doors so to speak. I definitely have found myself in episodes of anxiety when I've latched out or let another entity enter my space when I didn't have the right wards and protections in place. But sometimes things have to get emotionally violent before real change is made, before we cut away those things that seek to drag us under the rip tide. Major spiritual work is dirty and deadly. Not necessarily to you, but to parts of you that no longer serve the direction your work is taking you.
Years ago when I first came to practice witchcraft in earnest I instantly felt myself drawn to Hecate, the titan goddess associated with the moon, with the crossroads, descents into the Underworld, and the sea. As most baby witches do, I found her in the materials more easily accessible to me list her as a "crone" and "dark mother." When I began to understand that this was a gross skewing of her identity - she is a virgin (asexual, as I have come to understand through UPG) as well as the most powerful and respected god of her generation. Hecate's great insight and sight into mirror of wyrd saw that the monstrous tyrants of her family falling and making way for the the dominion of a new dynasty. As this goddess of the ways knows, everything shifts, every road must lead to a new world, a new space, and even the earth, as permanent as its power may have seemed then, was no different.
In those developmental phases of my path I honored her regularly, and I can't remember ever consciously deciding to back away from working with her, but I can recall that one night when I invoked her, her presence was so immediate and strong that it moved the table of my altar a fraction of an inch. She seemed to be busting through the door, as if to say, "I'm here, now lets get to work." But I was no way ready, so I feel back into the arms of Artemis, wrapping the cloak of her sacred woods around me like a visor over a baby's carriage. Instinctively my spirit seemed to know this goddess was not "beginner's material" for this witchling. So I merely made offerings to her as was her due at the time, recognizing her as the nexus of magic and journey work, the great needle in the cosmic compass through which the craft flows as it makes it's way towards its destination.
But this past year I have ritually performed the death of my old self while entering the cyclic states of depression fueled by dysphoria. It was as though I had to be emptied in order for the direction of my path to be made clear, to come into focus as the black smoke which filled my veins spooled out of me and back into the abyss. I'm not one for predestination or destiny, but I do believe in Wyrd - how the stirrings of the past bloom into the present and often times the gods and the spirits play vital part in the unfurling of the mortal world. Looking back on these events and how my general passion over the past few years has been journeying to other realms by hedgecrossing, its hard not to wonder if that knock at the door of that ritual several years ago was Hecate's first move towards asking me to be witch under her. Not a servant really - I in no way claim to be a priest - but rather a spirit worker who walks along side her and uses his energy to make changes in the below and within, in order to manifest changes above (here) and without. Perhaps I'm being too pompous about it all, but this feels as though this is the calling, the sacred space where I belong - staff in hand, following our Lady of The Crossroads under the dome of her holy night.
Tonight, I opened the door again and passed through to meet her. I lit the candle within my compass of slate which is tied directly into the Other and fell out of my body and down the through the earth. For days the image of a door banging open and shut, as though someone had just passed through it and it bounced against wood of the door frame, has been reoccuring. When this happens I have learned to recognize the repetition as a a call, a knock on my astral body. "Come," the titan goddess says. And so I pushed the door open again and found my sight confounded by a brilliant but stark white which surrounded me. For several seconds I was completely blinded until around me harsh, bold lines stood out which resolved themselves into shapes of a forest. No color, no detail, simply these errant lines. It seemed as though the entire world was blanketed in the white snow of death.
Ahead of me I recognized Hecate, bearing her two torches. Unlike the forest, she was fully defined and brilliantly lit by an aura of smoky blackness, which made her stick out vibrantly against the coat of white which smothered the world around her. Her dogs sniffed at the road beneath our feet. Searching, hunting. Eventually we passed the only hint of color to be found - a crystalline blue which seemed to move like water beneath the icy white of the forest floor. She snapped her fingers and the dogs created a circle, a watch, as they sat and kept guard against the faint spirals of energy, of wavering lines which seemed to be closing the distance between the forest and where the river of blue began. She pushed her torches into the ground, one in the north and the other in the south, and began to raise her hands. The crystalline blue water broke through the icy white of the ground and rose all around us, a sea rising just beyond where the dogs stood as points of the circle . We were shielded and as I felt my astral body connecting to the energies of my own protective spirits, gods, and fae, Hecate began to use her knife to cut open the white blanketed earth at our feet. She peeled it pack as though she was peeling back cut flesh and beneath the white she revealed dark soil, crimson, bleeding with roots of brilliant red. She continued to dig when she dusted away the dirt to reveal Dark Rabbit - a local cthonic spirit, curled up as though cold, shuddering as though dreaming. She nodded towards me and I reached down to touch Dark Rabbit when I realized my hands had found a hollow in her belly. I reached in and found a latch, or at least it felt like one, and when I flipped it, Dark Rabbit's eyes flew open and she seemed to coalesce, reforming into the body of a dark haired woman with soft floopy ears similar to those of her animal body. Red veins, like those of the earth which had cacooned and nursed her, trailed beneath her white skin. The blood was pulsing within her.
"Now you," Hecate said, and with little thought I seemed to understand what she was bidding me to do. I closed my eyes and saw a diamond like shape surrounding my own home and within it, the blood of the earth fueled my sacred fires, my hearth, my very life. But the white of this world of death was closing in. I had to set my own wards. So I empowered the diamond, mobilized it to become concrete and immovable and from there I reached out and touched the ruby of Dark Rabbit's heart.I felt fire seal the diamond, form it from the very flames of the deep. When I opened my eyes again, I looked up and saw the walls of water beginning to collapse, Hecate was feeding her dogs whole pieces of flesh she drew out of the earth.
"Go now." Above the dwindling heights of the waves I saw spiraling forms of black and white crawling down from the trees. I recognized them instantly - somehow, I don't know exactly when or where, I have met them before. They are the bottom feeders of the world beneath ours. They suck in what is falling apart and pour it into the meaty mass of the earth's astral form. But I had to leave now to avoid tripping their safe guards against the mortal from entering their world.
A great tree of myriad colors sprung up from the earth and a door at it's base opened. I crawled inside, running down the long tunnel until I saw the back of my head, my body sitting crosslegged on the floor.
I was back. My physical head now spinning and swarming with all that I had experienced, I realized what Hecate had led me to do on this journey. We were laying the wards, setting the foundation for new connections, new paths between myself and the Other, the Wild, the Beyond.
It all sounds so crazy but I realize now I'm entering the mature phase of my path. The way is open, my athame stands ready and my wand is arcing towards the stars. I just had to be brave enough, free enough, to actually open the door fully. No more with this one foot here the other foot sorta floating on the air in the Other. Its now planted, making roots, feeling the ground. Energy flows within and wanes as it moves out. My body is a circle, my life is a cycle. But I finally feel as though the cycles of crises have successfully dynamited open my way forward.
Hecate's torches light the way. Witchling just has to open his damn eyes.
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