Amber Honey, Faery Queen of Southern Summers & Queer Initiation for Lughnasa

For years I've been going through my hedgecrossing life without documenting very much of it. Poetry for the most part has been the most effective way I feel to capture that ineffable, ever shifting quality I experience when I'm in the world of Faery, but it's definitely not the best way to communicate to others on what I've found there.  And for the most part, what I see and do there are not necessarily of use to anyone else. The nature of Faery is something that is eternal yet the shape of things there are the very lesson of impermanence. Plus, the fae folk's reputation of playing tricks and being downright shoddy to mortals with their games of smoke and mirrors doesn't help in this matter. What you may have seen or been told by a faery being could be enigmatic at best or a downright lie at the worst.

And although it may sound like a magical rollercoaster of wonder and terror, I definitely feel that it's not too different from the human realm. We are constantly on a day to day basis changing the stakes and the definitions of our world through arbitrary laws and measures that are just as transformative and altering as magic. Our language encodes the perceived universe around us to such a degree that we often don't really see the "objective" world as it is anymore. Take for instance our binary gender structures. By calling a person with a vagina a "female" I have already slotted her, even by the so called scientific definition, into a world that is way beyond the mere image of human being who has a vagina. "Female" draws up connotations of birth, mother, breasts, food, weak - even before we get into the social construction of "Woman" the word "female" has already alluded to it - conjured it even, if I might be so bold.

With that thought in mind, it's easy to see that we really are not that different from the world of Faery, with the exception of that at least in the world of Faery, we are aware that change is the only constant, where as in the world of humans we try everything we can to keep up the appearances of law and order.

As I was bathing tonight, hoping to soak in that new moon energy and let go of all of this torturous anger and rage that has been bottling up out of my dysphoria as of late, I realized that I had conjured up a door way to an entity I had met previously in passing - the Fae Queen of Summer. Before she had appeared to me as the blood stained wife of the Fae King whose ashes and parchment seeded the Queer Fae Kin I spoke of in my previous post. This time, as I let myself simmer in a hot bath filled with dead sea salt treated with argan, rose, and black opium oil, I found myself sailing away down the river into a domain in which she truly ruled, and was not simply passing by.

Here, I was led up into a pine cone shaped wooden zephyr which billowed in the air, creaking as the breeze moved it, with pennants flying about in a rainbow of colors. Kou, the fae kin of Earth, with his sword in hand, led me up a flight of bottomless stairs which ran all the way around the zephyr, leading in a spiral to its height.  The night hung black and profound around us, as though its potential was liable to burst into starry radiance at any moment.  What happened next is a jumble, a series of impressions rather than any one experience which can adequately be pinned down. But I witnessed the Fae Queen sit before me and when she spread her arms out the earth rumbled and the air was filled with a sickening sweetness. Below us, the plates of the crust merged and subdued, creating new land, new scapes, and with but a gesture, her indigo skin began to glow as she bristled and hummed like a fluttering humming bird. The very same birds flew around her in a vignette. They drew nectar from her hair as she sang her animal song.

Kou's sword shone blue in the night and when he swung it to cut down vine and flowering branches for the queen, it made the sound  of feathers flapping in flight.

In order to honor this Faery Queen who walks in South Eastern Tennessee this time of year, I have compiled a few notes about her that I gleaned from this hedgecrossing.

• Her name came to me as I fell back into my body near the end of the trance: Amber Honey. The image of Artemis of Ephesus comes to mind when picturing her. 
  

• She prominently wears a violet third eye. Her flower is the lilac and hibiscus. 

•  I think of her as mother, but more of the word mother at it applies when describing vinegar's mother batch. She is more concerned with gathering the fruit and spreading it. She does not focus on motherly care or parental sort of actions. But rather, she is the great egg which bursts and fertilizes all which it yoke splashes on. Honey gushing from the comb, fruit bursting with over ripeness are her images. 

• To evoke and conjure: black opium, dead sea salt mixed with argan oil, rose oil. All of this is compounded during the new moon. The absent moon is her face. She comes to cover us in the night with her rapturous orgiastic culling of the vine.

• Iconography: travels in a pine cone shaped zephyr, She is black skinned woman with red hair wrapped in a braid about her head. She has star colored freckles and from her mouth runs the blood of the wolf's first kill. Or is it the the raspberry gone to bust? 

• Her husband was a human who was transformed into a fae being. He was only concerned with the ruling of the earth by edicts and decrees She let him be winnowed by the great winds to help birth the Queer Fae Kin.  I am her child - a seed that fell into fertile soil during her reign. 

• During the evening her skin turns indigo and glows with the pale fire of Polaris in spiral designs of the universe. 

• The excess pits and seeds she gathers she takes to  the deep in her great zephyr and there she tosses flowers and fruits into the black sea. The sea swallows her offering, and a tender hand reaches up. Summer and Ocean kiss. And then they are parted for another year. 

With Lughnasa coming up, I think I am going to take this time to think of initiation rituals as an enby witch with Queen Amber as my initiatory deity. Without her I would have never have met the Fae kin who have become so much a part of my everyday magical experience and her very presence seems to be the essence of chaotic creation in motion. And what is more queer than that?

Living liminal

At my place of employment there are these slanted Mirrors which run along the length of the building allowing you to monitor customers as they shop. It's intended to discourage and deter nare-do-wells from shoplifting. But one day last week the humidity and my erratic energy patterns(caffeine problems) came to a head on one of our typical Tennessee stormy summer nights, and so when I looked into the mirror for a split second hoping to catch my breath, it seemed as though I was looking into the reflection of an entirely different place. There were no magical kingdoms or unicorns in that reflection, nothing to simply justify my description of this "liminal experience". It simply it seemed as though the "real world" that the mirror was portraying was simply a gauze over a flickering light which illuminated our motions at a flame's whimsy. It was like watching moth wings beat inside of a lamp hood. Our movements seemed ephemeral and fragile and I felt that if I could reach out and touch that world inside the mirror, then I could pull of the skin of that world, like wings off a moth, and find the real body, my body, falling straighten into the gravity of that world. 

These sort of moments are common in my magical workings, but it was strange, and yet exhilarating to find this sort of calm and uncanny mixture of the "between" and the mundane nestled right where I perform the most menial, uninteresting of tasks in my day to day life. Here, on the grounds where I simply rinse and repeat in the great washing machine that is my retail working retinue, I found that our own bodies are still fluttering, still beating with that riotous chaos which gives us life, even though the patina of commercialism and consumer driven desire usually snuffs it out to a dim ember, so that all I usually feel and see are the down cast eyes of the man who just wants a pack of cigarettes and little else, not even a smile and a greeting which, when offered, he barely even acknowledges. Yet in the mirror, he was glowing, effervescent, a wisp of a light which, when snuffed out, gets swallowed by the larger light of the looming atmosphere.  

In the office it's not uncommon to hear the pipes banging against the lockers, which creates the illusion that someone is opening and slamming a locker door.  Once or twice it set me off guard, but after it's regular occurrence I realized it was the result of document-able and explainable phenomenon.  But just the other evening, I saw movement out of the corner of my eyes, and as usual, I shrugged it off as one of my coworker's heading back to their locker. When I went to grab some lotion out of my own just a few seconds later, no one was there.  My heart skipped a beat, my breath grew heavy, and I could only whisper, "I see ya'll are following me." 

I've traversed through these paragraphs to come full circle to the idea of the liminal and what walking the path of the witch really means outside of the mystery and mysticism of the circle. Our lives are not cleanly cut, the circle is always within other circles, touching and intersecting like ripples across the sea during the rain. My own path of fae hedge crossing work proves time and time again that you cannot simply take off the "hat" so to speak and expect only magical and transformative events to occur within our demarcations of "magic time."  Time and time again, it seems as though our magical systems and beliefs fall apart when we end up falling just a little too far over the line into the world of fae. 

I suppose that that is what grounding is for. Too often I find my spirit and energies easily uprooted by the call of the those across the hedge, so please take warning. Effective magical work needs be done with a foot firmly planted in this world and the next, but it's rather refreshing to be proven wrong about a closely held belief. Like the time when I called to the fae for the first time, expecting Lady of the Lake like women to meet me in trance, when what I get is an old drunken man asking if I've seen his moon shine bottle and if I could leave out some milk and honey for his twin daughters who have gone off again.  Or the time when that summer queen showed up all dressed in peacock feathers, convincing me that she was Hera, only to open up her mouth and show off her set of bloody pointed teeth.

If you go in with expectations, which is only natural, be prepared to have them smashed. In my history of walking the path of the hedgewich, I have found that just when you think that all you are doing is making an offering out of rue water, you consequentially end up offering a spell of protection over some baby entities who have come into your life out of the blue.  

Liminal in one sense means having a dual existence, but it can also prove to show that all of our actions have the two faces of a coin as well. Intention and will are all fine and good, and without them we wouldn't be witches, now would we? But once the fae step in, they often take what we offer and pour out and configure it in new ways. It's as though our moments across the hedge are not just about linear actions, but about stitches in an unravelling tapestry that is quickly and eternally being rewoven into the present. 

The essence of faery is the essence of change. Part of this relationship I have built with my magic and the hedge has shown me that in order to participate in such changes is to stand still, let it catch you up in it, and go along for the ride. I suppose that is contradiction, we must be still to move into the change that sweeps us up into the destructive, yet  re-birthing power of the worlds between worlds.  Yet also you cannot rest at anyone time on one perception of the universe. It's as though you have drawn a card. The first time you glance down at it, it's a spade. But the second time, it's suddenly an ace. It is the exact same card but you have drawn it in a multiplicity of instances resembling this exact moment, and yet it is never the same. Just like when you walk into the same valley in trance, the exact same one you found to be the home of a river sprite, and yet now, you meet a tree named Gall and he has no idea who you are talking about and has never met her. They both exist, but the time and ripples have  washed over each other, changing the landscape, without erasing your own experience. 

And so today, when I go into work later on, I might look into that very same mirror and see only the bland faces of singleminded shoppers who either look to get lost in our treasure trove of cosmetics and candy or hope to find the holy grail of a deal they think they are getting with that misread coupon. But that gauze of light, that rippling sinew of energy that resides is still there, thrumming, waiting to be touched. I just haven't stepped on the right patch of grass over the hedge to see it. Maybe the sky is too dark, or my muscles to tired, or my mood to sour. But it is there all the same.  

Close your eyes. Inhale, cross the hedge, exhale. What you find is anyone's guess, but it will never be the same card once. 

Faery Dreams - on trance work while dealing with mental illness

Night comes draping around me like a familiar blanket, one that often life has withheld from me during my periods of deep depression. Then, sleep was merely an escape, a total black out from consciousness, a temporary freedom from the hell of my own body and it's errant and self deprecating reality. It was like crawling into bed was falling into a noose that I hoped would never let off of it's grip.

But finally, with the help of my psychiatrist and some good old fashioned caffeine, and video game therapy which allows me to displace some of my gender dysphoria (until a time to deal with it when I mentally have enough strength to process and filter it properly), I seem to have found the alchemical compound that transfigures the nightmare of  the human world into a bearable case of ennui and so sleep comes as a sweet lover kissing my eyelids rather than as a despairing mother drowning their child in the hopes of sparing him the terribleness of it all.

It's taken a few months but with the chemical cocktail now in my system  as well as my latent fears  subsiding for the time being, I can look at my bed and no longer sees a coffin. Instead Hypnos reaches out too me, whispering to me of lands beyond the sandman's dunes.  Images began to take hold and for once they do not appear as the the terror filled miasma my mind often experiences during sleep, which decimates conscious fears into subconscious brambles, forever tripping me as I fall into slumber only to find myself surrounded by the imaginings of my own doubt.

Now I fall like a feather and for the first time in a long time I'm having dreams that echo my vision work, that seem to go hand in hand with my waking spiritual experiences. Instead of the jungle of randomness that my dreams usually consist of, I found myself wondering through a realm of story, one in which the edges seemed soft as a feather yet they still cut like knife. It reeked of faerie, reminiscent of something in a Gustav Klimt painting. All of the architecture appeared fraught with the luxuries of gothic architecture and the decadence of  the Renaissance. Through the main halls within a cathedral I walked, wearing a swirling print top of red and black and a skirt  of a fine lace with a belt of blue bells. Continuously I was pushed and shoved about my women wearing Puritan cuts of white and they shoved me towards a man carrying a book which he stored in a ornate wooden box on a stand. When he left I rummaged through it convinced he was hiding something from me. 

But soon he returned and began ordering the women about to make ready as he took the book from my hands. Soon I began to feel contractions and suddenly my belly pushed out an infant lined in silver afterbirth. Overjoyed I took the babe in my arms but the women began to scold me. It wasn't over yet. Three more babes followed nearly falling out of me like stones. And without further elaboration I woke up. 

Initially I brushed it off as nothing more than a dream but as the day went on I found myself haunted by the image of the man with the book, wondering what it was all about. They was a livid quality to this dream that was uncanny in its articulation of detail.

Strange as it may seem I happen to have much of my vision work come to me in the shower. I don't know if it's the liminal property of water that induces such states or the fact I tend to run it as hot as it  is humanly possible to endure without getting burns that triggers the trance but either way, my spirit often just jumps out of me without warning while I'm bathing.

And just so, it happened yesterday. I closed my eyes to find myself standing in a lonely meadow with overcast skies and before me stood a cloaked man. He remained speechless for several minutes until I called out to him and he tossed aside his cloak revealing that he held between his hands the same illuminated book I saw in my dream as he let it fall open between his fingers. It began to blow away into pieces, flailing about into the wind, breaking down into nothing more than crumbling ash. He himself bowed his head as though in gratitude. When he lifted it again, his hood fell back from his face, showing a circlet above his brow which began to sparkle and shine. 

He whispered a thanks and then began to disintegrate  into sand, falling like granules in an hourglass. Fiercely the wind tossed his remains about the meadow and I realized yet again that I was not alone. Four entities emerged from the vignette edges of the scene as though they had just materialized from the artist's hand. Four figures, four infants. The dream continued into my waking hours. 

It's difficult to describe what came next, but slowly their separate identities began to coalesce around them, as they they were taking form and weaving personality even while I watched. But what was clear by the end of the trance was this: they were the disambiguations of a king obsessed with the world in wrote and an enby witch who is distilling all of the harmful toxic things we teach ourselves about what it is to BE out of their blood. It was as though this fae king,with his tome filled with edicts, slowly crumbled into what the universe knows as true change, and from the ashes and my own bleeding heart arose these four spectres beyond my wildest imagining.  

Kou - fae of the earth, boyish yet femme around the edges, bares his sword and hammer in honor and protection of Gaea

Filis - blind harpist whose long draping skirts and bare chest tickled by waist length hair  whirls around him as he sings to the wind and conjures spells out of its notes.

Sejic - genderless (pronouns they), wears the flames about them like a shawl and veil. Eternally conjuring the sacred fires. 

Vyrnig - Water nymph whose body extends as long tentacles which love to pry open the earth's legs in endless copulation. Hair is the unending flow of the river. 

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how that happened exactly, but while dreaming I seem to have birthed in the astral half fae kids who are the highest hopes of a withering fairy king who hopes to return himself to chaos (the true primordial souup) and me, the ever dysphoric, ever shifting, unstable witch of the fucked up earthen plane.

I know it sounds crazy - in fact, I'm not that far above from declaring it's probably just the wishful thinking of a new-age blunderhole who just wants to feel  special. But I have taken this time to talk about my depression and this strange and unusual journey work to discuss something that doesn't receive a lot of coverage in mainstream witch circles : dealing with mental illness while walking the path of Witch. When I am more than likely experiencing night terrors from adjusting to  a new medicine - does that make it anymore exempt from my valid spiritual experiences than say, a child's simple nightmare? When the depression hits and it seems to lead me to the netherworld places while entering the trance state, have my experiences suddenly become invalid because of how my mental state tinges that sort of spiritual journeying? When, in the everyday world, people would just call me paranoid or overreacting, would such reactions be acceptable in the context of your magical life? 

Well, the fact of the matter is, most people think we are already crazy and that it's all "in our head" anyway (whatever the hell that means, perception is literally ALWAYS in your head). But I think we would be discounting the whole wealth of experiences and wisdom that comes from lessons learned while crossing the hedge and simultaneously combating out own mental demons. If Inanna chooses to take me on a ride to the underworld as I find myself mentally on the dark side of the moon - then perhaps that is exactly what this witch boi needs and the journey is no less important just because I'm not emotionally "right." I think there are a lot of attitudes in the writings on magick that are out there that imply to not engage in magical procedures unless you are "fine," "in the right state of mind," or out of the dumps, as though it's dangerous to be a witch if you're anything less than a neurotypical average Georgina. Well, fuck that. Conjure your wards, weave your protection spells, but baby, if you wait till you're "all right" you might be waiting till your dead. If the great primordial bath is chaos herself, then we the mentally skewed gotta a reservation at the Hotel Shook. 

But this is how I am - me, the enby, AD/HD, mood disordered witch - and these fae kids are just as wild, varied, and irreconcilable as I know I am. They literally were born out of the ashes of the old hegemony - the fae king and his edicts fell apart to form them. They no longer form monarchies and dualities of king's and queens. They are working to make something far more wicked - astral creation writhing into dreams and streams.  Don't let anyone tell you that because you're differently abled or neuro atypical that your craft is less than others - that fucking mothergoddess witch we see everywhere doesn't exist. There is no witch that is just a hag, or just a rutting stag of man. We are  chaos made flesh and the void fills us all  - but maybe we, the left of center, have one foot in each world, and our home truly is everywhere and nowhere. And if that isn't the way of the Witch, then I don't know what is.

*paintings by Gustav Klimt in order of appearance: Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Danae, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Judith II