Ancilla

Hod

  A warm September sun streams through the kitchen window. It's finally cool enough that we can turn off the air conditioning without broiling ourselves alive, so we have the windows open. Of course, the weather this time of year is fickle, so tomorrow we might well be broiling again. Alternatively, we might get a hard frost and wake up shivering.

   I'm in the middle of one of my essay assignments. My books and papers take up a large part of the kitchen table – basically, whatever part of the table is not already occupied by food. Stacking the spare notebook paper, folders, pens, and other miscellaneous supplies in a wooden garden carry-all I found stuffed in the back of the coat closet helped to tame my mess somewhat, but the books still have a tendency to sprawl when I write, because I'm cross-referencing them, and it's a pain to keep them in a neat little stack if I have to be constantly pulling them out to look for quotes.

   This time, he has me reading Campbell's writings on the Hero's Journey, a pop psychology book by someone called Maureen Murdock, some of Jung's writings on the Shadow archetype, and Gerald Gardner.

   What a combination.

   I have to take some responsibility for the selection – he has me reading the authors to come up with background material for a new initiation ritual. Ritual magick hasn't been something I've taken to. I found out the hard way when trying to conduct a ritual that while I make a decent temple assistant when he needs help boosting his concentration and power, my own talents are not so inclined. I work better on a path without much ritual at all, feeling delicate awareness of currents around me, while spontaneously focusing my power to push those currents around. That's how I clean a sacred space. Focusing on actual ascent is even more chaotic, and it only happens when I meditate.

   Except when sometimes, now, it doesn't.

   We were hoping ritual would give me enough structure that my search for gnosis would use a path for regular enlightenments, but unfortunately, the details become too interesting in themselves for me to remember what it was that I was trying to accomplish in the first place.

   In keeping with this, he suggested creating an initiation ritual of the "make it up as you go along" variety, rather than something scripted in his esoteric tradition.

   "Of course, it's not working for you," he mused. "My tradition is fraternal. There are women in it, but Florence Farr and Mina Bergson and goddess imagery notwithstanding, the rituals were still written in the nineteenth century by men, and mostly for other men. You're not a man. Dig hard enough and you'll find some criticism of the rituals, saying that they're oversimplified and sexist whenever feminine energy is concerned. Too polarized, in all the wrong ways. The women who find them useful and do well in the tradition probably have more polarized extremes of masculine and feminine energy than you do, and all of it conventional. Your animus and anima are differently shaped. Might as well ask you to fit a Procrustean bed."

   It made more sense, he said, to devise a home-brewed initiation ritual that I would find more personally meaningful and more suited to the raw and chaotic way I work energy, and I agreed. It's only common sense. If his tradition doesn't suit me well, why use its established rituals?

   Everything points to the necessity of my finding, or blazing, my own path.

   Everything also points to the need for an initiation of some kind. It can only be an initiation. Initiations are not just once-in-a-lifetime occurrences; they're ways to acknowledge transitions, achieve purification, and clear away obstacles.