The Goddess' Athames

A few years back, a Pagan man wrote an essay and published it on Witchvox in which he called him "the Goddess' athame." The point of this striking metaphor was that he considered himself to be an instrument of the Goddess' Will in all the ways that an athame works the Will of a Witch.

Last week, I got to experience the marvelous effects of several dozen "athames of the Goddess" all pointed at me in Love and Grace, and today, I sing that Love and Grace.

Since my initiation into an American Craft tradition in 2002, Lord Death has visited me and mine all too often. Now, I understand Lord Death's role in the greater scheme of things; life without death is cancerous, toxic, and miserable. For several Samhains I have enacted the Mystery of the Descent of the Goddess  into the realm of Death, the sacrifice of the Sacred King, and sung "Hoof and Horn / All That Dies Shall Be Reborn" with gusto.

Nevertheless, the deaths and the endings and the mournings and the letting-go-of-things have piled up and especially in the past two years, it's been relentless. Not only with the passing of people and beings I love, but the death of relationships I cherished; the death of my priestess role within my community, and my place in the community; and of the hopes and ambitions I had for my tradition. All gone. All failed. All faded away. 

It's been a lot of Winter. 

And so when Freya, my beloved and most special cat, my L'il, the Tiny Baby Kitty I helped feed unto life as a kitten, when she sickened, it was too much. Too much. All the grief of the past two years recapitulated into this one big grief. I reached out to the Goddess in confusion, asking, what should I do about Freya, what decisions should I make? And I felt nothing whatsoever except a blank and terrifying silence. My Goddess, why has thou forsaken me?

I was wrong. I was not forsaken at all.

Going public with my despair, I was astonished at how many people, dozens of people, took time out of their busy lives to read my posts and offer their words of  sympathy, consolation, and heartfelt advice. It was easy to see that every one of their messages was sincere. Some of these people I have never met face-to-face. Others I have not seen in over 20 years. 

It was an astonishing outpouring of Love and Grace, and through it I found great healing, and through it I found and felt once again the Goddess. 

I realized several things:

1. There comes a point where sadness morphs into depression, and the biological markers of depression often include a deficit of that marvelous spirit of connection that is the neurotransmitter "serotonin." Without adequate levels of serotonin, it is very hard to perceive, to feel viscerally, any kind of connection. That is one the reasons I had a hard time feeling the Goddess directly.
2. The Goddess, however, does not have to manifest directly into neural networks that may be misfiring at the time, but She can and does work through other people, who are not really Others at all, because we are all cells linked in the body of Her greatness, and love given is love shared.
3. That in this case, the Goddess very much implemented Her Will through these dozens of people who took the time to say a kind word, or many kinds words, to me. Every one was an athame of the Goddess, pointing a stream of glowing Love at me, and at Freya.

I have not felt the Goddess' love this tangibly in many years. It reminded me so powerfully that nurturing and cherishing the web of connection we have with one another is the highest form of service one can give the Goddess. Every single thing else pales in comparison, falls utterly away into insignificance. Status, "witchiness," tradition, form, praxis, all of them are meaningless unless they are subsumed into the service of Her Love. Without this Love, all these forms and items we Pagans cherish are like those decorative athames you hang on a wall: pretty and interesting, but ultimately useless. I know that is going to be a lesson I'll be unpacking for some time to come, and in that realization will come Spring, and the healing of my heart.

It may seem irreverent to quote a pop band at this point, but once again I marvel at the Awen of the Beatles - perhaps not surprising since they were, after all, Celts: "And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make."

On August 7 I had a new blog post all planned out. The theme was the pentagram and the human body: the "[hu]man the microcosm" we've all seen, but with anatomical and functional correspondences to the Elements and the five points. It was going to be a useful and original map that updated what's become a bit of a Wiccan cliche, plus it was to serve as an introduction to the next several posts...

...none of which got written, because as I was sipping a new, healthy probiotic beverage and exulting in my cleverness, my truck got smashed into by a man fumbling for a cigarette. And I had something to actually heal (a broken wrist bone, contusions, and a scared and scarred spirit) as opposed to merely improve (my fat content and muscle tone).

So I've been thinking a lot about how we put ourselves back together again after life's Humpty-Dumpty incidents. The car accident was firmly in the realm of Air and came after five weeks of Air craziness and the worst. Mercury. retrograde. ever. Yet my healing began with Air, also: the first thing I did was invoke the power of relationship, by calling  two friends to help take care of me while my husband was out of town. 

I also thought about the torn ligaments and fragmented bone under the cast, and how every minute, cells were dividing, enzymes were switching proteins on and off, old bone fragments were being broken down, and blood, lymph and nutrients were being shunted over to the fracture. How does this happen? How can you take a bone that is broken, and six weeks later, voila! it's no longer broken! That's hard to do, as anyone who has ever tried to gorilla-glue the handle back on their favorite mug will tell you.

For that matter, how can we grow new humans at all? How does a an egg and a sperm  come out to be a baby? Yes, genetics and all that, but that infinitely intricate process of switching on and off, of cells "knowing" where to go to make toes, which differ from ovaries, which differ from eyeballs, which differ from hair: what is that intelligence?

From this occultist's point of view, it is the Archangel Raphael*. Raphael's name means "God who Heals" or, as I prefer, "Healing of the Divine" (because it is a gender-neutral term). Angels are messengers of the Divine. A message is a thought or a communication, so I often think of Them as Divine thoughts that are tuned to particular purposes. Thought is Intelligence, and so over the past few weeks, I have come to regard Raphael as that Divinely Intelligent agency within my cells that knows how to mend an injury and restore the flesh to more-or-less its original form.

And it is Raphael that can help the worse injury: my newfound tendency to jump and hyperventilate whenever I hear a loud BANG; my occasional worry over sending my clients elsewhere. In the Western Mystery Tradition, Raphael is often associated with the Element of Air, which is also thought and mental issues, and travel, and relationships. May Raphael's Divine Intelligence continue to heal my thoughts and strengthen my relationships along with the bone in my hand, and may I remain mind-full of the miracle of mending and healing taking place in my body right now.

*This image is from an Archangel series by a fabulous artist named Briar. All Briar's art is amazing. Go check it out.