Dreaming the Dark

“Are you ready to hunt the shadow?” I ask Joy. She nods, and the blue-violet glow of her aura deepens, telling me she has slipped a shade further into the waking-dreaming state we call trance. She greets the four directions, casting the internal circle that becomes the temporary boundary protecting the self from merging with and getting lost among the shadows of the underworld.

She heads west, because it is the direction that feels least comfortable. The West is unbearably hot and dry. She is climbing a rocky hillside. “I should have started earlier,” she cries. The climb is steep and there’s a sharp fall-off to her right. “I’m dizzy.” She claps her left hand over her eyes. “It’s narrow—there’s just space—nothing to support me.”

She pulls herself along and stops, shaking. The fear is terrible. I stay with her, watching her breathing as she struggles to go on. A crack in the rock opens into a cave; she is pulling herself along, crawling on hands and knees. “I’m scared—I could get lost, get in and not be able to get out. I shouldn’t be doing this by myself.” She calls for a lost lover, for parts of herself that embody her power, but these cannot help her. Only a rope and a miner’s lantern appear. The cave gives way to a small ledge on the side of the cliff; she clings with her fingers, gasping and trembling, genuinely terrified. I put my hand on her belly, and tell her to breathe deeply, to remember the protective cape and spear she found in an earlier trance . . .

She affixes the rope to the ledge, and tries to let herself down. “I’m caught between the rocks!” she cries out. “The cliff that I’m squeezed against—it’s alive! I see faces—monsters. They’re laughing at me—mocking.”

“One says, ‘So you’re finally here—you think you can beat me but you can’t’ . . . I’m afraid the rope’s going to break.”

“It’s awful!” Her hands are grasping the air, as if it were a rope, and her face is pulled down in distress. She writhes on the mat, breathing hard. “It’s got big eyes—like an octopus—it’s slimy—slippery—OH, NO! IT CAN’T BE! OH, NO! OH, NO!”

“Use your spear,” I say, thinking, “Oh shit! I’ve let her get too far into this—and now I can’t help her out.”

“DON’T DROP ME!” she screams. “LET ME GO! DON’T DROP ME! LET ME GO!”

“The monsters take and snap it in two! They’re ripping up my cape. I’M BEING ABSORBED BY IT! THE MONSTER IS ABSORBING ME! IF I DON’T LET IT, I’LL BE SQUEEZED TO DEATH!”

Reclaiming our personal power is a healing journey, but not an easy one. For the human psyche forms itself from the relationships one has with other people, things, and institutions. It is a mirror of culture. The relationships we have mostly known and the institutions of our culture are based on power-over. So our inner landscapes are those of the stories of estrangement, and they are peopled by creatures that dominate or must be dominated. To free ourselves, to recover our power-from-within, the power to feel, to heal, to love, to create, to shape our futures, to change our social structures, we may have to do battle with our own thought-forms. We may have to change the inner territory as well as the outer, confront the forms of authority that we carry within. For we shape culture in our own image, just as it shapes us. If we are unwilling to confront ourselves, we risk reproducing the landscape of domination in the very structures we create to challenge authority.

Change is frightening, but Witches have a saying, “Where there’s fear, there’s power.” The culture of estrangement teaches men to deny fear—and women to let fear control them. Yet if we learn to feel our fear without letting it stop us, fear can become an ally, a sign to tell us that something we have encountered can be transformed. Often, our true strength is not in the things that represent what is familiar, comfortable, positive—but in our fears and even in our resistance to change. And so Joy will find her power, in the end, not in her image of her lover, or in her tools, but in the monsters and in the strength of their stranglehold.

Let us follow her journey meandering and digressing along the way, so that her battle can teach us some of the underlying principles of the work of changing consciousness.

First note that Joy does not go alone. I am there—not to guide but to support her. Since I have been trained both as a Witch and as a psychotherapist, I know an array of techniques for getting people out of tight places. I don’t intend to use them. My work is both simpler and infinitely more difficult; it is work that could be done by a friend, a lover, a coven member, a companion, but must be done by somebody—to be there for her and yet to let her have her own fears, her own journey, her own battle. I am there to stand for the human community, to hear and accept her fear, her grief, her monsters, her pain, her darkness, without taking them over or trying to cure them, so that what she encounters in herself will not isolate her, but will draw her closer to other human beings.

The solitary vision quest is romantic, but the cultures that send their adolescents out into the wilderness alone to discover their true names are very different from ours. A potential shaman raised in a tribal culture has a different psychic structure than that of a person raised in the culture of estrangement. In a tribe, the individual self mirrors the collective, the group mind; the solitary quest is a way of breaking free, of discovering one’s unique, individuated self, so as to bring back something new to the group. But in our culture we are raised separately—to the point of pain. We are trained to compete from our earliest years, taught that drives and desires and bodies are objects to be controlled. What we encounter alone in the underworld, should we somehow manage to get there, are the ghosts and demons of our culture—the thought-forms of power-over. They can be enormously strong, they have all the force of Western culture behind them. They sustain their power with the constant mantra, the whisper in the ear that says, “You are separated, isolated, alone.” There is no way that any one of us can defeat that whisper alone. No matter how strong we become, how many inner demons we conquer, how many insights we gain, how many spirit allies we acquire, we are ultimately confirming our own isolation unless our journey is grounded in a relationship with living, breathing, human beings.

And other living human beings can supply a perspective on our demons and our powers that we ourselves do not have, a perspective that can save our lives, or at least our sanity.

Let me illustrate with a personal story. Years ago, I made a meager living for a short while reading Tarot cards and palms at a succession of “Psychic Faires.” These gatherings took place at hotels or bookstores, where twenty or thirty psychics of mixed breed, and various traditions, skills, and levels of integrity would perform fifteen-minute readings, often for hours or days on end. During slow times, we would entertain ourselves by reading for each other. One of the psychics who read for me told me that I was destined to be a great teacher and healer, but that it would be a “hard and lonely path,” and people would not understand me. I took this with reservations—I have yet to meet the psychic (including myself) who will tell someone, “Face it, kid, your talents are mediocre at best—have you considered getting a regular job?” However, it disturbed me. I felt I must make a choice.

A few nights later I dreamt that I was on a train. The train passed through a desert and made many stops at towns the names of which all began “Rio __________.” (Rio means “river” in Spanish.) A man and a woman were cleaning up ashtrays and cups in the smoking car. The woman told me to help. “Why should she help?” the man asked. “She doesn’t even know if she’s on the train or off the train.” “It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “She still has to do the work.”

The next day, I decided to explore the dream further in trance. It was a sunny day, rare in San Francisco, so I went to Golden Gate Park, lay down under a tree, and relaxed—not very wise, since it was not a safe place. Without using a formal induction or much structure—also unwise—I let the dream take form again, until I was standing and talking to the man.

I hesitated, because, on the one hand, I did know that I was already committed to doing it, or I wouldn’t have gotten that far; on the other hand, the “hard and lonely path” did not attract me at all.

“Well,” I finally said, “I’ll go, but only on my own terms. I won’t go without equal companions.”

At that point, the man grinned. The woman suddenly appeared, grinning. It seemed that whole grandstands full of spirits had joined them. All shouted in unison, “Right, dummy! How could you ever do anything on any other terms but your own?”

I awoke with two further realizations. The first was that, while I was entranced, someone had come up quietly and stolen my purse.

The second was that I had come through a more dangerous test than I realized. Because if I had answered the man differently, if I had, perhaps, felt compelled to accept the burden of the hard and lonely path, those were the terms on which my further journey would have continued. And it would have been a false journey, as well as a hard and lonely one—based on self-inflation, leading not to growth but to a dreary playing-out and replaying of my own narcissism.

But there was a third realization I didn’t come to, one that perhaps a living companion on that journey might have been able to point out—which was that in raising the question of equal companions, I showed that I really didn’t feel equal. If I had, it would never have occurred to me that companions could be anything else. Although consciously I believed firmly in equality and collectivity, my unconscious identity was still that of the precocious child, the smartest kid in the class. Now I created situations in which I could remain one step above as the teacher, the focal point. Yet being central, keeping others peripheral, is a very lonely position.

Fortunately, I did not choose the hard and lonely path. The train, so to speak, that I am on contains many other passengers—real people, such as my friends, my students, my coveners, and my husband who are not afraid to challenge my assumptions, by saying, “Hey, you say there’s equality here, but you have all the power!” Those challenges have been more frightening, more painful, and, at the same time, more truly transformative, than a thousand astral battles or cosmic train rides.

But they were transformative because I knew that my companions accepted me. They might not like that aspect of me that felt set-apart—but they did like me, and could accept me with my human flaws. I didn’t have to hate my set-apart-self, which was, after all, not a unique piece of nastiness, but something fairly common among human beings, who would most all like to feel special, above others, not bound by the ordinary rules. And my set-apart-self also has positive aspects: it is creative; it makes me a writer; it allows me to speak in public, to teach.

Yet the power is creative because it is grounded in community. It is checked and challenged; the power of others whom I love and respect rubs against it. If it had pushed me further into isolation instead of pulling me into contact with others, it would have destroyed whatever true creativity was within me.

Let us return to Joy’s story. Her journey is different from mine, because she has companionship. Her trance is also far more structured than mine was. And that is another important difference. I begin by telling her certain things: that she is going down into her place of power, the place that is the center of herself, where she can be in touch with the deepest parts of herself, where she will be safe and in control, where she can speak and move and yet remain in deep awareness, and where she will remember clearly everything that happens to her. I tell her that every time she needs to, or wants to, she can be back in her ordinary waking state of consciousness. The structure, the formal ritual of the induction, sets the trance state firmly apart from waking consciousness, makes it a separate territory that can be entered or left at will. These cautions do not differ from standard hypnotic techniques—except perhaps that I give the control to her, not to myself. I encourage her memory, not her forgetfulness, because the experience is hers and can only be fully integrated if it is remembered. Actually, Joy may not completely remember the trance, and I may not either, so I write it down. Like a dream, a trance fades quickly.

“Relax,” I tell Joy, “and feel yourself rooted in the earth. Feel the energy enter into you, through your feet and the base of your spine. Breathe from your belly. Feel the breath move up through your body—to your spine, your belly, your heart—feel it radiate out from your heart, down your shoulders, down your arms, into your hands. Let it rise up past your throat, your head, your Third Eye, relaxing and soothing as it passes. Let it flow out the top of your head, like branches that sweep back down to touch the earth again, surrounding you, protecting you.”

In a sense, all the images of Joy’s trances could be seen as metaphors for movements of energy. But no modern English word quite conveys the meaning of energy in the sense I’m using it here. The Chinese ch’i, the Hindu prana, and the Hawaiian mana are clearer terms for the idea of an underlying vital energy that infuses, creates, and sustains the physical body; it moves in our emotions, feelings, and thoughts, and is the underlying fabric of the material world. Since energy is a concept central to magic, it is worthwhile digressing a bit longer to discuss it in some detail.

Energy is a freely moving fluid substance, and it also takes on patterns of varying stability that can be thought of as standing waves. Each human being is an energy pattern that many people can literally see and feel. I see the energy pattern as a treelike form, with roots in the energy-field of the earth, currents running up the body on both sides, at the front, back, and through the center—currents that are themselves hollow and can conduct energy downward as well. Energy vortices exist that correspond to the Hindu chakras. Branches extend down the arms and out through the hands. They also sweep up from the top of the head, down and around the body back to earth, creating the surrounding energy-field or aura, which is a protective yet permeable filter.

Although my description is metaphoric, vital energy is real and can be perceived, molded, directed, and changed. Western science is just beginning to acknowledge its existence, attempting to verify it with Kirlian photography, for example. Other cultures have always known it exists. It is the basis for Chinese acupuncture and Hindu yoga, as well as psychic healings, worldwide.

Emotional, psychological, and physical disturbances are also disturbances in the energy pattern, and vice versa. Each of the chakras is associated with particular emotions, body systems, and abilities. Although systems differ somewhat, the correlations I use are:

Base-of-the-spine: security, survival.
Sexual: sexuality.

Womb/belly: vitality (where vital energy is taken in, stored and radiated out to the body).

Solar Plexus: power (where power is sent out from the body; not counted as a chakra in some systems).

Heart: love, anger, emotional connections with others.

Throat: expression, communication.

Third Eye: psychic sight (in the center of the forehead).

Crown: in Eastern traditions—enlightenment; in daily life—energy intake and exhaust point (in the top of the skull).

Our personal energy field is never wholly separate from the earth’s energy-field. We are each a ripple in the earth’s aura. When we connect deeply with that greater source of energy, we can renew and replenish our own vitality constantly. Anything negative we encounter can pass through us into the earth, as lightning can be grounded. If we become partially disconnected, as we often do under stress, we become un-grounded in every sense. We are easily drained, fragmented, unable to concentrate or proceed deliberately, and emotionally ragged.

We begin all magical work by grounding, breathing from the belly (to open the lower chakras), and visualizing a connection, our roots in the earth (to draw energy from the earth so that we do not need to deplete our own). One of my tasks during Joy’s trance will be to help her stay grounded throughout our work together by reminding her to breathe, by touching her when I myself am grounded.

When Joy has established an energy connection with the earth, I begin the trance induction. “You are sinking down, down, on a beautiful red cloud,” I say, “and your whole body is red, as you go drifting and floating, down, down, rocking gently, on a beautiful orange cloud.” I continue through the spectrum. I am grounded; I am breathing from my belly and my voice is low, relaxed, my words flowing in a smooth stream. We reach the blue cloud, the violet cloud. “. . . And your whole body is violet—and you go drifting and floating, rocking gently, and landing, very gently, very very softly, in the center of your own place of power.”

We can each create a place of power in the underworld,¹ the underlying dimension of energy patterns beneath the physical world. Just as the light we see is only a small portion of the spectrum of radiation, we could say that the reality we generally experience is also only a small portion of the spectrum of possibility. Our minds and our senses cannot directly experience the deeper levels of reality anymore than our eyes can see radio waves; instead, we translate the deeper levels into images resembling those with which we are familiar, and through such images, we can shape the patterns of energy they represent.

The underworld has many levels. Those nearest the surface, the first we encounter, are personal, subjective, our own unconscious pattterns. Most of us never journey any deeper than the personal; until we are familiar with the subjective underworld, have cleared it of the worst of its demons, and can pass through its shadows in comfort, we cannot go deeper, into the communal, the cultural, the objective levels.

The place of power is our home-away-from-home in the personal underworld, our image of center, of strength, the place where we begin each journey and where we stop and re-center before returning to ordinary space and time. It is a place from which we can survey the landscape of the self.

To follow Joy’s journey, or to make our own, we also need a framework for discussing the many aspects of what we call self. In the magical tradition I follow, we say that each of us is made up of three selves; Deep Self, Talking Self, and Younger Self. Deep Self is essence, the self that underlies personality, that goes beyond time or any one lifetime. It is the matrix from which the other selves are born—the Goddess manifesting. Although these are all metaphors, they are useful ways of thinking-in-things about who we are and how we develop.

From Deep Self, the matrix, Younger Self is born with our physical birth. Just as a baby sucks in milk, Younger Self grows and develops by sucking in energy, taking in love, from those who love and care for us. Younger Self reaches out to the world, grasps pieces of it, takes them in, and experiences them. It imitates actions, expressions, gestures; and, as it grows, the movements, energies, and sensations it mimics gradually form into images that are taken in and held, forming the internal landscape in which we live, and the creatures who people it.

Younger Self also feels hunger and satisfaction, pain and elation, terror of abandonment, and the security of love. Within the images and sensory memories of Younger Self are locked deep feelings and enormous energies. The landscape, the imagery, and the scenarios Younger Self creates become the patterns in which we live our lives, because they determine the patterns our energies take.

The roots of Talking Self also go deep into infancy, but Talking Self is not fully born until we grow comfortable with language. While Younger Self experiences and senses, Talking Self structures sensations, brings order, classifies, categorizes, and names. Language is our most powerful tool for structuring reality.

What is named becomes separated out. A name creates a boundary between the thing named and everything else. Talking Self’s major task, when we are first learning speech, is to allow us to name ourselves, to separate our “I-ness” from “not-I”. As infants, we share an energy-field with our mothers (or primary caretakers, if you prefer). The field expands, becomes more flexible; what we absorb from our mothers becomes (for most of us) less of an encompassing field and more of an internalized source of warmth, security, self-esteem. But not until we become language-users can we name that warmth, that esteem me, and grasp that mother exists separately from the image we have taken in of her—that she, in fact, lives around her own center, which she calls me. The boundaries and structures that Talking Self creates give us freedom to be individuals, to be separate from others. But they may also become constricting, overly narrow, or rigid.

Imagine Talking Self’s domain as a house we live in, and Younger Self’s domain as a garden that surrounds it completely. Beneath the garden are the caves and wells of Deep Self; outside it are the other realms of reality, the wilderness. There is no clear dividing line between Younger Self’s garden and the wild until Talking Self builds a wall. Younger Self constantly brings in plants and animals. Some of them Talking Self may name and set out carefully in rows, others grow in any nook or cranny they can find. The garden of Younger Self may be pleasant and inviting, or overgrown with brambles and poison oak; it may contain nurturing plants or devouring monsters, the paths may be clear or impassable.

In order to walk out into the wild, we must first pass through the garden. Or, conversely, in order to examine any piece of the wild Younger Self brings in, in order to name it and set it on the shelves of our house, it must first be brought through the garden. The clearer the paths are, the more familiar we are with their windings and turnings, the friendlier we are with the creatures that inhabit them, the clearer are our contacts with external reality—both physical and metaphysical.

So the place of power is the spot from which we can survey the garden, see what needs weeding or transplanting, explore the corners where shadows may be lurking.

When Joy reaches her place of power, I ask her to turn to each of the four directions and note what she can see and hear and feel and sense. In doing so, she casts a magic circle.

The magic circle, the four quarters and center, is another structured way we can think-in-things about the self. Each time we experience the circle, we experience our present inner condition, vividly, sensually. What we see in the circle tells us what to pay attention to.

In magic we often speak of correspondences. We say that the East corresponds with the element of air, with mind and breath. The South corresponds with fire, with energy and will. The West corresponds with water, with feelings and emotions. The North corresponds with earth, with the body, with silence, with material reality—including all its potentials and limitations.

Correspondences are simply clusters of experiences. If I experience the East, the rising sun, the dawning light, I know, in my body, my heart, about the awakening of ideas, the dawning of inspiration. If I feel the air, its swiftness, its changeability, its presence that is so real yet unseen, I know something about thought. And if I use the tool of the East, the Witch’s knife, the athame, I see that it has a blade that can cut things apart, that can make separations, and that ability is a tool I need in order to think clearly.

The fire of the sun at noon can show me my own radiant energy, and when I hold the tool of the South, the wand, in my hand, and I experience it as once part of a living tree, I know the treelike pattern of my own subtle energy-form; I feel the way that energy can be channeled and expressed. The waves, the tides, the deep wells and still pools of the West show me the patterns of my own emotions; like water, they flow, they merge, they take the shape of whatever container appears, yet the tool of the West is the cup that contains the water. The earth of the North, if I dig in it, plant in it, experience the rounds of growth, decay, new growth, will teach me endlessly about renewal, and endings, birth and death; its tool is the pentacle, a new cluster of things that stands for my own body, its limbs and head, the five of my fingers, my toes, my senses.

The quarters balance each other; experiencing each one I can experience the need for its polar opposite. When I see and think in the East, using my knife to make divisions, I must also be able to feel, to flow, to merge, or I become cut apart. If I burst forth with expression, with passion, in the South, I must also be able to contain the fire, to ring it with stones from the North, or I risk burning down the forest. And if I allow myself, in the West, to merge, I need the power of the East to separate again. The earth, without the sun’s fire, remains dead, silence without expression.

When we stand in the place of power and greet each direction in turn, we are doing two things. First, we are casting the circle; creating an internal boundary that makes us safe in dropping the structures with which we are familiar. The circle is itself a structure; it says to Talking Self, “Look, you who need so much order, within my boundaries you can forget your usual names, you can change categories. You will be faced with many new sensations and experiences, but don’t panic. I’m here, standing guard—and only within my bounds do you take your holiday. When I am dissolved, then you can bring back the usual divisions, the ordinary boundaries. Until then, relax.”

Ordinary consciousness is a marvelous thing; it allows us to live in the world, to think plan, create, work, and do. Practicing magic, we respect our ordinary boundaries: our goal is not to escape them, not to destroy the separations and divisions, but to slip in and out of them at will, with flexibility. For the boundaries, the separations, the names themselves are, no less than our experiences of oneness, manifestations of the Goddess, who is that-which-creates-structure.

The circle is also an energy pattern that contains whatever power we raise so that power can be focused and concentrated. It protects us from intrusion, forming a barrier to any unwanted forces.

Casting the circle allows us to experience each direction as it is for us in the moment—to see where we are out of balance, what cluster of qualities needs work. So, for Joy, the East is warm and welcoming—a green garden and sunlit forest. The South is an ocean beach; it has been stormy in the past, but today it is calm. The West is a desert, bleak and uninviting. The North is another deep forest, green, cool, and comforting. The directions do not correspond, necessarily, with the traditional associations of elements because they reflect her internal geography. Her West, her emotional life, does not feel like an ocean, with its deep tides and burgeoning life. It feels, at the moment, like a desert, blasted with heat, lonely, empty, with no oasis in sight.

“Are you ready to hunt the shadow?” I ask when she has greeted each direction. Although we have agreed beforehand on the course of this journey, she is free to change it any time. Hunting shadows of the self can be dangerous; it means confronting and changing the most unknown and fearful of one’s inner structures and energy patterns.

Joy’s readiness for the transformation has come only after months of preparation. We have made several journeys into the dark together before, and we have spent many weeks talking about them, exploring the images and integrating a growing sense of her own power.

The shadow first appeared in an earlier trance. That day, Joy had gone to the South, which was stormy and turbulent. She had found a group of figures around a campfire; some could be seen clearly, one was a shadow. Later she had gone into a double garden; one side was full of flowers, the other, across a bridge, was a prison. In the prison was a bear, rattling its cage. Joy asked the bear what it would give her if she let it out. “Immortality, and the ability to growl,” it replied.

The caged bear, in the language of things, expressed the way Joy felt and controlled her own energy—enormous power, potential danger, confined in structures that were too restrictive, that contained the danger but kept the power from being expressed, structures that were themselves being shaken. “Release the bear of the South, the power of your anger and your will, your animal nature—and you will reconnect with life. You will be able to growl, to express your power, to say no,” was what the image said. For weeks, Joy had been working with the bear, experiencing its strength, growling literally as well as in her imagination—and making changes in relationships with real people outside herself, learning to say “no,” to say, “This is what I feel.” Now, armed with the bear’s penetrating spear and protective cape, she felt ready to face the shadowy parts of herself that were still unseen.

For Joy, we could say, the process of change begins in the East; with a deliberate separating-out of her patterns of interaction, an induced dissociation, so that she can see them. Because she has a well-developed talking Self, seeing the patterns as things is useful. Joy understands herself already; she knows intellectually the roots of her problems, could name and discuss them and remain unable to change them. Experiencing the patterns as things forces her to dive below the categories her Talking Self creates, to free herself from her own tendency to rate, judge, rationalize, and attempt to control her own feelings in a way that imprisons them.

If Joy were different, if she, by nature or because of her experiences, thought-in-things so exclusively that she had trouble naming her feelings with words; if, indeed, she felt her feelings to be hallucinations, landscapes, voices, images; if her Talking Self were too weak to establish firm boundaries between what was inside her and what was outside, so that the bear in the cage seemed more real to her than I did, our work would be very different.

If Joy lived in terror that the bear might escape, overrun her, and cause destruction—to herself, to anyone she was close to, we might strive to place a more secure lock on the cage, or to construct a more pleasant, open, but still safe bear-pit. She might attempt to feed the bear cautiously between the bars. The work would have more to do with the North—with creating structure, strengthening her ability to contain her power before she can feel safe to release it. We might have to enlist Younger Self’s cooperation in building a Talking Self up from the bare foundations. Instead of working in trance, we might work at naming the things in different ways—as feelings, as past experiences, as aspects of herself. Instead of learning to hold contradictory thoughts in mind at the same time, we might work at accepting contradictory feelings.

Or, let us imagine that Joy’s Talking Self, faced with a garden overrun with angry bears, had, under the stimulus of terror, gone to work overtime and created an elaborate, mazelike structure, in order to bind the energies that otherwise might seem uncontrollable. In this structure, composed of fragments of the culture’s thought-forms hooked together, the caged bear might be Jesus, and she, Joy, might have been chosen to hide him from his enemies. She might develop elaborate theories of the complex conspiracies his enemies had created; she might be convinced that she was set apart for special persecution because of her secret; or she might develop elaborate rituals to assure his safety. Our task would again be different—to establish trust, to introduce flexibility.

In each case, readiness is the key question, and the most difficult to answer. The tools of magic can be dangerous as well as powerful: thinking-in-things can release energies that might better be contained. Many people would insist that the tools should only be given to people termed professionals—those who are trained in diagnosis, who could label a hypothetical Joy “schizophrenic” or a “paranoid psychotic,” and, undoubtedly, prescribe the proper drug to dampen her symptoms.

I disagree. Even if professionals, on the whole, had a high rate of success with psychotic or borderline patients (and they don’t), even if psychiatric drugs were not addictive and dangerous (and they are), even if mental hospitals were pleasant, healing places to be, instead of prisons, even if mental health professionals were not the lineal descendants of the witchburners, we cannot reclaim our power, as individuals and as a community, unless we reclaim our power to heal. Professionalism itself reinforces the thought-forms of estrangement and alienation.² Whatever a therapist may do for me—and a good therapist can indeed do a lot—it is still, ultimately, within a community of friends, lovers, family, coworkers, that I find intimacy and meaning. Community is the ultimate healer. And it is the community—the conditions and relationships within it—that causes unbearable pain to people, that ultimately needs to be healed.

Fortunately, there is one infallible test that tells us with whom it is safe for us to work magic. We can ask: “Do I genuinely like this person? Do I really want to be doing this now, at this moment?” If the answer to these questions is no, then we are not going to be helpful and our trancework may even be harmful. If we must change the questions in order to answer yes, asking: Do I feel obligated to this person? Should I like her or him? Will I hurt this person’s feelings if I say no? Would I like this person if she/he changed? We are really feeling that we don’t like the person as she/he is. Of course, the people most desperately in need of help are often the least likeable. However, we can freely offer practical or material help with fewer risks involved for both parties than when we misjudge our limitations in working magic.

I genuinely like Joy, and I trust her readiness and her judgement. She begins her journey in the West, and soon finds herself terrified, clinging to a cliff, afraid of falling. Her internal landscape expresses in things the quality of relationships she has experienced in her family and in the institutions of this culture.

Joy holds on to the cliff, she clings tightly, she is afraid to fall. The conflicts in her life center around the theme of holding on/letting go—the fear of falling. Letting go of her lover, holding on to her mother, her fear of her parents’ holding on too tightly to her, letting go of her father and mourning his death, holding on to wakefulness, falling asleep, holding on to control, to anger. Over and over, she is telling herself—she is living in herself—the story of The Fall.

Yet we know that the other side of that story is Making It. Joy was taught the story in her family, in the schools she went to, at the jobs where she worked, in the movies and the television programs she watched—for this is the story that characterizes American life. We are led to believe that everybody can Make It, if they work hard enough. Yet in reality the rewards of the culture are reserved for an elite few, predestined for success by sex, class, and background. A sprinkling of others do Make It—just enough to perpetuate the myth that those who Fall by the wayside are victims of their own personal failings, not of the odds stacked against them. And even the elite must cling to what they have, for the abyss of failure yawns beneath their feet. One misstep, and over the edge they too can Fall. They can get a bad grade, or lose a job, a promotion, a lover, a gamble—lose whatever replaces for them the sense of inherent value this culture denies to their simple beings.

The cliffs Joy clings to become monsters. They jeer at her and mock her; try as she will, she cannot defeat them. One monster picks her up in its hand, begins to squeeze. She is faced with annihilation.

What are the monsters? At the time, I heard Joy’s cry, “Don’t drop me! Let me go!” as the cry of a child to its parents: “Let me separate, let me be myself without cutting me off.” Yet the monsters are not her parents. They are more, even, than the embodiment of her relationship with her parents. The monsters are the appearance on Joy’s landscape of a psychic structure common to all of us raised in this culture; the aspect of the self that jeers, sneers, humiliates, mocks, exults, “You think you can beat me but you can’t.” I call it the self-hater, after Doris Lessing, who describes it in The Four-Gated City:

Then one of the voices detached itself and came close into her inner ear: it was loud, or it was soft; it was jaunty, or it was intimately jeering, but its abiding quality was an antagonism; a dislike of Martha; and Martha was crying out against it—she needed to apologize, to beg for forgiveness, she needed to please and to buy absolution, she was grovelling on the carpet, weeping, while the voice uttered accusations of hatred.³

To the schizophrenic heroine of Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the self-hater appears as an assembly of accusing, punishing voices she calls the “Collect”, whose Censor has the duty of keeping her “worlds” apart, keeping her realities separate.⁴ In the course of journeys we have taken in my coven to confront the self-hater, it has appeared as a monster, as a toad, as an ugly little creep, creeping about, as a wooden puppet with a clacking jaw. Although it takes on varied forms, it is always characterized by the mocking tone of its messages.

The self-hater is the inner representation of power-over. We have internalized it, not just from our parents, but from every institution in society with which we have contact. It is the structure in the psyche that perpetuates domination. It reminds us of our helplessness, our powerlessness. It blames the victim; it tells us we are bad when bad things happen to us, that we do not have the right to be, to feel, to do what we do. It is the inner gun that keeps us in an inner prison.

All of us, from infancy, have an inherent sense of helplessness, a vulnerability to situations in which we feel powerless.⁵ As infants, as small children, we were helpless and entirely dependent for our comfort, for sustenance, for our very existence, on the care and good will of our mothers.⁶ To an infant, abandonment, even temporarily, feels like death. But an infant or a tiny child has no word death—to name and contain what is in reality a feeling—a terror, boundless because it is nameless, a fear that goes bone-deep, that lies at our core, below words or even images, because we learned it before we knew words or perceived images. It is welded to that other feeling we knew in infancy: the primal, whole-bodied bliss, the comfort, the contentment of belly and blood when the milk flowed and we were loved and warm.

The terror becomes bound progressively as we grow older and develop strengths that help us cope with it. For most of us, the lucky ones, the so-called emotionally healthy ones, the fear that was originally conceived as, “I will die” becomes “Mommy will die,” then, “Mommy will stop loving me;” then, “Mommy will not approve of me.” Yet the first fear is not gone, it is only covered over; perhaps it also binds our ability to experience its twin—primal joy in the body. Yet the covering is never entirely secure. Any separation, any rejection, sometimes any criticism. can threaten the delicate edifice of our sense of self-worth, can echo that primal terror.

The institutions of domination play on that terror. We are threatened with loss of approval, esteem, even livelihood if we fail in their schools or on their jobs. If we directly confront their authority, we must face the reality of their power to annihilate the power of the courts, the prisons, the guns. Every experience within an institution is a confrontation with the self-hater on its home ground.

The self-hater within is not just an internalized institution, however, nor is it an internalized person. It is a thing that embodies the relationship of domination; it makes us victim and persecutor both. The monster is not just the agent squeezing Joy to death; it is also her sense of helplessness, her conviction that she cannot win the battle. We dominate ourselves more thoroughly than institutions can.

For example, shortly after Reagan’s election, I spoke at a university and suggested that we each write him a letter expressing our political stand, as an act of taking power. Many women were afraid. “I will get my name on a list,” was a common worry. “It won’t make any difference, anyway,” was another. So although political repression has not yet progressed in this country to the point at which writing to one’s president is a dangerous act, people repress themselves out of fear to a greater degree than any authority would dare. The self-hater is the voice that tells us we are each uniquely responsible for our pain and its solutions, that we are alone. And so, although each of us may, alone, have only a very small voice, we are willing, out of a sense of futility (a defense against fear) to throw away the voice that we do have, which might, combined with other voices, have become a loud roar, a bear’s growl.

To reclaim our power, to change our internal landscape, we must confront the self-hater. As the Shaman descends into the place of death and dismemberment, we also must descend into fear, into terror, into despair itself. The confrontation must be more than intellectual. Joy does it as a trance journey, the culmination of many months of emotional work with her emotions and actions. Some people do it as a physical journey, a trip into the wilderness. Chapter 9, “Ritual as Bonding; Action as Ritual,” talks about a political action as the confrontation. However the battle is fought, it is not fought once but many times, in many ways and in many dimensions.

Wielding fear, despair, and helplessness as its weapons, the self-hater takes its strategies from the stories of estrangement. Again and again, it tries to pull us into Good Guys/Bad Guys conflicts, by tricking us, over and over again, into defending the one truth entrusted to the Chosen Few, especially in movements that radically challenge the present authorities. Over our heads it holds the threat of Apocalypse, of The Fall, i.e., the threat of annihilation.

The first weapon we have in the battle is the knife of the East—our ability to name, to separate out the monsters and dissect them to find out what they are. But the knife is not enough to win the battle.

And so we turn to the quarter of the South, the direction of energy, fire, and will. Will is that quality found in the depths below despair, when we have looked at annihilation head-on, faced our grief and anguish, and then made the decision to act so as to cause change.⁷ Will is the fighting spirit, that quality that says, “Yes, doom may be coming, but in that moment between the whistle and the flash, I will know that I have done my utmost to stop the holocaust, that I have worked to assure the survival of life.”

When we think-in-things about will, we think of fire. Will is the energy of anger, aggression, of burning rage, released from the self-hater’s grip and consciously directed. Its tool is the wand that channels energy, that transforms, that bridges heaven and earth, that turns ideas into realities. Fire also means expression. The finding of our will is tied to the expression of feelings, because expression frees bound energies. When we express our feelings, we assert our right to feel them, our right to be. Anger and rage especially fuel the self-hater when we cannot express them. We may fear that our own anger will evoke the annihilation that terrifies us—that it may cause the loss of someone we love, or cause that person to stop loving us. Yet we cannot own our power without owning our anger. For anger is energy—the deep, energy of the life-force that arises in response to threat. It gives us the strength to meet danger.

In Joy’s battle, her anger, her own willingness to fight—to scream, yell, beat the pillows on the bed, make sounds, and use her voice—becomes the tool with which the monsters are defeated. Although ultimately we want to win the battle, we may first have to lose, have to let ourselves be dissolved and experience annihilation, if only to stop running in terror from it. We may, like Joy, be absorbed by our monsters.

Joy fights, but she’s losing. I’m staying with her energy, watching the patterns change. Her aura glows as she breathes power up from the earth. She writhes on the bed, gasps and yells, and then suddenly she stops resisting.

“I’m being absorbed into the monster’s arm,” she whispers, “through its blood stream up into its brain. It’s like a control room—there’s somebody sitting at the panel. OH, NO! IT CAN’T BE! IT CAN’T BE!”

“Her Dad,” I think. “I thought it was her relationship with her mother. Can this be about her anger at him for dying—and her struggle to let him go?”

“He looks all green and decayed and sickly. There’s four big puppets, they’re dancing on strings and he’s pulling the strings. They’re mocking me.”

“Can you get their names?” I ask. If she can get their names, she has power with them—this is one of the oldest magical principles, and a sound one. A name anchors an image to Talking Self, forces it into consciousness, makes it susceptible to conscious understanding.

“The first one—he has a terrible grin, and big teeth—his name is Joseph. Then there’s one with awful eyes, Allen. He’s trying to hit me.”

“Stop it.” She fights, this time with a sense of confidence that she lacked before. She has faced her terror and found out what it is; now she has nothing more to lose and so her power flows freely. This time she wins. But there are more monsters.

“There’s one with a yellow scarf around her neck. She’s trying to strangle me with it. Her name is Mary.” Again, she fights and overcomes another monster. “The last one is just a skeleton too, he’s attacking me.”

The fight begins again. Joy uses her magical tools, knife and wand, breathes fire up from the earth, and scorches the skeletons. The control room is ablaze.

Joy’s knife—her ability to understand—is not enough to free herself. She wins the battle when she brings in her wand, her energy, her choice to fight. The control room goes up in flames that scorch but transform.

The monster, in part, is animated by her father; it is the image in which she can experience the quality of his energy. When she is absorbed by the monster, her independent, self-naming, self-defining part gives in to the aspect of her that feels like a child, that is willing to take the child’s position of helplessness, dependency. But when she reaches for her wand, her will, her consciously directed energy, she takes her own power as an adult, as one who decides and directs her own destiny.

But the monster is more than a parental figure. When Joy and I discussed the trance, the puppets at first seemed a mystery. But as we probed the meaning of their names, they took on associations with Christianity—in particular, the feeling of her early religious upbringing, the sense that she could make some irrevocable, damning mistake, could Fall into sin, be cast into Hell. The Fall, for her, was a story that strangled, that paralyzed her energy.

Her energy is freed by fire, by expression of anger, but she does not get stuck in the South; she moves to the West, cools the room with water, with love, nurturing, merging, integration.

The cup of the West is also a tool we can use to transform the self-hater and ourselves. For having cut ourselves apart with the knife of the East, and burned in the fires of the South, we must cool ourselves, reintegrate, merge again in new ways, or we remain burned out and dismembered.

Although Joy’s journey began in the East, other people might need to begin in the West by connecting, by forming a strong bond with someone. The struggle with the self-hater, instead of being a fiery battle, might be a long, slow, effort to form a relationship, to challenge isolation.

In magic nothing is completely destroyed; it is only transformed. Although we treat the self-hater as if it were a being apart, it is not. It is part of ourselves, and so we cannot get rid of it, because it contains our energy, our power. If we split it off, we lose that source of power—or see it reflected back in menacing forms from others, who become the monsters we fear.

So Joy, having defeated the shadows, the puppets, the monster, takes control. She becomes herself the animating spirit of the monster, which is no longer a monster. Having faced her helplessness, her fear of annihilation, her fear/wish to be passive, dependent, a child—she is now able to take the position of the adult, no longer cowering or clinging, no longer jerked by the strings of authority to perform according to someone else’s wishes. And, having taken the position of control, she is able safely to let go of control, to Fall.

“I’m looking out the eyes of the monster,” she says. She has merged with the monster—but it has been transformed. Earlier, she was terrified of falling. Now, she says, “I want to fall. I want to find out what happens when it’s dark. I cut the cord, and I give myself a push.”

She has cut the umbilical cord, let go of her wish to hold on to the past, let go of its fears and unfulfilled promises, and she falls into the unknown future.

“I hurtled through space and I became a red rocket, a comet, a star. I could see all these other stars, and I enjoyed being a part of it.”

The dark has been transformed; it is no longer fearful. Now it holds brightness. And in what was the monster, a beautiful woman who radiates light and power stands at the controls.

The woman assures her that the control room can be a safe place now—that the lights on the panel can give her information and warn her of danger.

Joy falls. She moves into her deepest fear—and the story that kept her constricted, afraid, now becomes the imagery of her liberation. She lets go. She dissolves. She leaps into the dark—into her very fear of dissolving—and recovers, instead, an ease, a comfort, a sense of being at home in the body, a sense of Tightness in her being.

The body, the material world, belongs to the fourth quarter of the circle, to the North. The body, through which we take pleasure and experience reality, is itself finite, limited in time and space in a way that emotions, energies, and sensations are not. Transformation of our inner landscape may transform our bodies and cure physical ailments as well as emotional pain. Facing our terror of annihilation, reintegrating our split, warring parts, frees us to cherish the passionate unrepressed “animal/poetic”⁸ body—and by extension to cherish nature and all of life.

Finally, earth represents the physical world, so-called real life. The transformation of the self-hater must be grounded. This means given material reality, in the form of changes in Joy’s life, work, and relationships. Reclaiming our personal power means reclaiming our ability to engage reality, not retreat from it.

The woman in the control room of Joy’s transformed monster, whom she calls her own image of the Goddess, represents a new type of control in Joy’s life, a power based on a different relationship. The esoteric term for the thing that embodies power-with, not power-over, is The Guardian of the Threshold. The Guardian sets limits and defines boundaries, that is why she (or he) lives on the threshold, the gateway, the place of passage.

Power is only useful when it can be contained as well as expressed. Earth symbolizes containment, limits, and silence. When we feel confident that our anger, our aggression, can be contained, we can feel free to express them in a way that harms no one. The Guardian embodies our power to choose when to express something and what to express, when and what to keep silent—not out of guilt, but from a sense of honor and self-esteem. Containing emotions and energies is not the same as suppressing them. A ring of stones contains the fire (but does not smother it with dirt) so that the flames can warm us without burning down the forest.

To have free will, to make choices, is to be able to say no as well as yes. If the self-hater is simply banished, and not transformed into the Guardian, no real change takes place. I, for example, have been a mild workaholic most of my life, driven by a fairly strong self-hater. After years of magical work and therapy, my self-hater gave up. I found myself with enormous energy, and proceeded to take on even more work and projects because they all looked so exciting that I simply couldn’t say no. I am still working on getting to know the Guardian better (which is why my discussion of the Guardian, you will notice, is shorter and vaguer than my discussion of the self-hater). My Guardian is slowly teaching me to recognize and listen to the warning signals from Younger Self that say, “Take it easy. Slow down.” I need to do things more slowly and deliberately, to take naps, to eat better, to let the machine answer the phone—not to feel so set-apart, and thus share responsibility, and power, more widely with others.

For Joy, the Guardian represented a new relationship with self-discipline. She could say no to television and yes to working on creative projects without having to beat herself. She could take pleasure in her abilities.

For someone else, the Guardian might represent the ability to set limits in relationships, to connect without being overwhelmed, to assert her/his own thoughts and feelings without needing to attack. For yet another person, the Guardian might mean the ability to say no to drugs or alcohol.

The Guardian is an aspect of the deep self. It is a conscience based not upon guilt but upon integrity; as such, it allows us to call forth power-from-within, to control and choose our actions—not to control our feelings. And the Guardian is a healer.

For just as our inner landscapes mirror our culture, so this culture mirrors our internal structures. The culture of power-over creates pain. The lives of those who fall victim to its outward oppressions are filled with pain; and the inner lives of both oppressor and victims are hurtful and bleeding.

Transforming the inner landscape is only a first step. Unless we change the structures of the culture, we will mirror them again and again; we will be caught in a constant battle to avoid being molded again into an image of domination. Reclaiming personal power gives us the courage to demand a change in the basis of society’s power. Facing our dread of annihilation allows us to face, unflinching, the real possibility of global annihilation, to face our own despair and rage at the pain inflicted by our culture, and to make that pain become active resistance to destruction; to create with that pain a vision of a new culture based on another source of power, to work for that vision, to risk ourselves in its service, even when the work seems hopeless or overwhelming. Refusing the domination of the self-hater, we break free of its imposed isolation—free to connect with others, to join our power, our wills, together. Bringing to birth the Guardian, we become Guardians—of ourselves, of each other, of the community of life.

CHAPTER FOURReclaiming Personal Power: Magic as Will

CHAPTER FOUR
Reclaiming Personal Power: Magic as Will