“What Are You?” A Journey
of Spiritual Identity
Natalie Zaman
Priestess Miriam Chamani sits across from me and smiles. “So tell me. What brought you to this table?”
I had gone to New Orleans because I love it and because, unconsciously, something inside me needed to be shaken up—it happens every time I go there.
Despite the relative coolness of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, I’m sweating—and not because of the Louisiana summer heat. At last, I’m getting the African bone reading I’ve always wanted. On all of my prior trips, Priestess Miriam was either out or booked up—but the third time’s the charm. In hindsight, I can safely say that I probably wasn’t ready for it earlier.
“People like to be lied to,” she says. Her voice is sing-song chanty, and she laughs before digging a little deeper. “What are you running from?”
I stare at the table littered with bones that look like amber, stones, and fragments of cowrie shells, tongue-tied. Then something inside rattles loose the true purpose of this visit. Not divination but a look in the mirror, and I know she can see this.
“You’re not gonna be of much use if you’re all over the place,” she tells me.
This isn’t my first encounter with Priestess Miriam. I’d visited the Voodoo Spiritual Temple years before and was dazzled by it. Even though I didn’t get a reading, she had a message for me then, too. The same one she was telling me now.
“You’ve got to float.”
I’m guessing she didn’t mean float “away.” I’d been floating—at least, I thought I’d been, traveling from place to place, discovering, becoming enlightened, and collecting things. My “office” is filled with veladoras, crystal skulls, wands, books and more books, wizard ponies, unicorns, dragons, a Thai spirit house, and representations of those spirits and deities whom I feel are my guides: Gaia, Ganesha, Budai, and Marie Laveau. It’s my sacred space, and I’ve filled it with travel treasures that I want to be talismans but are more like souvenirs.
Back in the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, Priestess Miriam stares at me, I hope, sympathetically. “There are days I’d rather be anywhere but here,” she tells me, more softly. “But if I’d only listened to myself and not to God, well, we wouldn’t be sitting right here, right now.”
I have a bad habit of only hearing my own voice when I get passionate about something. Traveling has never failed to bring me new and different things to love. Every journey brings some kind of enlightenment or fresh revelation, some of which have tantalizing hints of familiarity—and so far, that’s been enough. But really, it isn’t, because it’s hard to be focused when you’re always moving. It’s difficult to establish a meaningful, comforting, and effective means of prayer, ritual, worship—whatever you want to call it—when everything is always new. It’s hard to be whole when you don’t take the time to delve deeply.
I’d once had roots, and I was realizing that I missed them.
Losing My Way
Spirituality is an anchor that grounds you but doesn’t weigh you down. Through its lens, life makes sense and the unendurable becomes endurable. You float, but there is something bigger than you holding you up. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school (for two years), and after that, Catholic college by my own choice. I found great comfort in this faith. It was so dependable: a saint for every trouble, a prayer to ease any ill, and an answer to every question, even if that answer was “just believe.”
I remember the day all that came to an end for me. I was sitting in a classroom at Rutgers University at an art history lecture on Byzantine tomb paintings. The professor put up a slide of the god Apollo, easily recognizable with his laurel wreath and blond hair.
“Here,” I can still hear her saying, “we have an early representation of Christ.”
I didn’t have the answers anymore—they were somewhere “out there,” and I was free to try to find them. Freedom, I discovered, can be just as terrifying as it is exhilarating, especially when you don’t plan for it.
Excuse me?
That was a Greek god. He was make-believe, not real like the Jesus I knew—the gentle-eyed, bearded, ageless father figure who had always been a part of my life, albeit dimly sometimes.
But she went on to relentlessly, mercilessly, illustrate the evolution of the image of Jesus, and with every word, I felt sick. However I’d been brought up in terms of religion, this was history. And in that awful moment I realized that if what I was hearing was true, then just about everything I’d been taught since childhood was a lie. All reason, redemption, and everything that had been laid out so simply for so long was now out of my reach. I didn’t have the answers anymore—they were somewhere “out there,” and I was free to try to find them. Freedom, I discovered, can be just as terrifying as it is exhilarating, especially when you don’t plan for it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I read.
I read the suppressed and edited books of the Bible. Fear turned to anger at this discovery—who edits God? Factual biographies of my beloved saints showed them to be just as human as holy. But despite the confirmation and reconfirmation of what I was learning, I found it difficult to turn my back on what had been instilled in me pretty much since birth. Events brought me back to church. When my children were born, and on 9/11 (my husband was at the World Trade Center that day), I came back, the prodigal daughter, always welcomed but never quite feeling at home anymore. I would look up at crucifixes and statues and wonder, What’s your real story? It was no longer enough for me to “just believe.”
The gods (and goddesses) set me on this path, so I followed them—and found Celtic Wicca. I loved learning the origins of the holidays I’d celebrated my whole life, elemental workings, tracing the paths of the moon and the stars, and getting to know the cycle of the seasons more intimately. This incarnation of the Craft doesn’t have a monopoly on these things, but there was another, more intimate reason this path appealed to me. My mom is Italian, and I grew up surrounded by her family. I never really knew anything about my dad’s side, except that they were Scottish, with some Welsh, English, and a bit of French thrown in. I don’t even remember him mentioning any siblings (he had two sisters and a brother). When he left the family when I was ten, it was like he and everything about him were out of my life forever. Through this path I’d found a means of connecting with my unknown ancestors, one of whom—my dad’s eldest sister—I resembled so closely that a childhood friend of his who crossed our paths one day stopped my mother to ask her “if I was a Davidson.” Had I finally found my place?
If only.
As I continued my studies, cracks began to form in the connection I’d felt so strongly when I started. I think the biggest thing was that I wasn’t Irish. My elder was, and our work was heavily focused there. I felt closer to British and Norse traditions. I also found myself drawn to aspects of other religions—Budai, the jolly laughing Buddha; Voodoo veves; the kind eyes of Ganesha; and Marie Laveau, whose life read like a saint’s to me. And there were elements of Catholicism I didn’t want to abandon, even though a part of me still felt betrayed: candles and incense, the Blessed Mother and Saint Francis, music and angels. Through them I connected to countless ancestors and to family who still believed. Did I belong anywhere? What was I?
Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost
After the bone reading, I make my way back across the French Quarter to the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, with a lot to think about.
“When you’re grounded, you won’t be so scattered,” Priestess Miriam had told me.
The square in front of the cathedral is lined with artists and palm and card readers and swells with the sound of drumbeats and brass—but inside, all is quiet. Both places are equally sacred. I sit in a pew in the back row, remembering that Marie Laveau was comfortable with feet in two worlds: here in this cathedral and dancing only blocks away in Congo Square. My roots have spread, but I’ve not tended them—and I know what the next leg of my journey must be:
Studying.
Questioning.
Practicing.
Healing.
Revisiting—places, people, ritual.
And just believing.
I must learn as much as I can, try to understand the why and how of these connections and acknowledge their origins. It may take a lifetime. Luckily, I know a really good and simple grounding ritual. Closing my eyes, I breathe deeply, taking in the scent of incense and
candles—familiar, comfortable smells. I slip the St. Christopher medal out of my pocket and whisper, “Patron of travelers, walk with me.”
I am welcomed home again, this time with the knowledge that I’ll always be a pilgrim.
In February of 2016, the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans suffered a devastating fire. Efforts are being made to relocate, restore, and rebuild this sacred space. For more information, see http://wildhunt.org/2016/02/fire-destroys-historic-home-of-new-orleans-voodoo-spiritual-temple.html.
Natalie Zaman is a regular contributor to various Llewellyn annuals. She is the author of the upcoming Magical Destinations of the Northeast (Llewellyn, 2016) and writes the recurring feature “Wandering Witch” for Witches & Pagans magazine. Her work has also appeared in FATE, SageWoman, and newWitch magazines. When she’s not on the road, she’s chasing free-range hens in her self-sufficient and Pagan-friendly back garden. Find Natalie online at http://nataliezaman.blogspot.com.
Illustrator: Kathleen Edwards