I’ve always loved myths, from when I was a child. I drank up those fairy stories, folk tales, and Greek myths book after book; they were my gateways into magic and possibility, quite away from this world. In that place I was transformed. I was the princess questing for the golden apple, I was the third son setting out on an impossible quest, I was the beggar girl at the gates of the castle, the witch’s apprentice, the child who could speak with animals. This seemed far more true to me than the prosaic reality that I was the girl who sat in the corner and read, although one created and allowed the other. I sat in the corner and read, but in the inside world I was immersed in adventures, passion, and magic.
As a writer I made it my practice to step into myth and fairy tale, to inhabit the landscape of those stories until events twisted around me and I found myself living some version of them, their motivations and understandings unlayering themselves to my imagination. Dreaming, I found myself again and again within the terrain of my own stories, or I wove the stories with fragments of dreams; dreams and myths seem to share that landscape of becoming and rewriting, of the magical imagination. There were parts of my life when, for weeks at a time, I walked through those lands of myth, dream, story, and real life as if there were no borders between them; they overlapped and commented on each other, peeling back to reveal new layers and correspondences.
In ritual, in magic, what could be better than to step into a myth? To dedicate a night to Persephone, especially if it were on the dark moon; to cast a spell with her pomegranate seeds from a real pomegranate that I could split open myself, with the red juice running down my arms and my own mouth eating those seeds? Of course entering these myths alone has certain limitations; I am with Persephone, yes, but there are other roles in this myth—Hecate, Hades, Demeter—and they remain shadowy to me while Persephone leaps into life. This has a certain allure to it—to become one with Persephone so that I see the story through her eyes, feel its dimensions with my own emotions, espy details that were barely mentioned in the story, brushed over by eyes that were not Persephone’s. Ever afterwards her symbols have a doubled importance to me as her emblems but also, now, as they become mine.
For the myth, when entered into in this way, does not remain static, as it was written on the page. It leaps into life, into my life, and starts unfolding there like one of those storybooks with pop-up constructions, so that suddenly a whole castle or forest is erected within the open pages. Persephone’s pomegranate now symbolizes—as well as her binding to the Underworld—that night when I met the Dark Goddess willingly for the first time. Even so, I walk through these landscapes of myths alone but for the characters and stories that people them. What would it be like to walk here with others, under their own volition, exploring the myth in their own lives?
One of the things we did in the Circle of Eight was to open a myth over our structure as if we had split open a fruit, and each of us took different segments of it—not all to be Persephone, but one to be Hades and one Zeus, one Demeter and one Hecate. The landscape became peopled. When we came together to create ritual, it was rich in discoveries, as complex in motivations as the interactions of a whole cast of beings, not just one in isolation. Roles that were previously given marginal importance were discovered to hold intrinsic parts of the story—decisive underpinnings without which the whole thing would have turned out utterly differently.
Working with a myth this way, we could turn it and turn it, like a kaleidoscope, through all its different angles, not only discovering its resonances with our own lives but also discovering the hidden heart of the whole thing, the knot at the center of the paradoxes that claim any myth. In turn, this would feed our magic, our ritual, as we strove for learning, revelation, and personal transformation. We divided the roles up according to where we were sitting rather than a personal preference, so the myths were layered into the Circle of Eight itself and we transited through that landscape; if I sat in the South-East, I would be holding the dawn of a myth; in the North, the most prominent character; in the South, a subterranean aspect. So it seemed that the whole mythic landscape was something we moved within, whichever myth we happened to be exploring at any moment.
Sometimes we chose myths directly related to the season so that our rituals and festival were weighted again and again into one direction. The aspects of myth, season, and festival strengthened each other until there was a glory all bound up together and I did feel, then, that the mythos had come to life; not just me alive within it but that it was enormous and real, the whole landscape. We would take the essence of what we had learned and what we still wanted to learn and place it within the heart of the ritual. This intensive working and reworking—delving deeper and deeper within one myth—seemed offered to us by the complexity we created with our own layering; the different energies of holding the story and character privately, then bringing them together as a group, then opening them up for everyone at the ritual.