It was fair to say that Lisa captivated me.
Instead of going downtown every day, I started going to Lisa’s place. She lived in the bottom floor of a red brownstone house with two other roommates. It was a three bedroom apartment with a sprawling kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, a big backyard and it was a complete and total disaster.
The first thing I noticed when I started visiting her was that I had to clear off clothing and objects of any of the chairs if I wanted to sit down. There were ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and there were always dishes in the sink left in water, presumably to soak, for days at a time. She had a cat named Lucy and its litter inevitably stank. Having grown up in homes that required so much order and structure, the wildness of Lisa’s home made me feel like I was in some kind of forbidden forest and Lisa was the wild woman of the woods.
She always had something to say about magic and the art of creating spells of our own to take back our power. “The thing is, you have to find a god and goddess that call to you.” Lisa gave praise to The Morrígan, a goddess that symbolized prophecy, war, and death on the battlefield and Cicolluis, the Irish god of war. “It’s all about who you have in your corner, Jamieson,” she said and handed me a book of gods and goddesses to look through. “It’s about who calls to you.”
“Well, you picked two Irish gods. Are you Irish?”
“Nope, but I love Irish whiskey.” She gave me a smile which I returned. “Magic and the gods don’t care about your nationality, where you came from, your social status, how much money you make or your gender and sexuality. They are more than that, you know?”
“I don’t actually,” I said.
“It’s okay, you will.” She started pulling books out from beneath piles of closes and shelves crammed full of books, bits of food, ashtrays and crystals. “You should learn about crystals, too. They come from the earth, and they are meant to help us find our way along wherever our path has taken us.”
“Why did you choose a god and goddess of war?” I asked after looking up her deities in the book.
“I told you that I’m a warrior witch. You are too.”
I wondered what horrors she had seen and what she had lived through. I looked at the book in my lap and its large compendium of gods and goddesses and wasn’t sure where to begin. “I don’t know anything about these people.” I said, shrugging. I was a little overwhelmed. “I have no idea where to begin.”
Lisa shrugged and lit a cigarette. She handed me the lighter and I lit my own. “Well, you have to just start delving in. Don’t get overwhelmed, this is the time for discovery. What kind of mysticism are you drawn to?”
I didn’t have to think about it. “I love Egyptology. I love the magic of that world.”
“Yeah, you do read with the Ancient Egyptian Tarot, I should have thought of that. There is a whole section in that book about the gods and goddesses of Egypt. See, if you look in the index, it’s broken down by alphabet and then by place in the world.”
“Do I have to choose right away?”
“No, and you can change who you pray to, it doesn’t have to always be the same. During my early hippie phase before I chose my warrior path, there were others that I prayed to. Devotion in Paganism isn’t a set thing. It’s fluid, like we are.”
I took the book home with me that evening and flipped through it before bed. I let the pages fall through my fingers and I wondered if I could hear the whispers of the gods that were contained in the book, ready to share their wisdom and help me find the way I was supposed to go. My small room didn’t seem so small when I was reading about lands from the past, peopled with the spirits of the old.
I had no idea where I was going, but I knew that light had started to burn brighter within me. The light continued to grow the more I continued to read and I wondered what direction my path would take now.
I was ready for what would come.
Spirit of the Wolf 