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Wicca looked away and gave a sigh of relief. Brida had noticed nothing. She was a good student, and Wicca would have been loath to remove her from that night’s initiation ceremony because she had failed to take the simplest step of all, by not joining in with the general good cheer.
“And he can take care of himself.” The Magus had years of work and discipline behind him. He would be capable of keeping his feelings in check, long enough at least to replace those feelings with something else. She respected his hard work and his stub-bornness, and felt slightly afraid of his immense power.
She chatted with a few of the other guests but couldn’t quite get over her surprise at what she’d just seen. So that was why he’d paid so much attention to Brida, who was, after all, a witch like any other witch who had spent various incarnations learning the Tradition of the Moon.
Brida was his Soul Mate.
“My feminine intuition clearly isn’t working very well.” She had imagined everything, except that most obvious of reasons.
She consoled herself by thinking that at least the result of all her curiosity had been a positive one: it was the path chosen by God to enable her to rediscover her student.
The Magus spotted someone he knew in the crowd and excused himself for a moment to go and speak to him. Brida
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was euphoric, enjoying his presence there beside her, but she felt it best to let him leave. Her feminine intuition was telling her that it was best if he and Lorens didn’t spend too much time together; they might become friends, and when two men are in love with the same woman, it’s better that they hate each other than that they become friends. Because, if that happened, she would end up losing them both.
She looked at the people around the fire, and suddenly she felt like dancing, too. She asked Lorens to join her; he hesitated for a second, but then took courage and said yes. People were still spinning around and clapping, drinking wine, and beating out a rhythm on the empty wine bottles with sticks and keys. Whenever she danced past the Magus, he smiled and raised his glass to her.
This was one of the best nights of her life.
Wicca joined the circle of dancers, where everyone was feeling relaxed and happy. The guests, who had been rather anxious about what might happen and worried about what they might see, had now entered fully into the spirit of the night. Spring had arrived, and they needed to celebrate, to fill their souls with faith in future sunlit days, and forget as quickly as possible the gray evenings and lonely nights spent at home.
The clapping grew louder, and now it was Wicca setting the rhythm. It was an insistent, regular rhythm. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the fire. No one was cold; it was as if summer had arrived already. The people around the fire began to take off their sweaters.
“Let’s sing!” said Wicca. She sang a simple two-verse song
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several times, and soon everyone was singing with her. A few people recognized it as a witches’ mantra where what mattered was the sound of the words, not the meaning. It was the sound of union with the Gifts; and those endowed with magic vision—
like the Magus and the other Teachers present—could see the filaments of light joining various people.
Lorens eventually grew bored with the dancing and went to join the “musicians.” Others moved away from the fire, some because they were tired and others because Wicca had asked them to help keep the rhythm going. Only the Initiates noticed what was happening, that the party was beginning to enter sacred ter-ritory. Very soon, the only people dancing around the fire were the women from the Tradition of the Moon and the witches who were to be initiated that night.
Even Wicca’s male students stopped dancing; the initiation ritual for the men was different and took place on a different date.
What was turning and turning in the astral plane immediately above the fire was female energy, the energy of transformation. So it had been since time immemorial.
Brida began to feel very hot. It couldn’t be the wine, because she’d drunk very little. It was probably the flames from the fire. She had a great desire to take off her blouse, but she felt embarrassed, an embarrassment that gradually lost all meaning as she clapped and sang that simple song and danced around the fire. Her eyes were now fixed on the flames, and the world seemed less and less important; it was a feeling very similar to the one she’d experienced when the tarot cards had revealed themselves to her for the first time.
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“I’m going into a trance,” she thought. “But so what? This party’s fun!’
“What strange music,” Lorens was thinking as he kept time, beating the bottle. His ear, trained to listen to his own body, had noticed that the rhythm of the clapping and the sound of the words vibrated exactly in the middle of his chest, as happened when he heard the bass drum in a concert of classical music.
The odd thing was that the rhythm also seemed to be dictating the beating of his heart.
As Wicca quickened the pace, his heart beat faster, too. The same thing must be happening to everyone.
“More blood is flowing to my brain,” the scientific part of his mind told him. But he was part of a witches’ ritual, and this was no time to be thinking such things; he could talk to Brida about it later.
“I’m at a party and I want to have fun,” he said out loud.
Someone beside him cried: “Hear, hear!” and Wicca’s clapping grew a little faster.
“I’m free. I’m proud of my body because it’s the manifestation of God in the visible world.”The heat from the fire was becoming unbearable. The world seemed far away, and she no longer cared about superficial things. She was alive, the blood was coursing through her veins, and she was entirely given over, body and soul, to her search. Dancing around that fire was not new to her, for the rhythm awoke dormant memories of when she had been a Teacher of the Wisdom of Time. She wasn’t alone, because that party was a reencounter with herself and with the
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Tradition she’d carried through many lives. She felt a profound respect for herself.
She was once again in a body, and it was a beautiful body, one that had fought for millions of years to survive in a hostile world. It had lived in the sea, crawled upon the earth, climbed trees, walked on all fours, and was now proudly standing with its two feet on the ground. That body deserved respect for its long struggle. There were no beautiful or ugly bodies, because all had followed the same trajectory; all were the visible part of the soul they inhabited.
She felt proud, deeply proud of her body.
