How to Remove a Curse From Your Family
Witchcraft and the craft of writing share of import correspondences: evoking, invoking, conjuring, traveling between the worlds, searching for the sympathy betwixt things, creating relationships, slipping our fingers around the head of our ideas and midwifing them into the fabric world—both witches and writers exercise this. Sometimes I use the tools of writing to assist me be a improve witch, sometimes information technology's the other way around. In the final stretch of writing my book, Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, I used the tools witchcraft to help me break a writer'south expletive that had been tormenting my family for generations. While sweating over the final typhoon of the volume, I found information technology necessary to begin my workday with the invocation of Mercury, a Roman god, cognate of the Greek Hermes. Fleet-footed messenger and god of eloquence, his sharp wits give him the power to heal wounds and solve all riddles. Astrologers look to the nobility of the planet Mercury when assessing i'south ability to communicate. Queer, swift, sometimes untrustworthy, Mercury is a psychopomp, able to speak to the dead and guide them through the underworld. Before I sabbatum down to write, to that winged messenger I chanted: "Mercury come to me and be my guide… assistance me in my work, make my spoken communication graceful, guide my soul through the underworld and bring me what is necessary to my thriving." To call him in, I rang a bong four times, burned frankincense—his favorite incense according to the Orphic hymns—and lit a novena candle on which I'd pasted a color copy of the Mercury card from Penny Slinger's Tantric Dakini Oracle deck: a caduceus, ii snakes spiraling upwardly around a wand, with an enflamed ring of a solar eclipse blazing in the background. I always recall of eclipses as moments when curses can be cleaved, when the ordinary society of things is interrupted. At the time, an eclipse seemed necessary if I were to pause my case of writer'due south cake, supernatural in its proportions. "Curse" is a fantastical word for a pattern of events that doesn't occur to your favor. The particular "pattern of events" I was experiencing was characterized past self-uncertainty and feet. It went a little something like this: get excited nearly an idea, scribble downwardly pages of notes, search for the thread that holds them together, worry that my ideas don't make sense, have visions of all my critics and past failures, get distracted, become demoralized, and then, become mute. I practiced this pattern daily, and then diligently it would have put the near advanced yogi to shame. I come from a family of frustrated writers; folks who aspired to write and publish their work, simply who, for various reasons, were unable to become it out into the world. My stepfather was a playwright who became an engineer, abandoning his literary aspirations at the behest of his parents. My father'due south 30-year-erstwhile novels sit in a drawer of his desk, and every fourth dimension I run across him he laments the fact that his manuscripts were returned from the publishers with course letters: thank you, only no thanks. "Yous can tell they didn't fifty-fifty read it!" he still cries. But it was my mother'south expletive that felt nigh acute. When I was growing up, my mother had a contract with Beacon Press for a volume about our family tradition of witchcraft… but she never finished it. She also worked on some other volume, an historical ballsy. I'd spy on her through the cracked door of her office, scribbling thousands of pages of notes. But some shadow always stood between her and her finished manuscript: depression, divorce, a girl who stayed out all night clinging to the backs of strangers on motorcycles. And so, when information technology came to the closing stretch of writing my own book, for which I had a deadline, I approached that borderline with a special—a cursed—kind of anguish. I didn't believe I'd be able to terminate information technology. Family curses don't but spring up from nowhere. The painful patterns in our lives are commonly attendant to some kind of trauma. My memoir is a testimony to the ways witchcraft helped me escape from that trauma, from the underworlds of sex work, misogyny, family legacies of abuse, patriarchy, and shit jobs. To write the book, I had to descend over again into that labyrinth in search of the lost fragments of myself. But in retreading those grounds, I got lost again. I drew towards the rima oris of the cave. I glimpsed my finished volume dancing in a meadow in a higher place. But then a fog of uncertainty would creep in to disorient me. I'd virtually arrive, then whispers of self-doubt would make me expect dorsum. I'd exist dragged back downward, reaching towards a completed manuscript slipping perpetually from my grasp. I couldn't work. I'd slouch in forepart of the screen and aught would come, or only mess would come. I'd drift there for hours, panic mounting, deadline approaching, terrified the curse would become me too. The words and ideas were there, I could see them, welling up, pounding on the glass walls of my consciousness, just somewhere between my imagination and my fingertips my ideas would dissipate into the underworld. Some astrologers say the underworld appears in the quaternary House, the firm of the ancestors. To enter the oral fissure of the underworld is to descend into our genetic history. The underworld is caves and darkness; information technology's the identify where things get buried. Literally, the underworld is dirt. Information technology'south fossils and magma and tectonic plates. Keen masses shift there beneath the surface of the world. Mistake lines appear, impassable mountains erupt from the ground. It'south a place inhabited past the dead, our old stories, our old wounds and gods. In the underworld, nosotros're haunted by ghosts and monsters and the things we've repressed, by the things we yearn for only tin can no longer have. They appear as wraiths drifting listlessly through labyrinths from which we fearfulness at that place is no escape. To go out my underworld labyrinth, I knew I had to be able to choose a path and trust that it was the correct ane. I'd have to be able to trust my inner voice. Writers, and artists of all kinds, need to be able to trust the choices they make in order to complete a projection. My expletive fabricated me doubt myself. I couldn't choose a path and stick to it. I needed a psychopomp, a guide whose map I could trust. I chose Mercury, he'south had the job of psychopomp for thousands of years. He has experience. He felt friendly to me, queer, and with a expert sense of humor; he encouraged me non to take my curse so seriously. The rites of witchcraft can aid u.s.a. take writing dorsum into our own hands. I wasn't at the mercy of the muses, Mercury told me laughing. I didn't demand to wait helplessly for inspiration to come. I could conjure the allies I needed. I could forge the path myself through the power of my craft. Craft has several meanings, all of which I love and want to dwell in. The well-nigh common usage referring to skill in making—a dexterous utilize of tools, a skillful power to solve issues. A craft is also a vessel: an aeroplane, or a spaceship… or a gunkhole—the kind that ferries you across the River Styx for instance. Finally, craft is something that requires transmission skill. So non only knowledge then, just as well physical ability. Discussions of the craft of writing often go out out the torso, every bit if information technology were all just cognition and disembodied language booming out like a vocalism from the sky. Just writing doesn't just happen in our minds, bodies are a requirement. And in the depths of my writers block, every bit I chased my deadline through its corridors, my cursed body thwarted me. My back would spasm and my wrists would cramp—I couldn't get comfortable or stay put. To write, a body must show up, it must sit down, it must stay in the identify where the writing happens, even when all our fears, anxieties, and insecurities come shouting at us to leave, to go make ourselves coffee, to practise our dishes, to garden, to avoid. My cursed torso resisted, only witchcraft soothed me. For witches, our bodies, these gifts of the earth, are numinous sites of pleasure and grace. Our body is the sacred site where the transmutation from imagination to materiality occurs— witches call that transmutation magic. In witchcraft, we utilize our craft to bring what is in our imagination into the material world. We utilise scent and jiff, stones and bells. We use our words, our chants, to evoke the spirit of the affair we desire from within ourselves. Words accept the power to conjure the spirit of a affair: an bounding main fog seeping through the eucalyptus leaves; a jeweled skull; the drug state of war; Greta Thunberg. Say the proper noun, and the thing appears. To chant the name "Mercury" brings alchemy and quicksilver into the room, a connection to the planet astrologers say rules our faculties of oral communication. Mercury hastens ideas. Telephone call his name and he zaps out similar the volts of a Tesla coil, making quick connections between things, illuminating the room. To pause my curse, before I began writing, I'd spray blessed water into the four directions. I'd breathe those vapors into my lungs, my brain, my bones, and my fingertips. I'd dance through the room, charging the space, chanting Mercury'due south name as I listened for his inflow. So many of the techniques of magic and ceremony are related to space, to place, to situating oneself within reality, to calling ourselves dorsum into our bones, our viscera. It's surprisingly difficult to go back to procrastination, social media habit, and other forms of trauma-based avoidance after yous've performed the rites and invocations of witchcraft. Our gods are our guides, leading us by torchlight towards our desired event. Calling spiritual powers into the room—protective deities, wise allies—brings u.s.a. literary witches strength. I invoke Mercury because to exercise so means something to me. Practicing my arts and crafts gives me confidence. Through my arts and crafts, I bring the ideas hovering in my imagination onto the page where they can practice their work. For me, the arts and crafts of witchery and the arts and crafts of writing are the same arts and crafts: a vessel that sails me between the worlds, a craft that guides me back to my torso, my earth, my identify of ability. From that place, I tin can trust my inner phonation to lead me home. __________________________________ 
Initiated: Memoir of a Witch is out now via G Central Publishing.
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