Initiated: Memoir of a Witch

by Amanda Yates Garcia

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning and I am That which is attained at the end of desire. Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk, “The Charge of the Star Goddess”

I was in the desert to perform the Headless Rite, an arcane piece of ceremonial magic where you declare yourself divine. You call down the goddess Isis to enter you; you speak in her voice: I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that life can begin.

Like most women and femmes, witches are familiar with the demons of patriarchy. They follow us everywhere. Even out in the desert wilderness, we can’t be alone in our rites.

The shadow of violence falls unbidden, and for many of us, just the threat of it, the lifetime of warnings to be careful, the accumulation of micro and macro assaults, are enough to keep us home, “safe” under the protective aegis of the patriarchal father gods.

During my ceremonial initiation into witchcraft on my thirteenth birthday, my mother and I sat with a skein of red cord binding my wrist to hers inside a circle of mothers and daughters from our community. Called the Rite of Roses for the rose wands our mothers brushed against our dewy young cheeks, this was the ceremony for the adolescent witches of my coven as we dedicated our lives to the Goddess, and to each other. Lit by the glow of red candles, bouquets of roses festooned with ferns and puffs of baby’s breath perfumed our living room.

we were there to celebrate our blood, that life force that passes through our veins, throbbing its way back to the beginning of all life on earth, carrying us forward into the unknown future we must create for ourselves. That night, we chanted the names of our matrilineal ancestors, beginning as far back into the historical mist as we could reach. When we finally spoke my mother’s name, and then mine, we used a pair of scissors as an athame—a ceremonial knife—to cut the red umbilicus that bound us together. I was now my own woman, a free agent.

You don’t need to be born to a witch mother or receive an initiation from a high priestess to become a witch; you just need to pay attention to the lessons the Goddess is teaching you through your own experiences, and then rise up and take action.

puberty initiations usually begin with an act of rupture. The child is separated from her mother. Persephone is dragged down to Hades. A brutal process.

The world was once an enchanted place for me and my little coven of teenage witches.

Witchcraft is an act of healing and an act of resistance. Declaring oneself a witch, practicing magic, has everything to do with claiming authority and power for oneself. Life itself initiates each of us according to our own peculiar stories. Our stories lead us toward our purpose in this world. Each initiation strips something away and gives us a gift. If we want to meet our full form, we are obligated to give that gift to the world.

I died before I was born. I saw the face of the Goddess. Witches have many goddesses and Hecate is primary among them. As Guardian of the Crossroads, Hecate is a sorceress; she knows the secrets of the herbs and can speak to the dead. As Queen of Witches, she is a traveler between the worlds. She leaps through hell, a black dog by her side. She soars into the future, into the past, into the body and beyond riding on the black wings of a crow.

Women in Northern Europe probably stopped calling themselves witches around the same time you could have your tongue ripped out for saying you were one. So instead, my mother called herself an activist when I was a child. Years later, she told me that she saw activism and witchcraft as two parts of the same practice: devotion to the Goddess. From an early age, she always wanted to protect women and children.

Children don’t just believe in magic; they live it.

I wanted to play in the enchanted garden of the Goddess, to marvel at the way things grow, to encounter Her creatures, to dance in the fields and sing at Her altars. But the disenchanted world and its minions were always getting in the way.

The call to witchcraft often begins with trauma or illness. To navigate the underworld, you need to go there many times. A person who’s been to the underworld can be of special service to those trying to escape its clutches.

Why does the call to witchcraft demand a trip to the underworld? Why does it so often come with trauma, with illness, with strife? Because like shamans, witches are healers. To be a witch/shaman, you must visit the underworld. You must be humbled. You must recognize the limits of your power and confront the mystery, that there are forces that you can’t see and don’t understand, forces that have no beginning and no end.