Brida: A Novel Read online

  Whenever Brida came home and saw the candle flame, she felt a strange, almost sacred responsibility.

  Wicca told her that she must always pay attention to the sound of the world. "You can hear it wherever you are," she said. "It's a noise that never stops, which is there on mountaintops, in cities, in the sky, and at the bottom of the ocean. This noise--which is like a vibration--is the Soul of the World transforming itself and traveling toward the light. Any witch must be keenly aware of this, because she is an important part of that journey."

  Wicca also explained that the Ancients spoke to our world through symbols. Even if no one was listening, even if the language of symbols had been forgotten by almost everyone, the Ancients never ceased talking.

  "Are they beings like us?" Brida asked one day.

  "We are them. And suddenly we understand everything that we learned in our past lives, and everything that the great sages left written on the Universe. Jesus said: 'The Kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how.'

  "The human race drinks always from this same inexhaustible fountain, and even when everyone says it is doomed, it still finds a way to survive. It survived when the apes drove the men from the trees and when the waters covered Earth. It will survive when everyone is preparing for the final catastrophe.

  "We are responsible for the Universe, because we are the Universe."

  The more time Brida spent with Wicca, the more aware she became of what a very pretty woman she was.

  Wicca continued to teach Brida the Tradition of the Moon. She told her to find a two-edged dagger with an undulating blade like a flame. Brida tried in various shops, but there was nothing suitable. In the end, Lorens solved the problem by asking a metallurgical chemistry engineer, who worked at the university, to make such a blade. Then he himself carved a wooden handle and gave the dagger to Brida as a gift. It was his way of saying that he respected her search.

  The dagger was consecrated by Wicca in a complicated ritual involving magical words, charcoal designs drawn on the blade, and a few blows with a wooden spoon. The dagger was to be used as a prolongation of her own arm, keeping the energy of her body concentrated in the blade. Fairy godmothers used a wand for the same purpose, and magi used a sword.

  When Brida expressed her surprise at the charcoal and the wooden spoon, Wicca said that in the days of witch hunts, witches were forced to use materials that could be mistaken for ordinary everyday objects. The tradition of the dagger, the charcoal, and the wooden spoon had survived, while the actual materials once used by the Ancients had been lost entirely.

  Brida learned how to burn incense and how to use the dagger inside magic circles. There was a ritual she had to perform whenever the moon changed its phase; she would place a cup of water on the windowsill so that the moon was reflected in the surface. Then she would stand so that her own face was reflected in the water and the moon's reflection was right in the middle of her forehead. When she was completely focused, she would cut the water with the dagger, causing the reflections to break up and form smaller ones.

  This water had to be drunk immediately, and then the power of the moon would grow inside her.

  "None of this makes sense," Brida said once. Wicca ignored the remark, for she had once thought exactly the same thing, but she remembered Jesus' words about the things that grow inside each of us without our understanding how or why.

  "It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not," she told her. "Think of the Dark Night. The more you do this, the more the Ancients will communicate with you. They will do so initially in ways you cannot understand, because only your soul will be listening, but one day, the voices will be heard again."

  Brida didn't want to hear voices, she wanted to find her Soul Mate, but she said nothing of this to Wicca.

  She was forbidden from returning to the past again. According to Wicca, this was rarely necessary.

  "Don't use the cards to read the future either. The cards are to be used only for growth without words, the kind of growth that occurs imperceptibly."

  Brida had to spread the cards out on a table three times a week and sit looking at them. Occasionally she had visions, but they were usually incomprehensible. When she complained about this, Wicca said that the visions had a meaning so deep that she was incapable of understanding it.

  "And why shouldn't I use the cards to read the future?"

  "Only the present has power over our lives," replied Wicca. "When you read the future in the cards, you are bringing the future into the present, and that can cause serious harm. The present could confuse your future."

  Once a week, they went to the wood, and Wicca taught her apprentice the secrets of herbs. For Wicca, everything in the world bore God's signature, especially plants. Certain leaves resembled the heart and were good for heart disease, while flowers that resembled eyes could cure diseases of the eye. Brida began to understand that many herbs really did bear a close resemblance to human organs, and in a book on folk medicine that Lorens borrowed from the university library she found research indicating that the beliefs of country people and witches could well be right.

  "God placed his pharmacy in the woods and fields," Wicca said one day when they were resting under a tree, "so that everyone could enjoy good health."

  Brida knew that her teacher had other apprentices, but she never met them--the dog always barked when her time with Wicca was up. However, she had passed other people on the stairs: an older woman, a girl about her own age, and a man in a suit. Brida listened discreetly to their steps until the creaking floorboards above betrayed their destination: Wicca's apartment.

  One day, Brida risked asking about these other students.

  "Witchcraft is based on collective strength," Wicca told her. "All the different Gifts keep the energy of our work in constant movement. Each Gift depends on all the others."

  Wicca explained that there were nine Gifts, and that both the Tradition of the Sun and the Tradition of the Moon took care that these Gifts survived over the centuries.

  "What are the nine Gifts?"

  Wicca told her off for being lazy and asking questions all the time, when a true witch should be interested in all forms of spiritual inquiry. Brida, she said, ought to spend more time reading the Bible ("which contains all the true occult wisdom") and to seek out the gifts in St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians. Brida did so, and there she found the nine gifts: the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, the discerning of the spirits, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues.

  It was only then that she understood the Gift she was seeking: the discerning of the spirits.

  Wicca taught Brida to dance. She said that she needed to learn to move her body in accordance with the sound of the world, that ever-present vibration. There was no special technique; it was simply a matter of making any movement that came into her head. Nevertheless, it took a while before Brida could become used to moving and dancing in that illogical way.

  "The Magus of Folk taught you about the Dark Night. In both Traditions--which are, in fact, one--the Dark Night is the only way to grow. When you set off along the path of magic, the first thing you do is surrender yourself to a greater power, for you will encounter things that you will never understand.

  "Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect. You will understand things only with your heart, and that can be a little frightening. For a long time, the journey will seem like a Dark Night, but then any search is an act of faith.

  "But God, who is far harder to understand than a Dark Night, appreciates our act of faith and takes our hand and guides us through the Mystery."

  Wicca spoke of the Magus with no rancor or bitterness. Brida had been wrong; Wicca had clearly never had an affair with him; it was written in her eyes. Perhaps the irritation she had expressed on that first day had merely been because
they had ended up following different paths. Wizards and witches were vain creatures, and each wanted to prove to the other that their path was the best.

  She suddenly realized what she had thought.

  She could tell Wicca wasn't in love with the Magus by her eyes.

  She had seen films and read books that talked about this. The whole world could tell from someone's eyes if they were in love.

  "I only manage to understand the simple things once I've embraced the complicated things," she thought to herself. Perhaps one day she would follow the Tradition of the Sun.

  It was quite late on in the year and the cold was just beginning to bite when Brida received a phone call from Wicca.

  "We're going to meet in the wood in two days' time, on the night of the new moon, just before dark," was all she said.

  Brida spent those two days thinking about that meeting. She performed the usual rituals and danced to the sound of the world. "I wish I could dance to some music," she thought, but she was becoming used to moving her body according to that strange vibration, which she could hear better at night or in certain silent places. Wicca had told her that when she danced to the sound of the world, her soul would feel more comfortable in her body and there would be a lessening of tension. Brida began to notice how people walking down the street didn't seem to know what to do with their hands or how to move their hips or shoulders. She felt like telling them that the world was playing a tune and if they danced a little to that music, and simply allowed their body to move illogically for a few minutes a day, they would feel much better.

  That dance, however, was part of the Tradition of the Moon, and only witches knew about it. There must be something similar in the Tradition of the Sun. There always was, although no one appeared to want to learn it.

  "We've lost our ability to live with the secrets of the world," she said to Lorens. "And yet there they are before us. The reason I want to be a witch is so that I can see those secrets."

  On the appointed day, Brida went to the wood. She walked among the trees, feeling the magical presence of the spirits of nature. About fifteen hundred years ago, that wood had been the sacred place of the Druids, until St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, and the Druid cults disappeared. Nevertheless, respect for that place had passed from generation to generation and, even now, the villagers both respected and feared it.

  She found Wicca in the clearing, wrapped in her cloak. There were four other people with her, all wearing ordinary clothes and all of them women. In the place where she had once noticed ashes, a fire was burning. Brida looked at the fire and for some reason felt afraid. She didn't know if it was because of that part of Loni which she carried inside her or because she had known fire in her other incarnations.

  More women arrived. Some were her age and others were older than Wicca. Altogether, there were nine.

  "I didn't invite the men today. We are here waiting for the kingdom of the Moon."

  The kingdom of the Moon was the night.

  They stood around the fire, talking about the most trivial things in the world, and Brida felt as if she'd been invited to a tea party with a lot of old gossips, although the setting was rather different.

  However, as soon as the sky filled up with stars, the atmosphere changed completely. Wicca didn't need to call for silence; gradually, the conversation died, and Brida wondered to herself if they'd only just noticed the presence of the fire and the forest.

  After a brief silence, Wicca spoke.

  "On this night, once a year, the world's witches gather together to pray and pay homage to our forebears. According to the Tradition, on the tenth moon of the year, we gather round a fire, which was life and death to our persecuted sisters."

  Brida produced a wooden spoon from beneath her cloak.

  "Here is the symbol," she said, showing the spoon to everyone.

  The women remained standing and held hands. Then, raising their joined hands, they heard Wicca's prayer.

  "May the blessing of the Virgin Mary and of her son Jesus be upon our heads tonight. In our bodies sleeps the Soul Mate of our ancestors. May the Virgin Mary bless them.

  "May she bless us because we are women and live in a world in which men love and understand us more and more. Yet still we bear on our bodies the marks of past lives, and those marks still hurt.

  "May the Virgin Mary free us from those marks and put an end forever to our sense of guilt. We feel guilty when we go out to work because we're leaving our children in order to earn money to feed them. We feel guilty when we stay at home because it seems we're not making the most of our freedom. We feel guilty about everything, because we have always been kept far from decision making and from power.

  "May the Virgin Mary remind us always that it was the women who stayed with Jesus when all the men fled and denied their faith. That it was the women who wept while He carried the cross and who waited at His feet at the hour of His death. That it was the women who visited the empty tomb, and that we have no reason to feel guilty.

  "May the Virgin Mary remind us always that we were burned and persecuted because we preached the Religion of Love. When others were trying to stop time with the power of sin, we gathered together to hold forbidden festivals in which we celebrated what was still beautiful in the world. Because of this we were condemned and burned in the public squares.

  "May the Virgin Mary remind us always that while men were tried in the public square over land disputes, women were tried in the public square for adultery.

  "May the Virgin Mary remind us always of our ancestors, who--like St. Joan of Arc--had to disguise themselves as men in order to fulfill the Lord's word, and yet still they died in the fire."

  Wicca held the wooden spoon in both hands and stretched out both arms.

  "Here is the symbol of our ancestors' martyrdom. May the flame that devoured their bodies remain always alight in our souls. Because they are in us. Because we are them."

  And she threw the spoon into the fire.

  Brida continued to perform the rituals that Wicca had taught her. She kept the candle always burning and danced to the sound of the world. She noted down her meetings with Wicca in the Book of Shadows and went to the sacred wood twice a week. She noticed, to her surprise, that she was beginning to understand more about herbs and plants.

  However, the voices that Wicca wanted to awaken did not appear. Nor did she manage to see the point of light above anyone's left shoulder.

  "Who knows, perhaps I haven't yet met my Soul Mate," she thought rather fearfully. This was the fate of those who knew the Tradition of the Moon: never to make a mistake when choosing the man in their life. This meant that, from the moment they became a true witch, they would never again nurse the same illusions about love that other people did. True, this would mean less suffering or even no suffering at all, because they could love everything more intensely; finding one's Soul Mate was, after all, a divine mission in everyone's life. Even if, one day, you were forced to part, love for your Soul Mate--according to both Traditions--would always be crowned with glory, understanding, and a kind of purifying nostalgia.

  It meant, too, that, from the moment you became able to see the point of light, there would be no Dark Night of Love. Brida thought of the many times she had suffered for love, the nights she had lain awake waiting for a phone call that never came, the romantic weekends that didn't survive the following week, the parties spent glancing anxiously around to see who was there, the joy of making a conquest simply to prove that you could, the sadness and loneliness when you were sure that your best friend's boyfriend was the only man who could possibly make you happy. That was part of her world, and the world of everyone else she knew. That was love, and that was how people had searched for their Soul Mate since time began, by looking into another person's eyes in search of that special light, desire. She had never given much value to such things; on the contrary, she had always thought it pointless to suffer because of someone else, or to feel scared stiff because
you couldn't find anyone with whom to share your life. Now, however, that she had the chance to free herself from such fears forever, she wasn't sure she wanted to.

  "Do I really want to be able to see that point of light?"

  She thought of the Magus--she was beginning to think he was right and that the Tradition of the Sun was the only way to deal with Love. But she couldn't change her mind now; she knew the path to follow, and she must follow it to the end. She knew that if she gave up now, she would find it harder and harder to make any choices in life.

  One afternoon, after a long lesson devoted to rain-making rituals performed by the witches of old--rituals that Brida would have to note down in her Book of Shadows even though she would probably never use them--Wicca asked if she wore all the clothes she owned.

  "No, of course I don't," came the reply.

  "Well, from now on, wear everything in your wardrobe."

  Brida thought perhaps she had misunderstood.

  "Everything that contains our energy should be in constant movement," Wicca explained. "The clothes you bought are part of you, and they represent those special times when you left the house wanting to splash out a little because you were happy with the world, times when you'd been hurt and wanted to make yourself feel better or times when you thought you should change your life.

  "Clothes always transform emotion into matter. It's one of the bridges between the visible and the invisible. Some clothes can even be harmful because they were made for someone else but have ended up in your hands."

  Brida knew what she meant. There were some clothes she couldn't bring herself to wear, because whenever she did, something bad happened.

  "Get rid of any clothes that were not intended for you," Wicca went on. "And wear all the others. It's important to keep the soil turned, the waves crashing, and all your emotions in movement. The whole Universe is moving all the time, and we must do likewise."