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The Witches of Willamette

The next year my home was the back of my pickup, and various remote campsites in an Oregon national forest.

I was living Merlin�s nigredo, his blackening, his sojourn of madness in the woods. Like master Merlin, I had found one of the Nymph�s Springs. Mine was in a central Oregon wilderness.

The water gushed from the flank of the mountainside itself, two streams straight from Mama�s tits. From beneath a huge tree trunk the spring burst forth. To drink was to be dipped in power. To bathe was to pass the gates of Tartarus. When I�d had enough, a green snake appeared in the path, and I didn't cross over again.

I was devouring Jung�s Mysterium Coniunctionis, which I'd been warned off as �impenetrable.� Instead I found it a glittering gem, a consolation and validation.

The material in the Mysterium passed through medieval occultism, the Cathars, various gnostic sects, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and back into the mists of Egyptian Hermeticism, Sumerian kingship, and Paleolithic shamanism. The text's content was conserved in the West primarily in the literature and practice of alchemy, whose practitioners seek to effect coniunctio � the union and dynamic equilibrium of the opposites.

Jung wrote extensively of the nigredo, the �blackening� phase of the journey toward individuation � the individual or collective �down and out,� the �cinders work in the basement� to which Robert Bly refers.

The nigredo is a long, unplanned vacation, an old man crammed into the sickle of the moon. Sickness, poverty, friendlessness, pain, depression, homelessness: down is the way of nigredo.

Harry Potter is a wide-eyed newbie. Being busy at the Stone is dark work and dangerous, and cannot be accomplished without the blessing of both heaven and hell.

The black magician practices white magic. Darkness slays darkness, and from this comes night-light.

That summer in Merlin�s wilderness I knew the crow on the soul. Periodically during trips out for provisions I�d sneak into my brother�s little government cabin for a shower or ballgame. The ravens would gather on the nearby fence and the roof, screeching to raise the dead.

With the snows coming on I left the mountains, following the river down to the highway, down the Willamette Valley to the college town of Corvallis, in west-central Oregon, where I�d found the hawk feather, orange as the sun's corona, on the golf course.

There I lived a couple of months in the driveway of some prior acquaintances. These were a woman in her late thirties, her two early-teen daughters, and her mid-teen son.

Three witches and a warlock. But it came with a kitchen, shower, and music loft.

It was an exceedingly dangerous, though necessary, place to alight. There are few beings more hazardous than an unconscious witch. Three females who don�t know their own occult aspects � but DO desire power -- is trouble, all caps.

Three is the number of the Triune Goddess, the Nymph-Matron-Crone psycho-social-mythological complex. Old Three-Head is the queen mediatrix met by the artifex on his way through the underworld of the ancestors � the realm of the Mothers, of the dead, of the unconscious and pre-conscious. Down dere. The Triple Goddess resolves in the Nymph.

I was stranded in the gingerbread house of the Weird Sisters Themselves. I did the only thing I could under conditions of such Blatant and Uncalled-For Weirdness.

I turned Pro.

Bring It the Fuck On, just don�t make me go through it again.

I�d met the woman some years before when we both worked at a county mental health clinic. She was an R.N., I the file clerk. I had already been in my most recent tango with nigredo for about five years.

Her potential had come to my attention during a remarkable encounter with four land-locked fish, a berserking psychotic, and a lost dog, which I have elsewhere recounted as �Of Dogs and Fish I Am.�

I will spare you the details of her occult interests. She was largely impotent on her own, being primarily a ground, but when we were together � dynamite. I was first forced to evaluate her when she reached down into a pool of frenzied, trapped fish and began to pet them. This set off a series of impossible, and joyous, �coincidences� that turned Jung�s limits of synchronicity into taffy.

Thus began a strange relationship in which I was roped into acting, reluctantly, as the frater mystica and sensei of this woman. We had some fun and a couple of truly jaw-hanging adventures. In those years I also was able to help them financially.

Now, years later, the Laughing Wheel had revolved me back into her driveway. Why the driveway? Well, mama had a thing for me which I did not reciprocate. A soror -- fine. A lover � no.

The kids had aged into their mid-teens, but were no more aware of their natures than their mother. Mama had fallen into New Age self-empowerment lunacies, flailing about with crystals, tarot, sacred massage, temple-table prophetesses, local "shamans" and indiginous rituals. But like so many of her sisters, her heart was set not on service, but power.