Goddess Murder, 32: Aradia’s First Revelation; Avalon 2

XXXIV. The First Revelation Discourse

When Aradia, my mother, began to be a woman, her mother Diana called her and said, “I must tell you the story of Ara­dia, whom you are named after. She had come to teach us Witch­craft, but the Christians arrested her and murdered her.

“I had thought she was dead, but on the following day, as I was walking in the woods where we were hiding, I heard a voice be­hind me, and turning, I saw a woman, shin­ing more brightly than the noonday sun, and I fell at her feet in a faint.

“Leaning over, she took hold of me and raised me up, saying, `It is I, Diana, your Lady; do not be afraid. I was dead, and now I live. The gates of death have not prevailed against me. I hold the keys of life and death.’

“She told me how Joshua had come to her to comfort her and told her that she would live again.

“I asked her what had happened to bring her back to life. She said, `You do not need to know. Have faith that the Gods can do this for us. Come, we must speak to the others while I am here.’

“We walked to the camp where we were hiding. At first they did not believe it was her, until they had held her and touched her to be sure she was truly alive and they kissed her. She stripped off her clothing and stood revealed before us as a goddess, blazing with light. Then she began to speak, and these are the teachings of Aradia, the teachings of the power to become a goddess.

“Now, O Daughters of the Voice, listen to the speech of the mother of your mercy, for you have become worthy of the mystery that was hidden from the beginning of the ages.

“You all fear the man Joshua, whom the black priests call Jesus the Christ. Now hear me: he is not their friend, for they killed me, but it was he who returned me to life. They tell you that God is love, but I tell you that God is my lover.

“Any supposed god who would purposely harm, or curse, or wish ill toward a human being is not a god at all, but an enemy who hates mankind. Those who claim to rule in his name are liars and tyrants, who deserve to be overthrown; they rule merely because they have power to compel you to obey them. If you band together and overthrow them, they will have no power. You can rule yourselves far better than they can, for they care nothing about you.

“There are two ways, one of life, the other of death, and they are utterly different. The way of the Goddess is the way of life. There can be no life without sex; so they who believe sex is evil follow the way of death. They never see how ridiculous their stories are, for nothing is created without love. How could their so-called god have created the cosmos without love?

“Only one rule was set forth by all who have truly spoken in the name and spirit of Our Lady: that you shall love one another; and love itself knows no rules. It will seize upon whomever the Gods please or whoever pleases the Gods. Therefore the loving father of whom Joshua spoke was not the cruel god whom the black priests worship, for Joshua was a true prophet of Our Lady, who taught people to love one another and to look within themselves, saying, ‘The Queen of Heaven is within you,’ for the spirit of Diana is within all people.”

XXXV. Avalon 2

I looked down at Andy. She was smiling sweetly at me, with a touch of impudence.

“Did you do that?” I asked.

“Yes, I enabled you to see it.”

“Did you cast a spell on me or something?”

“No, I broke the spell that prevented you from seeing it.”

“Why would I have been under a spell? I don’t even believe in spells,” I said, bewildered.

“No, technically it wasn’t a spell, it was just the human condition.”

I didn’t know what to ask next. I rolled off to lie beside her. She turned on her side and propped herself up on one elbow, so that she could see my face.

“Eddie, what you saw was real, not an illusion. By the human condition I mean that humans live in an illusion, not seeing most of what is really there. I have an elaborate theory—I’ve devoted most of my academic life to it—about how the mind and consciousness work. I did this trying to understand myself better, of course. I may try to fill you in on it later. For now, let’s just say that your mind is not what you think.”

“I bet you intend a double meaning there,” I said dryly.

“At least two,” she said. “First, did you see any colors around me?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t my eyes that were seeing them. What was that?”

“It’s usually called the aura. You weren’t perceiving it by visible light. Your mind interprets it as colors to give you a way to conceptualize the information. Now, tell me exactly what you saw.”

“How do you know that I saw anything, rather than just, say, feeling things?”

“Just tell me what you saw.”

“We were outdoors, in a clearing, surrounded by flowers, birds, and animals. There were some fabulous beasts there, unicorns and I think centaurs.”

“That’s how your mind interpreted the data, as with the aura. You had to give it a name in order to make sense of it.”

“Okay, I guess. What was strangest was that angels were circling around us.”

“Those are the guardians,” she said. “There were five of them. Four were mine.”

“Yes, there were five of them,” I said. A chill went up my spine and stood the hairs on the back of my neck straight up. We had been seeing the same thing.

“You really are a Witch! You’re not just trying to revive a pagan religion. You actually are a Witch!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Eddie. I’m not an ordinary mortal—mortal, yes, but not ordinary. I’m a hereditary Witch–and in my family that means something quite specific. Many of us have eidetic imagery. Do you know what that is?” she asked.

“You see things,” I said, “like clairvoyance. My colleague Doug came up with the concept of genetic Witches, trying to understand his wife. She’s from a Russian-Jewish Hereditary family. At one point she had a nervous breakdown. When she came out of the hospital, she was telepathic. He thinks people with great psychic abilities are more likely to get involved with Witchcraft or other paths that allow them to train and use those abilities.”

“That describes our pattern to some extent, but that’s not what eidetic imagery is. When I imagine something, I don’t just see a vague internal image, in my `mind’s eye.’ Instead, it is projected outward, like a hologram. For me it is as real and detailed as the physical objects that everyone else can see. It’s not just visual. I perceive it with all six senses. I was a rather strange little girl, of course. I was almost five before I could sort out my images from the ones that everyone else could see. I’ve always seen my guardians. When I was little, they were my size, like cherubs. They grew up with me. They are among my best friends. They usually march or fly in a square surrounding me, at the four cardinal points.”

“Are they real? I mean . . . “

“Depends on what you mean by real. They give me real information. They can affect people’s thoughts and feelings and behavior. The scientific convention is that something can’t be real unless everyone in the vicinity can perceive it. So people with the least sensitivity are made the measure for everyone else. Think about yesterday, when I sounded the alarm about the gunmen soon enough for us to get away from them. Have you wondered how I did that?”

“Of course,” I said.

“While we were walking, my guardians took off. Two of them hovered over each gunman and analyzed him, then came back to tell me that the men were armed and gunning for us. That’s when I alerted you and we ran.”

“Did the guardians come with us, through the library and all that?” I asked.

“Two of them elected to keep your student friend at the library door from getting hurt. They caught up with us at my apartment.”

“You’d think as a Catholic I could take the concept of angels as real beings in stride . . . “

“No, they’re not angels. That’s the Christian interpretation. They are guardians, and they are universal. Everybody has at least one. You don’t need eidetic imagery to perceive them; that talent just makes it easier. There is competent research which shows that about 20 percent of human beings have perceived them, in all cultures.”

I must have looked skeptical. “If that’s so, why isn’t it generally known?”

“Because the major competence of the researchers was in gaining the trust of their informants. Most people are clever enough not to tell something like that to anyone who might be able to have them declared insane.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “How did you enable me to see them?”

“I’ll give you the short version. When we started making love, I linked my kundalini with yours. I then raised yours, timing it to reach your crown chakra at the moment of orgasm. As I was hoping, you were so horny and your orgasm was so intense that it induced an illumination that broke through your conditioning. You didn’t lose the boundaries of your personality, but they became permeable; so you became aware of the Deep Mind. You also merged with me. You have no secrets from me, Eddie. I know everything about you. You also know everything about me, though it will be a while before you realize it. While we were merged, I linked my eidetic imagery with yours to activate it, to let you could see more of the reality that your ordinary conditioning hides from you.”

“I didn’t know I had eidetic imagery,” I said.

“Yes, as a latent talent. All people have it, but don’t realize that all perception is eidetic imagery, because it’s completely unconscious. Since I have conscious control over mine, as Blake did, I understand how his mind worked. I can see where he is struggling to describe what his eidetic imagery revealed to him. As he stated in his verse “Now I a fourfold vision see,” he could have three eidetic images going in addition to ordinary perception, which he called “Newton’s sleep” because of the universal belief—another symptom of the state of delusion—that we have objective perception of the one and only reality. He knew better.