Waking the Moon

that have all turned out to be illusions…

Crazy drunken Sweeney, already seeing the end of things, but oh, Sweeney, if you only knew!—

As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

Angelica wept. Bowing her head and sobbing until her chest ached, she clutched their photos to her breast and wept for all of them. Oliver and Sweeney and Baby Joe and Hasel and Annie and Dylan, but for herself most of all: Angelica di Rienzi, like her poor dead friends given to the night.

It was twilight when she finally composed herself. No more time to waste. She wiped her eyes and brushed her hair, turned away forever from everything that might remind her of that other life and went to the bed where her clothes were laid out. There she readied herself for what was to come.

First she drank the kykeon. On her bookshelf was the recipe, garnered from a tablet she had found in the museum at Athens. Barley and honey and the crushed purple bracts and pink flowers of dittany of Crete, fermented in a vessel of fired clay; the same beverage the initiates had drunk at Eleusis millennia ago. It had a pleasant yeasty taste, the honey’s sweetness offset by the dittany’s raw earthiness. After drinking she wiped her mouth on a piece of cotton. She anointed herself with ground coriander and sandalwood, rubbed a fist- sized chunk of amber against the hollow of her throat until it released its musky resin. Then she drew over her head a simple shift of linen shot with gold thread, and piece by piece slipped on the sacred jewelry she had amassed over the years: bands of ivory and gold and sweet red sandalwood, rings shaped like serpents giving suck to children, bracelets heavy with steatite figures of women giving birth. Last of all she took the lunula. She turned to the window, raised the shining crescent to the eastern sky where the moon waited and cried out.

Nike Materon! Nike Materos obscura!

Victory to the Mothers. Victory to the Dark Mother. She slipped the lunula around her neck, and glanced around to see if she had forgotten anything.

The floor was swept clean, the gauze curtains had been drawn across the other windows. On her bed was an envelope containing a one-way ticket to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. It was dated the thirty-first of July, the eve of the ancient feast of Lammas.

But that festival had more names than Angelica had hairs on her head. In India it was called Kalipuja, by the worshipers at the Temple at Dakshineswarand and in Calcutta—the city whose name is actually Kali-Ghatt, “the steps of Kali.” In Finland it had been the day of Kalma, “odor of corpses;” in the Antipodes that of Kalwadi, who devoured her own children and then gave them rebirth. On Coatepec—Snake Hill, in Mexico—there gathered followers of the serpent-skirted lunar goddess Coatlicue, she who wore upon her breast the moon and from whose girdle dangled dismembered hands and beating hearts, Coatlicue who danced upon the entrails of her son while wearing his flayed skin. Upon other hills, the sun-gilded mounds of Tuscany, the good fairy Turanna still brings children balloons and bells and Nintendo games, while her Etruscan companion Zirna strews the floor of their bedrooms with tiny sugared crescents.

But woe to those children whose windows are left open at summer’s dying, because that is when Lilith comes and brings them fair dreams, then strangles them so that they the smiling; and woe to those who do not wear the new moon upon their breasts and so placate Lamasthu, whose bite leaves pestilence in the blood!

Upon the second day of the death of summer the silent poppy-goddess Spes walks. Spes whose mouth is red as poppies and whose skin is white, whose kiss is cold as alabaster. On that day, too, Aetna was worshiped, who disgorged her rage upon the city suckling at her breast; and the Haida goddess Dazalarhons, whose anger erupted when she saw that men were torturing the shining salmon in their streams instead of giving thanks for their plenty. In ancient Greece it had marked the transition to the time of the great women’s festivals, culminating in the Thesmophoria, that greatest and most holy of all feasts, honoring Demeter’s rescue of her ravished daughter from the lord of Hell. Everywhere that the moon shone, everywhere that people died and lamented, everywhere that infants failed to wake and grain turned to dust beneath the merciless sun, where women died in childbirth and their mothers and sisters keened in vain: in all these places, the dark goddess had been worshiped, and forgotten.

But now, in all these places and more, women had learned her name anew. Now, they called her Othiym. Now, her hour had come. Slowly she opened the doors leading onto the tiled patio, and stepped outside.

The dusk surrounded her like rumpled velvet, soft and warm and fragrant with the scent of crushed sage. Angelica breathed in deeply. Her heart was racing; a trickle of sweat traced its way across her rib cage. She tried to remember what Cloud had taught her about conserving energy in a marathon: breathe from the diaphragm, close your eyes, relax.

She began to pace across the patio, the heat from the tiles seeping through the soles of her feet and on up to her thighs. Compared to all that had come before—nearly two decades of work and study and sacrifice—there was really very little left to do. But the greatest sacrifice still remained. And only Angelica could perform that task.

In the course of the last year, she had instructed Elspeth and the other priestesses in the final rite of Waking the Moon. They, in turn, had gathered to them Circle upon Circle of women, radiating from Angelica outward to all the lost reaches of the world. It had taken years of patience for it to come to this, years of working alone and with small groups: waking first the women themselves, then encouraging them to teach their friends and neighbors.

But women work quickly once they are awakened. Angelica had learned that by watching television programs where women wept and fought and embraced; by reading the books that American women read, and the newspapers that told of their vengeance upon those who had harmed them; by visiting the tiny villages in Orisa and Bangladesh and Uttar, where girl children are aborted and wives are murdered for their dowries; by entering compounds in the countryside outside of Gracanica and Glamoc, where women were raped and forced to give up their babies to doctors and soldiers; by witnessing initiation ceremonies in Africa and New York, where girls were mutilated, and standing at the mass graves of nuns slaughtered in Central America and men and women and children in the jungles of Kampuchea. Everywhere, everywhere, she saw horror and death and brutality; everywhere she saw forgiveness, and ignorance, and endless cycles of poverty and servitude, women cringing before their masters and murmuring about love.

And everywhere she saw rage: rage that was twisted until, like an auger, it bored into the women themselves, and their children. Rage that like the desert creatures burrowed beneath the surface, waiting patiently for nightfall and moonrise.

“But it is time now,” whispered Angelica. She raised her face to the Devil’s Clock. Amethyst light danced across her brow, set the lunula aglow. “Oh Great Mother: it is time!”

She raised her arms, took another deep breath, and let her hands drop. Bracelets of bone and copper and gold slipped down about her wrists, and the linen shift fell from her shoulders, cascading around her waist and thighs in folds of white and gold to pool about her feet. Bare-breasted, naked save for her armillas and the lunula, she closed her eyes and sang.