Waking the Moon

From the purity of your blasted lands I come, Pure Queen of Those Below,
Of Hecate and Durga and the other Goddesses immortal.
For I claim that I too am of your blessed race.
I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.
I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.
I have entered into the bosom of Desponia, Queen of the Underworld.
I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.
O Blessed Othiym, thou shalt make me Goddess instead of mortal.
Haiyo Othiym! Othiym Lunarsa.

As she sang she began to move, swaying back and forth and stamping her bare feet upon the tiles. At each step dust rose beneath her, and tiny fragments of terracotta. Her dance inscribed a circle upon the ground, an orbit of dust and dried grass and the broken wings of moths. Her bare feet slapped the tiles, her heels grinding into them as though she were extinguishing small flames.

Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of the Pure above,
Of Ashtaroth and Artemis and the other Goddesses and Daemons.
For I too, I cry to thee, am of your blessed race.
I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous
But now I come a suppliant to Holy Phersephoneia
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.
Haiyo Othiym! Othiym Lunarsa.

Beneath her heels the tiles began to crack. Fissures ran from them toward the pool with its tranquil dark surface, and from the fissures reddish soil flowed, as though the earth beneath her was boiling. The soil stained her feet and ankles, but Angelica danced heedless, treading the red earth until it churned like wine or blood being poured in her wake.

Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden,
A bush, a bird, and a serpent with scales that gleam in the moonlight.
But I turned from you, O Great Mother,
Like a bolt I fell, Othiym.
And in your sorrow you grew old and hungry,
In your sorrow you grew angry and pale.
In your sorrow you gave voice to anger.
You rose and began the sacred dance
And where your feet trod cities fell:
Knossos and Iraklion the fair, waves devoured the land
And Kalliste most beloved of all your children,
The sacred island consumed by flame.

Her voice rose to a wail, a lament for those green places burned by Othiym’s anger, for the temples destroyed and the children buried when her rage erupted into streams of liquid fire and molten ash. She mourned for Kalliste and Keftiu, Aetna and Sumbawa and Pompeii; but most of all she mourned Kalliste, the island that had been her sacred jewel, her emerald eye, the center of all her worship. Kalliste, whose name meant “Most Beautiful,” but which after its destruction was known as Thera: Fear.

For they turned from you, Great Mother,
The rhytons ran dry and you went hungry
Your thirst unappeased.
Your priestesses were seduced and then enslaved.
Your altars were dry and no blood given,
No marriage, no sons to slake your thirst.
For this I beg forgiveness.
I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.
I have given you sons and daughters too.
Receive here the armor
Of Memory.
Angelica your daughter, by due rite grown to be a goddess.

Her face gleamed with sweat, sweat coursed down her throat and warmed the lunula until she felt as though a heated blade nudged between her breasts. Still she danced, her breath coming in sharp hard bursts that were counterpoint to her footsteps, and with each turn and stamp of her heels she drew nearer to the edge of the pool. Behind her now all the earth was broken, tiles shattered and stones as well, so that it looked as though some small but powerful machine had razed the patio. When she reached the edge of the pool she poised, shining like a glazed figure still cooling from the kiln, then without a sound dived beneath the surface.

The water was warm as new milk from a mother’s breasts, so warm that her blood seemed to flow in and out of her veins, mixing with the quiescent darkness that surrounded her. Seven times she climbed from the pool, seven times returned to its depths; until at last she rose and stood upon the broken patio, the water sliding from her in pale ribbons.

Above the Devil’s Clock the storm had spent itself. Now and then faint rumblings echoed from the distance, but otherwise the night was still. With the storm some of the evening’s heat had passed. A chill breeze rustled the spiny ocotillo and the agave’s heavy blade-shaped leaves, bringing with it the smell of rain and damp shale from the mountains far to the north, the first augury of summer’s end. Angelica shivered a little in her nakedness, but the potent kykeon still burned inside her. She picked her way across the cracked tiles, nudging shards of terra-cotta out of her way. When she reached where the patio ended in a jumble of soil and broken pottery, she laughed and shook her head, her tangled curls flinging droplets into the air.

“Come then!” she called, opening her arms to the night. “I am ready—”

And they came: from every opening in the earth they scuttled and slithered and crept, hollow legs and shells rattling against the stones, scales rubbing together with a sound like sand running through the fingers, ponderous feet clawing for purchase upon terra-cotta. Gila monsters and elfin lizards, rattlesnakes and pit vipers, the tiny sacred scorpions of Innana that would be colorless were it not for the amber venom floating inside their arched tails, like retsina in a glass. Ancient tortoises pushed aside walls of earth and clambered up to gaze at the woman. Nestling spiders, and beetles that dwell within spheres of dung, and millipedes, whose legs whispered across the sand, and centipedes, with mandibles that clacked: all emerged from their sunken castles, to welcome her and give her homage.

But mostly, there were snakes. Docile rosy boas, western racers like wands of brushed steel, eyeless worm snakes so small a hundred of them would not fill a teacup. Puff adders, coachwhips, tiny ring-necked snakes that children could wear as glossy jewelry; lyre snakes, whose bite causes gongs to ring and clamor, and night snakes, whose rubbery fangs hold no more venom than a honeybee. As though they were being disgorged from the earth’s very core, as though rivulets of magma spewed forth and then cooled into living coils and veins of serpents: in