SOF 48 / July 2001 FREDERIC LAMOND describes an experience that changed his life. Was it 'religious', 'mystical', 'psychological', 'chemical' - or what? wicca's world Gary Fleece's description of the experience that changed his life in SOF 44 was very moving and instantly recognisable by anyone who has ever had a mystical experience. But Gary is wrong when he assumes that such experiences always originate with Jesus or lead one to him.
Jesus himself said "In my father's house are many mansions", while Buddhists talk of the many different paths up the mountain of enlightenment. Let me share my own experience when I was a little younger than Gary is today.
An only child, I grew up in the 1930s and 40s well before the sexual revolution. I attended boys' schools and then Cambridge University where men outnumbered women about ten to one. So I found it difficult to understand young women and to interest them in me, and graduated at the age of 21 without ever experiencing a deep relationship. But the heart cannot be denied for ever, and the time came when I found sexual frustration no longer bearable. So one evening, I sank to my knees and prayed earnestly to God to let me meet a girl whom I could love and respect, and who would love me in return. The immediate effect was a state of inner peace and confidence, as a voice in my head said "Have faith! She will come in due course. Meanwhile, just concentrate on your studies!" A few weeks later, as I was preparing for a ball, I felt that that night would bring me the companion I had prayed for. At midnight a group of fellow students suddenly appeared with some local girls in tow. One of them, Mary, was unaccompanied, so I danced with her for an hour before taking her home. She was light, witty and graceful.
When I awoke the next day I was madly in love. One week and three dates later she returned my love passionately.
For the two and a half years that our engagement lasted we were separated mostly by my studies in America but were in constant telepathic contact. Each of us always knew what the other was feeling and these intuitions were invariably confirmed by the next letter.
On one occasion I fell out of love for a few hours and wondered what I saw in Mary. It didn't last long before I was again feeling passionate, and I had been careful not to write to her during those few doubting hours. Yet in her next letter she wrote: "You have been having doubts, darling, I could feel it. Please don't make me suffer!" When we met again during the next long vacation, it was Mary who took the initiative to make our relationship physical. I was totally unprepared and did not want to make her pregnant, so I restrained myself. As she climaxed I was suddenly catapulted out of space and time into cosmic consciousness: I was all the males of all ages and species making love to all females of all time, while all around us all the other couples were watching us like boddhisattvas in a Tibetan mandala, nodding approvingly as if to say "Well done! Welcome to the club!" In my head a gentle but strong feminine voice was saying, "All the empires and political systems, all the dogmas, philosophies and ideologies that men have formulated since the dawn of history, put together weigh less in the divine scales than a single embrace of two young lovers, or a single smile on the lips of a new-born infant as it gazes at its mother for the first time!" The next day I felt in a state of pure grace, cleansed of all sin by Mary's love. I floated on Cloud Nine with Mary for ten days, but after we parted the curse of the intellectuals reasserted itself and made me analyse my experience. If there were divine powers I felt I had just encountered one, but which one? Not the vengeful Jehovah of the Old Testament, nor his long-suffering crucified Son:
Christianity and sexual mysticism just don't mix!
So I immersed myself in books on sexual psychology on the one hand, comparative religion and religious history on the other. Their insights intersected at the description of the love goddesses of Ancient Babylon and "I was all the males of all ages and species making love to all females of all time" Greece. So it was Aphrodite Herself whom I had encountered in Mary's arms! So She is a real power, not the lifeless idol described by Christian ministers. It was She who had brought me peace of mind when I prayed to God in my frustration, She who had brought Mary and me together, She who had taught us the reality of telepathy and who had finally opened my consciousness to Her cosmos during our first intimate embrace!
I did not fully share these speculations with Mary but she sensed from my letters what was going on. She realised that marrying into her very conservative Catholic family would hinder me in my spiritual development, yet she was not prepared to break with them herself. So six weeks before our planned marriage she broke off our engagement, though it took another 12 months of deep unhappiness on both sides before our telepathic link was finally broken.
Freed from having to pretend to be Christian, I could now pursue my quest for fellow worshippers of the Great Goddess in earnest. The English anthropologist Gordon Rattray Taylor's book Sex in History alerted me to the theory that the mediaeval witches were not a mere figment of the Inquisitors' sadistic imaginations but the survival of a country Earth Mother religion. So I started looking for books on witchcraft and it did not take me long to find Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today. It rang all my spiritual bells, so I wrote to the author who interviewed me and then introduced me to his coven.
After three months I was offered initiation.
When the blindfold was removed from my eyes I found myself in a dark incense-filled room and sensed the presence of the same divine power whom I had encountered two and a half years earlier in Mary's arms.
And when the High Priestess recited "The Charge of the Goddess" which contains these verses:
I am the Soul of Nature, From Me all things proceed And unto Me all things shall return...
And before My face, beloved of Gods and men, Thine inmost self shall be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite!...
I felt this power welcoming me home!